Geekness - closer to the world » Think-Tank

Renew my Flickr Pro Account?

CoCaman — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:11:07 +0000

What happens if my Pro Account expires?

If your Pro account expires, don’t panic! None of your photos or videos have been deleted!

This means instead of enjoying the super-duper capacity of your Pro account, you’re now subject to the limits of a free account. If you upgrade again, all of your photos will be waiting for you.

Any of your sets that disappeared will magically reappear when you renew or upgrade.

I am really thinking about moving my photos to Google+ and/or Picasa..

Quora Takes Over Switzerland

CoCaman — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:10:51 +0000

I mean, c’mon! I have my Quora account since May 2010 (230 days to be precise). Nobody bothered at that time. And now, in the past 24 hours Quora has taken over the “early” adopters in Switzerland like crazy.
And I really how not “got” Quora yet…

Sometimes being a “pre-early” adopter does not pay.

Lost Series Finale (spoilerfree!)

CoCaman — Mon, 24 May 2010 07:35:56 +0000

Letdown
Or
Surprise
Today?

Tell me know in the comments. I am still uncertain what to think…

Protestieren Sie beim BAKOM gegen CI+!

CoCaman — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:04:34 +0000

Cablecom will als Alternative zur aktuellen Set-Top-Box das System CI+ einführen. Damit macht sie unter unserem Druck auf die Entschlüsselung der digitalen Fernsehsignale einen Schlenker: die Signale sollen neu durch eine Karte für Fr. 99.-, die man in den Fernseher schiebt, entschlüsselt werden. Jedoch: CI+ wird von den allermeisten aktuellen Fernsehern nicht unterstützt und beschneidet Ihre Fernsehfreiheit massiv.

Das Bundesamt für Kommunikation (BAKOM) hat es in der Hand, CI+ zu untersagen. Es hat eine Gesetzesänderung zur Abschaffung des Boxenzwangs vorgelegt. In einer Stellungnahme verlangt die SKS, die Grundverschlüsselung zu verbieten. Oder im Minimum den internationalen Standard CI vorzuschreiben.

Unterstützen Sie uns dabei! Bis am 10. Mai kann nämlich jeder dem BAKOM seine Meinung zur vorliegenden Gesetzesänderung senden. Wir haben hierzu im Internet eine Musterstellungnahme vorbereitet. Helfen Sie mit und senden Sie diese ans BAKOM!

Am besten fügen Sie noch ein/zwei Sätze zu Ihrer persönlichen Situation ein. Denn das BAKOM muss begreifen, wie die Realität in Ihrem Wohnzimmer aussieht!

Weitere Infos finden Sie in unserer Medienmitteilung und unter www.grundverschluesselung.ch. Streuen Sie die Information in Ihrem Bekanntenkreis oder auf Internetforen. Denn nur gemeinsam können wir etwas erreichen!

Vielen Dank für Ihre Unterstützung.

Wasted Hours with Lost (Mathematically)

CoCaman — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:22:27 +0000

The highly popular and irritating ABC hit TV series “LOST” will come to an end after the sixth season (currently airing on US television).
Now we just calculated how many hours you have wasted, if the series’ end sucks. And there is a little chance that it will.

So 6 seasons with 22 episodes each: 132 episodes total. Each episode runs 45 minutes, with the interruptions they run 1h. Just watching the episode you have wasted 132 hours. But if you have ever seen Lost, you know that you need at least double as much time to talk and reflect about an episode. Sums up to 264 hours. 264 hours wasted watching and thinking about a fictional story. Now let’s put that in contrast to a normal life.
80 years equals to 700’800 hours. Half of that time we are asleep: 350’400 hours awake.

Out of our awake time, we spend 0.07% watching Lost.
Even if the end of Lost sucks, our loss is little.

Google vs. China: What About Mobile?

CoCaman — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:50:38 +0000

Google today announced, that they redirect any services from google.cn (Google China) to their services at google.com.hk (Hong Kong). The reasons are, that google.com.hk is outside of the great Chinese firewall and therefor does not need to be self-censored. On the other side, this means that China can just block any traffic from inside to google.com.hk and hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users are cut off from Google and their services like Blogger, Picasa, Adsense, Google News and others.

