Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Casual Gaming Without the Flashy Effects

Kari wrote last time (I like the idea of continuous conversations) that writing’s therapy, and there’s no way it isn’t. At a stressful time, such as end of the quarter financial reporting, for instance ( ), there’s nothing like taking a breather and reflect on things through text. Today’s topic… casual games and how they [...]

Robots At Our Doorstep

There’s a really, really interesting blog post that talks about robots a little bit. It’s by Paul Miller on IEEE Spectrum and draws a parallel between how the personal computing industry got started and the state of robot development today. Specifically, it talks about hardware hackers. If you want to dig even deeper, there’s another [...]

Good Ideas!

Becoming a more prolific writer on Tech IT Easy, means that I’m moving back to “napkin-work,” i.e. coming up with ideas for this blog post on a whim and seeing where they take me. Yesterday, I sat on a jury evaluating ideas that came out of a number of student teams developing game in a [...]

Paradigm Shifts Between Phone, Tablet, Desktop & Web Interfaces

…Or how not to approach development. It’s busy in Vincentland, but I’m still determined to regularly update Tech IT Easy. Today, my question is: What determines the choice for a platform? Is it market, personal taste and talent, or the desire to create something that fits a certain paradigm? In the end, no matter how [...]

Artful Pitching

My partner, Graham, is a bit of a wonder. He’s been in “the biz” of telepresence for some time, starting as an inventor / artist and really being part of the core of how to connect remotely to someone else since the 80s. With my company, AquaCinema, too, he’s worked with some key-players in VR [...]

The Missing Stat

This post started with the wrong premise, that Facebook wasn’t providing enough stats to page administrators. Last night I received a mail from Facebook that outlined some brief stats from a page that I administer. It looked like this. At first I thought, nice thanks. Then I thought that what I was really missing were [...]

Instapaper 3 is out

Best.app.on.my.iPhone. Period. So Instapaper 3 is out on iOS, which makes the app a whole lot more social and collaborative. What Instapaper does is that it allows you to save articles to it, after which it takes out all colours, (most) pictures, and side-bars, so you can focus on what really matters. If it wasn’t [...]

A Guide to Twitter

“What is Twitter?” People still keep asking me this, 5 years after Twitter was founded (I joined mid-2009). This “guide” will be my answer from now on. Just read this if you want my understanding of what Twitter is. So what is Twitter? Is it… …a celebrity medium? Charlie Sheen is the latest addition to [...]

A review of the 23andMe genetic profiling service

People frequently ask me why the $%^# I decided to ‘get my genes done.’ I get the feeling that this is a scary area for many of us and that is part of the reason why I did it, to explore something that has an interesting future possibly. I also thought it would be a [...]

E’Ship Diary Part 8 – On the Marathon of Starting a Business

I’ve been struggling for a while about what to write for Tech IT Easy—things seemed to change from one day to the next and it made little sense to reflect, rather a speedy reaction felt more like the right thing to do. That hasn’t changed much, as I believe we’ve just reached a stage of [...]

E’ship diary part 7: Gut Instinct vs. Calculation, or On Managing Uncertainty

Let me start by saying that it’s hard to write about what we’re doing, particularly from a non-marketing angle. Tech IT Easy is a .Org and it doesn’t feel right to use it as a commercial medium (apart from the sponsorship banner, which I value very much and which will at some point host my [...]

IDEA GENERATION: what is your workflow?

I asked yesterday for a more graphical and intuitive way to plan out costs for products and projects. The reason lies in an essay I co-authored several years ago with Jeremy Fein, co-founder of this blog. I forget the exact title of the thing, but its premise was that good entrepreneurial teams are composed of [...]

E’ship diary part 3: Why I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneurship’

Both ‘startup’ and ‘entrepreneur’ are terms that immediately evoke an often false reaction from an audience and I would personally prefer not to describe my work using those words. In the following post, I write about three associations in regards to entrepreneurship, one positive, one negative, both somewhat false, and one what I see entrepreneurship [...]

An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur. One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more [...]

Truest sign that we are nearing the Singularity – on the Value of Backups

Materialism doesn’t matter. There, I’ve said it. Nothing material, nothing that you can touch, matters… when talking about computers. See, I’m not that evolved. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my laptop got stolen on the train. Last summer, due to a friend of mine “borrowing” my laptop at an event without telling me, I [...]