Well okay, I actually receive an average of 2160 spam messages a day. I don’t actually read any of those because my mail is checked for spam first at Gmail, than at Me.com and finally in Apple Mail. I end up deleting 10 to 20 spam messages from my inbox a day that aren’t caught somewhere along the way.
But today I read two spam messages. Here they are:
I received these within seconds of each other and of course they are were completely automated. I smiled when I read the first one because it is such a nice example of how people can screw up with technology.
My emailaddress is bomega@me.com (yeah sure, send me more spam, I don’t mind) and as you can see the clever developers at ‘CGT Consult’ had their computer analyze that and and conclude than I must be “B. Omega” who works at “Me.com”.
The reason I’m sharing this with you is that it was just such a great example of how NOT to use technology. I couldn’t have asked for a better example to prove a point I want to make.
Technology: Enjoy In Moderation
We all love the personal touch: a friendly word, a hand on our schoulder, the sound of our own name and the bartender that knows what we drink. Unfortunately technology makes it far too easy to become distant, cold and impersonal. It is just too easy to spam your whole address book. Copy list, paste in BCC field, press send. Annoy 1000 people in three clicks. Done.
The trick to technology, the secret, is to use technology to make your life easier but stay personal, at every level. The challenge is to use cold technology to warm up your communication and strengthen your relationships. Sounds easy enough but technology keeps seducing us to take advantage and show our bad sides.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Contacting 10 people personally is more effective than spamming 1000 strangers. Give it a try and find out for yourself.
Written on 20th April 2009
7 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The guys over at IDEO Labs were fortunate enough to grab a tour of WATG’s Wimberly Labs and EON Reality’s new immersive 3D room.
The iCube is described as being:
“comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.
The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.”
A video demo can be found below but I highly recommend you watch the HD version here.
Written on 3rd April 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Headquartered in the UK, Intruders.tv launched May 2007 with little fanfare yet impressed from the start with interesting, often personable interviews with internet entrepreneurs and industry players. Recently the company had appeared irregularly quiet, but it’s to no surprise, as the company were hard at work preparing for a grand relaunch of their internet television service.
The relaunch sees a number of significant changes. The site has been given a design overhaul (with thanks to Howard/Baines), content is no longer country specific but rather language focused and above all, the content is not just internet/technology focused but will also soon be entering music, film and fashion arenas.
Vincent Camara, Intruders.tv’s head of Content and Co-Founder says
“Throughout the last year, Intruders tv registered over 10 million video plays, conducted over 600 interviews and have a library of over 300 hours of HD content available.”
Camara also told Techcrunch’s Robin Wauters, that the company hires 10-15 part time staff and earns its keep via channel sponsorships and revenue sharing with syndicating sites.
Interestingly, the company have also teamed up with satirical European tech and hardware site The Inquirer to bring in a different perspective on technology news.
“Intruders tv is great platform for our readers to now enjoy our unique style of reporting on video. We have already lined up a wide variety of content that both INQUIRER readers and Intruders viewers will enjoy.” says Inquirer Editor Paul Hales
Sadly it appears embedding of Intruders.tv videos doesn’t seem to work with Wordpress, however you can obviously watch directly on their site, stay in touch via RSS or subscribe in iTunes – I highly recommend you do.
TwitterCounter is growing fast and is taking more and more of our time. We try to keep up with Twitter as it grows and becomes a mainstream media company. Arjen recently did an interview with a Dutch blog about the technology behind TwitterRemote with some interesting stats which I thought would be nice to share with you here too.
Currently our whole infrastructure consists of just one server at SliceHost which was tuned to give us as much performance as possible. We used to host TwitterCounter in Europe but because it has to talk to the Twitter API a lot we decided to move everything to the US. This turned out to be a very good decision as the connection time to Twitter is three times faster from the US than Europe which saving us 40 hours of waiting time a day.
Our server often handles more than 200 mysql queries per second. The database contains more than 700 million records and takes up 45 gigabytes. Our biggest challenge is updating every account, every day. With more than 1.5 million unique user accounts that need to be updated every 24 hours we would need to get the information for 62500 accounts every hour to get everything updated every hour. Previously we used to query the Twitter API more than 300 thousand times an hour. That worked fine for us until Twitter decided to limit the number of requests per hour to 20.000.
If we would do 20.000 request per hour we could only update 480.000 of our accounts. Less than a third of what we needed! We spent a lot of time analyzing the API and have come up with a way to update more than 200.000 accounts, per hour, without exceeding our API limits. That means we can track up to 5 million unique Twitter users with our current technology.
Arjen Schat, the co-founder and lead developer at TwitterCounter, came up with some pretty revolutionary technology, tricks and solutions which he will share with the audience at the upcoming Kings of Code conference in Amsterdam in a few months.
Since mid february we are generating more than 3 million TwitterCounter buttons every 24 hours and we can only see that number growing. With TwitterRemote now live and more and more bloggers joining Twitter we expect to generate close to 15 million buttons per day before the end of the year.
Last year Twitter reportedly grew 800%. TwitterCounter has been live for a little more than 6 months now. We enjoy working on it immensely and plan to keep innovating and adding interesting stats to it on a daily basis. Right now the service is generating some modest revenue, enough to pay for hosting and some office space. We expect to add more revenue generating services soon which I will talk about in a follow-up post soon.
Following YCombinator of San Francisco-California, Techstars of Boulder-Colorado now Austin-Texas has a startup incubator called Capital Factory (from today).
