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Intouchables
Last day in Chicago - we meet Kasia & Will
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| Creative Bike parking |
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| Trying to reach The Loop |
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| It was St Patricks' Day and everyone and everything turned green -even the river... |
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| Wil, Liam and Kasia |
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.
The day we got our iPad3
Room with a view
The new Palomar Kimpton Hotel Chicago is awesome (like every Kimpton hotel really). The view is also impressive.
Biking along Lake Michigan
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| Skyline of Chicago |
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| 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!
WTF? - Tyler what are you doing?
The windy city is sunny!
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| No I did NOT buy these Adidas |
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| carrot ginger orange juice |
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...
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.
Day 4 SXSW
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| Thunderstorms in Austin |
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| Interesting conversation with Jill Abramson |
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| The queue for Al Gore and Sean Parker |
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| Marijn is still Happy! |
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)
How to Survive a Robot Uprising?
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| Daniel |
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.
Day 3 @SXSW
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| Marijn checking the schedule |
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| Lots of people in the ACC |
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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