Petit Bourgeois

Cute ad from our Italian colleagues:

You surely remember those amazing scenes in Minority Report where Tom Cruise manipulates several video streams, comparing them, replaying them, using hand gestures.

The company that created the interfaces seen in the movie is now releasing info about a similar commercial product. It is a fascinating opportunity to extend our ability to interact with computer data.

However, I have the vague fear that such non-verbal interfaces hold the false promise of liberating the human race from efforts, and in particular from the effort of learning languages.

This is obviously not a criticism of this specific (and awesome) project. It's rather an observation about the mental state such projects are fostering, a certain type of magical thinking, where machines improve their understanding of human desire, to the point that we no longer need to verbalize it.

We believe that through technical progress, expressing our will shall eventually be replaced with merely manifesting it.

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Blink.

After parsing the convoluted language, my reaction to this comment on my blog was, "yeah! Finally someone understands my posts."

Then I realized: this is social engineering. The language is there to fool spam filters, and the flattery to make me want to hit the "publish comment" button. Nice try!

The Dutch Railways' NS Hi-Speed brand has introduced a new train to the network: Fyra, which links Amsterdam central station and Schipol airport to Rotterdam, without going through The Hague as is usual for that segment. It uses the more direct, specially-equipped high-speed line that also enables the Paris-bound Thalys to ride at its top speed within Holland, as it does between France and Brussels.

NS just reported significant losses related to their high-speed operations. This Amsterdam-Rotterdam segment opened this winter after years of delay: they were talking about it in 1998 already as about to open, and trains aren't delivered. Also, tuning difficulties are normal immediately after launch: late or canceled trains are to be expected for a few months. Perhaps it explains that no major marketing campaign has yet supported the launch of the new product.

But aside from those issues, Fyra has some pretty interesting usability flaws that might explain its apparent lack of success: pricing, frequency, and on-board experience.

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Open source software is an important pillar of humanity's control over computers. Or at least used to be. Worthy systems like Mac OS X are built using open source components, and are built for human beings (read: they work out of the box for most people). Arguably, OSX couldn't exist without open source. But such systems go beyond the premise of free software (free as in freedom), and deliver something of a mixed blessing: by hiding the innards of their components, and by delivering such a smooth user experience, they further reduce the need for people to understand the entire computing stack: this is New World Computing.

A few years ago, I firmly believed that people understanding computers better was crucial to us making meaningful use of their possibilities. Now I believe that understanding services better is crucial: how does Facebook deal with your data, how does Google index public and private pages, what traces are left of content that made it to the internet and was then pulled. It's a large shift, I guess.

The RASCI model is a framework to identify external project stakeholders, and to help keeping those people involved in the appropriate fashion. In an organization like mine, global projects are handled by regional staff that cooperate. Each team member is embedded in his own local context, so it's very hard for the project coordinator to have a complete overview of the project's stakeholders.

Asking my colleagues to give me an overview of their external stakeholders as per the RASCI model should help identifying and addressing potential issues before they become problems.

Every weekday, walking from my house to the Amsterdam Centraal train station, I cross De Ruyterkade, the street that runs along the northern side of the station, the "IJ side." That street is a simple 2-lane, speed is limited to 30 km/h, and on the water side, there's also a double bike lane.

This area of the station is undergoing major construction work, but speed bumps were recently added on the bike lanes, on either side of the pedestrian crossing, presumably to reduce collisions between bikes and pedestrians. Seeing people negotiate the bumps, I was struck by the idea they might actually have further reduced safety.

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There's an open position in my team at ASICS Europe: webmaster. Do you think you have what it takes? Send your resume and cover letter over to hrm@eu.asics.com and let us hear from you!

We're based in Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam's airport, and you can read more about the company at asics.eu.

Tasks description

• Regular content updates to the web sites.
• Ongoing industry intelligence and reporting.
• Project management and coordination of ongoing projects like:
  • Unification of the look and feel of the websites of our subsidiaries and distributors.
  • Creation of an interactive and interesting online experience that will attract new customers and make existing customers want to come back.
  • 4 times a year collection management.
• Activity divided between Onitsuka Tiger (50%) and ASICS (50%).

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By the way, I've got this thing about "website" which I prefer to spell "web site" because it's prettier. Is that bad?

6 weeks ago, I started experimenting with ads on this site. In this period, Google Analytics tells me it received 295 visits, 392 page views, plus 220 views through the RSS feeds, for a whopping total of about 600 views!

Google AdSense tells me there were 387 page impressions with AdSense for content (one click, page CTR of 0.26%), and 362 ad impressions with AdSense for feeds (zero clicks), which earned me a total of €0.34. They calculate my CPM (cost per thousand impressions) at €0.88, which means my site sucks as an advertising space, although I'm not sure how significant the calculations are with such low numbers.

I wasn't going to get rich this way: time for me to remove all the ads--thanks for bearing with me through this experiment!

One of my bigger neighbors, Hunch, is making an interesting foray into what it means to be an advertising property: I imagine they're hard at work developing concepts, technologies and partnerships to monetize all the information I'm giving them about who I am and what I think.

However, what's amazing is that existing AdSense technologies, simply preying on the pages' content, can already serve me ads that are incredibly targeted. They can be served at a time when I'm quite receptive (at the end of a quiz).

The proof-of-concept basis for Hunch.com is incredibly simple, and the power of its idea lies in how existing commodity technologies (simple web programming, content-aware advertising) and infrastructures (Google's vast pool of advertisers) are arranged, and start making sense when they scale (enough people, content and ads to make sense on average).