So, everyone around the webs is talking about tablets. iPad was the first example and since then, every single tech company is producing, or trying to produce, its own iPad-killer device.
Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Flyer are just few of the Android alternatives. Most tech analysts and reporters agree that Android 3.0 Honeycomb is immature. Google wants to unify the UX between smartphone and tablet users. It doesn’t matter. Really soon, every single tech experience will be the same, no matter which of our devices we decide to use. Our only choice is the Operating System. OSX, Android and Windows are the three competitors.
Everything will be on the cloud. Is that good or bad? Nobody knows yet but definitely this is the future. Do you wonder what will happen with the hardware? In fact, it’s pretty simple.
Tablets will conquer the world. They will not only smash laptops, but desktops too. Not tomorrow, but Apple is already working on it. OSX Lion will borrow many elements from iOS. Steve Jobs will show the future in a month, on the stage of WWDC. This is huge and that’s the reason I find valid the not-coming of iPhone 5 rumors.
I ‘ll describe a typical day from the future. You wake up, you throw your tablet in your backpack and head to office. You connect it to its dock and you have a decent physical keyboard and a huge screen to work on. And of course, you work on the cloud, not locally. Once you are done with the office, you head to a friend’s place to watch a movie. Connect your tablet to his TV monitor and boom, watch any movie you want. Back at your place, you have a similar dock and you can do whatever you want.
CPUs get more and more powerful as days go by. In a couple of years, quad-core CPUs will be in our tablets and their abilities will be endless. Even the, so called, heavy programs will be able to run flawlessly in tablets. Not to mention the possibility of using the computational power of idle cloud connected PCs.
It is a brave new world that Steves (Jobs and Balmer), Larry and Jeff are building for us. Do I like it? Yes, sounds amazing. We ‘ll find out if it also looks amazing in the 6th of June, when Jobs will show the OSX Lion and, probably, the iOS 5..
Wikileaks and cablegate are the hottest keywords out there. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was arrested in United Kingdom and a couple of days ago he was set free after having his bail posted. Who posted a part of his bail? Michael Moore, the well known and controversial filmmaker.
That says a lot for me. Michael Moore has made many interesting documentaries about some really hot topics. One was about 9/11, one other was about the healthcare system in US and, his latest documentary was about the economic crisis. As you can see, he is an activist and he is trying to inform the masses about everything that is really important for their everyday life. And now, he is posting bail for Julian Assange.
The guy who made public more than 250.000 classified documents of correspondence between the US State of Department and US diplomats. Everyone who works in the old-type media is thinking “wow, that’s a huge scandal”. But if you are not one of those conservative guys, you are probably able to understand why this is nothing more than a proof that in the web-era nothing stays secret. Sooner or later, if there is a piece of information that would change someone’s life, then this information will reach its final destination.
In the years to come, everything will change and there will be no more “classified” documents. People will have to act openly, will have to make public every one of their upcoming moves and they will be judged according to them. Social networks have enormous power and now that sharing is a piece of cake, every person who acts shady should think twice before doing anything controversial. Deleting your past or your moves, is going to be much more difficult, if possible at all.
See Wikileaks for example. Who is against this site? The US Government, Amazon, Paypal, Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard. Some of really big players of the corporate world. Now, that we are in the middle of this -so called- scandal, what’s the result? Wikileaks is online and everyone can transfer money to support them. Like Lernean Hydra, Wikileaks has more servers every second, more money, it gains more and more publicity and people are finally starting to wake up. Even if Julian Assange will be found guilty for espionage (?) or whatever it is, can anyone believe that there won’t be any imitators? I ‘ll say just this: openleaks.com is already under construction. And it is so much smarter. Everyone will be able to receive anonymous information through this site. By increasing the channels of receiving information and the potential senders, it’s sure that more and more information will reach its destination.
Web is transforming our lifes and Wikileaks is the biggest proof of that. There are many more changes to come and if corporations can’t follow the individuals, then, in my eyes, they are absolutely doomed.
I love twitter. It is now a vital part of my everyday life. Even when I am out, I check what’s going on in Twitter through my iPhone. But this post is not about my addiction to the 140-characters social network, it is about its latest feature: realtime updates. I find it completely useless and pointless.
Yes, we are living in the era of information and yes, we want to get as much information and as soon as possible, but there is practically no difference if we get this “super crucial” info a minute later with a bunch of other tweets. I am following less than 600 people and yet, having Growl pop up notifications every 5-10 seconds is very counter-productive. I don’t want to know what happens when someone is following thousands of people. Probably his/her screen is always packed with the latest tweets.
When I am on my MacBook, chances are that I am trying to do something important. It may be a project for a university class, a blog post, analyzing some data or simply reading an article. With pop ups coming up all the time, concentrating is almost impossible. I suppose that I am not an exception and that people work on their computers. And if your job description is not “twitter analyst”, then realtime updates are completely useless.
Probably the only case that realtime updates are usefull, is the one of a sporting event. Yes, In NBA Finals realtime updates are priceless, but do we always need realtime updates? In my opinion, no.
