Net

Insane Superhuman French People

Pub Fifa Street 3 (Foot Capoeira)
by mehzz

I wonder if frog legs are on their diet..?

Israeli Facebook Song

Orchestrating Collaboratioin

This is a great lesson in leadership & collaboration by the conductor Benjamin Zander. Thanks Phil Lichtenberg for sharing this.

Facebook is an Awesome Company!

First Dustin's keynote at CTIA demoing the awesome Facebook for Blackberry application, then this! Must say that I work at an awesome company and with very talented people!

The Psychology of Immersion - Virtual Reality Is Reality

A recent article in Wall Street Journal talks about virtual relationships and their affect on real relationships. According to a recent study cited we can learn the following about the cognitive processes in players brains:

• On a neurological level, players may not distinguish between virtual and real-life relationships
• People socializing in virtual worlds remain sensitive to subtle cues like eye contact - in one study, participants moved their avatars back if another character stood too close, even though the space violation was just virtual
• Our brains are not specialized for 21st-century media - There is not switch that says "Process this different because it is on the screen".

More discussion at the MIT Advertising Lab and Neuromarketing

Storyboards As A Business Plan

Since I have been sitting in on quite a few start-up pitches as well as continuously being pitched myself by all kind of ventures, I was thinking if it is not on time to change the current format for business plans. Let's face it most VC's don't even read them, not even the executive summary for that matter. Power point is more and more taking over although we are all sick and tired of them too - especially if they have more than five slides.

Since most businesses are like a developing story - wouldn't it be easier to use the storyboard as an example of visualizing you business plan? We all love stories, wether they are fiction or not , on TV or not, true or false. As a matter of fact, most good businesses have a good story to tell. Why not try to tell that story as you see it develop over time on a storyboard?

Using the storyboard as a format for describing a business forces you to reduce the crucial steps into single frames and let go of those long never ending paragraphs that nobody reads anyway. I personally use a lot of visual tools in my day to day businesses. My favorite so far is Mind Mapping wether on paper or as for the past four years, a software called MindManager. As a matter of fact, I went through all my University studies using mind maps, which some of them I still have left.

I think that story-boarding is very close to mind mapping, but helps you perhaps better to tell or develop a story. Going forward, I will start using storyboards for some ideas I am developing in parallel with mind mapping.

What then are my favorite tools? Well, except for paper and pen:

• MindManager
• Pages - comes with Mac's iLife (use the creative templates )
• MacJournal - not a visualization tool, but fantastic for note taking - especially the full-screen author with enable me to write with green letters against a totally black  background - putting all the distractions behind.

Finally there is Montage, which is a very interesting screenwriting software aimed at pro's - but an interesting option if you really would like to tell your story in a screenwriting format. What are your favorite tools?

Technorati Tags: businessplans, macjournal, mindjet, mindmapping, montage, startups, storyboard, storytelling, vc

What do you think?

Ever since I announced that I am stepping down from my active involvement in Maxthon, the stream of proposals and offers just keep coming. Although I did expect some positive reactions I never anticipated the amount of positive reactions. I now really need to carefully think about what my next move should be and what kind of venture/s I would like to get involved in.

Since I know that my blog readers are extremely intelligent, wise and really wise people, I have decided to crowdsource for some inspiration. Currently a number of options are open:

• Join the VC world
• Top position in a very well known public company
• Join a start-up
• Combine a number of ventures under my Mashup Media company
• Start something completely new
• Just take a very long vacation and think about it

What do you think?

For those of you located in the Bay area, I will be over again July 24 - Aug 1st and as always I love to meet up with fellow entrepreneurs and share experiences,  so if you want to meet up, please leave a comment or contact me directly on you know what...;)

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs, Maxthon, netaneljacobsson, crowdsourcing, VC, venturecapital

Loic's & my Run & PoolCast From Spain

 

Loic's and my first RunCast together finishing of with a PoolCast filmed at a secret location in north Spain.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, netaneljacobsson

Virtual Goods Summit 2007 Videos Up

Here's two video's from the Virtual Goods Summit in Stanford last month. The first: Virtual Items - mainstream or not? Featuring: Jia Shen, James Hong, Robert Scoble, J.T. Stephens and John Vars.