What makes me wonder is that, what happens to the tens of millions of mobile users? Isn’t Google all about mobile web and search? How are they going to offer their products to these users? Are they being redirected as well? Will more device makers switch to bing or Baidu?

Zattoo Feature Requests

CoCaman — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:31:00 +0000

Zattoo, the first IPTV online video player for TV stations, is now for more than three years on the market and available. In fact, my first blog post about Zattoo “Zattoo – News from the field” is from January 2007. Since that time a lot has changed. The installable software has lost its Linux client and has moved from a proprietary MPEG-4 video codec to Adobe Flash. Both, the online interface as well as the installable client now uses Flash. The main reason for this is costs. In licensing and in keeping an updated client software.

Teletext
Just a link to the website just does not do it for me. Sorry!

But for the time being, Zattoo is just a player. I really wish Zattoo would start to offer some new feature and maybe gain some attention once more.

Feature Requests

Video Recorder
This is a no-brainer. Why not negotiate contracts with TV stations, that allow the end users to record? There are other Swiss services that allow recordings. Their are basically just online tv recorders without the Zattoo user base. And Beat Knecht and the Zattoo team sure has the contacts to get stations to the table.

HTML 5 / MPEG-4 or OGG Streaming
I really do not like flash, at all. It sucks up energy for nothing. And especially videos are very CPU intense. Why? Can you not go back to MPEG or better OGG streaming? OGG is an open and free audio and video codec. Somehow you already must have created some sort of MPEG-4 streaming. Or how does it work on an iPhone? For sure not with Flash.
Maybe you can even start to offer “direct” links to streams, much like Cablecom on hispeed.ch does. That way I can fire up my regular video player (VLC) and watch TV over it. Yes, you have to show advertisements to make money and pay your infrastructure. Okay, than just offer this for premium customers.

These are all feature requests that come to mind. But I am sure, you have more ideas that could help make Zattoo a better service and experience. Please leave a comment with your idea or requests.

Communicating with US Blogs

CoCaman — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:19:37 +0000

The following presentation was just a small idea in my head on a train ride from Zurich to Basel a few days ago. But I think and after talking to a few friends, colleagues and partners I decided to go for it. The following presentation should give every startup a basic idea on how they can contact an American blog like TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, CenterNetworks or any other blog and pitch them your idea or business. If you follow these tips, your chances are much higher than if you just sent a mass email to all of the blogs.
The slides should be self-explanatory. But if you do not understand something or want to discuss about it, please feel free to send me an email or add your input to the comments below.

Communicating With US Blogs

View more presentations from Corsin Camichel.

You can also view the presentation on my SlideShare account.

And if you have any more tips or ideas, please feel free to share them with us. Maybe we can create a better resource and get more Swiss startups covered on US blogs.

“Communicating with US blogs“ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Switzerland License.

Idea: A Better Copy and Paste Function

CoCaman — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:50:32 +0000

Computer software and techniques evolve. From the keyboard-only interface to the mouse over to touch or voice commands is just one example. From mainframes and thin-clients to workstations, to home computers to cloud services is another one. Many parts have changed over the year. But one thing that hasn’t is your clipboard. That is the part of your computer you use if you copy something (a text, an image) from somewhere (Word, your hard drive) and paste it somewhere else (into a form, to another folder).
But this clipboard is “dumb”. Every time you copy something new, the old data is overwritten. This might be useful. But imagine the following scenario:

You have a folder with 200 photos of your list paragliding trip
You want to send 20 photos to your friend or copy them to another folder
What you would do now is chose all the 20 photos from the list of 200 photos selecting all the ones you want and copy them

Now my idea is to have a more intelligent clipboard. Mine would allow you to add objects (like photos) to some sort of a collection or list. Lets say you copy the first three images and you have to scroll down for more. Now if you select more photos and copy them, they are added to the collection of the previous selected photos. Now your clipboard contains five of your photos. Now you can paste these or add more photos to it.

One problem I have not found any solution for is how to empty such a collection. Of course, if you have those 5 photos and copy some text, the photo collection should be emptied. But what if you want to start a new photo collection? They should not be added to the previous clipboard (= photos from paragliding).

