Susan Krieger

Thermostaten zijn niet ‘s werelds slimste apparaten in je huis, want meestal zorgt jouw handwerk ervoor dat hij jouw huis wat warmer maakt in de koude tijden die voor de deur staan. Nu zou het natuurlijk handig zijn als een thermostaat gewoon weet wanneer jij thuis bent, wanneer je weg bent, wat voor temperatuur je het fijnst vindt en deze ook vanaf een afstand kan bedienen. Dat kan binnenkort met Nest!

Nest is een lerende thermostaat, hij registreert wat jij doet met de temperatuur in huis en maakt hiervan een schema wanneer hij het huis moet opwarmen en wanneer hij het huis moet laten afkoelen. Omdat dit soms kan wijzigen kun je het automatisch gemaakte schema natuurlijk altijd aanpassen. Dit kan handig zijn wanneer je wat langer weg bent.

Omdat het milieu steeds belangrijker wordt, let Nest ook op hoe jij er gebruik van maakt – ben je goed bezig, dan laat hij een groen blaadje in het scherm zien, zo bespaar je geld en doe je ook nog iets goeds voor het milieu.

Nest is in je huis verbonden met het draadloze netwerk. Door middel van deze internetverbinding, kan de thermostaat de laatste weersverwachting ophalen en de temperatuur daar op aanpassen. Ook kun je via deze verbinding de temperatuur op afstand bedienen.

Als je een iOS of Android telefoon hebt, kun je een app downloaden waarmee je vanaf een afstand de temperatuur kan aanpassen. Mocht je ver van huis zijn en ben je er achter gekomen dat de verwarming nog aan staat, kun je deze met gemak veranderen. Heb je nog een oude telefoon die geen apps ondersteund, kun je ook naar de website van Nest surfen en de temperatuur bedienen. De verbinding met het netwerk is ook handig voor updates die Nest automatisch download en installeert.

De functies zijn leuk en aardig, maar het oog wil ook wat. Dat krijgt het zeker ook, want met een metalen afwerking en een glanzend minimalistisch ontwerp maakt het Nest toch een van de mooiste thermostaten die tegenwoordig verkrijgbaar* is. Nest is op dit moment nog niet verkrijgbaar en is vooralsnog bestemd voor Noord-Amerika. Of Nest ook beschikbaar wordt in Nederland en België is nog onbekend. Op dit moment draagt Nest een prijs van $ 250 dollar (omgerekend zo’n € 180 euro).

*Op het moment van schrijven is Nest alleen nog te pre-orderen.

LONDON (Reuters) - Research in Motion said on Tuesday it had restored BlackBerry services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, some 20 hours after users in EMEA and India first reported problems with email and BlackBerry Messenger.

Aakash costs $35 with government subsidies for students or $60 in stores. The government is giving away 100,000 for free during its launch period. The first 500 tablets released received a mixed response, as some complained that they are slow.

The government hopes the device will bridge the gap between the rich and poor. “The rich have access to the digital world, the poor and ordinary have been excluded. Aakash will end that digital divide,” says Kapil Sibal, the communications and education minister.

If you’re wondering what a tablet that costs as much as a pair of sneakers can possibly do, here’s a bit more about its specs: Aakash runs Android 2.2 Froyo, has a 7-inch touchscreen, weighs 350 grams, and has 32 GB of internal memory, 256 MB of RAM and two USB ports. The 2100mAh battery should last for two to three hours. Although it comes pre-loaded with some apps, it does not access the Android Marketplace. It has been tested in 118 degree Fahrenheit conditions to replicate northern India’s summer.

Datawind, a small British company, developed the tablet with the Indian Institute of Technology. The tablet is being produced in India and should be available in stores next month. The government plans to start selling them at the subsidized price to students next year.

What do you think of this tablet? Is it worth compromising speed to bring access to millions who otherwise could not afford a tablet computer or any computer at all? Let us know what you think in the comments.

