The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt on Internet freedom for global development.
He is without a doubt one of the worlds most online savvy and knowledgeable elected government ministers. He often debates internet freedom and condemns those who restrict internet freedom (he does that in this talk as well). He naturally is present with a personal blog since February 2005 as well as very active on Twitter.
Kids aren’t leaving social networks. They’re redefining the word “social.” Rather, they’re actually using the word with the intent of its original meaning: making contact with other human beings. Communicating. Back-and-forth, fairly immediate dialogue. Most of it digitally. But most of it with the intent of a conversation where two (or more) people are exchanging information and emotion. Not posting it. Exchanging it.
Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, commencements speech at Michigan University
This talk by Dick Costolo was a big surprise to me, funny, insightful and inspirational. It kind of made sense when he said he had been a stand-up comedian in his youth. The red line through the speech was to live in the moment.
Well invested 17min.
It is not what people listen to that is interesting, it is what they like and like so much that they even take action and share it in one way or the other. Music is social in itself, but still we do not have a place where we together can discuss, share and write about music.
How many of us have not thought this sentence when using Spotify.
I love my friends, but I hate their music
I am really lacking a great social music discovery service in my life!
The productivity hazzle, collaboration dilemma and the prioritization problem in the landscape of online communication today is well documented. Many of us suffer the consequences of what e-mail does to us and we also suffer from the lack of innovation with the e-mail and enterprise collaboration space.
But finally someone has taken on the task:A company called Handle!
(a lot more on Handle a bit down i n the post)
There are many great collaboration tools today, but still the most important one is kept as a isolated silo and no one seems to dare to touch it. E-mail innovation is so close to zero. Unfortunately this is the main reason that most collaboration product do not fill the full value it could within most organizations.
Lately there been some traction in the e-mail client space with products like Mailbox, Sparrow etc. I have written about Mailbox and why I thought it was more of a feature then a product earlier. Even though they got acquihired (yes, that is how I see it) by Dropbox I think my main concerns are still accurate and solid. Two big obstacles are not challenged in todays e-mail innovations:
What I am looking for is a product that thinks out of the box and builds the product that actually reflects the way we communicate today in a business environment. This might have the impact that the product needs it’s own server messaging infrastructure (still compatible with existing protocols).
I have written some posts of what a product like I foresee could include and what value it would bring, so I will not elaborate on that in this post, but will definitely get back on the topic. What I will write about is yet another product like all the ones I do not like (mentioned above). If you have not heard about Handle it might be worth continue reading
Handle is an on-top of Gmail inbox product that will help you prioretize and improve your personal productivity and task management. Seems very similar to Mailboxapp right?
Two days ago I got my invitation to try Handle out (if you visit the link that I have posted as headline (or this link), there will be invite-codes available). I was initially disappointed, I had higher expectations, this even though I know the product is in it’s very beginning of it’s journey.
As many startups do today, I received a mail from their CEO Shawn Carolan, where he asked for feedback. 99% of those goes to the trash, but since this is an area that really interests me I thought I could give it a couple of minutes, so I sent a mail with short notes. The mail also included my short (not so thought through) thoughts on what a product within this area should look like if it was created today, without legacy etc.
The response from Jonathan McCoy, Founder and VP Product, included some answers, but the most interesting was in regards to my thoughts of a product, he linked to a post on their Tumblr by Shawn Carolan with the headline “Humans need an operating system too”
The post completely made me change my mind on Handle. Their vision is almost exactly the same as my vision. That is something completely new to me. People who know me, know that I have been talking about this for about 10 years by now.
This is actually the ending of the Handle post, but read it carefully:
Noun — op·er·at·ing sys·tem, for humans.
Software that works in tandem with your mind to support basic functions, such as capturing ideas, triaging inbound information, automating Internet interactions, optimizing the sequencing of tasks, and facilitating focused execution equipped with the right information at the right time, in the right context, to maximize effectiveness in alignment with goals.
The entire post over at the Handle blog is great so jump over and read it.
I will keep my eyes on Handle and what the team will produce and if they are even near their vision they will do great things for productivity and e-mail (and maybe some other stuff as well).
Ghurka - My kind of brand! …and also cool and good looking leather bags for men.
I’m back with a gorilla post. Spent the morning going through the Gorilla part in the WWF iPad app named WWF Together. It includes many of the animals that are threatened to be extinct if we as humans do not act. Some of the animals are pandas, tigers, elephants, whales, rhinos and polar bears. The entire list.
The app is kind of cool and beautiful, but it does not miss out on the main topic, how to save the animals. The only thing I actually miss is the “click to action”. Nowhere (what I could see at least) is there an action to donate or how to adopt / sponsor a gorilla or any of the other animals.
WWF does have several options to take action. The simplest is to adopt a gorilla, but there are many other options. The Gorilla section on the WWF Together site is not that informative (on that specific topic) either, but do link to the adoption site.
Since it is sunday I think my daughter and I will try out this gorilla origami lessons.
If we all help out, we might have a planet not entirely ruined by us humans.
Triip.me uses crowdsourced travel experiences to build a social travel company. Kind of like an AirBnB for travelling.
Over the years we have seen many startups with in the travel space fail. There are a few huge ones like TripAdvisor who are hard to move from their dominant position. This in combination with a quite centralized market where most hotels and airfares go through a few huge databases.
Some companies who are struggling and fighting in this space are Gogobot, Tripbirds (do not know status, but site seems to currentliy be down), Tripl (deadpool), Dopplr (acquired by Nokia 2009, now a ghost town), Trippy etc.
It is a known difficult space to compete in, but Triip might (hopefully) find a way to use the crowds to build a market, in the same way as AirBnB have done.
Social Travel is a difficult space, but I recently stumbled over the Vietnamese startup Triip.me. They are a like an AirBnB but for travelling.
The concept is simple. As described on their startpage
Triip is the travel platform that enables travelers to enjoy amazing tours passionately crafted by local experts.
As with many things before I think, “Why is this not done before”, but that is the thing, you need to invent it to see how brilliant and yet simple a great idea can be. I hope that Triip will scale and have trips for most countries and cities in the world, then they will truly give the travellers of the world a better experience of their trip.
In the same way as AirBnB gives you a more true experience of the city you visit, Triip will do the same but probably on additional levels as well since each travel pack can include more then just living or a tour.
Currently Triip offer travel packages for a few countries in South East Asia (Cambodja, Vietnamn, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Indonesia) and still at (very) limited scale, but hopefully this will change soon. The company is currently 7 employees (5 co-founders). They are looking to use crowdsourcing (Indiegogo) to fund their further endeavours.
Alexandra Bylund from FOAP have put a great presentation together about FOAP’s biggest mistakes as a startup. FOAP is a simple way to sell your photos, but this presentation is general and not only FOAP specific. The presentation has some great learnings that many who consider starting a company should read (if not already have bumped into these obstacles).
Thanks Alexandra for sharing!
