Looks like OpenID developers don’t have to worry about potential patent problems in the near future: sun microsystems has pledged to never use their patent portfolio against any sort of OpenID usage, except against companies that use their portfolio to stifle OpenID. That last one is actually the good news: It means any company that tries to muck up OpenID by trying patent shenanigans has to contend with the idea that sun will start a patent battle. I don’t know if sun even has patents that matter, but I doubt this is relevant: So long as the company has a nice patent portfolio, enough money to pay a law firm, and the economic clout to make it stick, you can sue. It’s one of the reasons every tech professional I know is vehemently anti-patent.
While google might be best known for it, I really like this brave new world, where certain companies have taken the do no evil directive to heart. I guess Sun is aware that the real in-the-trenches techies eventually make decisions on which server hardware to buy, and thus they better get on our good side.
Yesterday we had the second edition of Open Beer Delft. Turnout wasn’t as large as we had hoped, but a good time was had by all.
The event was livecast using the WiFi present and the technology from ustream.tv which we reported about earlier.
Newcomer this time was Crijn Bouman from Epyon. Epyon is a startup company of Yes!Delft who make superfast charging batteries. Their first gizmo which is due out, you plug into the wall and it charges itself in a minute and you can then use it to charge cell phones and other small devices on the road.
They are working on getting the technology into laptops which would be a godsend. Imagine charging your Macbook battery in 1 minute.
Next week the event can go on as usual but I will not be able to make it. I am going to setup a notify mailing list for these meetings. If you want to be added to that, e-mail me or post in the comments here.
Last Thursday I went to London’s OpenCoffee Club Meetup. OpenCoffee is organized by Saul Klein and is basically a weekly social meeting in a local StarBucks . It was started here in London in March and since then the concept has been spread around the world in more than 30 other places including Amsterdam.
As this was my first time at OpenCoffee I was totally unprepared as I was the only person in his t-shirt. Even worse was the fact that I forgot my Moo-cards so I couldn’t spread the word about FourStarters and teachr.tv (more about this soon). Luckily most other people did bring theirs and I managed to keep in contact with them.
One of the most interesting people I spoke with (and strangely also the first ones) were the guys behind Yuuguu. Yuuguu is a cool desktop sharing program that has a lot of potential and I think it might even be interesting in an educational context, so expect something in the teachr.tv podcast soon. I also had a nice word with David Terrar who (next to running a very interesting blog) is the only Brit I ever met that knows Frankwatching.
Funny enough I was not the only Dutch person there as I met the guys behind Meganova (Dutch incubator) and The Next Web Conference (more on this later, too). Standing next to Boris and Arjen Schat I did feel more and more out of the ordinary in my t-shirt. I will definitely go more often now but next time I will definitely go in suit. Anyone joining me next Thursday?
TipIt.to has been nominated for the category Beta & Stealth for The Next Web Awards. I think this is quite amazing for a company without a product (although this is obviously a reason why they are nominated in this Beta & Stealth category). I was amazed that Soocial was not nominated with all the buzz around them lately. Let’s see how far TipIt.to will manage to get in this category by all voting for them.
The award ceremony of this award will be on the 1st of June at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam.
Yesterday I buckled down and got a new cell phone subscription. I have been a loyal customer of T-mobile for the past seven years. The only effect this loyalty has had was to give them an effective carte blanche to screw me over. Their philosophy probably is that if your customer is too lazy to switch, you’ve got to incentivize them.
I identified Orange as being a lesser evil and took the cheapest one year plan from them I could get. I’ll pay €7,50/month which will be effectively doubled and all my actions will be substracted from that €15.
The customer service at the orange shop was of course dismal. This wasn’t in their flagship store but in their tiny retail outlet in Delft city centre.
They had no clue what HSDPA is and couldn’t tell me if and when Orange is planning to roll it out (Orange hasn’t released anything about this yet). They also couldn’t inform me about the availability of the Nokia N95.
I never want to be tied to a mobile operator for longer than a year. Usually I forget to cancel on time because every operator imposes a three month cancellation period so that means I’m stuck longer. They do everything to tie you down and squeeze the most possible money from you.
This time I am going to cancel my plan immediately. It would be nice if they would have offered that service in the shop.
My 3310 —proclaimed by some to be the greatest phone ever made— is not really cutting it anymore in this age of GMail apps and Jaiku presence. This means I’m looking to get a new phone.
N95
The N95 though very expensive looks like the mobile phone to get (look at the review on YouTube). But reading the review at GigaOM shows that it is everything but that battery life isn’t.
Builtin WiFi is nice to escape data costs when you are at home and at work. But the things I would be going for mostly are the excellent photo/video capabilities and the media features.
I’m looking for a pocket camera and combining it with a cell phone would seem to be the best utilization of pocket space. For unobtrusive shooting and shooting e.g. while sporting or going out a 1kg DSLR is too obtrusive. The N95’s GPS would mean that pictures could be automatically geotagged. It does all this and more.
The N95 is simply too expensive and the next runnerup candidate is the N73.
Rabo Mobiel
The other thing I had been considering is to take a mobile plan from Dutch bank the Rabobank called Rabo Mobiel. Rabobank has recently been offering very affordable mobile plans to its customers with the promise of digital mobile payment options for the future.
