I decided to start trying to bring some of my culture to London, other than just absorbing its own. First stop: home made pasta :)
Details soon.
Author Archive for bru
Last week I participated in a conversation with Matt Biddulph (Dopplr’s CTO) here in London. Since it was set-up as an interview to allow Feba to gather material for her thesis, I joined in with a few questions and here you’ll find my personal highlights about it (for detailed notes, see Feba’s posts).
Together with us there were also Alexandra and Massimo of Tinker.it, who contributed some good inspiration, but I’ll keep this for a future post, with a that it would be nice to attend one of the forthcoming Arduino for Beginners workshops…
But without further ado, let’s go back to the notes:
Bits of dopplr history
Dopplr was built by people who had a day job. Most of the thinking, early design and even a working prototype was built over a weekend.
The renting of the place was the only “cost” dopplr had sustain that far.
Dopplr releases are named after the next conference. That keeps the team on the edge, makes a good milestone date and automatically gives you a good time when to announce new features. Everybody loves announcement and “early access” at conferences
Dopplr and open source
The value of software companies is shifting from the code itself to the data. Google could proably let his search algorithm out in the open for free and yet not fear any real competition, because G has ten years of “history” behind it. Besides, everyone who worked in a fairly sized enterprise knows that software is always far too patchy, undocumented and/or business specific to be easily reusable “as it is”.
Releasing bits of software not only lets you benefit somehow from the crowd as well as providing useful tools (and ideas even more often), but it acts as a statement, and lets you also somehow model the industry and market in the way you believe in. Think OpenID.
Advices for young European Enterpreneurs
. Do something you know
. Do something you’re gonna use/need yourself.
. Do not spend months dreaming, just do it. You can start with a mashup that increase the value of what exist yet. And so, if you have to fail, fail early.
. Stay in touch with SF: go there, participate in events, dinners, show your face around. Or, if you’re not in London, stay in touch with SF through London.
Just to start the new year diverging from my resolutions, I started playing a bit more with my tumble log. It’s (mainly) in Italian, and it’s turning out to have a good affordance for being an “inspiration” dump. Which is quite in conflict with how I mainly used this blog so far. Blimey.
So this is my current knowledge toolscape:
without further ado:
* read more
* synthesize
The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond.
[via Webgol]
Because it’s interesting when computer games take physical space as model and metaphor, but it’s even more interesting when gaming experiences are recreated in physical, everyday environment: think ARGs and mobile augmented reality systems for different approaches to this same concept.
A previous example was PacManhattan by Dennis Crowley (of dodgeball fame) and others: a mobile powered PacMan game set in the “grid” of real world manhattan. Amazingly funny.
Saw already twice (Joi’s and Matt Jones’s) this morning a link to Mission Bicycles, an interesting project just started where you can design your own bike, that starts as a “light steel frame fixed gear bike with high quality components, a custom paint job, no visible branding”.
That reminded me of Stefano and SlyWay, an Italian bike design studio I’ve been involved with in their early stages of, a few years ago. I went to check the website and I’m glad to see it now features several videos and models.
They still focus on the recumbent concept but apparently have several different “interpretations” of it. Quite cool!
I need to nag them though for the absence of microformats and whatsoever form of interaction on the website (well, there is a network, but pretty static). However on youtube you can find a few videos… enjoy! :)
game mod from steph thirion on Vimeo.
Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.
Although they had no experience in coding, the task of each participant was to make a mod (modified version) of a game built in Processing.
Hat tip: Régine
Just a link to this article by Emily in SmartMobs that reports a study about how broadband access could spare the planet 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases.
How would faster downloads and Web page loads curb the annual flow of globe-warming gases, and by how much? According to the report:
– Telecommuting, a “zero emission” practice, eliminates office space and car commutes: 588 million tons.
– E-commerce cuts the need for warehouses and long-distance shipping: 206 million tons.
– Widespread teleconferencing could bring one-tenth of all flights to a halt: 200 million tons.
– Downloading music, movies, newspapers, and books saves packaging, paper, and shipping: 67 million tons.
well, actually “just” 56. 56 archetypical geeks that Scott Johnson illustrated and aggregated in this poster as well as making them available as individual portraits (prints also available here).
Seeing this poster made me remember a conversation had a long time ago with Lilia and Phil Wolff on the many natures (or many types) of geeks (yes since you can be an art geek, or social science geek, a mind geek and so on…).
So, what type(s) of geek are you?
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