This job as cultural attachéfurniture Videnovfurniture Elhovomebelimebeli to Brian Grazer seems like a dream to me. Anyway until I am in the position to hire such a person for myself.

It seems the position is already filled by people probably more qualified than myself, but maybe some other notable person is looking for a similar curator.

What makes me think I’m qualified? I’m curious and I read voraciously, I speak a smattering of languages, have competencies and interests in the alpha, beta and gamma sciences, can learn complicated stuff and explain it simply and clearly, am quite capable with a computer and most new media and I don’t mind going out and getting physically into people’s faces for that contact or deal.

Per assignment contract also negotiable. Interested parties can contact me on alper at this domain.

If you aren’t aware of a recent bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, this article certainly wasn’t meant for you. However, if you have, you may also know that Microsoft pulled its offer last weekend.

Some speculate that Microsoft will try to install a more take-over friendly board in June. Some speculate that Microsoft is letting Yahoo’ stock fall so they can retry later at a better price.

Both of these are incomplete speculations; after all, if the offer is off the table, how does microsoft install a new board? And how does a dip in yahoo’s stock price help microsoft? After all, if they put the offer back on the table, the stock prices will immediately rise again.

The answer to both of those questions might be the following idea, which so far I haven’t seen on any blogs:

In the movies, the CIA sometimes has ‘front companies’ - companies secretly owned by the CIA through a long line of other front companies and individuals, for business. The idea is not totally unheard of; plenty of corporations are actually conglomerates of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of smaller (but very real) companies. if you were to map out the ownership of all those subcompanies it would make quite a picture.

Microsoft can have many front companies if it wants. And those front companies can buy yahoo stock. At its current lowered price. Microsoft is also rumoured to be behind SCO’s attack on Linux; its far less of a leap to consider microsoft leaning on friendly companies to buy some yahoo stock as well.

Because at the end of the day, buying yahoo is all about controlling some stock. The more stock microsoft controls (either through front companies or through friends), the less of a percentage of the rest of the yahoo-stock-owning world needs to be convinced that microsoft is the future for Yahoo. The stock holders decide the board. For hostile takeovers, Microsoft needs to control more than 50% of the stock. That’s a lot easier to get to if 25% of all yahoo stock is already under your control.

I’m not streetwise enough in the finance sector to actually figure out if microsoft has front companies and if those are buying yahoo stock right now. However, if you have a vested interest in the Microhoo future, that’s where I’d look to see if Microsoft threw in the towel or if its just switching tactics.

Originally posted to Cristiano on Tech/Life on May 4th, 2008

So I got to see Iron Man last friday with a load of movie buffs/comic geeks, and even though I am not that much of a comic geek, which would make this look like yet another comic book adaptation in the first place, but I….LOVED…. IT!!!!

Iron Man is a funny, well thought out movie, which happens to stay way clear of many of the common comic book interpretation mistakes that Hollywood has made in the past. Most of all they made sure that stuff doesn’t like too much like it was all done in CGI, which for me made the movie so much more believable

The actors were very well picked (Robert Downey Junior as Tony Stark/Iron Man and Jeff Bridges as his mentor) but I don’t think they will stand up against Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as The Joker in the upcoming The Dark Knight movie.

Iron Man wasn’t the best movie though that I’d ever seen, but looking back at movies like Spiderman 2 and 3 this is just so much in a different league, so go and watch it!.

TIP: Make sure to stay seated until past the credits for a little but very important extra!

A week or so ago it was brought to my attention that this weblog Four Starters.com is not reachable by users of the Firefox 3 browser. It seems that Firefox3 uses the stopbadware.org blocklists and people who try to visit our site get to see this:

Stopbadware is designed to stop spammers and other evildoers online, but in doing so it is causing a lot of collateral damage and blocking a site such as ours which has been mostly spamfree for most of the time.
This is a situation where the cure is worse than the pain. An arbitrary and unmotivated verdict is being cast without our awareness and there is very little we can do about it. Kafka could not have written this as well and even though rules of due process have been greatly relaxed in the USA, we didn’t expect the same low standards to be applied to our website.