The second video: "Making Virtual Economies Work" focused on what it takes to build, launch, and maintain a successful virtual economy. Featuring: Mark, Joshua, Brock, Raph, and John.

Technorati Tags: vgsummit, vgsummit2007

Frets On Fire - Open Source Guitar Hero

This is just awesome! Frets on Fire is a game about musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible. It's an open-source project with hundreds of songs composed by the community and supports multi platform. In short it is open source guitar hero! How cool is that!

Features: 

• Unique inverted keyboard gameplay style
• Song editor  form making your own tunes
• Compete iwth others on the World Charts
• Supports importing Guitar Hero I-II songs
• Multiplatform
• Open source

Technorati Tags: fretsonfire, games, opensource, guitar hero, music

MX Play - 3D Audio Mashups

Last week I meet with Ruper Dolasia CEO and Marcy Keenan, VP Business development of MX Play - a new and very cool music player based in San Francisco. At first I asked myself, who needs another music player? But MX Play is different from other players out there in that they have really emphazised on the audio quality. The founders have a strong background in working with audio codex and technologies - and you can hear that.

MX Play makes you music come alive with 3D audio. For serious music lovers this is music to your ears. But there's more to it than that. MX Play even lets you mash your own music with videos from YouTube and let's you discover new music as well.

• Mash your music with videos in the 3D AudioSpace
• Organize and import  your music from anywhere
• Browse the web in MX Play and discover new music

Technorati Tags: mxplay, mxplay, music, audio, mashup

Are Virtual Goods the Next Big Business Model?

Last week I attended the First Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University, organized by CRV's Susan Wu and Charles Hudson
and reported about it here. On the panel "Are virtual goods the next big business model?" I realized that I this really might be the case. 

Accel's, Kevin Efrussy who invested in Facebook, got a lot of question about Facebook's introduction of virtual gifts. Kevin said that if he who is a pretty boring non-cool person with pictures of his kids on his profile got gifts that people have paid $ for - then imagine what people (read attractive girls) who are cool & in receives! 

Susan Wu also reported that prior to the panel she got a virtual pizza thrown in here face by somebody she didn't even knew. And this person paid for that. How weird is that? Although virtual goods is extremely popular in Asia and a huge revenue generator the uptake in the US and Europe has been very slow. Enter Facbook. Min Kim from Nexon, added that Facebooks introduction of virtual goods is paving the way for a general acceptance of virtual goods outside of China, and in particular in the US. Judging from the popularity of virtual goods on Facebook - he just might be right.

But why on earth are people buying bikini's to their girlfriends avatar or virtual flowers that dies after two weeks?

According to Doppelganger's Tim Steven, its a real expression of affection, identity and emotion. People really feel just as proud wearing a pair of branded jeans in a virtual world as in real life walking across the school yard. It's the expression of the same thing. Moderating the panel Susan Wu, clearly stated that she would invest in a company selling virtual goods on Facebook! We have just got used to all the applications being launched on Facebook by companies hoping to gain distribution like a Trojan horse, now be prepared for the same companies getting ready to sell virtual bikinis, pizzas and why on iPhones to make some money too.

So are virtual goods the next big business model? Probably. If Habbo hotel make 90% of their revenues on virtual goods, they sell more furniture than IKEA and girls in Korea spends more money on their virtual haircut than on their real - there must be something in it...

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Nexon, vgsummit, virtual goods, virtual worlds

Piclens A Really Cool Way of Browsing Pictures

I have been following the guys from Cooliris for a bit more than a year now and today they came to see me and demonstrated their new product: Piclens. Piclens delivers an immersive and full-screen experience for viewing photos on the Web. By downloading a browser plugin, you can search and browser images from Google, Flickr, Yahoo, Friendster and more in full-screen theater like mode. I think it really rocks and totally changes the way images can be experienced on the Web. Download Piclens here!

