iakttakelser (observations)

Updaated: The Atlantic reports that researchers at John Hopkins University, has managed to use hydrogel to grow scar-free tissue for burn victims. Hydrogel should be part of the "home apotek/drugstore" everywhere. Stemming blood is lifesaving, Read CNet article here .

Hoon Lee (from IMDb) Horace Dediu in another great podcast with actor Hoon Lee discuss disruption in the theater and performing arts. Dediu made me think of what could be done with classical concerts. I've some experience in live classical consert production. I actually have a small concert hall in my house, and in 7 years from 1975 I offered 7 concert yearly, with the best musicians I could find. The conserts was financed by public funds. During the 7 year of high quality concerts, however, the public diminished from a average of 60 to 20. And at twenty I decided to quit. After that I've always been looking for ways to revive the classical concerts, and your discussion gave me some ideas. Based on my experience I very well remember the immense value of the natural sound and sight. I even denied the National broadcasting in Norway to tape concerts. But also the silent communication between the musicians and the public are extremly valuable; When you come to a ...

The foundation for a fincacial applications success is a good API. I good easyli subscribe to that meaning. But still we don´t have any. But our application has an SQL part running in SQL Azures based on stored procedures. Then Entity Framework 1, sits on Windows Azure, communicating between our business layer written in ASP.net MVC and SQL. Then ASP.net use the T4 template to push and receive data to our beloved iFacturas. So it´s cloud, SOA, SaaS and whatever TBL you can imagine. But I think it´s a piece of cake to create an excellent API on this. ReadWriteWeb, however, tends to prove I´m wrong with their serie on API. In this article they write: Hunch's VP of Business Development,  Shaival Shah  has written a post along these lines today, with suggestions on how to "Cannabilize Business Development by Popularizing your API." As Shah writes, the challenge isn't simply to build an API: "the great challenge is how to market your API so that people know a) tha...

Normally we think our thoughts shape our language. But can it be the other way? Some linguist says so. GUY DEUTSCHER in New York times writes: SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. Read the whole story (it´s 5 pages) here .

Nikhyl Singhal, the co-founder and CEO of voice-application startup SayNow asks: Is it conceivable that one of our greatest inventions, the phone number, is about to face extinction? Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this year,  when asked  if Facebook would be around in 100 years, as long as Ma Bell has been around, Zuckerberg responded, “I don’t know. But I don’t know how long telephones will be around for.”  Will they be around for ten more years? I’ll go even further. It may not even take 5 years for the phone service, as we know it, to meet its demise.

Good news deserve a real flower, and here that means Calenula Officinalis Mark Chillingworth was at the BizSpark European Summit in Paris in May, and we discovered today that he had written about us  here . Amongst the applications on display were simple tools with business models that made you think, "I wish I'd thought of that". My favourite was Spain's No Excuse Accounting, a Smartphone application for invoicing. Pitched at tradesmen it allows them to keep on top of this vital business process from the one piece of IT you can't prize from a plumbers hand, the Smartphone. Coming from a family of tradesmen, I could see the business case for this instantly and it gets my backing, although not financially. Thanks!

In addition to Amazons Mechanical Turk, just using a place like oDesk.com can be suitable for for a lot of tasks. The ad here, is for ad rewriting. Update: the person was found for $3,33 per hour.

No will ever give you the time you need to meditate, you have to create that timeslot yourself. If you cannot, now there is antother option that just wait for your next incarnation, meditate on the go.  Seeing this article I glimpsed out of the window and saw a big gull standing on the terrace looking at me. So I took the advice from Firman and tried to sink into that staring bird. Read the article from Psycology today by Dorothy Firman, Ed.D. here.

Its look like competitors doesn´t dear to release tablets to compete with iPad. No wonder - they need more than a Harry Potter to compete with Apple ;) CNet has a story here , and Wall Street Journal has an article describing how the iPad suddenly is secure enough for the US enterprise market. They write: The past few weeks have been fascinating for Apple watchers. The business press has been reporting that the brand, formerly a pariah in the buttoned-down world of corporate IT, is now being accepted with open arms. We had a story yesterday about the  growth of Mac sales in the government and enterprise markets , and now the Wall Street Journal is reporting on how the  iPad is finding a home in the business world .

Do you know Futurama? Here is something similar. Tap it (or click if you are so out of date;) to see source witch is an interactive big picture. You can even order a print! NMap.org via  Gizmodo .

