The TV is death, long life the new TV

Most of us don’t remember the introduction of the first black &white TV in the fifties. Our parents and grandparents do. Today more than 50 years later, the TV is still in most of the houses. Some technologies didn’t reach 50 years.

Even the TV is more static comparing to other media, TV is not death, in the contrary, and the TV is here to stay for at least another 50 years and the impact will be as strong as before.

TV in the first place was important to families because the whole family or neighborhood came together to watch the news or a football game. It was a social event. For those who remembered the first landing on the moon, TV played an important role.
Then the gaming industry came, they needed a way to push their games to the families. By connecting their game console to the TV, they reached a much bigger audience then when they have to sell you another (expensive) computer.

Also digital TV came, trying to make TV as a medium more interactive. This is a whole other discussion, in some countries it worked well, in other it didn’t.

But what is the future of the TV? Will it replace the computer?
The answer is no and yes
No when it comes to typical personal computer tasks. As the name stated a computer is personal and TV isn’t. You don’t want to read your private message in front of your kids. You don’t want to take the risk a porn picture pops-up in front of your 3 year old kid
No when it comes to writing documents or analyzing excels.

Yes when it comes to social media. As in the early beginning of the TV, TV was bringing people together, this will happen again in the future.
Ask yourself a question: which big object is centralized in the living room? I guess TV is one of them?

Idea 1: TV family phone of the future
when TV would build in a video camera (like most of the notebooks already do) and connect it to Skype or other VOIP, TV can become a family phone, calling the grandparents and see each other, or your brother who lives down under with his family.
Technically it is possible, TV is good quality, are connected to the internet for digital TV

Idea 2: TV as the new Las Vegas
some games needs some atmosphere to play. Like poker. These games are big on PC, but with the modern TV and the bigger screens, game developers can bring more, control more, the atmosphere.

Idea 3: TV as replacement of the gaming console
not everybody has a gaming console as it is still expensive. But what if a TV is connected to the internet and you can download (free or buy) games. Like the iPhone app store. This would open a huge market as we count more TV’s in the world then iPhones.
While writing this article, Samsung is implementing this.

Idea 4: Interactivity 
during a sport game, fans can zoom in on different views. ex. F1, stay longer in the view like you are a racer of your favorite driver. Ex Tennis, stay focused on the game from the view of Kim Clijsters. This can be linked with publicity or other info.

I can continue writing down idea what TV can do. In general TV must bring entertainment, must connect people.
The main idea is that TV should become real computers, or at least easily connected. Nowadays for 350 dollars you have a netbook. I am sure this extra cost of the TV is worth it!

TV makers, be creative, we, consumers, are ready for the next phase!

What is Yabbedoo and what it stands for?

The United Nations states that 11% of the GDP (Global Cross Domestic Product) is related to tourism. They also stated that around 200 million people are working in the tourism sector and they count > 700 million international travelers a year, expecting to double by 2020.  Tourism represents a great potential for sustainable growth.

The internet is the primary source of information on tourist destinations and more difficult accessible destinations become more accessible thanks to the internet.

Nowadays we see a big challenge in the world to categorize all the available tourism information in a way that is accessible to all the people and in a way that the company owners don’t have to re-enter the same information over and over again.

ICT can help the tourism companies to brand and promote their image and tourist attraction in a cost-effective and less time –consuming way
ICT must guarantee that the company makes profit out of it by using the system.  The main goal of the company is to offer more service to and spent more time with the tourist/traveler, not to spent time to on the internet to promote his/her company.

Yabbedoo.com is such a platform, after discussion with several people from the tourism sector and travelers.

The main ideas behind the project are:

1. One place to enter the data, which will be distributed to many other websites
2. Open Information Platform
3. The best place to have the right information is the website of the company, so leading future travelers to the company’s webpage.
4. An easy way to cross-link other tourism attractions in the neighborhood without any extra work

One place to enter the data, which will be distributed to many other websites.
The Yabbedoo Platform let the tourism company enter data in an organized/standardized way.  Many other websites, applications, companies can connect to the Yabbedoo Platform and get the data offered by the company. 

