Would you rather buy a lizard pet or an iPhone?

And the winner is: the Iphone! What did you expect?

This is the funniest story I heard in weeks. It happened to John, a ex-colleague from the late nineties to about the millennium turn, whom I briefly met after all these years in Brussels, yesterday. John lives in Atlanta, Georgia, but he was born and raised in Motown. His dad was one of the top execs at Ford Motor Cy, many years ago. As the story goes, it was him that fired Lee Iacocca's ass from Ford, as the boss, Ford Jr didn't have the testicles to do it! Probably the best thing to happen in Lee's career, as he later became iconic inside Chrysler, in the times when CEOs of the traditional Big brick and mortar companies, like Harold Geneen and Jack Welsh, were calling the (management guru) shots! Followed by the Gates and Jobses of our days.

So goes the story... John's youngest daughter turned ten recently and as a house rule, she was entitled to a cell phone. However, the girl has been long planning her birthday present not particularly with any cell-phones or smart-phones occurring in her planning thoughts. Instead she wanted a lizard. She's been all over the Internet to find out stuff about the animals and convince dad and mom that the pets didn't bite and were friendly and clean and quite, low maintenance etc... John wouldn't hear any of it. They already had a couple of dogs and it was a burden every time the family would leave them pets under the care of friendly families in the neigborhood, but who in his sane mind would a put a lizard to care for on this lot of pets? The day before her birthday, John, following his very own cunning plan (Black Adder style), took the girl for a window-shopping walk to the local AT&T store, and let her try the iPhones on display. The lizard image started fading away... for good! Long story short, the lizard's still waitin' at the pet shop. Mind you, John is no Apple geek as I am. Far from. He uses an iPhone but that's all. And he knows tech stuff far better than you and I, that's for sure. A seasoned IT and business professional by all counts. The kind of folks we need supporting our beloved Apple products! Capice?

Fans scramble for Apple's iPhone upgrade

I'm getting old. I almost forgot it was June 24th today. The day of the launch! Until my eyes fell upon this... Fun, innit?

BTW, Apple was today 25 Billion green bucks more capitalized than Microsoft. Will Jobs eventually get richer than His Gateship? I doubt it. Bill is after the Peace Nobel prize these days and wouldn't care less. He's also the first person that reached a paper money wealth status of more than 100B, once upon a time... so long ago that I don't even remember when. MSFT was more than half a trillion worth in market cap then, along with the likes of GE, CSCO and even INTC of all people. Where are all these guys these days? I doubt they reach half a trillion all of them put together, unless you add AAPL to the sum.

Like the Greek national anthem lyrics go: περασμένα μεγαλεία και διηγώντας τα να κλαίς...(Glories for ever lost and you weep when you talk about them...)

World Sucker Cup 2010

For more than 10 days now hundreds of millions soccer fans of all colors and shapes are glued to their TV screens to watch their favorite teams and players kicking each other's butts like modern gladiators. Only difference with ancient Rome, conform to the pretentious habits and rules of the current era, no blood drops are allowed on the grass carpet. In the times of gladiators it was exactly that fans loved to see.

I'm not an expert in soccer... far from; I can tell an off-side, I think. I'm mostly watching the matches because of the HD TV factor especially in close-ups, and few ultra slow motion images, real pleasure to watch. What are these shot at in terms of speed? Ten times normal? I have no clue... but it's fabulous...

I must say, I'm not too impressed with what I saw so far. Most European favorites suck very badly! Especially the English. I hope the Krauts teach them a lesson this weekend.

Oh, yes, the English... They went to South Africa with big slogans that they'd get to the final and maybe win the Cup first time since 1964, but... they almost didn't make it to the following round. Whereas, Team USA, the underdogs, playing wonderful game, no fuss (or dirty soccer player tricks), or any C.Ronaldo-like show-offs, and no hooligan players like that Rooney dude, smoothly made it to the next round as a 'surprise'! Believe me, in a few World-Cups from now the Cup will end up in the US. I kid you not!

What irritates me the most though is the lack of looking at the facts objectively by match commentators and round table reporters, and "experts" discussing the game between halftimes, and after the game. Especially the so-called experts piss me off big time. Know what? They all know it better, they would all have done it much better, they all feel entitled to blame some team or player of being useless. How arrogant these a-holes can be! Makes Dick Cheney a pussy cat!

