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Living Asynchronously at all costs…

// August 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Philosophy

We don’t seem to have taken any lessons from Horace’s Carpe Diem

Seizing the day or every moment in that sense would mean to enjoy every emotion, every action and reaction that comes with it in that moment, in that exact perspective with everything around it. In this sense technology is allowing us to avoid most confrontations in life:

We prefer to write each others sms, emails and instant messages where we hide behind stylized fonts and emoticons to represent our virtual projections trough a filter of not who we are at that moment but who we want to represent.

We came to the point where trough social networks we have hundreds of friends that we really don’t know or care about and yet trough the ease of various technologies we easily remember to send them massively impersonal holiday greetings. We would never talk to them to cheer or never be with them in time of joy or sorrow, never share that instant feelings that would be there only for us to experience.

Last new years eve we sent 43 BILLION SMS messages around the globe. 43 Billion happy messages… How many of those 43 billion messages really meant something ?

This kind of fastfood massively multiplayed relationships make it impossible to have real one-to-one deep ones for a very simple fact: we decided to have lives with separate internal clocks, therefore we live asynchronously with everything around us, including the world: every man is an island… (contrary to John Donne)

We respond to feelings or problems in our own time, we join or leave discussions in our own time, we add, block or delete friends in our own time, we start or end relationships in our own time.

Technology is no evil, we just decide to make bad use of it (as we always did).

We have the illusion to be infinitely more connected then we used to be but connected so loosely that the real strong bonds that made the human race survive trough many tough times are simply not there anymore. New generations will probably not have a clue of what real friendship meant, or loyalty, or belonging…

Its so easy to divide and conquer were you don’t have to cut trough those tight knots we once had.

Don’t misinterpret me, I am all for liberty and I am not saying that bigotry, the power of the church, empires or kingdoms are better: those were not hand-by-hand, arm-by-arm knots but chains!

I am talking about big families, old towns, tribes, clans… On a bigger scale I am talking about being one with the universe, with the ecowatch and not the egowatch.

Sincronicity is a way of life, is a huge lesson, it needs will and training but most of all it means having a totally different mind set and surroundings.

“Walk lightly in the spring; Mother Earth is pregnant.”

I am not going to discuss what this means here, just listen to it… I wish we could feel this way one day!

An old Navajo saying says: You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep

So for who is not pretending: WAKE UP!

SK

Iphone: How a Fad becomes Phat !

// August 7th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Technology

I was very skeptical at the whole Iphone craze.

The device obviously lacked major features almost standard in any other phone. The very few applications available limited the actual use of the breakthrough screen technology and the keyboard was incomparable to any qwerty.

Then with the 3G version, with lots of fixes and improvements on the stability and hardware, came the Apps Store.

Now virtually anybody can develop applications, and what applications! People who really understand software are starting to use the full potential of the beatiful device wich was craving to be usefull.

Its still lacks some basic, important features (copy/paste…why?) but the usefulness of the applications, and the USER EXPERIENCE in capital letters is definitely worth the hassle now.

You still wont have a good phone, but who uses the phone to actually make a call anymore ?

Screen, Browsing, Email, Messaging, Social Apps, Games, Music, Video, Podcasts, Pictures, Storage, Connectivity, Utilities, Contacts, GeoAwareness: function and experience wise are the best on the market, and not compared to All-in-one devices but comparing each feature to the best portable device who’s job is to do something specific.

Phone, Camera and Typing features are not even close, but they are not so bad + its sexy as hell (can’t believe I am saying this, but it really is) and the rest makes it a definite buy!

I am once more amazed at Steve Jobs vision! I am sorry I didn’t buy into it without first actually seeing where this all was going to…

SK

E-Ink, finally a revolutionary technology, sadly threatened by greed

// June 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

Its been a while since I was really impressed by a technology in the real sense. I must say the last time was when I first saw a graphical webpage in 1995 and started browsing for the very first time (IBM OS2 Warp / Mozilla).

Then few months ago I was walking down a mall in SF and entered a Sony store, when I saw their ebook reader for the very first time. I heard about the technology and read about it a lot, I read about Kindle etc. I must say I was very skeptical as I love to “feel” books, but having the reader in my hands changed all that. At first I literally taught there was a printed sticker on the screen and that i was holding a dummy, but then i pressed a button and the text changed… You have to see it with your own eyes to understand what I am talking about.

So the technology is awesome, but what about content ? First thing I did was to look for content availability and the best E-Ink device there was. I was disturbed by seeing that history didn’t prevent the same mistakes to be made:

Both Sony and Amazon (Kindle) decided to invent a new proprietary file type and therefore sell exclusive content to their exclusive devices. I do understand Sony’s inclination to do so as they come from a “console war” experience but Amazon deluded me plenty:

There are many examples on why content and hardware should not go hand in hand: Apple vs Microsoft, MP3 vs ATRAC, Blue-ray vs HDDVD… nothing good came out of trying to monopolize content.

Amazon of all people, leader in eshopping, content delivery, huge advantage on customer base, marketing skills, CRM, loyalty etc shouldn’t have been afraid to let people use whichever device best suited them.

