Wow… Great talk about a great brand and car that will change the we see cars.
Great stuff on how UX goes into designing a car with a 17 inch monitor.
An SDK to allow third-party to develop apps for a car…. amazing
Just didn’t understood one statement “Gramma can get into the car an she can drive away.. [due to the familiar elements] and turn the volume up”
Who the heck has a car like this and let gramma take the wheel????? 
The chat goes into technology in another talk.
[EDIT: It uses Adobe Air, less 50 miles to power it up ]
(Via @danmartell)
Pure genius of a video…. A nuts turned into a leader, under three minutes. No comments
Via @joshk via TED
Tomorrow, America’s Cup 33, is starting. Two monster boats, built by two spoiled rich dudes, will race on some terms that are not really made for those boats. This time, following the boats will be so difficult that even the empires will have to run fast to follow 30+ knots speeds.
2 skippers: One is rich and apparently will race his own boat, the second a match-racing genius.
2 boats so fast that “close” in “close racing” doesn’t mean the same anymore.
Looking forward to what it life.
Photo from SLAM
A fun experience always yield more results: check the video bellow.
There may be one problem with this though. It doesn’t always scale well!
Can you imagine a big city full of these? Well, kids could see if as a fun experience but at one point the surprise factor stops.
The same happens in different subjects: I recently watched this amazing guy talking about new ways of thinking sustainability. He argues against the “less bad” thinking that has driven carbon-trading and other initiatives on global warming. Instead, we argues about driving radical innovation trough imitating nature’s way of doing things. Some of them are truly amazing but on different occasions I kept thinking about the fact that, for instance, a bamboo house cannot be scalable because raw materials and skilled workers would lack or because human life is simply not ready.
How to avoid this? If scaling in quantity doesn’t work, scale variety, innovation and uniqueness… Radical innovation always drives different branches of thinking that will eventually lead to solutions that reach the same effects while being able to scale.
Make sure you visit this: thefuntheory.com
After years of depressive opinions that no one supported, I got one right. An insightful comment immediately got a very down-to heart response from @twitter himself.
Thank you as in “Thank you for noticing that, you really suck at that and I’m getting pretty annoyed with you deleting misspelled posts …” (they just have a limit in characters as you know, so Thanks is enough)
Morten Lund claimed his trends (and hopes) for 2010.
Guess what: i haven’t told my trends for 2010 yet.
I believe there’s a lot of the same when comparing to 2009 but found 3 relevant trends follow:
App stores
The app store fad is in. Desktop Apps (Intel, Twitter Apps (OneForty) or Business Software (GetApp.com) they all race after the gold ruch, which in my opinion is more like Led. Apple made wonders when they introduced the App store because they simplified the way people had access and bough music, iPhoneApps,… But Apple controls the platform (ie, the iPhone, the iPod, etc…). Beside Google and the Android Market or Amazon and the Kindle no one else controls it (even Google is more open). This only means 3 things:
You build yout platform: Audible is trying to do it, maybe going against open formats(?)
Fees will be minimum since users can by directly from the App owner (the same is happening and already happened to some extent with the music and gaming industry: being middle man when you don’t control distribution channels or other forces in the supply chain doesn’t pay off)
The only value they can add is based on how much extra exposure they can add to the apps: basically they become another point of sale the if the extra exposure created is enough, app owners may be able to. Some hype may keep the fad for a while though and some opportunities may be squeezed while the gold rush lasts (and everybody knows while the gold rush lasted, the only guys making money where basically the ones selling the pick and shovels ).
Simplicity
Web 2.0 is reaching a stability phase. Features will move toward integrated functionality. Real-time and Geo is still growing and experimental. The real deal will be driven by integrating these different geek features into things that make people life’s simpler. Twitter and Foursquare/Gowalla are breakthroughs but the real value out of it is still to come. It like the vinyl players that someone tried to squeeze into a car: the true meaningful innovation was portable music, which arrived with the k7 player. Too many features spur creativity and experimentation: they certainly drive unique stuff but more money generating ideas will arrive from the maturation of it.
The third one
There is a third one and it’s linked under different levels to the two above, while focusing on reducing cost to users (real and perceived cost). But I’ll ride that wave before someone notice it 
TIP: TrendWatching.com has some good macro-trends that may be worth to take a look at
Why? Teechnology, that’s why…. Technology grows faster than my ability(xFocus x …) to learn Danish.
