I came across MyHippocampus.com in a post on the Google Widget Toolkit newsgroups. This is not your ordinary webapp - so let’s have a closer look:

The basic idea of myhippocampus is mindmapping; a way to dump everything you’ve ever seen, read, learned or thought about into a website, so that you can search through it, visualize the evolution of your experiences, yadayada. When you see or read something new, you add the info to the site, and you’ll get back related thoughts and materials you’ve entered before, to give you some perspective.

That’s a tough pill to swallow though; “everything ever seen, read, learned or thought about” covers rather a lot of material, and it’s rather a lot of work to write it all down, so the ‘payoff’ - the ability to visualize it all, has to be large to even try. With this much info its also difficult to come up with useful visualizations. Still a closed beta, but fortunately there are screencasts to gawk at.

Remember the xkcd comic with the map of web communities? That same kind of interface is what MyHippocampus uses to map your life:

Nifty, and on a technical note, impressively done without flash. You can zoom in and out as if it’s google maps; the more you zoom in, the more details appear. The basics of usability are there as well: simple full-text search at the bottom, and an index ‘glossary’ of sorts as well.

However, I wasn’t convinced this might just work until I saw the ways you can visualize your experiences. For example, I currently don’t track the books I’ve read nor the movies I’ve seen because writing it all down and coming up with interesting visualizations of the data is too much hassle. However, this timeline feature, which can handle as many ‘islands’ (like a tag, really) as you like, seems useful:

The app also tracks where and when entries are made, comes with bookmarklets (think del.icio.us but with a world map visualization representing your tags and your bookmarks), and automatically links any content you focus on by giving you ‘neighbours’ in the dimension of time, location (in real life), location (on the map), and stuff you manually linked.

It’s certainly hip, but will it catch on? I don’t know yet. The biggest problem as I see it is difficulty in importing stuff you’ve already written down; some import wizards to grab your delicious bookmarks and e.g. amazon book lists would be a big help. There’s also no social aspect to speak of; it would be interesting to browse mindmaps of friends or people with similar tastes, for example.

You can see some screencasts here.

This weekend I got a Sony Vaio which came with a pre-installed version of Windows Vista Home Edition. Windows Media Center is part of it, so I took it for a spin. I’m not a big fan of Windows Vista, but I must admit: the Media Center interface is not bad at all. Recording your favorite TV show and showing off your holiday pictures is quite easy.

However, people don’t buy a Media Center to enjoy the interface. According to Microsoft, people buy such equipment because they want an enhanced entertainment experience. A friend of mine who actually owns a Media Center agreed with that.

Yet this very same friend has spend days - if not weeks - installing and maintaining his Media Center. Over the last months he had issues with its sound card, hard disk, network connections and so on (it’s not even home made - it’s a proper Acer Media Center). As if this is not inconvenient enough already, he also has to deal with a buzzing machine in his living room whenever he wishes to watch TV, play music or see holiday pictures. All together that’s not exactly my idea of an enhanced entertainment experience.

Even if it would work flawlessly, I still don’t get it. The simple fact that I have to turn on a Media Center - which takes forever, a receiver and a TV to just listen to music doesn’t appeal to me at all. Considering that a decent Media Center setup will set you back several thousands of Euro’s, I’m wondering: what’s Windows Media Center’s right to exist?

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

You might have noticed that we are getting started slowly. I thought an update might be in order.

We have finished our about pages and also added OpenId login for comments. I have written a couple of posts, and the others are busy writing their first posts (or so they tell me…).

This is stilll quite ?eta. What remains to be done?

Design

We have a truly kickass design in store designed by our very own Martijn. Of course none of us have any prior experience in creating Wordpress themes, but we’re confident that it can’t be very difficult.

Launch Event

When we are well and ready, we are going to host a launch event to inaugurate this blog. Suggestions for venues and support are welcome. Announcements will be posted here and on Upcoming.