Blog08 & Dinner at my place?

On October 24 we are organizing Blog08.nl. It promises to be a spectacular event with famous internet celebrities from all over the world including Pete Cashmore from Mashable, Hugh MacLeod from Gapingvoid and my pretty bearded friend Scott Rafer (CEO of Lookery).

It is pretty rare to find so many influentials in once place at the same time!

The evening before Blog08 there will be a speakers dinner in my house with all the speakers present. I will be cooking dinner and you have a chance to be there too!

Buy a ticket before Wednesday and you might get an invitation to my dinner party.

Haven’t bought your ticket yet? Don’t wait untilt he last week because there is only limited space at the event and those seats are filling up fast.

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting and I am looking forward to hearing your comments!

Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

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Online TV: The Boris & Friends Show!

A few months ago Ronnie Overgoor told me he had plans for his own Internet Television station. He also wanted to know if I would be interested in having my own talkshow on his station. Well, you can imagine I didn’t hesitate to join his effort.

Yesterday BlueShots.TV officially launched and you can watch my first talkshow right here. My first guests were Robert Gaal from Wakoopa and Pieter van der Does from Adyen.

Hope you enjoy the show. I had a lot of fun making it and I hope it shows…

Achieving (and living with) Perfect Knowledge

On September 21 I was relaxing in the sun with Tessa and Loïs. I was drinking Tonic water which is flavored with quinine which gives it a distinctively bitter taste. Loïs wanted to taste it and Tessa wondered out loud ‘do you think quinine could be bad for children?’.

I thought “Well, maybe it is. Quinine is a fever-reducing chemical and the first effective treatment for malaria“.

But I didn’t know if it was bad for children so I simply said: ‘Look it up’.

We both own an iPhone so within seconds Tessa could tell me that non-medical Tonic water contains a medically insignificant amount of quinine and was perfectly safe for children. A few minutes later Tessa said “This is probably one of the last hot days before autumn starts”. So I asked her “When does autumn start?”. She simply replied: “Look it up”.

So I did. It started September 22, the next day.

No Excuse for Ignorance

When Loïs was 4 she demanded cookies on a Sunday. I told her we were out of cookies. She told me to make new ones. I told her I didn’t know how. She became irritated and exclaimed “Sure you do, just look it up on The Internet!”.

She was right and I was wrong. I do know how to make cookies and I also know how a battery works and even how to build a nuclear bomb. I just have to look it up. I have no excuse for ignorance.

As technology advances, internet becomes ubiquitous and portable devices like the iPhone are distributed to billions of people, we all get access to more information then ever before.

Sometimes you hear people complain about ‘Information Overload’. They say that there is too much information to handle. What they actually mean is that they have too little time to handle the tasks that get thrown at them in the form of email. There can never be ‘too much’ information.

If you pick up a dictionary you won’t complain that it is too complete will you? Do you think Google indexes too many pages? No, the only thing you might complain about is that you can’t find the information you need. Once you do, there can never be TOO much information to choose from.

Achieving Perfect knowledge

If you look up “Perfect” in a dictionary it will say something like this:

“Lacking nothing essential to the whole; complete of its nature or kind.”

One day, we will have Perfect Knowledge. Although we won’t know everything there is to know, our knowledge of the world will approach a perfect state. It will be ‘lacking nothing essential to the whole’.

Will scientists know everything there is to know? No, certainly not.
Will we know everything about the past up to and beyond the origins of the universe? No, certainly not.

What we will know is everything we could possibly want to know in the course of a lifetime as will be practical for a normal human being. We will be able to answer 99.999% of all questions we can expect to ask ourselves. All we will need is a second or two to formulate the question and look it up. This will present us with new issues to deal with. Right now our lives and societies are focused on the pursuit of knowledge. Our schools, universities and companies all work on finding our more, about more. We want to ‘Know’ it all.

What happens if one day we do? What if technology makes knowledge accessible everywhere for, almost, everyone? What if we reach Knowledge Nirvana? How would we deal with an abundance of knowledge and the responsibility to deal with it.