[via The Times of India]

More About: developing countries, Social Good, Tablet, World

Finding the right people for your company is extremely difficult and important. Your company is your product, your vision and the result of your strategy but that is all just 20% of the total. The rest is made up by the sum of all your partners and employees. If the people suck, are stupid or uninterested it won’t matter how good their resumes look, you will be screwed.

Now lets assume you have put together a beautiful team of smart and ambitious people that all complement each other and strive to build the best company in the world.

Congratulations. So far so good.

One day in the future one of them will want to talk to you and announce they will be leaving the company. The reason won’t really matter or make things better. You will be seriously disappointed.

So what do you do?

How you deal with this has a great impact for the future of your company. You can scream at them, cry a bit, beg them to stay, or throw a chair at them. But in the end, by the time they confront you, you can be certain their minds have been made up. They WILL leave you.

So what do you do? You are going to lose them anyway. Might as well praise them, wish them luck, help them finish their work and throw a hell of a goodbye party. Shower them with praise make sure their last memory of your company is a great one.

So, when a partner or employee announces they will leave do the following:

• Publicly praise them
• Make sure you have a nice ‘farewell’ party
• Help them with the transition
• Don’t speak openly about their faults
• Treat their exit as a logical next step for both of you

Make sure their last memory of your company is a great one. Now check out this quote by Cardinal Roger Mahony:

“Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.”

As a founder, entrepreneur or CEO you could say that you will be judged based on how you treat the people who you don’t need anything from.

Treat everybody well, including those departing employees, and  who knows, maybe one day they will be back with a lot more experience.

Disguise your iphone docking station with old-school looking books, inbook Charging Station from ets..(Read...)

En dan te bedenken dat het een kopersmarkt is, waarbij alleen al in Amsterdam 8.700 huizen in alle denkbare prijsklasses te koop staan. Er zijn 70 huizen die meer dan 2 miljoen euro moeten kosten - niet onze prijsklasse, maar het geeft wel aan wat er aan de hand is. Soms staan ze op een rij: drie vrijstaande huizen aan de Apollolaan 1, 5 en 7 staan te koop voor bedragen rond de 2,5 tot 3,5 miljoen. De beauty hierboven staat voor een mooi rond bedrag van 3,5 miljoen te koop. Zal wel door 'de economie' komen, niet door riskant beleggingsbedrag of boven hun stand leven van de bewoners. Zoals bedrijven ook niet failliet gaan omdat de eigenaren domme beslissingen hebben gemaakt, maar omdat er een concurrent kwam die alles net even slimmer aanpakte.

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The Internet has been incredibly empowering to creators, and just as destructive to middle men. In the 20th century, every musician needed a record label to get his or her music heard. Every author needed a publishing house to be read. Every journalist needed a newspaper. Anyone who wanted to send a message needed the post office. In the Internet age, the tail no longer wags the dog, and those middle men have become a luxury, not a necessity.

Meanwhile, the software industry is moving in the opposite direction. With the web and desktop operating systems, the only thing in between software developers and users is a mesh of cables and protocols. In the new world of mobile apps, a layer of bureacrats stand in the middle, forcing each developer to queue up for a series of patdowns and metal detectors and strip searches before they can reach their customers.

That's not to say there is no value to middle men. Middle men exist to reduce the cost of getting a product from A to B, and as long as that cost is significant, they will be useful. However, the moment the middle man monopolizes the means of distribution, he becomes a gatekeeper, and creators can be made to fail not by the merits and popularity of their products, but by the whims and short-term interests of the gatekeeper.

We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don't think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.

I do not wish to fight any mobile device makers who want to create a software ecosystem and act as the gatekeepers for that ecosystem. What I do want to fight for is the viability of the mobile web. Developers are rushing to create native apps, meanwhile letting their mobile web apps atrophy (I have certainly been guilty of that myself). Web technology is still relatively weak, and improving slowly. At this pace, what will the mobile web look like in 10 years? Will we wake up and find that the next generation of great software companies have incredibly powerful native apps, but mobile websites that are little more than "About" pages?

In short, the mobile web needs better tools, better standards, and better browsers, and it needs them fast, before the only technologies that matter are the ones controlled by the gatekeepers.