I´m way to connected to the digital world, and would have to make a strategy to keep sane. If you also are a bit addicted read the post of Mary Sojourner, M.A from Psycology today, which wrote this poem: Pursue thought;  Put on a lined cape  And go outside Far from the silent houses, lit by lamps... Along the path, the gaze of the moon follows you.  The tangled branches  There on the snow  Mark out the signs  Of your thoughts.

The speed of entering data is one important facet of productivity. For invoicing and accounting I consider it as the one most important. The Unofficial Apple Weblog had this post .

My goal for  GL21Azure.codeplex.com  was this, crowdsourcing vulnerabilities and errors and fixing bugs. And not to forget, creating versions for the thousand of languages that exists on earth. CIO tells that this works well for Google here .

When I see templates like this, I´m tempted to give up my loved/hated blogger and move to Wordpress. I´m so compelled by good typography and design, but my experience with http://noexcuseaccounting.com on Wordpress on GoDaddy, tell me not to do it. Blogger at least works, works and works. Read the SmashingMagazine article here ! Anyone out there who can make one for Blogger?

Apple creates its API thinking on longetivity, that the API should be useable generation after generation. Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering takes this a bit further. (Via ReadWriteWeb )

Update: Orkut, Googles own social network has just announced the functionality described below: Separating friends and followers and a clear choice when you post. See here . Everyone are using Facebook, but I´m still uncertain on how I could earn money using it. Twitter, on the other hand, is a really powerful marketing tool. Our four weekly campaigns for our invoice app iFacturas, has tripled the followers and multiplied the clicks on my blog with ten. Facebook is a more tricky beasts, and I was glad to see MG Siegler from TechCrunch discussing his experience and his idea on how to make Facebook even better: It’s simply time for Facebook to evolve the social graph. If they want to be the social center of the sharing web, they could do that with such an option. Forget the silly “everyone” button — move to the follower model. Allow people to opt-in to following others but allow that user to determine if they’re actually a friend, and as such, open to more information than a regular ...

I stick with Simplenote until Google makes its apps edittable themself! GoDocs downloads and show the documents on iPhone, but I´m not able to edit anything, nor in iPad - bad! Googles own app is better. This definetly wasn´t worth the 22NOK! Dropbox cannot be used with Google Docs at all. Its only a cute GDrive you can up- and download files too. There is however a number of apps working directly with it like Elements word processor. But then I have to alter the workflow of my company so no way. Memeo is´t just an app, but is an Google Apps Premium app which you add to your account for $9 user/month. You get the apps for iPhone and iPad for free. My problem is that I use the standard version of Google Apps and are not willing to spend $300 to put the the whole company on that now. Conlclusion: wait to Google itself introduce editing on iPad and stick with SimpleNote. Edit Google docs on Mac or PC.

I´m accepted at App Inventor and installed the required software on my Mac. But unfortunly I don´t have an Android phone so I cannot test it. But the App Inventor seems so easy to use. I have to get me an Android to do some testing! Here are some stuff from the instructions: In creating App Inventor for Android, we're fortunate to be able to draw upon significant prior research in educational computing, and work done in Google on online development environments. The blocks editor uses the  Open Blocks Java library  for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's  Scheller Teacher Education Program  and derives from  thesis research  by Ricarose Roque. We thank Eric Klopfer and Daniel Wendel of the Scheller Program for making Open Blocks available and for their help in working with it. Open Blocks visual programming is closely related to the  Scratch programming language , a ...

The Norwegian painter J.C.Dahl sky study Small ISP are delivering most of the mail to companies and organizations in Spain and Norway. It seems that both Microsoft and Google has settled at a $5 price pr. user/month. Take note ISPs, and start to use the Cloud yourself! Read the rest of CIO.com article here .

The Nobel lauderate Joseph Stiglitz is some I really like to read. Her I have copied from "Economist's View" by Mark Thoma: The blame game continues over who is responsible for the worst recession since the Great Depression – the financiers who did such a bad job of managing risk or the regulators who failed to stop them. But the economics profession bears more than a little culpability. It provided the models that gave comfort to regulators that markets could be self-regulated; that they were efficient and self-correcting. The efficient markets hypothesis ... ruled the day. Today, not only is our economy in a shambles but so too is the economic paradigm that predominated in the years before the crisis – or at least it should be.