A girl in a candy store

In an interview a famous candy store owner was asked if he ever had trouble with employees stealing candy. His reply: “We tell our new employees to eat as much candy as they want when they start. They all eat a lot of candy the first day or two and then become so fed up with candy that they never eat, and steal, again.”

Could the same be applied to information and knowledge? If suddenly you would be able to know everything there was to know, would you become bored with the whole thing after a few days? Would you start concentrating on other things than the pursuit of knowledge and just focus on being happy? But happy with what? How does it feel to know everything?

The Horn of Plenty

Of course you can’t contain, freeze or finish knowledge. Information tends to multiply if combined and shared. If I know something and tell you about it I don’t get poorer but we both get richer. I know what I know and I know that you know what I know and I know part of what you know. Information increases in mass as more is gained. Information grows as magically as Van Helmont’s tree:

“A 17th-century scientist by the name of Van Helmont planted a willow sapling in a container that held 200 pounds of soil and, for five years, gave it nothing but water. At the end of that time, the tree was found to weigh 169 pounds, and the soil 199 pounds, 14 ounces—from just two ounces of soil had come 169 pounds of tree.”

Add information to information and you will get more information back than you have put in.

Absolute & Perfect Knowledge and the End of War

Knowing everything includes knowing everyone. Knowing everything and everyone changes your relation to everyone. It is difficult to hurt someone you love and easier to kill someone you don’t know.

People who hate foreigners are often very friendly with their foreign neighbors, or foreign evening shop manager or security guard at their company. They will say “yeah, they ALL have to get the hell out of MY country. Well, except my neighbors because those are really hardworking decent people. The rest, gotta go!”

The truth, of course, is that ALL foreigners are really hardworking decent people once you get to know them. The whole basis of that problem is a lack of knowledge. Nobody would kill anybody if they really know them, and their mothers. Lack of knowledge starts wars and ends marriages: ‘we never really talk anymore’ and ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’.

It seems highly unlikely that Navy Captain William S. Parsons (”Deak”) would have dropped “Little Boy” if he would have known any of the people on the ground and the devastation they were about to cause. In fact, he said “I knew the Japs were in for it, but I felt no particular emotion about it”. You need a large amount of ignorance to kill another person.

Unfortunately there is more media attention for people killing each other over MySpace profiles than there is for the positive effects of everybody being connected to everyone via Social Networks right now. I’m sure that will change as soon as the first bomber returns from its mission because they checked out the Facebook pages of the people in the city they were about to bomb.

Living with Perfect Knowledge

Not long from now you will carry a little machine with you that will be able to answer any question to throw at it. There will be no excuse for ignorance for any and all of us. You will know where you are, what the rules are for the place you are in, what happened there 5 minutes ago to whom and what happened there 5, 50, 500 and 5.000 years ago. Oh, and what the weather will be like tomorrow. You will look at something or someone and instantly be presented with everything ever documented about that thing, event or person.

What if that moment, that little machine, was here tomorrow. Isn’t the iPhone that machine? How does that influence us as human beings?

I think we have an obligation to start thinking about this state of Perfect Knowledge so we will know what to do when we realize that it is here.

Death, Nalden.net, TwitterKeys, TV, Radio & the Kashmir pouch

If I’m not blogging that surely doesn’t mean nothing is happening! Here are a few links to what I’m doing and what happened:

An old friend, Mark Hoekstra, died this week. Too young. Way too young! We did the Slurpr project together and he used my old iPhone and turned it into the first all black iPhone in the world:
http://www.bright.nl/in-memoriam-mark-hoekstra

Nalden.net published my top 10 music of all time and a short story about me:
http://www.nalden.net/#/audio/414/

I invented TwitterKeys last week and it became the most popular post on The Next Web blog, ever! Made it to Techcrunch, Digg frontpage and got tweeted by Twitter founders, and several ‘members’ of the top 10 most popular twitter users:
http://thenextweb.org/2008/09/18/twitterkeys-the-first-48-hours/