The tourism company will have control over the brand/attraction and gains a lot of time as they have to update in 1 place.
The professional user of the platform has guaranteed the correct information as it comes directly from the source.

Open Information Platform.
The word OPEN is important; the main goal is that everyone has free and easy access to the data in the database. 

The best place to have the right information is the website of the company, so leading future travelers to the company’s webpage.
The main source of the correct information concerning the tourism company/attraction is the website of the tourism company/attraction itself.  Therefore one of the goals of Yabbedoo is to lead the user of the platform to the website for the latest and up-to-date information.

Ex.  When people want to book a hotel room, Yabbedoo will lead the user to the booking page of the hotel.
Ex. When people want to read the history of a monument, Yabbedoo will lead the user to the website related of the monument.

Yabbedoo wants to generate directs leads for the tourism company/attraction, which will give the tourism company/attractions opportunities to control his/her branding and image.

An easy way to cross-link other tourism attractions in the neighborhood without any extra work.
No tourism company/attraction can survive without other tourism companies/attractions.  (Ex. People visit a certain hotel because it is close to a natural park or ski area or many historical famous monuments are in the neighborhood).  Keeping track of all these other tourism companies/attractions is time consuming and it is a lot of double work.

Yabbedoo will take care of this with his unique cross linking algorithm.  The tourism company/attraction can use these feature for free as part of the Open Information Platform.

No extra work has to be done to offer other tourism companies/attraction in the area.

In which stage of the project is Yabbedoo?
Yabbedoo is in preview phase.  This means that many features are online, tourism projects can register for free, but we are still uploading data and new features will be added regularly.

So yes, you can start using the platform, and when big changes are coming up you will be notify.  All data entered now will not be lost.

Yabbedoo plans to go 100% live in 2010, after enough data is uploaded so we can offer the cross-linking feature and when we have enough third party partners.

Vist Yabbedoo: http://www.yabbedoo.com
Follow Yabbedoo on Twitter: http://twitter.com./yabbedoo
Read the blog: http://yabbedoo.wordpress.com

How to become an expert in your domain? (Real life example)

Do you sometimes think why some people have so much expertise? How come they know their domain so well? Do you sometimes ask yourself how to become an expert yourself?

I will explain my experience what I did to become an expert and thanks to this knowledge I am not only smarter, but also my company signs new contracts.

Knowledge is the basic of becoming an expert. I am sure you knew this already. But studying takes time, money and planning. Not everyone can leave office to study, not everyone has a company that pays specialized trainings.

An easy way to get knowledge is the internet, not just using Google or Bing and reading the articles, but to get interactive in forums.

When you find a group or forum related to the domain you known or interested in, just join. Read the questions people ask, read the answers and more important ask yourself why people ask those questions and try to answer, try to solve their problem.

Shortly said: go into discussions.

On CNN I have read an article, Learn the five secrets of innovation,  (thanks to Rich Lazzara of Lazzara yachts) about the 5 keys of a successful entrepreneur. A study found out that being a successful innovator, you need to observe other people from different area, different companies etc.

I agree and I started an experiment with my IT Company (SilverSands Associates), we started with InfoPath. Result: Every week we have a new visitor record and more and more interaction with people. Also when we negotiate with new customers, (multinationals) we talk about our blog and commitment to the InfoPath community. We sign 90% of the cases.

Is the signing of the contract related to the time spent on answering the questions and getting involved in the community?
Of course this fact only didn’t make the deal get signed, but it had an impact. So partially yes, as we could answer questions people try to solve on a daily basis, and we are not like others who stay in a theoretical, testing environment.

This way to get knowledge can be very successful for graduates also. In school you get the basics, then while working you become an expert. So using the forums can help you to be one step up front.

Let me know how you try to be an expert in your domain? As my way is only one way and others are existing.

Tip: when you get involved into forums and the community, be sure to use in a consequent way your name and a link to your blog or website.

