The Nabazmob: smart rabbits indeed

As seen yesterday evening @ the ICT2010.eu reception held in the Koninklijke St Hubertus Gallerij in the centre of Brussels: the Opera for 100 Smart Rabbits. 100 Nabaztags perform an opera, transmitted via WiFi. Each rabbit has a small loudspeaker in its stomach and the combination of the lights and the choreographed ears gives the whole performance a magical touch.

You'd expect this performance to be relatively new -especially when it's one of the attractions at a ICT2010 event but it has been created in ... 2006. Makes me wonder ...

The creators have a website and this is what the performance is all about: this opera questions the issues of working together, organization, decision and control, which are increasingly central and difficult in our contemporary world.


I'll stick to 'magical'.

Why the Internet will fail (said Newsweek in 1995)

"Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney."

Or so said a Newsweek article, published in 1995 and recovered by the blog ThreeWordChant, where you can read the full article. This is the era of Usenet (BBS), of the first mobile phones in the workplace, the shift from desktops to laptops (but nothing to be compared with what we use now). I should check my old professional files: I'd probably come up with this kind of stuff as well. The only part of it which isn't totally wrong is the part about a more democratic government. Still a long way to go there.

And I would absolutely love for someone to take 15 years of Forrester reports with 5 year predictions and calculate how often they were wrong. Or any other big consulting firm, for that matter.

To be a little kid again ...

It's not as if I have an iPad or plan to buy me one any day soon but even die-hard Apple-bashers have to admit that these tools bring out the best in some publishers.

Imagine working for Penguin Books' interactive division and be able to create this stuff. 3D Pop-up books for the iPad.  This is soooo cute. Enjoy!

Thank you, Leonard ...

... for a fantastic concert last Saturday in Ghent. It was a magical night, cloudless, warm breeze, perfect soundmix, great musicians and you, of course. Although I must admit I've never been much of a fan: Leonard Cohen, that's sixties stuff (before my time) and The Future is a CD my mom used to play a lot. When I bought tickets it was more of a 'let's go see him because he may never be coming back' kind of motivation so I was completely caught off guard by your impact. Of course you are a ladies man, but still. And what a playlist. You started at 20PM and played till a couple of minutes before midnight, half an hour intermission included. Such energy, such grace, such a gentleman.

By far the most sexy 75+ I ever saw :-)

Who'd have hunched it was Belgium?

As a starter: I'm not convinced. Hunch.com, the new toy created by Caterina Fake (Flick'r) basically claims to personalize the internet by asking its users a bunch of questions, thus creating profiles and link these to services, products, destinations, ... based on gathered profile data. I don't see why I would bother leaving my very personal information on likes and dislikes out there in Cyberspace but hey, maybe that's a generational thing.

What Hunch.com also does (and my guess is that's where the money is) is data-mine this pile of data. They keep a blog in which they come up with fancy new demographics. On the subject of travelling:
- women prefer to travel to Europe: in particular to 'civilised countries like Belgium, Ireland or Greece
- when Americans in general travel they again think Belgium and the UK are the countries to visit
- Europeans on the other hand seem to think Finland is the country to visit

Hunch.com claims that their registered users have already answered more than 50 million questions and are registering at a rate of 3000 a day. It would be interesting to know where they come from.

One example of user feedback: 'whoooaaa! (...) It's so accurate! 80% of the stuff (in this case: recommendations linked to his profile) I already have/use.

My point exactly. Where's the added value? Why bother?