Last day in Chicago - we meet Kasia & Will

Creative Bike parking

Trying to reach The Loop

It was St Patricks' Day and everyone and everything turned green -even the river...

Wil, Liam and Kasia
Time to go home after a very intense but interesting SXSW week in the US, learning lots of new things, meeting lots of new people and seeing long "lost" friends like Will and Kasia, which turned out to be living in Chicago now and saw that I was in town on FB (thanks FB!) So we had to meet up and it was like we had not missed 10 years - we continued our conversation like never before :-)
late at  night it was time to return home - a swift flight (and a good night sleep) later we arrived in sunny (and a bit cold) Amsterdam.
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Chicago: skyscraper city



This truly is one of the most beautiful cities that I know of... wow!
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The day we got our iPad3


As expected there was a bit of a line in front of the Apple store here in Downtown Chicago, but we just sat and had breakfast at The Omni. After breakfast the line was gone and we had our iPad (3/HD/?) in no time and were ready to play!
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Room with a view


The new Palomar Kimpton Hotel Chicago is awesome (like every Kimpton hotel really). The view is also impressive.
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Another Bike picture :-)


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And counting...


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Biking along Lake Michigan

Skyline of Chicago

All the necessary ingredients

 
The weather is still amazing here in Mid March Chicago (high 70's) so time for a bike trip along the Lake. Although the season only starts in April, the guys from Bike & Roll were so friendly to rent us a bike anyway and off we went. It was a perfect day with blue skies, a cooling breeze and a smooth ride. I had the chance to testdrive my new Levi's commuter jeans - awesome!
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WTF? - Tyler what are you doing?

OK - it turned only be a mannequin doll and a label which Tyler (of the GAP) is "checking out". He only wanted to help me because I wanted to have those pyjama trousers... (haven't found them yet)
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The Water TowerThe real one

The real one

The Lego one at The Water Tower Place Mall
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The windy city is sunny!

No I did NOT buy these Adidas

carrot ginger orange juice
We flew this morning very early to O'Hara and to our pleasant surprise the weather here is much better then in Austin :-)
It was also time to recover from our abstinence from our shopaholic addiction and go see all the stuff at the Golden Mile shops - O, yeh: and buy some stuff, and some more...
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To kill a grackle - or not...

 
Here in Austin there are many, many grackles (which I find one of the most awesome birds there are) It slightly annoying though when they attack you while trying to eat a taco - it's more like "The birds" from Hitchcock.
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Day 4 SXSW

Thunderstorms in Austin

Interesting conversation with Jill Abramson

The queue for Al Gore and Sean Parker

Marijn is still Happy!
We  haven't seen any app, product or other service that we could say of that it THE HIT here in Austin. Lytro perhaps, Highlight maybe. But there are some things that are coming back in a lot of events and speeches.
Mobile of course, we are truly living in the post-PC area no doubt about that
Data is still strong
Streaming
Quality

The last two I find the most intriguing of the new developments and make me think more.
Streaming is not only media (audio/video) also FB timeline, twitter and what you have. We are moving rapidly towards a real time society where all kinds of streams will enter our lives. That is a radical change of the fixed way we treat most content up to now. Google's whole business model is based of fixed (searchable) content - and a lot of websites are build around that idea. Think of zomoto.nl or auto.nl or what have you. Maybe we have to rethink that.
Next is Quality. The quality of the content and the way we present that (UX) will be more and more important now that we have access to all the data there is. You already see that people will choose certain websites and apps just because they look nice. (wunderlist) So we have to pay even more attention to pixel detail and maybe step a little away from pure functionality focus and move to a more overall pleasant design. Let's see where that brings us.

Very striking: the struggle existing businesses still have with the new age. Publishers, traditional manufacturers, retail chains - they seem not be able to change.
What also doesn't change is the weather (RAIN!) and the admiration for Al Gore (a mile long queue - which Marijn and I decided to skip)
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How to Survive a Robot Uprising?