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Twitter Quest

Who isn’t using social media? A big change that you found this article through social media like Twitter or Facebook or Blogged etc.

But together with these huge success of social media some interesting (missing) features are pumping up like backup or advanced search.

To do some web2.0 research, I will look for the most professional Twitter client by asking questions to you.

I will be posting regulary new features and hope at least one company implemented it.

At the end of the post I will add (soon) a table with the result. (don’t forget to bookmark this page)

#1: which Twitter Client let me searh in and sort by the list of people I follow?

#2: which Twitter Client let me take backups of the Tweets I have been sending?

#3 Which Twitter Client let me follow discussions? (in reply to)

#4 Which Twitter Client let me group all my accounts (DM, mentions etc)together in 1 tweet
       This can be handy when you have several Tweets in one area, vb you write about Whiskeys and about Belgian 
       Beers.  You want to have one big overview and answer fast and easy.
-

Let the quest begin and may the best Twitter Client win!

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Produce Electricity while walking on stones

Companies are understanding more and more the need o think green.
The company PavGen, generates electricity when people are walking (on their stones).  The electricity can be saved in batteries.
This seems great to install in subways or trainsstation where many people walk.

Have a look atthe video:

Visit the website of PaveGen on http://www.PaveGen.com

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Cloud Computing in Plain English

Ever wondered what Cloud Computing is?
Watch the following video, it explains Cloud Computing in plain english

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Booming business, steal and sell to governments

Everybody heard of the fact that an employee of a bank in Lichtenstein has sold for big money information to Germany. The data contained information about foreigners and their bank details.

Today, November 3,2009, Reuters published that The Netherlands received a list of people and their bank details and will pay the informant depending on the value of the information, but will end up several hundreds of thousands of Euros.

I think this is getting very dangerous, I will not discuss the fact of black money here, but the dangerous part is that the government pays thieves to reach their goal.

When an spy gets caught, selling private information he has to go to court, when an employee talks to the competitor, he/she gets fired and probably a law suite as a bonus. But when governments are doing it…. Well nothing happened.

Can we allow as citizens that government pays our tax money, which big part already goes to police and investigators, to spend on thieves? Can we allow that government spies on legal companies?

The government is playing with big amounts of money on the accounts, so the public is blind. Who doesn’t want to have a few millions on his/her account? People start dreaming when they hear this amount, and dreams are making the reality just that little bit different….
When the government is launching the news, they don’t say the money is fraud, they will start the investigation.

After 9/11, many governments used the event under the umbrella ‘war on terror’ and bypasses laws, now we have financial crisis and governments are using every means to ‘handle’ the crisis and bypassing laws.   Will it help solve the crisis?

Do you think governments should pay thieves to buy data?
(This can be become very lucrative business and wondering if the thief pays taxes on his income and in which country )

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A modest annual fee model for the internet, the most attractive business model?

When you are launching your service/product online, the most attractive business model on the internet is to offer the service for free.
It let the service grown quickly and users can gain a quick understanding of the service without risk. But when the service is a success, what is the next step?

The first issue to solve when launching your service online is to grown, so free access is the easiest way to do this. Then the next issues is to handle the growth and how to handle the headaches of growth like spammers, how to scale the infrastructure, how to handle quality issues etc.

I believe that the best way to go is a modest annual fee model. You charge a small amount of money for one year. This can be very small meaning between 1 and 49 euro a year.
The mathematics of the internet is like playing with big numbers, this is certainly true when we are talking about a success stories. Look at Face book, 350.000.000 users (read 350 million), multiply this with 1 dollar, that is 350 million dollars extra income.
This is much more then what they earn now. The same for Twitter, they will earn millions of dollars and much more then the 0 dollor they earn now.

This money can be invested in extra growth, in advanced infrastructure and in creativity by hiring employees.

Will everyone pay? Will they loose people?
I guess they will loose some users and not everyone will be ready to pay, but when the price is acceptable and low, and people thinks the service offers them something extra then yes they will pay. This is a basic economic law.