Take me for example: I want to use the reader as replacement to books, therefor only to read, I don’t need anything else: no connectivity, no note taking, purely reading. Therefore my device should be light, should be able to read as most file types as possible and battery life should be great. None of these features are best with the Kindle. I do want to buy books from Amazon though, as I think they have the best shopping experience and yet I can’t… I am sure I am not the only one…

I wont be surprised to see Amazon and Sony take exclusivity on delivering ebooks of big writers, therefore try blocking the way of other hardware providers, blocking the best technology to emerge and blocking the way to cheap great ereaders… They won’t succeed, as Apple didn’t succeed with the PC, as Sony didn’t succeed with MiniDisc or ATRAC, history will repeat itself, but as always progress will be delayed, and many fights will have to be fought…

I chose to buy the Bookeen Cybook Gen3 reader: AMAZING! I am reading at least 4 times more what I used to read (and I did already read pretty much) it supports all the important ebook and document formats, and you can find tons of content on MobiPocket.com, BooksonBoard.com and many more…

This is the beginning of a new content delivery technology: still very expensive, still limited (no colors yet…) but a real breakthrough…

SK

UPDATE: Sony must have understood their mistake as they have included in their last firmware update support for the open ebook standards EPUB and DE PDF. This puts them at the top as device, well done!

Bake your Cookie and eat it too!

// December 16th, 2007 // No Comments » // Marketing

When the first HTTP Cookie was ever made it had the main objective of making shopping carts more usable therefore converting more sales by giving the users a better experience.

There have been a lot of discussions regarding the privacy issues a cookie implied, but marketers immediatly understood how strong a tool it was and did’nt want to let it go. The real reason for today’s success of the cookie technology is that some major players on the market forced the users to accept cookies in order to be able to access their services.

When a technology is too strong, you simply can’t resist and you forget even when was the time you really allowed it to happen in the first place: Javascript, Flash, CSS…

With a cookie you can track tons of information regarding a user behaviour: where he has been, how many times has he seen wich advertisment, how did he react, what did he do next: basically this is how most of behavioral targeting is done.

But how would you impose such a sneaky object into a paranoid crowd: you give it a cute name! From a marketers perspective it could be more appropriate to call it a “Quicky”…

That a cookie improves user experience there is no doubt, but the tools it gives marketers and the information we gather is unvaluable.

I always was tought that “you CAN’T bake your cake and eat it too” but apparently when it comes to cookies you actually CAN…

Slurp!

Sadok Kohen

Can you ever afford not to care ?

// December 7th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Business

Its a dangerous thing to be the biggest, to have no competition, to have too much money: makes you callous towards your business.

Last week Paypal decided to suspend my account without any notice and without any explanation, and worse: as standard procedure towards successful businesses!

So if you are growing too fast, if you show success, if you make Paypal earn more money then the average customer, apparently you should be doing something criminal. So without a call, without a mail, without any verification, they decide to stop the service. Just like that.

Imagine your bank doing the same thing: you go to pay a bill, they tell you “sorry, you are making more money then the average Joe, liberal marketplace is an illusion, you are lucky we don’t arrest you, so until we feel like it, go away, we will call you!”

So I try to call the customer service, and very professionally they tell me they need me to explain to them howcome the success. I wrote them my business description (which is openly available on my website) and call again: they tell me I have to wait for the “qualified people” to check the info and that they have everything they need.

After waiting (and loosing money by the minute) I asked them to put me in contact with the holy “qualified people”, but even they can’t get in contact with them, all they can do is email them the information requested by me, I should wait, there are a lot of people waiting (!)…

My account was put back to normal in 6 days. I still haven’t been told why the account was suspended in the first place.

Even the smallest bank have account representatives. I can’t imagine how anybody could afford to do business like this. I am shocked of how such a great service could afford to have such bad customer care.

I am not the only one having this kind of problems, and it seems I won’t be the last, this is exactly why its healthy to have competition, and I am sure the competition took notice, but why should you be threatened to improve yourself ? Isn’t that the ultimate purpose of business ?

Sadok Kohen

When Atlas Wants to Shrug…

// November 22nd, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Philosophy

Freedom is a tricky word, it is very subjective, its a shape-shifter perpetually changing identity.

Sometimes its just a way of being, so romantic and courageous, sometimes its a revolt, a revolution, a declaration of independence, a country, a job. Sometimes its a house with a view, sometimes a word, sometimes a song. It can be a smile, a kiss, a stroll in the park, a juicy wonderful steak. Its sometimes a book, a movie, a name… But at the end its just a word.

We live in a world with lots of illusions, the biggest illusion is freedom! We have no difference from the world depicted in the Matrix:

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

I find myself asking the same questions again and again. Different circumstances, same questions, sometimes it makes me want to puke…

There are several wars you can attend to, but not all are clean and you can’t win them all. A saying says:

Never wrestle with a pig-you both get dirty but the pig likes it!

Another says:

Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience!

Well its sometimes hard to run away from getting dirty and from being beaten down. Its also true though that every war bares a lesson, and every lesson has a price. The price makes you want to shrug and give up on the world you have built on your shoulders, and life seems so pointless and in vain.

So why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Because I choose to.

Sadok Kohen

for Sam