Daniel

I was at a really funny (and interesting panel about robots: when will they be a part of our live? (2016) and will they have a conscious? (yes)
I was most intrigued by Daniel Wilson, a doctor in Robotics (yes that is possible) who wrote tons of articles about robots. He recently wrote a novel which turned into a NYT best seller: “Robopocalypse” He was signing his book later and I got to have a chat with him about robots and his book.

“Robopocalypse” is a science fiction novel that takes place in the near future after a robot uprising where several characters from across the world tell their stories and eventually meet and come together in an attempt to fight back.  He had only written 100 pages when his literary agent sent that to some publishing houses and then someone in a publishing house, without him knowing it, actually sent those pages to DreamWorks. So DreamWorks just called him and said ‘we want to buy this. They wanted the story for what ever price, and right away, NOW. So Daniel got an amazing amount of money and only learned after the deal that no one else then Steven Spielberg wanted the story. “Robopocalypse” will on the big screen as a Steven Spielberg-directed DreamWorks movie july 4th 2013.... Only in America.

Daniel wrote the remainder of “Robopocalypse” while production of the movie was already underway. He ended up writing the rest of the book while they were doing their thing at the studio, he told me. Funny. :-)
Needles to say that I bought the (printed! hardcopy!) book and will read it on our way back home.
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My first Lytro portrait

Click anywhere in the photo to re-focus.
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Day 3 @SXSW

Marijn checking the schedule

Lots of people in the ACC
We are really busy from early morning till late at night trying to follow the interesting events that are going on at this conference. There are lots of mobile, social sessions that are of interest and also some specific car oriented ones. Today we had a session with Michelle Avary of Toyota Motor Sales - who shared their experiences with in car apps and what could be the future of these apps.
The apps are focused on:
safety & securtity
navigation
diagnostics
convenience (fuel prices / traffic etc)
entertainment

And for each segment there are specific requirements to meet and there is a policy of the car manufacturer. (e.g. level of involvement, type of app - in head set or external etc.) Leading developments are Ford Sync, Toyota Entune, Mercedes Mbrace, Hyundai Bluelink.
But it will take some time before we will have 1 standard. Even withing 1 car brand there are several different technologies and also between countries it differs. the car industry is also used to a very long development process (7 years) and model tunrover (7 years) and ownership (also 7 years)= total of 21 years! (compare with an iPhone which has a total turnover of one year).
So do not expect to see things moving very soon...
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Day 2 @SXSW

Typical SXSW pose

Lytro camera
We had a start-up competition this morning with companies like:
mystream (direct phone to phone streaming)
livestagemusic (online audience participation during live concerts)
distil.it (content protection against scraping)
newsIt (mobile crowd reporting platform)
Qukku (fan generated video advertising)
DADapp (3D private sharing)
VoteIt (collaborative online decision making)
RealEyes (interpretation of emotion of human faces)
GivePals (craigslist for student campuses)
Spots (cloud based SAP)
Gonnabe (social media - sharing what you will gonna do)
Storymix (automated video creation)
Recite (translating web content for dyslexic)
GoingAway (P-2-P ride sharing)
Sojolife (a new mynameisE)

Distil.it won - which we agree.
We got to play with the new Lytro camera - which takes "pictures" in such a way that you can re-focus later. That was cool - but it is definitely an early stage product. It looks and feels great but you cannot use it as your only camera still.
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Happy Feet

With this new colored sox craze going on in the Internet world it was easy to see who was going to SXSW as well on our plane...
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1st day @SXSW

Austin airport

Green Cards?!

Summer Veggie Rolls

Everyone is attached to its iPhone/iPad

People from all over the world
We started our SXSW adventure. There are more then 2400 speakers and about 25.000 attendees from around the globe present in Austin. On every given moment there are more then 20 different events you can choose from - so we have to "choose wisely"...
We are planning to have a closer look at start-ups (see what's new and hip) and to how brands should relate to the new (social) media. We also have some specific car-related sessions - in-car apps e.g.
The events take place in the big hotels and in the Austin Convention Center - so we will have to walk a lot going from one place to an other and the sessions start at 09:30 and last till 18:00... Quite a full program.
But first we had to pick up our badges - which was a long queue and a very traditional process where you had to fill in a green card, hand it over to one person, wait till your name was shouted out loud (that will be fun with 25.000 people), then go an other person etc. etc.  Anyway: we got through. Why not a simple iphone app you wonder? a propos: iPhone - it seems that no one here can do nothing for more then 10 seconds - at every break everyone takes his device at starts browsing. next to that you have the people who are biological attached to their FB and twitter feed and tweet/post all the time...
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Do not ask how we got in Austin - the flight to hell

