Eelke and I are in the process of investigating office space options in Delft to form a coworking space of some sorts. Eelke currently is somewhat more urgently looking for living quarters, having recently returned from Berlin.

For the coworking space we want to have a 20-25m2 office (space to be negotiated) in Delft’s center where we can both go every day to keep our semblance of office hours, exchange ideas and create a space where people can find us.

I’m aiming for 2-4 people in the office to start with, preferrably with some fixed people but with some flex spaces as well. If that goes well, we can always expand.

If you know of anything suitable or if you are interested in joining us get in touch. We think it can be a lot of fun and add to our creativity and productivity.

I was looking at the excellent Ratatouille (Pixar’s upcoming movie) video podcasts recently and a thought struck me:

Pixar always makes their product live looong before the product is finished. The amount of video material that doesn’t even make it in the DVD extras, let alone the movie itself, is astounding. For example, on one of the podcasts, Pixar’s own cook explains how he cooked up a bunch of dishes to allow the artists to draw tasty looking food. Then somewhere in that segment, a fragment of a little video with the main character (Remy the Rat) commenting on the how yummy each animated item looks, with no background and a couple of rendering artifacts flashes by.

That scene was written, voice-acted, animated, and partly rendered JUST to get a feel for the characters, the tone of the movie, and to make sure everyone in the entire company has an real relationship to the work they are doing.

For those of you in IT - there’s a lesson to be learned here: Make your software does SOMETHING as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter if half the material is patchwork mockup. Once it’s a real application you can actually start or go to and see it in action, even if most of the results are just simple scripting - in other words, once it starts to ‘live’, you have a marketing message, motivation, a sudden sense of priorities, and most of all an unqualifiable feeling about the thing you’re making.

NB: All Transactions are based on Trust will continue tomorrow.

This Friday we will be having a blogwalk in Amsterdam (the eleventh such edition) and I am happy to be participating.

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As far as I know, you pay a network a set amount of money per second to air a given commercial in a given timeslot.

That doesn’t strike me as economically optimal, though.

People zap away during commercials, but I doubt people zap away during a funny or catchy commercial that they haven’t seen before. If it’s funny enough, they won’t zap away at all.

A very annoying commercial, like this one (turn your speakers off - some screaming zombielike thing pops up midway - people with a weak heart should probably not watch it at all) will immediatly get people diving for the remote to turn the volume down. And once you’re holding the remote, zapping is that much easier.

On the other hand, anytime an ‘apeldoorn’ advertisement (like this one) comes along, I’ll keep watching, even if I’ve seen them before.

Thus I’d argue the cost to run an ad on a tv network should be not just a function of duration and timeslot, but also of how long its been running (how boring it has become, basically), and how ‘funny’ it is, though how you’d rate that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Even without the networks creating incentives for companies to make funny or intriguing advertisements, the internet’s always a help: interesting ads tend to see lots of free publicity once the youtube video gets posted.

For example, I thought this mini pie catapult was so funny, I just had to write an article about it. Talk about viral!

Creativity is fashionable these days. Many people I know love to fight about new ideas endlessly - or ‘brainstorm’ as they like to call it. It doesn’t bother them that most of those ‘brainstorms’ are nothing like the creative technique referred to here. Being a creative professional myself I feel the urge to share my thoughts on creativity with you:

First of all: what is creativity? According to my favourite dictionary it means ‘the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.’ (source http://dictionary.com). That’s an elaborate way of saying ‘coming up with new combinations of existing things’.

Why would you like to be creative? Because it fuels innovation. Creativity doesn’t help you maintain reality as it is. So if that’s what you want in the first place, don’t be creative (and stop reading here).

If you’re still reading, you might wonder how to be creative? A common misconception is that new ideas just pop up. As I’ve pointed out before the key ingredients for creativity are existing things - that is everything you’ve seen, heard, smelled or tasted before. This means you’ll have to trigger your memory.

Luckily you’re not the first person ever to be creative - there’s a whole lot of tools and techniques available to dig up ideas. Apart from brainstorming there’s also brainsketching, mindmapping, problem reversal, forced fit, etc. (Google for more). All of them have two things in common:

• Less is not more - 99% of all ideas are insane, so in order to come up with one realistic idea you’ll have to generate one hundred
• First you generate ideas, then you judge them - postpone ‘yeah, but…’ until you’ve generated enough ideas to chose from

Many creative techniques require the exact opposite skills of those you’ve been taught at school. If you’re planning to use such techniques, ask somebody experienced to guide you through the process. Don’t think you know it all - watch and learn.