But as the service is so common for most of the users, like Twitter or FaceBook, I am convinced that people will pay a modest annual fee.

What about smaller web companies?
Even they can win with a modest annual fee model. The question you have to ask yourself is do you need 350.000.000 dollar (read again 350 million) to run your company? No you don’t, but it would be nice

The fact is if you are charging a modest annual fee you generate a stable income to help grown your service and making more profit in the end.
Most of the great services on the net disappear, because the company behind it can’t pay for the huge investments related to the growth and their own success.

So my question to you is:
How do you handle the growth of your online service?
Are you thinking of to ask a modest annual fee to your users?  if not what stops you to do so ?

Feel free to leave a comment!

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(Picture from http://www.wddx.net)

Are politicians good entrepreneurs?

I wish I could answer this question quickly by saying yes, and let you stop reading, but I am afraid I can’t. The good news is that they can become good entrepreneurs.

Running a country or region has similarities with running business: follow up budgets, deadlines etc.

When the customers or voters are not happy, well both entrepreneurs and politicians are in trouble.

We see in the world news that every country has the same problems: public transport, traffic, energy etc. So it would be great that these countries are learning from each other to find solutions.

I am a lucky person to have visited many countries and I emigrated myself away from my motherland, I saw many good things happening in every country, but I didn’t seen much copied to other countries.

I know not everything can be copied, but sometimes it is already good to share small ideas. (Sometimes hug issues demands small solutions)

Ex in Europe, Belgium is already many years talking to reduce paperwork while discussing with the governmental departments. They do a good job but the process takes to long and to much money. In Geneva, Switzerland, the services are already very good connected.
Why isn’t Belgium looking at the Geneva Canton is working? (Just as an example)
Even the 2 countries are different, many issues discusses in Belgium are already solved in Geneva and so Belgium can win time and money.

I don’t talk about meetings, business trips, agreements etc. as this will cost a lot of planning and money.  But as every company needs to do some market research before launching a new product, a politician needs to do some research also first before proposing laws, rules etc.

The politician can win with this idea, as he or she must be re-elected every X years, so they need to have quick results.  By searching for working ideas abroad, they can introduce quick solutions but low risk (as it is working already somewhere else)

So my questions are to you, what is good in your country? Can we copy this idea to other regions or countries?

Please feel free to add comments and I will adapt this post with your feedback.

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Project .generic.IT started

I am involved in a project called .generic.IT by SilverSands Associates.  Many of my business are related with IT and SilverSands Associates has a lot of experience with IT Consultancy.

Short Definition
.generic.IT is en free and open platform, a source to reduce work, time and money especially for and by IT people by offering re-usable code, documentation and manual templates for different platform.

Why
Every time I saw the same questions coming back concerning documentation and quality control and while developing I saw every project creating their own entities.

As we are in an economic crisis period and many companies have to reduce cost, I thought that the IT departments would jump on the opportunity to reduce the workload and offer more projects needed for the business.  Well, it isn’t

I asked several managers, developers why they invent the wheel over and over again?  Why do they organize still meetings on how manuals and documentation must be written even manuals and documentation exists already for years in their companies.

I asked several managers why their databases are not consequent when it comes to entities. ex.  Table of Countries, of Employees, of Addresses?

Everyone agreed this should not be coded anymore but instead we should re-use the previous code, about documentation everyone agreed that the number of pages must be reduced etc.

Who
Together with the SilverSands Associates team, we are going to provide this documentation.  Every person outside Silversands Associates is also welcome to join and collaborate.

The idea of the project .generic.IT is that you can download templates, source code, and scripts to re-use.
We started with a simple entity, Country. (now we have the code for .Net and SQL Server, but PHP, JAVA, and Oracle will be added soon.)

Join and Collaborate
It is a start up and all ideas are welcome.  The more information we get the better documentation and code we can offer, if want to collaborate, please join by sending us an email and your name + company name will be added.

The Blog:  http://SilverSandsAssociates.wordpress.con (category .generic.IT)
Follow the team via Twitter for updates: http://twitter.com/SilverSands_IT