Technorati Tags: piclens

Ideas for the Next Le Web 3

Here are some additional thoughts I have for the next Le Web 3.

1. Lifehacker competition
2. Virtual goods, world & economy panel/speakers
3. Bootstrapping - building the most effective and cheapest bootstrapping budget

Technorati Tags: bootstrapping, leweb3, lifehacking, Lifehacks, vgsummit2007, virtualworld

At the Virtual Goods Summit 2007

I am at the first Virtual Goods Summit taking place on Stanford Campus. Virtual worlds and good are really getting hot and here are some amazing facts:

• Tencent with the QQ IM brand in China has more than 254 unique million users & 28MM simultaneous users
• Neopets: 40 MM registered users and 750, 000 daily transactions
• Nexon: 3.5 MM registered users, virtual goods cost between $0.60-$1.00. People by functional & decorative items like a rainbow colored balloon to use in a game rather than that standard balloon because people don't want to be like all the others.
• Nexon users spend more money on virtual haircuts than on normal haircuts!
• Habbo Hotel sells more furniture than IKEA!

I am really happy that I decided to go here and skip the second day at Supernova. Virtual goods and worlds are going to be so huge - the fun has only got started.

Technorati Tags: Habbo Hotel, Neopets, Nexon, Virtual economy, Virtual worlds, puppy, puppy, QQ, Tencent, Vgsummit2007

Outsourcing My Life

Inspired by Timothy Ferris book "The 4 Hour Workweek" and AJ Jacobs, editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, I have just taken the first steps to outsource my life. Being a Swede/Israeli living in Israel, running the business of Maxthon, based in China while spending lots of time on the road especially in the US and running Mashup Media can be quite a challenge. 

So when I heard Timothy Ferriss speak at the Web 2.0 Expo last month I got inspired. I have always been of the opinion that you don't need to run around, answer all your emails and talk on the phone all the time to get real results. I never picked up the book, but today I stumbled upon Timothy's website and read the account of how AJ Jacobs outsourced his life.

This is music to my ears! I just know that this is the right thing todo. I immediately contacted Brickwork
, and now I am sitting here all excited waiting to take the first step in oursourcing my life. I already work on a daily basis with China, US and Europe, so why not add India to the sauce as well? I've always loved a good curry.

I will let you know how it goes as the story develops..

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

Tao Te Ching

Let the story begin..

Technorati Tags: Outsourcing, Timothy Ferris, 4 hour week, AJ Jacobs, Esquire, Brickwork, Maxthon, Mashupmedia, Lifehacks, India

My Personal Google Search History

I just checked my personal search history on Google and it's quite fascinating. I learned the following about my search habits that I didn't have any clue of:

1. I search mostly during January and November
2. I search mostly on Thursday followed by Wednesday
3. My search activity is at peak at 2pm

What are your search habits? A quick analysis of this seems to imply that I am search mostly during the winter months, my search activities are mostly intensive towards the end of the week (in Israel Thursday IS Friday) when I have got the most important stuff done and I have more free time. Finally, I my search activities reaches its peak a 2pm - that is after lunch when I am more relaxed and I am in a discovery mood.

Technorati Tags: Google, Search, puppy

Firefox As a Netscape Wrapper

For all you rendering engine zealots & fanatics out there:

Maxthon is as much an IE wrapper as Firefox is a Netscape wrapper. How many people really care what engine powers their car? A few nerds perhaps. Most people choose their cars based on important attributes as: comforts, design, speed, BRAND and cost. NOT engine. Get real you wackos! If you want to worry about something meaningful there are plenty of burning issues to get involved in out there such as: poverty, health, global issues, racism, anti-semitism, terrorism and better education.




