I doubt there is a better example: Nintendo is beating two of the largest companies of the world; Sony and Microsoft, simply by knowing they can’t compete within the rules of the game, so they changed the rules. I mean, Look at this… I don’t like game consoles and I really don’t like Mortal Kombat-style [...]
Well done!
Spent 2 hours yesterday team-editing a document using google docs with Jeroen, whilst voicechatting by way of skype. I have no idea why anyone would need an office given these two fantastic tools. Whilst the ‘word’ variant of google docs is a bit sparse on the formatting, editing the text there and taking care of [...]
New Venture is one of a number of entities in the Netherlands helping startups flourish. On the advice of Lesly Mulder of YES!Delft, the local incubator project sponsered primarily by the Delft Technical University, we’ve applied a rough draft of our business plan. The best 10 get 500 bucks. Not exactly a reason to break [...]
Spent last night learning PHP. A decidedly unsexy language in that it doesn’t introduce any new concepts whatsoever, it’s proven to be even easier to pick up compared to python or even javascript. Fortunately a lot of features introduced in PHP5 allows pushing the language quite far before you hit the unmaintainable dregs usually contributed [...]
Random check at the success of the tipjar idea: It’s currently the highest rated comment on an article by Shirky about how (mandatory) micropayments will always fail. I didn’t make that comment, someone else did. I’m more and more convinced that we’re “on the clock” as it were. This idea is so great, it’s really [...]
Writely has just been acquired. By one of the big five – google to be exact. I wonder how long it’s going to last, but, for now, aiming to build something cool appears to be enough to get acquired by one of the 5 (Yahoo, Ebay/Paypal, Amazon, Google, Microsoft). Good stuff – makes it real [...]
A one-sentence description of the failure of micropayments convinced me to cook up the idea for tipjar, but a bit more robust treatise on why your average run of the mill micropayment scheme is doomed to fail can be found here (Clay Shirky). Always nice to read a thorough report on why your future company’s [...]
I like open source. I operate 2 linux servers which do their job very very well, and I’ve personally looked through some code of the JVM (that’s ‘shared source’ but the point is there) which helped me figure something out. I even patched mplayer to do stuff I wanted it to do, which pretty much [...]