Daily

Holland != Netherlands and that’s fine

It’s complicated

Holland != Netherlands and that’s fine

The Netherlands is a tiny country with only 17 million people. Most people in the US would not even be able to [...]
Inbox zero vs inbox infinity

Email bankruptcy is no excuse

Inbox zero vs inbox infinity

An article from the Atlantic was making the rounds this week. It makes a case for letting go of inbox zero and just [...]
Alternative to Facebook

You could just use a mailinglist

Alternative to Facebook

I’ve written about this topic before, but we lost something powerful when social networks turned into social [...]

Lowering the barrier of entry

Openness drives innovation

Yesterday, someone asked why I’m so much in favor of open systems. In his opinion much of the value was created through closed systems. And he’s right, you know. But many of these closed systems can exist and scale because of open systems. Just imagine the following: You can create a shopping site and reach […]

Hard to explain hobby

Audiophile truth

I’m distracted today and I’ll have to keep it short. This is a great cartoon from The New Yorker which sums up my audiophile hobby.

Corporate-driven open source communities

Slow communities, fast companies

I wrote this when the news came out that Microsoft was adopting Chromium for their new browser. I’m always fascinated by how groups of people organize themselves to get things done. There are many types of organizations, but here I would like to focus on companies and communities. Everyone understands what I mean with companies, […]

Collecting data comes with big responsibility

Contrarian view: collecting private data for good

Sometimes the media goes on a tangent and seem to agree universally on a particular issue. In those circumstances, I like to explore the contrarian viewpoint to balance my own viewpoint. In this post, I’m going diving into privacy and especially Facebook and Google’s hunger for collecting your data. Both Google and Facebook have one […]

Hey, I followed the rules! What more do you expect from me?

Corporate rules and rigidness

This post is from the “attic”. I wrote it a few years ago. When I was speaking to employees of a large corporate I was doing business with a few years go, they talk about the company as an external thing. As if they cannot control it by themselves. There is a certain feeling of […]

We’re not all the same

Personalized product ratings

Nowadays everything is rated. Products are rated on Amazon, TV is rated on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, venues are rated on Yelp and Google Maps and even our cab driver has a rating. Often though I feel like the ratings do not reflect my personal experience. It makes me pause when I look at ratings in […]

Your data is out there

Control your personal data

This week Quora got hacked and the account information of 100M users was exposed. The week before Starwood admitted they were hacked for several years and details of an estimated 500M people were exposed. And then there were the hacks of: Yahoo (3B accounts) Equifax (143M accounts) JPMorganChase (83M accounts) Anthem (80M accounts) Target (70M accounts) […]