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Personally I would like to have something like this. Realistically speaking, this should not be such a big problem. The copy mechanism just should check the file header for the file type and add it to the appropriate stack or list. And the pasting method should ask what stack/list should be pasted.

Idea: Local SMS

CoCaman — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:10:44 +0000

We all use SMS/short messages regularly. It must be the most used option of a mobile phone today. And this even though it is so expensive.
I use my mobile phone also as a notebook for my ideas. But I have to search my to-do or notes list every time I want to write something down.

What I wonder is, why is there no (free!) option to send an SMS/text messages to my inbox directly? I am in the SMS/texting application all the time. Why can’t I create a regular SMS/short message and set the recipient to 0 or 1270001 and the message is directly moved in my inbox? That SMS/short message does not leave my phone, so it would be free of charge.

Toni Schneider: CEO Role Model

CoCaman — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:44:27 +0000

On August 27th 2009, Toni Schneider the CEO of Automattic (makers of WordPress.com) gave a very interesting and entertaining talk about his life as CEO, his past in the States and about the super-exciting life as a part-time venture capitalist with True Ventures.

First he talked about his past in California. Growing up in Switzerland and being very interested in technology and computers, he did not have much of a choice for studying computer science. But as he phrased it, he luckily met an American one day who told him about this great college in Santa Barbara. And that is where Toni went. He studied in Santa Barbara and Stanford computer sciences. At Stanford he joined a startup that created three dimensional sound. They later sold it. After a few other startups and acquisitions he became part of Yahoo. At Yahoo he was vice president of the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN). I did not know that and I was very surprised to see a Swiss guy having the lead at the YDN.

After the time at Yahoo, a friend of Toni created a Venture Fund and wanted him as a partner. At the same time, Toni proposed to Matt Mullenweg to set up a company for wordpress.com. It is important to note, that Automattic is not the company behind the software. They see themselves primarily as a service provider (wordpress.com, Askimet, PollDaddy) with an infrastructure of 1200 server you can use to host your sever. The business model is upgrades for your blog, Google AdSense (but only for Internet Explorer users, not a joke!) or Askimet licensing.
One of their clients, CNN, hosts around 50 blogs with several million unique viewers a day. They pay USD 30’000 a month for using the Automattic infrastructure.
Toni also talked about Automattic as a “virtual company”. They did not have any office until a little while back. Of the 55 employees only half are located in the US and have a working contract with Automattic. The others are consultants, that are payed on an hourly-based consultant contract. They never have any meetings (= saving lots and lots of time). The only time they meet each other eye-by-eye is at their 6-monthly event somewhere on the planet. The other time they collaborate over IRC or the P2 theme for WordPress. They never use e-mail, because it is not very easily searchable, most e-mails remain unread or get lost and so on.

One important lesson he gave the audience was the frequency of decision making. If you have to make a decision, see how fast it can be undone. Let’s say you release a new feature. If nobody likes it, you can easily remove it again. But if you take VC money, you are stuck with the investors for a couple of years.
Making decisions that can be reverted is important. As well as “release early and release often“.

Also something very interesting is the fact, that each employee has full access to all live systems and source code repositories. If there is something you do not like, you can easily change it. And it takes 30 seconds to change all 1200 servers. After that, you have another 30 seconds to remove or fix the thing you just broke . How many people do you need to administrate 1200 servers? One hell of a good system engineer. Yes, only one guy is in charge of 1200 servers. And those servers are regular, USD 100/month root boxes. They only have to run Apache, MySQL, Linux and are all set up the same. I am really eager to hear more about the technology behind WordPress.com. Anybody wants to organize the first Swiss WordCamp?
Wordpress.com/Automattic is profitable. They have an income of 1 million a month and expenses of USD 800’000. The reason why they took the first million in funding was to have at least something in the bank, as a reserve. Then they “had to take” 30 million because the investors really, really wanted to invest. Something you don’t see or hear very often. And this is of course very good for the company. Now they can dictate the rules of the investment. The idea behind taking the money was to give it to the employees, changing stock for money. At first the team was very happy with that. But in the end, almost no stocks returned. Seems the employees believe in Automattic and have higher goals .