Technorati Tags: Maxthon, Firefox, Netscape, Browsers, Trident, Gecko, Mozilla, Webkit

How LinkedIn Led To Maxthon

I often get the question of how I got involved with Maxthon. I mean how does a Swedish/Israeli guy becomes a partner in a Chinese company? The answer is, thorough LinkedIn. Belive it or not. Not directly, but in-directly. Here's the story:

It all started when I was working at ICQ (an AOL subsidary) and was trying to track down Nicklas Zennstrom from Skype for an idea I wanted to explore. I then found that the missing link between be and Niklas Zennstrom was a Danish fellow called Morten Lund (early Skype investor). To get to Morten I had to go through a contact I had at MTV in London, another Danish guy called Henrik Werdelin - now VP at Joost.

Morten was quick to respond, but said that Nicklas was just too busy those days (I doubt it has changed ) so why don't I come by Copenhagen and he would give me a bunch of more interesting deals... I accepted his invitation, went to Copenhagen and then spend a day with Morten discussing Bullguard (his main baby then) and a number of other ventures for ICQ.

Nothing really came out of this meeting, more due to the lack of action from ICQ and less from Morten. However, it was the beginnning of a friendship that led to countless hours of IM chats for over a year. Morten kept pitching me on behalf of all kinds of ventures he was involved in or was planning to get involved in. At that time, I was really fed up with the total incompetence and lack of understanding of what was going on on the Internet at ICQ (and AOL too for that matter) and had started to look around for the next challenge.

Of all the ventures Morten and I discussed, nothing really seemed attractive to me at that time. Partly because I didnt want to relocate from Israel and partly becasue it just didn't make me excited. But things changed.

One early morning in late November 2005 Morten Skyped me from the Arab Emirates and asked me to have a look at a new browser he had stumbled upon. He was quite excited. 20 Million download in a year! And it was created by a Chinese developer living in Hong Kong!

Since I just had downloaded and converted to Firefox, my inital reaction was" Who needs another browser" ? But Morten just said: "Just download it and you will see.." Said and done, I did. I was converted - again! Maxthon was so cool, and they story behind so fantastic that I agreed to take on the challenge.

Morten wanted me to become a business partner and take the company to the next level. How could I refuse? After I made up my mind I spend the 4 months in endless IM conversations with BloodChen - Mr. Maxthon himself a.k.a. Jeff Chen. It was my first experience in Chinese psychology and negotiations. It taught me a lot of patience..

Jeff and I finally reached an agreement and signed it off - without ever having met...Talking about an original start of a new venture. Two years has passed since I joined and I haven't regretted it for a second. Maxthon is an amazing piece of software, but more than that, Maxthon is more like a movement of passionate fans and co-developers all over the world. We have actually become the only Chinese Internet/Software company with a true global footprint. And we keep on growing like crazy.

That was my little LinkedIn story. Hope you liked it. What is yours?


Technorati Tags: Maxthon, China, LinkedIn, Morten Lund, Skype , China, Joost, icq

Overheard in New York - Real Urban Anthropology

With all the respect to Virtual worlds, Second Life and Twitter,  it feel great to sometimes be able hear the voices of real people from the real world. I stumbled upon a very interesting site called Overheard in New York .

If you are looking for unforgivable one-liners served straight up you face from the streets of New York - this is your place. But be warned, this is from New York...so not for the faint-hearted.. 

Or what about these samples?

Little boy: Mom, how did the dinosaurs cook their meat?
Mother: They didn't, they ate it raw.
Little boy: Oh. [Long pause.] Are Japanese people dinosaurs?

--Astoria Park

Chick #1 perusing lunch specials: God, that is so guh-ross!
Chick #2: What now?
Chick #1: That bloody roast beef thing right there... All of that red meat... It's the flesh of animals! It's so cruel and it makes me sick. I'm a total vegan these days.
Chick #2: Huh. Wait, didn't you have a bacon and egg sandwich this morning?
Chick #1, haughtily: Yeah, but that's not the actual flesh of any animal, now is it?
Chick #2: Wow. You are the first real idiot I've ever met.