Not convinced? Check it bellow. Now Google Translate automatically recommends me to turn on automatic translation. Is this technology advancing on internationalization or is Google mind-reading me and knows that I suck reading that (in this case it was Blur.se, a Swedish site about sailing: but bare with me on the little differences between Svenska and Dansk).
[EDIT: Cant wait to have in on my Gmail!!!]
I’ve been reading some material related to Human Behaviour and choice (Predictably irrational, great book) and ended up stumbling on 2 TED gems.
The “Paradox of choice” is one of my favourite books. This guy just keeps you thinking and thinking …
Too much Information
It’s no news that we have to much information available and that we consume too much of it (34Giga a day apparently).
IQ is growing 3 points per generation it seams, but some kind of loss of wisdom seem to happen. People spending more time absorbing stuff than socializing (when the man is a naturally sociable being… is that going to be lost?)
I tend to feel that.
Leadging to too little productivity(?)
Can too much information drive to less things done? People do turn of their Internet, gadgets, mobiles, skype’s to be able to work. The apparent haunt for information leaves immense trails on productivity. The guy checking his friends on Facebook when he ought to be working, the guy (ME included) clicking trough amazing links in Twitter or Wikipedia loosing myself into it, and failing to do what was planned only to end up catching up until 4am…
I personally find myself having too many ideas and not executing that many because I just can’t. My recent focus has been about making a few really happen and kick-ass on them.
What about Happiness?
Is happiness affected by the huge amount of information we consume? Linking human behaviour, racionality and paradox of choice, another gem from TED (Why are (/are not) we happy?) seem to point in that direction. By knowing too much humans tend to want too much. It’s natural, and probably an evolutionary thing that led us to where we are today.
A cool study made me think: people with immediate memory loss were given the option to choose their favourite paintings. On the cases where they were said that some paintings were theirs, they find those more beautiful: people tend to believe that their own life is better that actually is. 30 minutes later, they choose other paintings just because that time they weren’t told the painting was theirs…
This is basically being “Content” which is a word that on it origin links to contained/restrained and at the same time ”Happyness”: in fact “Contente”, is a Portuguese word for “being happy” (portuguese is a latinic language, FYI .
Meaning: people that contain themselves (under different levels) tend to be happier. A I am not talking about huge containment here… just a little …. Now this makes me think… A LOT!!!
Winning the lottery vs Getting paraplegic? We’ll the choice is easy but research constantly proves that winning the lottery makes people less happier and that paraplegic learn how to be happier, even more than they were before.
Finally the importance of rewards: Carrots and sticks don’t work anymore. After years of climbing Maslow’s hierarchy trough better living standards, modern civilization find other motivators to be happy on what they do. Money is strongly related to LOSS OF PERFORMANCE, and yet, bonuses drive business today (read banker’s bonuses while a freaking crisis is affecting everyone).
Something stuck with me:
Bounded Ambitions = work joy, sense of achievement
Unbounded objectives lead to frustation, unfullfilment and some times to theft, fraud, and so on
Having so much choice and possibilities ahead, it’s good to have achievable goals, to split goals into more immediate steps so quick wins can leverage the resulting attitude. Long-term is good, but humans don’t relate to long-term/obscure things that much: Try to achieve long-term objectives trough small but tangible steps.
Nice looking back at something that I (we?) only know from today. And so many things just look like the same (in a good way).
Classic & Genius in a way…
From www.CopenhagenCycleChic, tipped by @ML.
Google just came out with some some news on making the internet 2 times faster with a new technology that may replace one of the crucial protocols of the Internet. Plain dumb and let me explain why
If I was Google (Disclaimer: I’m not), I would make the internet two times faster in about 1-2 years by simply making website’s performance increasingly important in page rank.
Every SEO freak would invest like crazy on making their websites lightning fast and natural selection would dictate that slow sites would stop being as used since they would not show on top results. Google even promotes it already with best practices on performance.
3 little things are known to be able to make the website load more than 2 times faster:
- Compressing CSS & Javascript (static elements)
- Optimizing image sizes
- Having static elements loaded from Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s)
Caching, blablabla, blablabla can also help.
Google, there is no need for a house full of PHD’s. K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) always works.
PS: Obviously they are investing in a longer term leap in performance, but i decided to contribute with a short-term “fix” anyway