Payment possibilities here in the Netherlands are in the dark ages compared to the far east or even with the Nordic countries. I’m guessing that uptake will take a while but Rabobank are trying to get people on board with very competitive pricing (appealing to the Dutch) and a very well done advertising campaign.
This offering is cost efficient, sympathethic and promises to bring you to the future of payment. Still I didn’t take it because seeing is believing and switching banks is nontrivial.
For years I have found Yahoo to be a “shit” company. This is mainly because my mother kept using Yahoo Messenger while this product proved to be very open to hackers. Frequently she asked me if I (as I am a computer science student) could write her a program to restart other people’s pc (in other words hacking) because this often happened to her. Obviously she wanted some revenge.
So I never used Yahoo, not their messenger nor their email. Strangely I do use del.icio.us and Flickr, two sites bought by Yahoo. On Flickr the presence of Yahoo is steadily growing, causing many problems recently when they forced all old-school users like me to switch to a Yahoo account. On del.icio.us though, they are not that present. On the front page they are not even named.
So what is happening here? When Google buys a product they often totally integrate that product in their own services. Is Yahoo aware of their own (bad) vibe with users, and are they becoming more of a consortium of other services besides their own brand? Maybe one day del.icio.us will also be rebranded to a Yahoo product. I must say that I like most of the newly bought Yahoo products, so on that fact they are creating a better vibe in my sense.
Last Sunday I ended up in the Orange flagship store in the heart of Rotterdam. Orange claims you can ‘experience’ their brand in this huge shop and guess what: you can!
At first sight it looks like any other telecom shop - lots of mobile phones in a crisp décor.
However, proceed and you’ll find a coffee shop called ‘Orange café’ in the back of the store. Take your macchiato upstairs where Orange has created a couple of lounge areas - they call them ‘living rooms’ - full of sponsored gadgets. A free wifi connection is available, so you can even get some work done while you’re there. Did you forget your laptop at home? No problem - Orange also provides workstations.
‘Living room’ in Orange flagship store (Picture by Alper)
Not for free, but just as interesting are the meeting rooms. Together with Samsung and Motorola, Orange set up two slick meeting rooms crammed with high tech. I’d say it’s a sweet spot to present your brilliant web 2.0 concept to investors. Prices start at €350,- for half a day.
While reclining in one of the lounge areas I realised that flagship stores are indeed a very powerful way to express a brand’s identity. This is particularly interesting for companies whose products are intangible, like Orange.
Products of web business are intangible as well, so why don’t they open flagship stores? Take Google for example, they already provide me with tools to get my work done, so why don’t they also provide me with a space to work in? There’s a couple of benefits to this:
It lowers the bar for people to get to know new tools. In general people are not very keen on changes. Working with new and unfamiliar tools (Google Docs, Google Talk etc.) scares them. That’s why most of these tools are only popular amongst a small group of people. Opening up recognisable stores can help overcome this fear.
It gives shape to a company’s identity.
Companies have an identity, that is, what they’d like to be. They also have an image, that is, how they’re seen by customers. Obviously, the gap between a company’s identity and its image should not be too large. Flagship stores can bridge this gap.
People are probably willing to pay for it.
Flagship stores are expensive but they don’t have to be unprofitable. I believe people are willing to pay for both coffee and a working space.
Clearly, opening flagship stores is far too expensive and risky for small companies. But, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, what are you waiting for?
In the last few months my mind has been filled with some stories by Reinier and Alper about what keeps them busy. I’m especially interested in two of their topics, namely their problems with salespeople and the dead/rise of functional programming.
As some of you might know I have been a salesperson for 5 years at various stores and I think this gives you a different perspective whenever you walk into a shop and encounter some problems. For example, I am way more understanding when store personnel is unable to help me because of my inside knowledge of how shops (or franchises in particular) work. I explain more about this in this comment on a post of Alper. On the other hand I’m easily annoyed whenever a salesperson is unable to communicate with me on a normal personal level.
I had this problem here in the UK when I wanted to get a UK mobile SIM for use in my Dutch mobile phone. I know that my phone is SIM-lock free so I just walked into a Carphone Wearhouse (a.k.a. Phonehouse) and asked them what my SIM-only options were. The lady asked me if I wanted a phone, but I clearly stated that I just moved into the UK and already had a phone. Imagine the surprise I had when I asked her why the SIM did not work in my phone and she answered, “Oh, you need a UK phone for that SIM!”. The simple inability to think along with a customer and try to clarify some constraints had lead me to ever want to buy anything at the Carphone Wearhouse anymore.
I saw so many people at BarCampLondon2 with their own Moo Cards that I decided to ditch my old business cards and get some myself. I really loved the idea of personalizing your cards, and not having 250 cards with the same design. So I ordered 100 (minimum) with some of the nicer images in my Flickr feed.
Now, I learned a wise lesson with my last business cards that made it very worthwhile to buy only 100 this time for the same price (19.99 euro) as the 250 I bought before. The whole idea of buying a lot of equal business cards is just ridiculous unless you are a sales person. For the rest of us fewer is better because we are (A) not popular enough that we would be going to run out of them soon and (B) if we will, we are probably popular enough that the important people manage to find you without.
Now if you think you would eventually definitely run out of the cards, it is still good to only by a few. I for example ordered 250 a while back, on which most of the information is now outdated due to my move to the UK. Buying less cards makes it easy to update your information and maybe once in a while chose a fresh design.
