Joost starting a beta

Quite cool: the Venice Project becomes Joost and I Joost got an invitation to join their new wave of beta test.
From what I ave been able to gather over the web, this is going to be great and I certainly trust the creators of Skype to build something amazing... again.
The product installed without a glitch and I am absolutely impressed with the quality of sound and image.

At this point I do not have sufficient experience with the functionality of the software package to give and opinion as to how it is going to affect the landscape of online media. All I can say is that television will never be the same again and that my first impressions of user experience are very very positive.

Jamendo picking-up speed

Jamendo recently announced having over 2000 albums online and their website is more and more active with the number of members growing fast and volumes of file sharing exploding. Today they announced a revenue sharing scheme thus starting the roll-out of a business model that is suitable both for artists who wish to keep offering their music free of charge and for bands who intend to use Jamendo as a direct distribution community-enabled platform. For details, take a look at the press release below.
Download pr_jamendo_rs_en.pdf

The world is shaped in the blink of an eye

I just finished reading a fascinating book called Blink. Malcolm Gladwell, the author does a great job at showing how the human mind has an ability to sort and process very rapidly relevant information in the blink of an eye to reach conclusions, make decisions and take action. Blink is about "the power of thinking without thinking" as Gladwell says, that incredible capability in of our unconscious mind that helps us steer our course in this universe for the best and for the worse. The book contains some very interesting case studies from a variety of fields from marital counseling to marketing to military and art. I was struck by the work done by Harvard to show the unconscious biases into which our education and social contexts conditions us: try it for yourself at this site or here (if the first link does not work as was reported by a reader).

One of the most interesting case studies deals with a war game of the Pentagon which took an unexpected turn as the bad guy was able to inflict severe losses to US forces in the simulation simply by organizing his side as a loose system instead of trying to capture huge amounts of data to make decisions in the heat of the battle. In a way it reminded me of modern management where there is a drive in many companies to capture all sorts of data about a business in a futile attempt to control the future, whereas it is often far more productive to hire the right people and give them the freedom to perform.

Quaero: search yields trouble

Do you remember when French President Chirac launched an initiative to build a European search engine to compete with Google? YAGIDF = Yet Another Government Initiative Destined to Fail. A little more than a year later, it does seem that Quaero found trouble while searching for an architecture for the future of search: I clipmarked here a piece of news that I found on Slashdot today. And have you tried "www.quaero.com" or "www.quaero.org"? What's a search engine that needs another search engine to be found by a user worth? How about a new product that does not have a web presence before it's completemy developed? Passé? Perhaps it is time for European governments to change the ways in which they try to support European entrepreneurship and crucially time to stop having dreams of European grandeur, come back to Earth and act realistically... Shimon Peres stated that governments are becoming irrelevant in December at Le Web 3. Quaero might be a good example.
Meanwhile Google presses on and continues to let a thousand flowers bloom in a process of continuous innovation. At the same time I know Mangrove Capital and Mark Tluszcz who have been eager to do something in the search engine space since late 2005 (go to this site, search for "Tluszcz" and watch this video



- sorry but v-pod.tv does not support linking to videos or embedding it appears.) seem to be betting on Quintura, an interesting search engine that uses artificial intelligence to interconnect concepts that the user is looking for. I saw a presentation of theirs at Le Web 3 and tested the platform: it's quite good although there are a couple of bugs with the nice flash representation of concepts (last time I checked it did not update when the user hit the Back button of the Firefox 2.0 browser).

Going to AlwaysOn Media in NYC

I decided to attend AlwaysOn Media in NYC later this month. It definitely looks like an interesting conference and since I am currently working for a couple of "disruptors" in the media & marketing industries, being there felt very appropriate. My plan it to have my Archos 604 WiFi with me and to publish a couple of videos from the conference... just to expand on my most recent multimedia experiments ;-)

Clipmarks rocks

I've been using a great tool called Clipmarks for the past few weeks and it's just awesome. Given that I have a bias for sifting through a lot of information when working on a project this is exactly the sort of tool I needed because it allows me to keep track of the meaningful and useful parts of web sites I visit, thus also helping me cope with the incredible loads of information that are available. Before using Clipmarks I used to make PDF files of pages which contained some useful information. Needless to say the management of those files was a real challenge.
Features I just love with Clipmarks:

1. the ability to pick several parts of a page and to save them on Clipmarks as one document (called a clip in Clipmarkese)



2. the ability to send a document to friends and contacts via email



3. tagging of clips



4. submission of clips to del.icio.us



5. the ability to organize clips as "collections" (which are pretty much like categories, but can be qualifications of privacy if you want)



6. the submission of clips to a community of users who will "pop" the clip and push it to first page (a bit like Digg)



7. the creation of a personal web space with all of my clips

Clipmarks is absolutely great.

How sustainable is our current way?

This morning aroudn 06:15 CET there was an interesting interview with Edward Goldsmith on BBC World Service. Edward Goldsmith is one of those pioneers who were early to recognize, in the late sixties, the impacts of our model of industrial development on the environment. His point of view is very interesting and although he feels he was not successful in his quest to make mankind understand the risks of disrupting the planet's ecosystem, I believe examples like his inspire quite a few people in our societies.
At the very end of 2006 I got a chance to discuss sustainable business with a Belgian business leader and I was impressed with his keen understanding of the dimension of the challenges ahead: he was telling me how he felt we would be compelled to change our ways of running the economy and how we'd better start right now because businesses who are early to adapt stand a better chance to survive and develop in radically different conditions. Edward Goldsmith's position is more radical because he supports de-development... All that makes for interesting times. And now that I think of it, back in june 2000 I recall spending a week in San Francisco, California, expecting to see a lot of teleworking and extensive use of technology to change the working models and feeling very disappointed with the huge traffic jams on highway 101.