We held another Next Web Salon in my house last friday. We cooked for 60+ people. See the photos on Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/thenextweb/sets/72157607385246694/

I used an old 100% Kashmir sweater and needle & thread to make Tessa an iPhone Pouch:
http://flickr.com/photos/thenextweb/2875592184/

I did an interview on BNR last Friday. Very short and all about what I did 10 years ago which is a LONG time ago. If you don’t know that story yet check it out:
http://www.bnr.nl/static/jspx/play.jspx?datum=19/09/2008&tijd=09:12:40&lengte=4

Patrick and I visited the AT5 (Local Amsterdam TV station) on Wednesday for a live interview in a show called Kort Amsterdams Live about the Next Web Conference, blog and our other projects. We were in a very good mood and had a lot of fun during the interview. Unfortunately they don’t show anything online so I can’t show the video here.

The Flying Boat

Imagine an entrepreneur, lets call him Jack, talking to his partners:

“Let’s cross the ocean together! We could do that! We could discover undiscovered countries and become rich! All we have to do is build a boat. We are qualified, experienced and motivated. Jim, you have experience with the open sea and know how to navigate. Bob, you know about construction and materials, and I would be an excellent skipper because I know how to motivate people and set a course. Let’s just do it!”

And so they do. After months of hard work, they have a good looking boat. It is a bit heavy and during the construction process they had to sacrifice some of the more interesting features they had planned for lack of money or resources. Bob found some bugs in the hull but thinks these will disappear once they start sailing.

Unfortunately, they do have one serious problem. They spent all their money on the boat, and forgot to plan for food. They know the entire trip will take a few weeks so they need to bring plenty of water and food. Fortunately, Bob has a rich Uncle, and they decide to ask him to invest in their plan. They prepare a few sheets that guarantee a nice return on investment for Uncle Bob should he decide to invest.

One fine morning Uncle Bob comes walking up the pier to inspect the boat and talk about financing their trip. The boys are nervous and are waiting next to their vessel with their hats in their hands. Uncle Bob, an experienced entrepreneur who became rich from selling office furniture, looks at the ship approvingly and then turns to Bob and says:

“Why didn’t you build an airplane?”

Bob is speechless. He looks at his partners for help but they seem to just stand there - staring into the distance - as dumbfounded as he is. They all seem to realize it that instant; if the only goal was to cross the ocean, an airplane would have been a much more efficient way of doing it!

But there they are, standing at the end of the pier next to a shiny new boat, with no supplies, with their hats in their hands.

After Uncle Bob leaves, the three partners retreat to the nearest bar for an emergency meeting, and a few beers. Deep down they understand that the obvious thing to do, the only sensible thing really, is to forget about the boat, start all over and just build an airplane.

But Jack was looking forward to the trip and his role as skipper, and Bob spend so much time polishing the hull, and Jim has learned everything there was to know about currents, ocean navigation and the weather that they just can’t bring themselves to even suggest doing that.

So they decide to take what they have, and adapt to the new circumstances. They take all the components from the old plan and try to apply them to the new plan. This is what they ended up with:

Blast from the past

In 2003 I sold my Wi-Fi Hotspot company to Dutch telephone operator KPN. One of the first things we did (we = me and my partners Koen & Caspar) after we signed the contract was to install HotSpots in the lobby of the main KPN building. The boxes we hid the Wi-Fi equipment in were shaped in the form of our logo. I was very proud to see them installed there! Then, after a few months, we parted ways and KPN completely restructured the company once I was out of the picture. I heard that most of the people working there were replaced (or left) by KPN people and they changed the technical infrastructure too switching to ‘Off-the-Shelf’ parts instead of the custom made Wi-Fi Access points we developed ourselves. All of this made perfect sense to me and I had no problem with it but you can imagine it still feels awkward to see the company you built change into something completely different.

