Connectivity as a Utility and other news
There were two news items that made a huge impression on me this week. The first was that Apple sales of Leopard exceeded sales of Vista in Japan in October. Apple has been a niche player for decades but this might be a turning point: In the six days after Leopard’s 26 October launch, combined single-user licence (46 per cent) and family pack (7.9 per cent) sales accounted for 53.9 per cent of the total OS-only market in Japan. However, at Microsoft, Windows sales fell from 75.3 per cent to 28.7 per cent The second announcement that made...
read moreAmsterdam Style: Tessa!
Tessa got spotted on her way to the Post CS building (where my office is) a few days ago by the people from Dam Style blog. They thought she was representative for hip Dutch girls and asked if they could make a photo of her. Cool!
read moreSerendipity and a Haircut
Last night I was invited to a special ‘Music & Internet’ event hosted by Veronica. Tessa was invited too so we asked a friend to watch over our kids. As we were getting ready for the party I noticed that my hair was really long and that I was completely out of hair gel. I complained about it to Tessa who suggested that we would buy gel on our way to the party. I didn’t like that idea and just gave up. Then we arrived at the party and to my surprise it turned out to be in a very hip Amsterdam shop which included a...
read moreArchitecture 2.0
My father is a well known architect from Rotterdam. After visiting the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam last year he decided to organize a conference about the future of architecture. It grew into a pretty impressive event over the previous months! The Architecture 2.0 conference will be held on November 9 in ‘De Doelen’ in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and is organized together with NAi (the dutch architecture museum) in Rotterdam. The speakers are Wiel Arets, Ben van Berkel, Francine Houben, Rem Koolhaas, Winy Maas and Willem Jan...
read moreSteve Jobs: Design & The Washing Machine
As you might know I have a huge (complete!) collection of Wired Magazines. Regularly I grab a random copy and browse through it. Today I grabbed a 1996 issue with Steve Jobs on the cover. I only read half of the article but was thrilled when I found a quote that made a huge impression on me when I first read it. The last question that Gary Wolf asks is “Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?”. Steve Jobs then tells a very personal story about his ideas about design and how he and his family deals with...
read moreI:Untelevised
A few months ago I had another problem with my cable provider. One of the payments got screwed up and I had to fax them something and spend too much on hold waiting for some lady to help me with things. I had cancelled my internet connection earlier but still had a TV signal and telephone subscription. During that call I complained to the lady and said something like ‘I wish I could just cancel everything‘. She replied that all I had to do is say the word and she would erase my record and cancel all services I subscribed too. I did...
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