Archive for the ‘Technology’ 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Features & Cost Comparisons between the iPad 2, the iPhone 4, & the MacBook

Most people haven’t read my previous posts on the iPhone, but they started out extremely negative. My main complaint was that touch-typing was inferior to physical keyboards and cost of the mobile subscription fees, also taking into account that I live in Europe and have to add roaming-fees to that equation. Then things happened quite [...]

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 [...]

8 Things I learned about Entrepreneurship in 2010

This is not a post about the macro-economic climate. I tend to think that we all make our own fate, though certainly financial conditions affected the way I perceived certain things. It’s more a post about a guy who’s never been an entrepreneur, but who watched, interacted, and tried to learn a lot about entrepreneurship [...]

Is Apple’s FaceTime (meant to be) Disruptive?

Note from Vincent: Hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates on this blog. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m very preoccupied with other things (that actually make me money) and really, really miss blogging on Techiteasy.org. If perchance, a random reader thinks he can blog at least 1-7x per week on business, tech, [...]

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. [...]

Can we accept piracy as a necessary evil already? [Cranky Rant]

I have a general philosophy on the evolution of the B2C and B2B relationship, one that is inspired by history. Let’s look at some examples. Money first took the form of barter, then gold, then coins, then paper, and now bits and bytes. Transport: on foot (great shoe-sales), animals (great stable-sales), cars (great garage sales), [...]

Swedes know how to connect with music – or how to stream Spotify to the living room

ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify. [...]

The last retail store on earth—a fantasy story

The door slid open slowly, all that was visible from inside the store was a wide beam of light that slowly expanded into the shape of a door. The automatic triggers kicked in and the other security-panels in front of the windows slide open also, illuminating the last retail store left in the world 2020. [...]

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 [...]