Let me give you an example: On BBC, the anchor reporter for many years, Gary Lineker, top scorer of the English team in the Mexico World Cup in 1984, is regularly accompanied by Alan Shearer, another UK team International. Both are more or less descent... There's this other guy though, whose name I don't know (and don't even wanna know), who's got a big mouth full of shit! He probably played ball some time ago too. My Gosh! The way he comments about teams and players! All things English of course are the best possible football could buy! All the rest are good for nothing. A small sample of this attitude: His comments before the game Argentina vs. Greece. "Greeks are useless... I hope Mesi scores many goals... I hope Argentina breaks the current Portuguese record against North Korea... I wanna see many goals in this game...". After the game, it was all the fault of the Greeks and their solid defense that the Argentina superstars could only score twice, and this by mistakes of the Greeks. They shouldn't allow teams building Greek defense walls in the game. In other words, if the English would play Argentina, they'd be heros if they did what the Greeks did. Now that the 'bleedin' Greeks played like this, it was bad... they took away his orgasmic wet dream fantasies to see them lose like North Korea and have the Maradona stars kick ball into their goalpost in double digits, right?

A Dutch commentator on the Flemish channel Canvas Sport had a similar remark : "The Greek coach..." who happens to be German and led Greece to winning the European Cup in 2004, I think, he urged, "took the bricks off the Berlin wall after the breakdown and moved them to Athens to build a Greek wall in the National squad." How insane can someone be to make a public statement like that?

You don't even wanna hear what I witnessed during the Portugal-North Korea match. The number of times commentators cynically referred to the 'Great Leader', the upper Chief of Korea that every brainwashed Westerner loves to hate, is beyond count. They all 'felt sorry' for those poor suckers (the Korean squad) who would end up in jail or face death upon return to the country including all the members of their (up to third degree) families, for the shame they inflicted upon the Nation... C'm on folks! Get a life! These reporters need to see a shrink real quick! Do I pay my radio and TV tax to hear this shit on my screen? Dear me! That's why the other day I stopped watching a game and saw a movie instead. Invictus! Also playing in South Africa. Rugby this time...

This tells you a story. Soccer fan(atic)s and their experts are brainless morons, violent bloodthirsty suckers, cynical nitwits, full of arrogance and unfair sarcasm, who know all things soccer better than God, and when their team sucks it's always the fault of the referee, the ball or the other team's sneaky tricks! How sad!

Where is the problem here?

Who ever said that mobile devices are only for fun and not educational? That's a nice one from a free iPad app called Optical illusions. Can you find why this is not possible?


Posted from VJK Diaries iPad...

The times they are a-changin'

But the NMBS in Belgium, that is the National Railways company, has never appreciated Dylan's music, obviously. Like many other National Railways elsewhere, mostly government owned or likely with large government (majority) participation, the NMBS in this country is run by not what you'd consider management geniuses. Like elsewhere. Or, like the Post to mention another example of 'outstanding' management skill. Now, why am I gettin' in a rant about them buggers, and this on a Sunday, you might wonder. Well, listen carefully.

Those who know me, or read some of my other posts on the upcoming computing paradigm (so-called 'curated computing' and pioneered by Apple), will easily understand my rage.

You see, content consumption by the masses today is all about visualization of versatile data residing in huge databases inside so-called server farms. Personal computers, these days, don't need to have much local storage. Good quality, safe, updated data are better off staying in the 'cloud' (geeky slang for Internet-connected servers) than in local computers (on solid state, magnetic or optical disk storage). This is especially true for casual users who can't tell the difference between a mouse and a cursor.

What do casual users do with computer devices at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, after all? They simply email or instant message their friends and for the rest they surf the web. This is what I called 'content consumption' above. Reading of articles online, listening to streaming music, watching Youtube and streaming video clips or whole episodes and movies, flipping thru millions of images and photographs, or any combination of the above.

So, this is the trend. Modern CPU baring devices (whatever you can think of) are by design Internet connectable and most are very light and mobile. Also, other devices that traditionally were CPU-less, like TV's, will soon find their roles change to part-time PCs and running TV-OSes provided by the likes of Google and others like Google... The traditional desktop PCs and laptops as we know them will be further specialized and upgraded to serve more powerfully but only those IT 'experts' who need the power, and will almost disappear from the vocabulary of casual users of the coming generations, born after the millennium turn... mark my words. Instead, these kids will learn to live and use what we currently call smartphones and slate computers.