--Cafe Europa, 6th Ave

Angry guy: Fuck her and fuck her wedding. I piss on her nuptials. I shit on her nuptials.
Angry wife: I know. I know. But we still have to send a gift.
Angry guy: A gift? I should shit in a box! Tomorrow you get a box from Tiffany's. Today I eat walnuts!

--Trader Joe's, 14th St

Say no more. Talking about real urban anthropology! Would love to see an Israeli version of this - overheard at the Falafel-stand..

Tags: Overheard in New York, One-liners, Real Life, Second Life, Anthropology, New York, Fun

Chinese-Jewish News

Danwei is pointing out that we have had a record month of Jewish-Chinese coverage in the western media. Since I am slowly but surely immersing more and more into China, and as an observant Jew, I find Chinese-Jewish relations very faschinating.

Here is a great video from the Sexy Beijing, about the opening of the first Mikveh in Beijing in modern times. And by the way, good news for all China visiting Jews! There is finally a kosher restaurant in Beijing !

Joost Great!

I have seen the end of the Television as we know it - and it is called Joost! Henrik just send me a beta invite (thanks!). Looks amazing on my MacBookPro.

Technorati Tags: Joost, TV, puppy

IKEA Hacker - Genius!

Last week I discovered IKEA hacker . And man! It is probably one of the coolest ideas I have seen for a while. Having grown up in the Swedish "Folkhem", been dragged all over year in and year out by my mother to IKEA who religiously reads their catalog like the Bible, I must say that I got an IKEA overdose that lasted many years. Not until the last couple of year I have started to recover from the IKEA blues. Or should I rather say, I didn't really have a choice when IKEA came to Israel to my wife's great excitement...

IKEA IS the Swedish Embassy since it really represents Sweden in the best possible way. Everything is in order, practical, clean and you have to serve-your-self (but also free from excitement) - the true middle way we Swedes call "lagom" (impossible to translate..).

Anyway, IKEA hack suddenly opened up my eyes putting the finger spot on for what IKEA really is. Hackable. What a fantastic idea! Of course, why didn't somebody come up with this long time ago? IKEA is modular by nature - and made for mashing up and hacking.

This is probably one of best possible ways to market IKEA world wide, by inviting people to build, compete and share their IKEA hacks. If IKEA is not actively supporting this blog, I would recommend them to run for it immediately. What a way to leverage on people pure passion and love! I keep watching my feed to see when a new hack drops in.

Way to go! I'm in! Now I am going to have a go on the bookshelf Billy!

See you in IKEA land :)

Technorati Tags: Cosumer Generated, Creative, Great ideas, Hacks, IKEA, Marketing, puppy, Sweden

Why Israel Lost the War..

A picture says more than thousand words..BBC caught our (yes I am even embarrassed to admit "our") defense minister, Amir Peretz inspection troops in the Golan Heights with the newly installed Army Chief-of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi.

According to the BBC photographer, Peretz gazed through the capped binoculars three times, nodding as Ashkenazi explained what he was looking at. With a defense minister like this, who needs enemies? This photograph alone should be enough to kick this clown of a defense minister out of office and back to where he belongs. Selling tomatoes in the shuk (market).

Perhaps this picture illustrates perhaps better than anything else, perhaps one of the biggest problems and dangers with decision makers, namely the weakness of not being able to admit what they don't see, what they don't know, and the inability to admit mistakes.

If this was the vision our government had when they went to war , then G-d help us..

Amir Peretz, didn't they teach you in school to ask other people for help when you don't understand?
Thanks Jacob for making me laugh and get angry at the same time..

Technorati Tags: Amir Peretz, Binoculars, Israel, Lebanon War, Perception 

The $15 IKEA Guitar!

I love this story! Zachary created an electric guitar out of an $15 IKEA table! I don't know if it is the Swede or the musician in me, but this is so cool.

