Author: Robert Schouwenburg

Life hacks

Charging drawer

One of the life hacks I enjoy every day, is my charging drawer. It may sound silly, but I really enjoy it. I used to have devices on chargers lying around everywhere, it was just a mess. My charging drawer contains every cable I ever need to charge all my devices. It gives them a […]

Best gadget of 2018

Nintendo Switch

If I had to nominate the best gadget I bought in 2018, it’s the Nintendo Switch. I love it because it’s a mobile game console. I really dig the ability to sit and play anywhere whether it’s a plane or on the couch at home. Even though you can, I never ever hook it up […]

Voice interfaces are here to stay

Alexa

Last month, Nielsen published a piece of research on the use of voice recognition systems. Below an overview of most common use cases: I use my three Alexa’s in a similar way except perhaps listening to music. Mostly because I prefer proper old-school stereo speakers. My main use case though is not on this list […]

Save me time, save you time

Customer service call back

Yesterday, I was on the phone with IKEA about a delivery. The customer service agent was courteous and nice, but my problem required her to call the store and then a delivery company. All in all, I was on hold for 21 minutes. She came back a few times to “check up” on me while […]

Start small, grow tall

Endless Tweaking

Regardless the kind of startup, the secret of all tech startups today is software. Marc Andreessen wrote a seminal post about it a long time ago; why software is eating the world. One of the major advantage is that software allows for endless tweaking. It’s almost impossible to tweak hardware when it’s out of the […]

It’s in the water

Vacation feeling

I’ve been in the US for 8 years now and still whenever I take a shower, I get a vacation feeling. Weird right? I can tell you, it’s in the water. Water in the New York City area has a major similarity with water of the European nations of the south. Like many Europeans, I […]

Nobody gets it right

Conference calls

There are a few product categories which see constant new entrants, but never gets solved. Note taking apps is a good example. Same goes for calendar or email apps. Today, I wanted to talk about conference calls. Another category with constant new entrants. Yesterday, I had a atrocious conference call on Google Hangouts. The sound […]

Still a thing in 2018

Business Cards

This week, I was at a conference. One of the established rituals is to exchange business cards. It never ceases to amaze me that with all the technology at our finger tips, we can’t use them effectively to exchange our contact details. We use to have Bump which had a brief moment of fame before […]

Let me annoy you for a second

Every website in 2018

The video in the tweet below sums it up. It’s a mess again. The pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders are back! Now implemented in CSS. Every website in 2018 pic.twitter.com/Gm7jhfuuUO — Daryl Ginn (@darylginn) October 20, 2018

The platforms of the many turn into platforms of the few

Local stardom

One of the most interesting trends of the internet in the last decade, is what I like to call local stardom. Not everyone is the same on the internet and it is caused by algorithms. I call it local stardom. The amount of content we need to consume is so vast, we use algorithms to […]