Last Toni talked about his great life as a venture capitalist. Everybody wishes to be a VC. It is a easy job, no work stress, you met many new and bright people. And he confirmed all of it. He works 20% as a partner at True Ventures. A relatively new fund that seeds in early stages small sums between 0.5-2 million dollars. For that, they take 23-24% of the shares. Compare to other and bigger VC firms that invest 5-50 million and take 30-40%. The first batch was around 150 million big. Of that money 40 millions are invested in around 40-50 startups. The rest is banked for later investments or bigger rounds.
In a second batch True Ventures has now 198 million dollars to invest. Not bad if you know that other funds are dying or not investing. But True Ventures was investing all the time, even in this bad time. The investments Toni did are more personal, for people he personally know from Stanford or somehow through his day job at Automattic.

The evening finished with an apero at the Technopark foyer where many people had the chance to exchange a few words with the CEO of the Year 2007 and talking about ideas for the WordPress Dashboard or asking about sweet life in California.

Here are now some photos of the event. The last photo shows some Swiss WordPress bloggers (including myself). Enjoy.

A big thank you to Toni Schneider, Myke Naef of Doodle, the /ch/open team and the Technopark for this great evening and the insights Toni gave.

Other posts
Lucas of Amazee has a recap of the first part.
Dania of Amazee has the second part.
Doodle Blog has a small text

Thoughts on Twitter

CoCaman — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:25:31 +0000

Note: This article started completely different than it is now. I have just written down what just came out of my head!

Remember the time when everybody was working hard to get a higher and higher Google Pagerank? Hours spent by marketers to get sites to link to your site. Paying good money to have a .edu domain linking to your website.
Nowadays people use Twitter. And with each tweet you feel more important, your message is read by more people.
Retweeting is the new pagerank (in terms of egoism and comparison)
Pages like TweetMeme and ReTweet will be very valuable in the future. Until spammers discover the possibility to set up hundreds or thousands of bots that each retweets their messages.

Corsin Camichel's Twitter Ratio Badge

And there lies the problem for Twitter: Fighting the bad bots. Fighting the black hat TMO (Tweet Message Optimization). Fighting the growths.
Of course Twitter already starts blocking bots and bad people. But not very automatically and very fast. Out of my 165 followers I guess 30% are not real or have actually heard of me. Check my Twitoria for details.
I appreciate every human follower, no matter I we have ever met or if you just follow me for my non-sense. My stuff is mainly just noise.
Or check my TFF (Twitter Follow Friend Ratio). I am very selective to the people I follow. A main criteria is that I have met you in person or your input is important to me. I very often also unfollow people. Just because it crossed my mind.

I think I need to rewrite this article some day in a more structured way. This are just ideas, thoughts that I had.

Twitter Explained IV

CoCaman — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:44:30 +0000

Twitter is like your bedroom, only without the curtains

Twitter Explained III

CoCaman — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:12:51 +0000

Twitter is just public Instant Messaging

Or IRC. Or a forum. Just the design is cleaner. And the subscription model is different.

HSR Twitterverse

CoCaman — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:23:23 +0000

Seit nun fast 2 Wochen existiert das HSR Twitterverse (HT) schon. Das HT ist für twitterer dasselbe wie Planet HSR für Blogger: ein Aggregator von Inhalten – im Falle des HT’s von tweets – von Studierenden und ehemaligen der HSR. die Idee stammte von mir, kurz programmiert hat es dann aber Giuseppe (@_giu). Der Feed, von welchem das HT die Einträge lädt, wird durch die gleichbenannte Yahoo! Pipe generiert.

Momentan werden die tweets von 15 Personen (im Fachjargon twitterer genannt) aggregiert. Eine schöne Zahl, es könnten aber wesentlich mehr sein! Deshalb mein Appell an euch: registriert euch bei twitter.com (Mirko, gilt auch für dich , Sendet ein @reply @_giu und profitiert von den vielen Möglichkeiten, die euch das HSR Twitterverse anbietet (täglich tausende Pageviews…NOT, Fame … NOT, Frauen/Männer … NOT).

Ich hoffe in den nächsten Tagen trudeln einige @replies bei @_giu ein! Natürlich sind au Dozenten und Professoren herzlich willkommen!

[via giu.me]

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