You can imagine the satisfaction I felt when I got an email from an old friend at KPN who took this photo in the main lobby of KPN last week:

Yep, our original Wi-Fi hotspot, in the case I designed with the logo I designed is still active and visible to everyone visiting. Makes me proud…

Viva la Revolucion!

We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends. Last Friday Patrick and I went to the T-Mobile store and bought iPhones. They didn’t have them in stock so we will have to wait for a few weeks before we actually get them. There are several reason why you could get an iPhone but I want to talk about one reason in particular in this post. By buying, using and developing for the iPhone right now you can participate in the start of a new era in computing.

Yep, I’m serious. The other reasons for wanting an iPhone are valid too and apply to me too. It is the mother of all shiny objects, a great tool and a nice phone and you just want one as soon as you hold one in your hands. But besides that the iPhone platform is also clearly the start of something new. And I want to be a part of that.

Early Apple computers (before the Macintosh) had serial ports and something called a Game Port. It could be used for digital and analog input and output and was very powerful. People would buy an Apple I or Apple II and hack around with these ports to build exiting stuff like printers or home automation tools. Back then it was clear to people that you could build practicably anything with these machines if you had some basic hard- and software knowledge and that was an extremely exciting prospect.

Now we have the iPhone. A lot of people are complaining about the closed character of the iPhone but I see it differently. Sure, things could improve a lot. The NDA should go and the App store should work more transparent and all that. But look at the possibilities for a moment and you will realize just how empowering this little computer is!

The early Apple computers had serial ports that let people do anything with their computers which was cool. The box itself could do a few basic things which were exciting but still fairly limited. Now look at the iPhone: developers have access to the Internet, the GPS chip and all the motion sensors. The touch, tilt and move interface is all there waiting for you to take advantage of. All you have to do is come up with an application that uses a few of these, freely available, technologies and built it.

Better yet; you don’t even have to worry about setting up an eShop, coming up with license fees, promotion, illegal copies or how to make your invention available to users. The App store handles everything for you.

So what you have is a phenomenon with unlimited possibilities, free tools to build applications, an app store that handles distribution, promotion and security and millions of eager users who can’t wait to play with your products, and pay for them too.

It is not often that a revolution takes place where you get a chance to participate. It happened, and is still happening, with the Internet and now it has just started with a new platform called the iPhone.

I just couldn’t resist becoming a part of that.

How I’m proved wrong by being right

Often people tell me their ideas looking for criticism or confirmation. They will pitch me an idea and I will give feedback. I enjoy the process and always try to really put energy into wrapping my head around an idea.

Lately I have been experiencing an interesting side effect of giving feedback during pitches; the opposite of what I’m predicting happens because of what I am predicting.

What happens is that someone will casually pitch me a rather simple and raw idea. I think about if for a minute or so and, sensing a lack of real determination in the person pitching it, realize that the idea will never take off. I explain my thoughts and pessimistic view of the idea to the person doing the pitch. He or she feels slightly disappointed and maybe even insulted a bit.

A week passes by and this person comes back to me with more determination. He or she pitches their idea one more time and again I will respond negatively. Of course I will sense the entrepreneurs more determined attitude towards the idea but I will still see some major flaws. But by highlighting them I will maybe just inspire the entrepreneur to find solutions and become even more determined.

So, in both instances I am right that the idea won’t work. But by explaining this I change the situation and the chances of the idea working out.

I could of course simply say ‘Yeah, that will work’ to any idea I’m being pitched. But besides being impractical it would also probably have an adverse reaction and doom the project.

I don’t mind being wrong and I wish everybody all the wealth and successful projects in the world so there is no problem there. But what should I do when someone I like comes to me with an idea I really don’t think will work out?

Basically it is a small example of the Hawthorn Effect. The basic idea here is that people change their behavior when they know they are being observed.

What I’m wondering about is what I should do with this information. By influencing people I end up contradicting myself and I like being right about stuff. So, what is your advice?