We have a number of issues with the stopbadware.org process:

1. We are blocked arbitrarily, in the reports posted on stopbadware.org not once does it mention which parts of our website were in question and what they were guilty of. Stopbadware lists Google as the reason we are blocked and Google says it gets the lists from Stopbadware, so we are in an infinite loop. Suppose I have a very big content filled site, how am I supposed to find the offending links without decent reports?
   And if those reports are a work in progress, how about not blocking sites until you have your operation in order? We think we have fixed the problem as far as Four Starters is concerned, but without detailed violation descriptions, we won’t know for sure. I have written a detailed complaint to the stopbadware Google Group.
2. Having fixed any violations we could find ourselves, we have asked our site to be reviewed for reinclusion but this has taken days already without any word. Getting on this blacklist seems extremely easy, but getting out is somewhat more difficult. We are annoyed that Four Starters is unreachable (our traffic is in the basement), but imagine that this is your business’s website that’s in the doghouse.
3. Blocking is also unilateral without notification to us (we had to hear it from people sending us the screenshot) and without possibility for appeal. Seeing as getting off the list is so difficult and slow, the possibility of appeal should reasonably be an option.
4. Blocking a site does not solve any real problem. For phishing sites it may be somewhat reasonable, but in our case the report does not even say that we host badware, no it says that we link to sites which may host badware. Blocking us on that ground seems like shooting a nuke at a butterfly.
   If people do not want to read our site, give them the choice. Firefox does no such thing and cedes the entire site to the spammers.
5. Lastly I do not recognize that badware is a problem, at least not for people who are visiting our site. Most people reading Four Starters have a Mac or Linux based system and/or are computer savvy enough never to go to the bad parts of the internet. So we are being punished because a large part of the internet is stupid. Again this does not strike me to be a sound principle to run a blacklisting operation.

Stopbadware tries to reach a noble goal but currently it is striking out too broadly and in doing so it is doing more harm than good. Furthermore it does this based on an authority which I do not recognize using a process which is broken. If arbitrarily gagging sites is what it takes to fight spam, then maybe it’s not worth it.

I hope that in the following days our ban is lifted and you can read what I have written here.

I have an idea for a really cool service that I don’t see myself developing anytime soon. Though if there are some funders and mobile hackers who want to collaborate I would be willing to go for it.

The iPhone and recent Qik streams that I saw, gave me this idea:

Create a distress application on the iPhone. Tapping it shows you a Yes/No button to indicate whether you are really in distress. A distress call sends a live video stream from your iPhone, a cellular phone connection and your best guess location as received from Google Maps to a party who can aid you.

These parties can be one of two:

Social: Other users who use the service and who are nearby are alerted and they are expected to at least make the effort to move towards you and keep tabs of what’s happening. Heroic measures are not required but if somebody who’s feeling threatened is no longer alone their threat level usually also decreases.
This would imply a high level of social coherence and necessitate a way to penalize people ignoring distress calls. But I think the willingness to ‘make society work’ is present and seeing an old lady afraid of being mugged would prompt most people to at least walk over and check if she’s ok.

Premium: This is where you can make the money. The easiest case would be to connect the person to a 911 (or 112) central and have law enforcement officials assess the threat and take action. This works for the base case and in societies which have a functioning rule of law.
People who want extra protection or who don’t want to depend on official police could contract a SLA which depending on the amount of money paid could dispatch private security enforcers to your location by car or by helicopter (from $2000/month up or so).
I think there are enough people with enough fear that this could be a viable business model.

The problem with the premium model is that it opens up avenues towards a freelance police state (of the Blackwater type). For me and I think for the coherence of society in general, this makes the social model more desirable.

Direct communication and location information is going to have large effects on how society works and is organized but I think that has been obvious for some time now.

Determinism

And they pretty much taught us in our technical university that that technological determinism was not the way to go. There was some discussion but not nearly enough. In ethics classes I think the American approach of giving all the arguments and have students debate it out is far better, than the soft socialist Dutch approach of implying a One True Way (you’ll won’t usually find a convincing pro-Death penalty argument in course readers).

I’m not saying technology is the end all. But implementations carry with them their own values which are difficult to work around to say the least and technology which makes difficult or impossible things convenient, radically changes societies and is completely unquestioned by new generations. We have seen this and we’re going to see more of it in the future.

What with being busy with work and play I hardly have enough time reading the backlog of New Yorker articles I get referred to via blogs. How people manage to be subscribed to the New Yorker, have a television and maybe even read a newspaper is beyond me.

Anyway, this week I read this great article on elevators: “Up And Then Down”. One part in it was particularly enlightening:

Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. […] In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. […] Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

This explains many interactions I have had with elevators over the course of my life where this button never worked and where I always wanted it to work, immediately. I hadn’t really considered this explanation blaming it mostly on shoddy engineering or interface design—which it of course also is.