Vevo is going to dominate youtube’s music videos. Most artists have their own Vevo Channel on youtube and they publish there their latest videoclips in High Definition. Unquestionably, Vevo is gaining power and now users know where they can find videos from their favourite artists.
However, users may not be just fans but people who are able and willing to take advantage of these videos and make money through them in direct and indirect ways. A direct way would if a blog was monitoring Vevo’s activity and uploading, under his domain, Vevo’s latest videos and make money through advertisements in his page. What is more interesting, are the indirect ways to make money with Vevo’s content. For example, commercial facebook pages.
A big company is using, obviously, its facebook fanpage to improve its profile and, as a result, return a greater profit. Can they embed Vevo’s media in their page? Is that considered as a commercial use and Vevo should get paid about that? Although I -thought- I knew the answer, I sent them an e-mail asking them exactly that: Wheter or not a company should pay anything to Vevo in order to use their videos in company’s fanpage. Their answer came to me as a great surprise and I quote it right here.
VEVO is always free to the fan. Anyone can embed our video player on a Facebook page, a blog, etc. at no charge. VEVO is an advertising-supported model which means we make money through advertising across the entire VEVO platform – this is why there is never any charge to the consumer.
So, Vevo is supercool and they don’t want any money for their videos, even if these are being used commercialy. Thumbs up Sony & Universal.
I am using Twitter for over 2 years. For those 2 years, I have been tweeting only in English as my followers are not only Greeks. Recently, I decided to start tweeting in Greek as well and just right then I got informed that my replies are only shown in people that follow both of us, me and the person I am replying to. To be honest, I was finding hard to believe it in the first place.
I find it really pointless and I can’t understand why twitter’s developers took that decision. Twitter is a great tool to discover new people, new ways of thinking and other cultures than yours. In my opinion, the best way to do that is through interactions between users. I ‘ll give you an example to make it more clear: Let’s say that I am user A and I am interested in cars. User B is a well known journalist specializing in car news. Of course, I am following user B. If User B starts a very interesting conversation with user C (that I don’t follow) about cars. If I knew that such conversation exist, I will definitely follow it and, why not, I may jump in. Either way, I will start following user C as we have something in common.
But now, Twitter doesn’t allow me to do so because.. I don’t know that these kind of conversations actually exist. And that phenomenon removes much of Twitter’s potential in my opinion. Twitter is about openness and sharing everything with everyone. That’s why timelines are by default public and not private like Facebook. I would really love if someone from Twitter could explain me the reason behind this..
Feel like following me? There’s my username: @dkalo.
I love using Twitter, it’s a great tool both for work and fun. The truth is, that I have met people from all over the world, virtually or in real life, and the best way to communicate and interact with them is by using the English language. However, most of the people I am following are Greeks and they mostly use the Greek language in their tweets.
So, from now on, I will be using both languages in my tweets. Most of my tweets will be in English but those commenting on Greek reality or anything Greece-related will be in Greek. This way, I ‘ll be able to communicate better with the rest of the Greeks and the English speaking people won’t lose time reading tweets that don’t make sense.
If you still wan’t to follow me on twitter, here’s my profile: @dkalo.
The truth is that since the day I first installed WordPress and started blogging on dkalo.com I haven’t spent a single minute caring about it’s technical side. It was all about blogging and writing. A couple of days ago, my hosting plan expired and I either had to find a new host or to renew my subscription.
To be totally honest, I wanted to change my host but all the other solutions I found out there where for a year and I can’t commit for such a long period. As a result, I just renewed my current hosting plan. However, I made a clean installation of the brand new -and totally awesome- WordPress 3.0. Since I host all my photos on flickr.com, it was really easy to restore my old posts. I just uploaded the old XML and.. voila!
The theme, as you can see, is completely new. It’s the iBlog from Pagelines. Also, I installed some plugins. First of all, Google XML sitemaps because SEO is really important nowadays. Then, I installed the “Facebook like” button because.. well, every blog must has this button. Some social features are included in the theme by default. Of course, Akismet is here as well to protect me from spam comments. What I also updated is the contact page and the about me page. More information about me and my interests, and definitely more accurate as the old page was outdated.
As it is right now, I like my new blog but I ‘d love to hear some of your feedback and your thoughts about it. Can’t wait! 
The last two months I have organized my schedule in a totally different way than I did for the last 4.5 years. The reason for that? I wanted to be more productive in order to keep up with all those things that I have to do in a weekly basis: University lectures & projects, blogging for pestaola.gr, working on my bachelor thesis project and of course spending some quality time with friends and family.
The truth is that there is a great change in my way of living but nothing has really changed. Ok, that sounds impossible and weird. Let me explain what I mean. By following a strict program, there is plenty of free time to do all those lazy things that I did before but without having to worry about deadlines. How did I manage to do that? Small, simple, steps.
1) Changed my web browser’s homepage to google.com/calendar. And I activated the Google Tasks add on. So, whenever I open Chrome, I know exactly what I have to do and when I have to do it. When I have 20 days -let’s say- to complete a project, I see it every day and I can do a little thing per day. That way, the project is usually completed a couple of days before and stress free. It never comes that last day with me running mad and trying to finish a 20days project in a day or so.