Zachary seems to be very pleased himself with this work:

This is one of the most interesting guitars I ever built and it is also one of the best.The action is great, the tone is unbelievable, the neck is super fast, tuning stability is as good as it gets. In short, everything just worked out great on this guitar. This amazingly figured top is from Ikea Furnishings. I bought one of their unfinished end tables for $15 and I can get three guitar tops from it. What a shame that they would use such amazing "tone-wood" for their cheap furniture. Its a sacrilege.I introduce several new things in this guitar. I use DiMarzio Virtual P90 pickups for the first time and I love them. They are powerful and have a lot of guts. Its some kind of a midrange tone which screams Texas blues and Billy Gibbons.

Something about Zachary tells me that he should be a Maxthon user..

The one thing that does not appear from the story is what table did he use? You know all the IKEA stuff carries swedish names. Was it the table Oskar or Rasmus? Anyway, I am eagerly awaiting for the next IKEA hack..

Oh, and if you have checked out the IKEA Hacker go there now - a wonderful blog dedicated to IKEA hacks for all of us who grew up in IKEA land ;)

Technorati Tags: Cool, IKEA, IKEA Guitar, IKEA Hacker, IKEA Hacks, Music, the art of the pitc, Zacharyguirars

PeaceMaker - Become A Peace Maker

I really believe that games are excellent for learning and practicing new tasks, but to making peace in the Middle East? Impact Games have just released PeaceMaker, a video game to promote peace. PeaceMaker is a role-playing game were the goal of the player is to establish a stable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and win the Nobel Prize before his/her term in office ends.

I find this a very creative approach to problem solving. While the game starts as a zero-sum game, the key to success is to gain momentum and create a win-win scenario. Now that is great - win by create a win-win scenario! Although I don't believe the game will have any impact what so ever on our daily affairs here in Israel, I support anything that can make even one person change his or her mind.

What I especially like is that the game encourages players to play on both sides of the conflict, thus being forced to see and experience the other side. I can imagine how this could be applied in other areas as well such as business, intercultural communications, politics, relationships and psychology in general.

Or what about role-play games for :

• Parents & Children
• Politicians & Voters
• Spouses
• Prosecutors & Lawyers
• Recruiters & Employees
• Agreements negotiations
• Police & hostage takers

Technorati Tags: Games, PeaceMaker, Israel, Peace, Impactgames

Tales From The Jungle: Carlos Castaneda

Personality Secrets in Your Mp3 Player

A recent study put participants in same-sex and opposite-sex pairings and told them to get to know each other over 6 weeks (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Analysing the results, they found the most popular topic of conversation was music. What is it about music that's so useful when we first meet someone and what kind of information can we extract from the music another person likes? In the first week on average 58% of the pairs discussed music compared to 37% of all the other categories of conversation combined.

This is very interesting since it suggests that we probably think that music indirectly is telling something about the others person's personality. To test how good music really is as a measure of personality, a test was conducted that asked to judge other peoples personality based only on their top 10 list of songs. Compared with participants results on a standard personality type test measuring the Big five personality traits: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.  Some of the interesting finding were:

• Likes vocals: extraverted
• Likes country: emotionally stable. On the face of it, this is bizarre really because country music is all about heartache. Either the emotionally stable are attracted to country music or it has a calming effect on the unstable!
• Likes jazz: intellectual

The big problem with this study is however, that the age group tested was around 18 year old. Young people tend to talk about music more than older people. There are other problems as well with this study, however, I find the subject of judging a personality based on his favorite music quite interesting. I guess I would end up as an emotional unstable person based on this study. I hate country music, but loves jazz, classical, reggae and greek music...I guess I suffer from a split personality.. Via PsyBlog

BTW, would be great to combine Pandora with a personality test and then offer people to meet with other's like themselves...Perhaps a more effective way of finding a new partner or friends?

