Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category

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 [...]

Blogs are to Books are what TV-Shows are to Movies?

So Penelope Trunk wrote a book. I previously wrote about her here. A commentator on one of blog-posts asks: Penelope, I read your blog regularly. Is there anything in your new book that I wouldn’t have already gotten from your blog? Either way, I’ll probably buy it… but I was just curious. Posted by Kelly [...]

The Great Divide

I sent off my V-moda headphone for repair. The address was somewhere in Los Angeles, California, and I live in the Netherlands. They checked it and sent me a replacement with no questions asked. The only problem? I sent them off on the 23rd of February and got them back yesterday, 15 days later. Even [...]

More thoughts on the ‘networked’ enterprise or why all “networks” end up becoming “silos”

I finished my last post on the stance that, realistically, all enterprises today are partially networked and they should be. The question for a company is always to what extent they should ‘externalise’ the processes of their company and to what extent they should ‘internalise’ them. There certainly is a mix of fear, greed, and [...]

Are we living in a networked world?

Cecil Dijoux has been writing a lot on what he calls the networked enterprise on this and his site. He’s a big believer in it and I respect that even though I disagree on a great many points with him. This post is the beginning of a response to him—I would have to summarise many [...]

The Internet does not make much sense… On pricing digital goods and other illogicalities

“From my cold, dead hands…” It’s something that came to mind as I was thinking about writing this post. The part that doesn’t make sense about the Internet, today and perhaps since ever, is that American concept of “Freedom,” of independence and lack of governance. In my post on piracy, my point was not complete. [...]

On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]

I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair. OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up. Global package delivery, [...]

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 [...]

E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks

Having reached a personal milestone, part 5 of my entrepreneurship diaries, I should mention that it’s very pleasurable and useful for me to write on these topics, and I hope it’s the same for you. In this post, I want to briefly address the issue of uncertainty in early stage technology companies and how that [...]

Why I look down on coding (and why I’m completely wrong about it)

I live in a funny world. My company, which is composed of several disciplines in the manufacturing, industrial design, and, yes, programming space, is one factor. I sometimes see people screw together contraptions in our workshop, and I see coders banging away at their PCs and Macs, and I wonder what the hell I am [...]

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 [...]

e-Reader or Print Media which is Greener? Join the Debate…..

We have been  reading postings and briefings on all sorts of touch pads and e-Reader recently, be it the Amazon Kindle or much disputed Apple’s iPad. But apart from usability and innovation involved in developing the product one feature that inspired me to write this post is  its long term affect on existing Carbon Di [...]

How Mergers and Acquisitions May Actually Narrows the Scope of Innovation

Be it Automobile , Aviation or Heavy Metal Industries, everyone felt the heat of recession but regardless IT fared better than most. In spite of worst economic meltdowns in history, acquisitions among big vendors continued to reshape the market, operating-system wars extended to mobile battlefields, microblogging became a powerful source of real-time information, and the take-up [...]

Why Entrepreneurship is ultimately Not a Management Science

I’m reposting this comment I wrote in response to Eric Ries’s stimulating blog post on Harvard Business Review online, with the title “Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?” Feel free to share your thoughts on it there as I think it’s worth thinking about whether Entrepreneurship can eventually learned or whether it is an art-form. My [...]