2) Rearranged my feeds. In Google Reader I kept only those subscriptions that are really interesting and have something to offer. In Facebook, lists helped me sort out the people I really want to follow. In Twitter, I have some saved searches in echofon to find the latest info on whatever I care about. That way, only crucial information reach me and I know that there is no chance to lose something that I find interesting in an enormous pile of useless information.
3) Turn off whatever may get you distracted. Distractions don’t only force you to spend more time doing the same thing, but they also lower the quality of the outcome. Yes, it is really interesting catching up with a friend on MSN Messenger but trying to concentrate back again is difficult and you may not succeed. The flow of your thoughts is never exactly the same. Too many times in the past, I have started writing a blog post, I left an unfinished sentence because of an interesting tweet and when I came back to the post, I didn’t remember what exactly I wanted to write.
4) I don’t need to be at a certain place in order to work. Blogging and coding need only one laptop and a decent Internet connection. Nowadays, most of the cafeterias have free WiFi. I think you get my point.. Working out of home has many advantages. I can simply stare at the road, at people around me and see every minute something different. This, never happens at my place. I know exactly what I ‘ll see out of my window. And that is not very creative.
What I didn’t mention above is the will you need in order to follow these steps. That is probably the most difficult of all. I tried to follow some of these steps a couple of years ago. They never actually worked because I didn’t want them to. So, before trying to do any of the above, be sure that you really want to be more productive, otherwise you will just lose time trying to rearrange your feeds and organise your Google Calendar..
[photo via flickr.com, user ifindkarma]
A couple of months ago, OpenFund was founded by the Greek OpenCoffee organizers. What is OpenFund? As its name states, it is a fund willing to help newly formed startups to develop by giving them a seed capital as well as providing top quality advisors.
George Tziralis, one of OpenFund’s initiators, recently twitted that “Openfund’s main offering is not money”. In my eyes, this is wrong. Don’t get me misunderstood, I believe that their team of advisors is great and that it can help many ideas turn into kick-ass companies. But, their biggest advantage is the money they are offering.
Advisors will give you solutions in current problems. Advisors will make suggestions on how to develop your company. Advisors will probably introduce you to people who think out of the box, who are able to tell you a totally different opinion about your service. Advisors may even save you from some difficult situations, even bankruptcy. To make a long story short, advisors are very helpful only when there is a business model, a product and not just an idea.
And what is necessary for an idea to evolve into a product? Yeap, you guessed right, money. You need money to get someone to build even the simplest thing for you. You need money to pay your host. You need money to rent some office space. Even if you work all by yourself, you need money to buy some food. Maybe in the beginning all these sound “too much” but how far do you believe is that situation?
To sum up, in my opinion, money are much more important than advisors, especially when we are talking about seed fund. Because getting top level advisors is difficult but getting top level advisors without having any money is pretty pointless.
[photo via flickr.com, user jovian]
That is what Andrew Keen said in The Next Web Conference some days ago. What was also mentioned was that every old-fashioned industry is on its way out. The first victim of the new age that is coming is the music industry. Torrents, Limewire, Rapidshare are some of the reasons that music industry is about to change. iTunes & Amazon MP3 are the most important reasons though.
These e-stores were able to understand the new conditions and they adopted to the new market. They made the right choices that helped them to gain a great market share while offering amazing services to their customers. You are able to download only one song, get all the metadata you want with just one click and the most important, the MP3s you are buying from e-stores are already in the format you want them. Nobody buys nowadays an album and he is not ripping it for his iPod, it is so much easier to already have an mp3 file in the first place.
The next victim is definitely the publishers. The days that the newspaper’s brand name was more important than the journalist are long gone. One of the main characteristics of that new era is that individuals are much more important than their organization. Writers websites are being visited much more than a publishing’s company, their twitter accounts have thousands of followers. People are more important than the brand.
Big publishing companies have no future unless they are able to rewrite their business plan from scratch. Very few magazines & newspapers keep making money the old way. News are traveling very fast thanks to the Internet and, lately, thanks to twitter. Just remember the recent earthquake in Italy, the riots in Greece, the plane in the Hudson river in NY and all these cases. Until now, I have never seen a media corporation to integrate a twitter search in their site. Can you think of a better way to inform your people immediately? You don’t need money to send your reporter on site, you don’t need somebody searching twitter, you only need a twitter script. It is FREE, DIRECT content, give me a reason not to want it on your website.
What else is really important is trusting the media. Come on, let’s be honest, do you totally trust news corporation? Because I don’t. In the other hand, I almost fully trust bloggers and twitter-ers. Of course I don’t mean that I trust social media personas with one blog post or one twit, but you get my point.. As Chris Sacca said, Twitter makes us more honest, and that’s the greatest advantage of all. Individuals have already risen above their companies, we are probably in the start of the individual’s age.. Think about Obama, do you believe that majority of people out of the US know whether if Obama is in the Democratic or Republican party..?
[photo via flickr.com, user: tayseerh]