Technorati Tags: Mp3, Pandora, Personality, Psychology, Dating, puppy

IRA 2.0 - Zecco: World's first $0 Commission IRA

Zecco has done it again! Last year they shook up the traditional brokerages with the introduction of $0 commission trading last year. Now on Monday the 12th, the little David will take on Goliath again with the world's first $0 commission IRA.  According to Jeroen Veth co-founder and CEO (and former Merill Lynch Vice President who I met last week at Zecco's new corporate headquarters in Burlingame), investing in ETFs vs mutual funds with a Zecco $0 commission IRA will make an investor $1,000,000 richer over their investing lifetime, age 25-69.  Not bad.  IRA just met 2.0..

Technorati Tags: IRA, Trading, Zecco

Sex, Lies and Bribes - Welcome to Israel 2007

The story:

• A president indicted for rape.
• A Cheif-of-Staff that were forced to step down due to Lebanon 2.
• A totally incompetent Defense Minister (looking like Stalin - but that is not his fault)
• A joke as a Prime minister also under investigation,
• A suspended Justice minister who "kissed" a female soldier and
• Corrupted Tax Authority executives
• A Finance Minister that failed to report a missing 5 million shekels. I am sure I have missed something..

Is this the story line for a new TV Soap Opera? No, it is a reality show. Welcome to Israel politics and public administration 2007. Sometimes I wonder what is worse. The enemies living amongst us, or those surrounding us...

Technorati Tags: Corruption, Israel, The Middle East

iTTQ: IM and IpTV at It's Best!

Tencent has partnered with TCL to develop an Internet-enabled, interactive TV with QQ-branded applications like IM and games.  It is called iTTQ. The photo above is from iTQQ's demo at TCL's Industrial Research Institute in Shenzhen. iTQQ seems amazing. According to Intel's Mobile in China blog, this new iTQQ TV can both play TV programs, online games, photo albums, e-cards and instant messages. Finally the older generation can communicate with their children with no former Internet experiences.

Another cool thing is that the remote control can be used to communicate with children to know when they will be home for dinner etc. People can also share their favorite programs instantly via the QQ enabled remote control. No set-top box in the way..

Once again QQ has demonstrated that it is still possible to be innovative on the IM arena. I bet this is going to be a big hit. Would love to see the same implemitation in Europe and the US too.  Via Virtual China.

Technorati Tags: China, China TV, IM, iPTV, iTTQ, TCL, puppy, Stanford, Tencent, TV

Marketing To Your Mind

It definitely seem like Neuromarketing is on the rise. The Time has a great article on Neuromarketing.

Like the article says, to scientists, it's all part of the larger question on how the human brain makes decisions. However, the answers can be invaluable to business.

Perhaps the future stores will be equipped with a portable brain scanner where you first scan your brain - and then the scanner tells you what you would like to buy...

Technorati Tags: Brain, Marketing, Neuromarketing, Neuroscience, puppy, Stanford

The Equation For Procrastination

This is the formula for procrastination:

U = x V / I x D

where U is the desire to complete the task; E, the expectation of success; V, the value of completion: I, the immediacy of task; and D, the personal sensitivity to delay. It took 10 years of studies to come up with this formula as well as the finding that procrastination is on the rise. Explanations? According to the article in the Scientific American, it seems that the plethoria of distractions around with convenient access to inferior choices such as YouTube etc is the culprit..

Technorati Tags: procrastination, psychology, mind, Stanford

911 & 311 Lines To Accept Digital Images

The New York Times have a good story today about how emergency numbers 911 and non-emergency number 311 will start accepting digital photos and images from callers. Mayor Bloomberg calls it 'a revolutionary innovation in crime fighting" and I couldn't agree more. Pictures definately speaks louder than words.

The question is just how 911 and other services will be able to process all the images? The need for a very smart image and video search engine just keeps growing stronger..


Technorati Tags: 911, 311, emergency numbers, digital images, images, crime prevention, technolgy

Nice Video With Soke Masaaki Hatsumi