The program is 10 week summer long and was founded by the local entrepreneurs like Joshua Baer, Sam Decker, Bryan Menell, Brian Beard, Jason Cohen, Pat Condon, Chris Sherman. These will select 10 finalists from a pool of applicants and from these will, eventually, pick three winners (this will be announced on April 13th).
What those three winning companies will get?
It seems they’ll get a slightly better deal than either YCombinator or Techstars offers (at least financially): $20,000 in cash (in exchange of 5% of the company) and weekly mentoring sessions with a select group of proven, successful technology entrepreneurs (other perks are included)
The program runs from May 22nd to August 7th with August 14 being the Demo Day where the chosen companies will showcase their products.
YCombinator’s success in funding early stage startups prompted others to replicate it around USA, Boulder-Colorado being one and now Austin, Texas.
Austin is a great place for technology startups having almost all what it needs for a startup to thrive: infrastructure (startups will use Tech Ranch Austin), talent (University of Texas is there), venture capitalists (Austin Ventures is one of them), small town feeling (although it has 1,6 million inhabitants) and nice weather (no winter).
What it doesn’t have is the close proximity to the ocean (like Silicon Valley-San Francisco has) or to the mountains (like Boulder has). The ocean is like 2-3 hours away (driving) and that shouldn’t stop people who want to enjoy the water. But the closest mountains are like 12 hours away (driving) and that could be a problem if you crave that (which rules out spending weekends skiing – unless taking the plane comes to the rescue).
Austin was known before as a technology hub among other “celebrities” like Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, New York being a central location for companies like Dell, 3M, HP, AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, National Instruments, Samsung, Sun. This gained the city the nickname of “Silicon Hills”. There are also pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
It is also known as the live music capital of the world and that’s not a small thing. Almost everybody likes music but not everybody gets to see artists perfoming live on the city streets.
I visited Austin last spring and I liked it (I have stayed only one day though).
The city feels more european than many other american cities and, for an european like me, that’s a plus (I’m not forgetting my roots).
I hope to hear about companies who originated from Capital Factory’s incubator and have done good things.
Update: By sending fax and email log files, Renée De Meo from Venere proved that it was actually the mistake of the Arcadia Hotel Belmondo.
For most web professionals, the Internet is like a religion. We evangelize the almost endless opportunities of the medium and try to convince people to trust new technologies. It almost sucks us up, and creates some sort of tunnel vision. So when a new technology lets us down, it hits us extra hard. It happened to my co-editor Patrick and me.
We traveled to Hamburg, Germany last Thursday to visit the one-day conference Next08. Right before we left, I booked a hotel via Venere.com. Quite last minute, but hey, we’re busy guys. Moreover, that’s where these services are for. I browsed around, looking for an affordable hotel within walking distance of the Next08 venue and ended up at the Arcadia Hotel Belmondo. When I completed the reservation, I was happily surprised with the confirmation message via SMS.
So after a rather tiring six-hour drive with traffic jams and without a navigation system, Patrick and me arrived at the hotel. A bit stressed, as we were late for the Facebook Developer Garage after party. Yet when we arrived at the reception, a nasty surprise was waiting for us. After a lot of shaking no with her head and desperate looks in our direction, the receptionist told us the hotel was fully booked and she couldn’t find our reservation. When I showed her the confirmation page on my MacBook, she told me that it should have been impossible for us to make a reservation on that very day, as she had closed the booking system in the morning.
There we were standing, two angry young men. Utterly disappointed in the so-beloved medium. In our anger, we decided to write a blog post titled: “when the Internet fails”. Apparently, the disappointment got to our head, as it wasn’t the fault of the medium. It was the fault of one of world’s largest booking sites, Venere. The technology didn’t fail, the people behind the technology did.
Our faith in the web was renewed when the receptionist gave us two WLAN access cards. Within five minutes, we found an excellent last minute offer from a design hotel called Arcotel Rubin. Two minutes later we booked the room on Hotels.com and ten minutes later we were checking into a very comfortable hotel.
So all you fellow technology evangelists out there. Next time you try to make people trust the web, use this story to explain that when new technology fails, it’s often the people and not the whole medium. That might sound familiar to them, as it’s often also the case with technologies that exist for decades. Explain to them that they can use a broad range of new super handy tools, with the same or less risk.
The title of this blog is ‘The Next Web’. We are constantly looking for events, technology, services and people who are changing the web. In a way, we are trying to predict the future so you can take advantage of that. And of-course we are not the only ones doing this.
Deloitte, a company that offers services in audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory, is also interested in the future of technology. But instead of just reading this blog they have invited the public to help them.
They are hosting a Dutch predictions event in association with Fast50.nl which will take place on February 13, 2008. During this event, Deloitte presents its vision on the Telecom, Media, and Technology market for 2008.
Prior to the event, everyone is invited to participate in a discussion on these predictions on the weblog www.dutchpredictions.nl. The input from this blog discussion will be an important driver for the event on February 13.
It will be interesting to see what will be the result of all these user generated predictions. If valuable information comes to light I’m sure we will see similar events in the other 139 countries where Deloitte is based.
Written on 1st May 2009
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The title of this blog is ‘The Next Web’. We are constantly looking for events, technology, services and people who are changing the web. In a way, we are trying to predict the future so you can take advantage of that. And of-course we are not the only ones doing this.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