Since the introduction of the iPhone and iPad there's something else that changed fundamentally though. Never before in the history of computer addicted mankind there was a market of so many useful software applications for mobile devices that are so easy to acquire and use, and which cost next to nothing. The Apple owned AppStore has more than 220,000 such applications and counting, a large percentage of which are free and gratis, whereas the remaining won't cost you typically more than a few bucks. How come? Various reasons. 1) The 'Free' business model gains increasingly higher tract among key market players. 2) The effort to create apps is sub-minimal, compared to traditional software development, due to the richness of Apple's available SDK. And 3) like I mentioned earlier, most of these are 'visualization' apps looking at data residing in the cloud. In other words, they don't share the burden of creating and maintaining such massive data inside their server farms. They just look at them. They visualize data in compelling ways, and by so doing, they get rid of the usual noise 'elements' that fog the space between consumer and content. Therefore, the creation cost (in effort and needed infrastructure) to make and distribute such apps is so tiny small that many noble souls, especially young geeks and startups who typically love this stuff, simply choose to offer their apps for free, or at an extremely low price point, pretty close to 'free'. They drive the market and company profitability via high volume / low price, as His Jobness admitted in his recent Mossberg interview at D8. That's today's most popular business model.

Now, what does this have to do with my rant on NMBS? You'll understand... I promise you. NMBS has also got a homepage of course that shows train schedules, PR and other info. They also sell tickets which you can print on your home printer. That's not a bad alternative to queueing at the station, waiting for a not overly motivated, middle aged, counting his days to retirement, NMBS ticket-seller to print your miserable ticket while the train's entering the station... and soon about to depart... Problem is though (and I heard it from the spouse, the Belgian stereotype of the casual PC user who can't tell the difference etc... etc...) that the NMBS homepage is like any other page we find in Public Services homepages (ministries and all), or any other inefficient 'old' brick and mortar organization that just happened to have discovered the Internet! Your eyes don't know where to rest first, your temper's getting agitated, your entire ego intimidated, and you just then walk away from the bleedin' homepage, preferring (OMG) to wait in queue in front of the miserable ticket seller instead.

What is the problem, then? Well, you see, the NMBS data is fine, residing on their precious servers, connected to the Internet, no problems there (more or less)... However, their interface designers (these are ICT 'experts' who create the visualization component that looks at their precious data via a browser, pointing to their Home URL), are simply too old fashioned, who have never understood and will never ever understand the mind of a casual user. Why? Because that's the way it is! Poor management. At the top and all the way to the bottom. In other words, any sane IT expert in this country can certainly do much better than that. Once he or she gets employed into the NMBS structures, he/she is painted in the national NMBS colors and turn overnight into the poor buggers we see 'serving' us!

Never mind... we are used to it. Thank God, there's still a huge hope in the new generations of geeks and geniuses in the country to cover for the shortcomings of the large Public Services Homepages. One such kid, whose brain-ware I enormously respect as I happen to know some of the mechanics behind creating iPhone apps, went out in 2008 to create an app for the iPhone that would provide the Belgian railways time schedule, simply and efficient (and he even told NMBS that, naively waiting back for a word of appreciation). Like I said earlier, access the useful data easily with no noise between consumer and content. See the picture posted above to see what I mean. And see the kid too. His name, Yeri Tiete! IT student, 22 year old. He was two years younger when he wrote the app, too. iRail.Be I thought its name was. Well done kiddo.

Don't go look for the app at the AppStore though. Recently, the kid received a big-ass letter, written by some 'expert' lawyers (Jeez I thought they all ended up chained in the bottom of the Ocean), threatening court actions on behalf of NMBS, if the kid didn't pull the app off the AppStore immediately! For data copyright infringement reasons, that is. Because he accessed the NMBS servers with their precious and wholly owned (OMG) scheduling data to present them (after working on his app for a couple of evenings he said) to poor casual users like myself and my spouse in a simple and 'human' fashion. They even dare treat him as a criminal! It's not only RIAA that's full of morons then. We got our fair share in this country too...

It's been said that NMBS made the whole fuss in order to boost usage of their own smartphone app, that happens to have been launched recently, two years after Yeri's iRail was released. I reckon that project alone cost them a few million euro's to say the least, and two years of waking up before they realized the need! Jeez, what a geniuses! That's the most stupid excuse I heard in decades. Proves the point I made earlier. There's nothing worse in a company's fortunes than being led by a bunch of incompetent managers at the steering wheel. Lord save us from their wrongdoings...