Het land Suriname begint aan zijn opmars binnen de sociale media. Van een wit vlakje op de social media wereldkaart tot een actieve online community waar andere landen van kunnen leren. Het gebruik van social media groeit als Sopropo binnen de Surinaamse samenleving. Bedrijven die starten met social media kennen een stijging die zelfs voor Nederlandse begrippen nog ongekend is. Wat is de reden dat social media zo succesvol is in Suriname en wat kan Nederland ervan leren?

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'Posted on Oct 2, 2011 4:42:59 PM PDT

The Amazon Kindle team says:
(AMAZON OFFICIAL)

We apologize for the confusion. Our new Kindle Touch 3G enables you to connect to the Kindle Store, download books and periodicals, and access Wikipedia - all over 3G or Wi-Fi.

Experimental web browsing (outside of Wikipedia) on Kindle Touch 3G is only available over Wi-Fi.

Our Kindle Keyboard 3G will continue to offer experimental web browsing over 3G or Wi-Fi. '

Google lanceert vandaag Google Analytics Premium; een betaalde, uitgebreidere versie van Google Analytics bedoeld voor grote websites en veeleisende gebruikers. Wat houdt deze betaalde versie precies in en is dit interessant voor mijn organisatie? In dit artikel zal ik hierop antwoord geven en kort toelichten wat het onderscheid is met de gratis versie van Google Analytics. Lees meer

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' As you’ll see in the video below, Silk isn’t just another browser.  We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers. 

  Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture.  All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. 

  Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. 

  In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.'

Amazon employees will be breathing a sigh of relief after the company finally released its new Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablet. Adding touch to its bestselling Kindle and offering a multitude of different entertainment mediums via its book store, video on demand service and music download platform for its tablet, we are poised to see just how Amazon can compete in an Apple world.

We managed to get some hands-on time with the new Kindle, Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire – let us tell you, it’s seriously impressive. Scroll down to view the photos and make sure to stay tuned for more!

Whenever Facebook launches a major re-design, there is a user outcry. Partly that's because Facebook is known for its clumsy and confusing design, partly it's because people are resistant to change. This time round though, the main issue is that Facebook is trying to be something it is not: a newspaper.

The change causing all the fuss is to the News Feed, which makes up the primary content on your Facebook homepage. Instead of the most recent content from your social network displaying on your homepage, now you see "top stories" as determined by Facebook's software. In announcing the change, Facebook claimed that "News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper." The problem is, Facebook is a social network - not a news network.

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This is nicely illustrated by my own most recent Facebook status update. I accidentally locked myself out of my house, so here is what I posted:

That's not news - and I wouldn't want it to be a "top story" in any of my friends' Facebook homepages. It's simply a personal comment about something that happened to me today. Which is what Facebook is mostly used for: personal and social updates.

Facebook claims that with the re-designed News Feed, "you won't have to worry about missing important stuff" and that "the most interesting stories" will be featured at the top of your homepage. But a social network shouldn't be concerned with what it deems to be important or most interesting. It's main purpose is to keep me connected to my network of friends.

This isn't the only recent new feature that points to Facebook's desire to emulate a news network. Last week Facebook launched a new "Subscribe" button, which will allow you to subscribe to the updates of someone you're not friends with. This was marketed as being a way to follow celebrities and media people. The Subscribe button does have some social benefits though, in that you can customize how much of your friends content you want to see on your homepage.

Don't get me wrong, I applaud many of the changes that Facebook has recently made and is about to make. The improved Friends Lists are a promising, if somewhat clunkily implemented, feature. That was inspired by Google Plus and its circles (which are lists of friends). And the media sharing features that Facebook is set to release later this week - buttons for Read, Watch and Listen - will give people more exciting content to share...more exciting than for example a status about locking oneself out of one's house.

Lists for friends, media sharing, filtering information that you see on your homepage through the Subscribe button. All of those are features that enhance Facebook's core purpose: to be a social network. And just as importantly, all of those features are directly controlled by the user. Not by Facebook's software.

Let us know what you think about Facebook's newspaper design. Is it unnecessary and distracting to you, or do you find it useful?