Hurray for KLM - taking us to London
We just arrived in Austin TX, but don't ask how we got here. It all started way back this morning at 06:15 when we try to check in our bags on the first leg of our trip to London. Something was wrong with Marijns ESTA and she had to re-apply. We had 15 minutes to do that with the ESTA terminal in the back of Schiphol. We couldn't make it - these ESTA terminals are a utter disaster (Windows - trackball with popup screens all over the place which you cannot close). We missed our flight and the bad news was that there was no other British Airways flight to get us in time to London and there was also no possibility to re-route the whole flight this week. All flights are packed with people attending the conference.
So we ran to KLM, bought tickets on their flight to London, finished somehow the ESTA and ran to the gate. In London we arrived at Terminal 4 where our next leg of the trip left at Terminal 5. With 30 minutes to spare we had to run against time (and odds). We picked up our luggage, took the train and arrived exhausted at the check-in counter: the flight was already closed. Fortunately we had a very good agent and he made a call and we were on! The downside: we had to run like hell through security and T5, take the shuttle to reach the gate.
The flight itself was great, except for the headwind which was causing the plane to have a delay of 2 hours to arrive in Dallas. We had missed our flight to Austin. Luckily because almost everybody on this flight had this problem, American made the wise decision to delay the Austin flight and after a crazy race at the Dallas Airport (waiving with special Yellow fast track cards and an extra security check) we made it in Austin. That is we did - our suitcases were still in Dallas...
They arrived a flight later and after an other hour in the Taxi cue we checked in in our Sheraton Hotel in Austin, where the restaurant just closed...
This SXSW better be awesome 
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Go South! (by South West)

We are preparing to take off and visit SXSW this year in Austin - with 2400 speakers, 25000 participants and more parties then official events it should be awesome. Weather forecast is not so good however: rain, rain and a touch of... RAIN!
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Ska (amazing) Danny åka till Azerbaijan?

Nu andra chansen tävling är slut vet vi vem är finalisterna på melodifestivalen. Ska Danny vinner med "Amazing"? Hans kläder är mycket snyggt men kan han också sjunger live bättre den förre gånger? 
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Hmm...


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Those were the times

Great music with a large Album sleeve with a great photograph, drinking and smoking... Something else then a spotify track...
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30 februari? - ja kanske i 1712

titta på datum :-)
30 februari är ett datum, som endast har infallit en gång (i Sverige 1712), då månaden februari i de kalendrar där den finns (den nuvarande västerländska gregorianska kalendern och dess föregångare, den julianska kalendern) inte har 30 dagar, utan vanligtvis 28 och vart fjärde år 29 dagar.
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Spring lunch

Asparagus with apple

Lobster with grapefruit

Green apple sorbet
The sun is shining - time for a sunny lunch @spring :-)
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Welcome home buddy!

Sgt. Brandon Morgan, right, is embraced by his boyfriend Dalan Wells in a helicopter hangar at a Marine base in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii upon returning from a six-month deployment to Afghanistan...
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The amazing Lytro

By Jason Bradley Real-time surf report. Click anywhere in the picture to adjust the focus.
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Motor Exhibition 2012 - Time for a Husqvarna?

Eddie & I were @motorbeurs (Motor exhibition in Utrecht). It seemed that everyone who likes riding motor was there... Also nice: you could see everything there is in the vast motor universe. I had a close look at the all new Husqvarna Nuda 900R. Pretty cool bike - maybe a little bit too basic for everyday Dutch work related traffic (buddy, small gas tank etc.). So for now I'll keep my beloved Z1000 :-)
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