About the culture of riding an elevator and the politeness norms, I think most of those are lost on the Dutch. But that’s another story.

Fascinating story about Jan Chipchase, user anthropologists at Nokia in the New York Times. A man with the dream job for for anybody interested in human centered design and travel. Younghee Jung has a complementary blogpost detailing their experiences in and Chongqing, Dharavi, Jacarezinho and Buduburam

Fixed identity

A key point in the story is how cellular phone numbers provide a fixed piece of identity for people in societies where many things are usually unclear and people are on the move.

Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.

This is pointed out as a good thing enabling people in developing countries to have the same Just In Time moments as we here have been used to for a while. We generally use them to organize meetings more efficiently and it increases our effectivity and up to dateness.
The kind of information people lower on the pyramid need to exchange is usually much more vital and so of a larger relative worth. Access to that information leads to direct and large increases in their income, wellbeing and general control of their lives. The article is packed with examples and numbers.

Virtualized SIM

Many people use their fixed identity as an enabler for transactions, but for certain transactions a requirement could be the ability to shed your identity easily, take a new name and move shop to a different place.

For instance for the prostitutes advertised in cell phone booths around the world from the article:

The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Those people do not want a fixed identity that is traceable to a single account. A combination of the anonymity of the pay phone and the freedom of the cellular phone may be useful. Maybe not only for illicit purposes, but also for people who do not want to be tied to a single telco or need some other increased flexibility.

Innovations that help people take on multiple mobile identities are already springing up with multi-band multi-SIM phones, not only for business travellers but also used by residents of developing countries where plans have large disparities for different use cases.

This makes you wonder if the whole concept of the SIM-card, the modern day passport of the mobile citizen could not be completely virtualized. Instead of a phone with multiple SIMs inside, it could contain a virtual SIM driver that communicates with a server and retrieves appropriate SIM images as needed by usage, location an cost efficiency.

Fortunately this is not going to be necessary because freedom is being effectuated by flat rate data plans and VOIP clients on various phones (see for instance Fring). But I’m still waiting for the moment that I can buy a generic device and get a simple plan to connect it to the cloud wherever, whenever.

Ben Hammersley has opened a separate tumblelog where he posts stuff not suitable for his main line. His first batch of posts is pretty great with an eye opening account of Tibetan history.

And secondly the trailer for FIFA Street 3 which is a jaw dropping mix of tricking and street soccer. The site for the game: fifastreet3.com is a pretty impressive but mostly confusing and useless display of Flash, 3D and gaming.

I do that one hand backflip (macaco as it is called in capoeira) pretty well; hell I’m doing one on this picture, but I’ve never tried kicking a ball with it.

Last week was busy. I was home pretty much only to sleep and lived off train station junk food. Not the best life, but a lot of fun and cool things happened.

One of these was the Next Web conference, a great startup event where a lot of interesting people from the European and American startup scene were present. The conference was complicated for me slightly because Eelke and I volunteered to shoot a report of it for Frankwatching, one of the Netherlands’ leading Web 2.0 blogs.

The report is in Dutch but there are some choice bits of English interview in there, especially a Q&A with Robert Scoble which cuts pretty much to the essence of what he told us at The Next Web. It is up at Vimeo:

Frankwatching @ The Next Web 2008 from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

I’ve never done something like this before, but I’ve wanted to for a long time. This was a great opportunity. Suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, very tiring and I learned a lot. I have a lot more respect for (video)journalists now.
I expect to do more with video in the future especially for travelblogging and ambient recording and I’m thinking of getting a Flip.

The Next Web was a great conference with a spectacular ambience fitting the growing European startup scene. I didn’t hear a lot of new stuff from many speakers. I like my speakers in depth, on the edge and interdisciplinary because I learn the most from those. But maybe that’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

This week the Next Web conference is taking place in Amsterdam. There’s a contest where startups who want to attend can make a movie pitching their concept and the best ones get a free ticket.

We had a lot of fun making this movie:

Tipit.to Startup Pitch (English) from Alper �ugun
This is a rough cut, we’ll put up a better version during the course of the week.

So if you like it and want to help us, you can vote for us at pitchstorm.tv. There’s a poll on the page but you can only vote after you register in the box on the top. The registration sends a confirmation mail which can take some time. Once you get that, you can login and cast your vote.

Thanks and see you at the Next Web!