iakttakelser (observations)

Flott at det offentlige legger ut data som kan bearbeides! En post fra Vox Publica ved Olav Anders Øvrebø har hele historien . Her er en del: NAV publiserer en gang i måneden oppdaterte hovedtall for arbeidsmarkedet i Norge. Februar-tallene kom i dag, og de fleste mediene bringer nyhetsmeldinger om dette (se f.eks.  Dagbladet.no/NTB ,  DN.no ,  Adressa ). Ingen av de nevnte redaksjonene har imidlertid gjort tallmaterialet tilgjengelig eller laget visualiseringer, selv om NAV nå publiserer tallene også i regnearkformat. Her kan du laste ned dataene i det redigerbare xls-formatet: Hovedtall for arbeidsmarkedet februar 2011 Dette er et ganske innholdsrikt materiale. For eksempel kan man se ledighetsutviklingen fordelt på kjønn, yrke, alder og fylke. Det er også tall for utviklingen i antall ledige stillinger fordelt på flere variabler. Blant tendensene er at ledigheten går mye ned blant menn, blant annet fordi sektorene bygg og anlegg og industri er i ferd med å a...

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 .

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!

Googel har nettop gjort det enklere å søke i blogger. Bare se på søket "kleppa trafikksikkerhet" hvor jeg har sjekket av for Blogs og Posts. From SearchEngineLand.com

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.

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 .

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.

Kineserne sparer ca en fjerdel av det de tjener. Amerika drukner i gjeld. I Europa er ledigheten svær. Til nå har amerikanerne stått for shoppingen godt fulgt av europerne. Og Kina øker produksjonen.  Vi i vesten er i ferd med å bli et nytt proletariat. Forgjeldet som vi er, eier vi egentlig lite. Se bort fra Norge, foreløpig. Vi må snu opp ned på begrepet arbeiderklasse her i vesten. Vi må innse at kjøpesenterne er de nye fabrikkene. Eliten forakter de som fyller opp kjøpesentrene. Nå er det på tide at de innser hvilken viktig jobb som utføres der. På kjøpesenteret foregår det manuelle arbeidet så og si på samlebånd, ved kassa der konsumenten løfter varer på bånd, for så å samle det i poser, før han utfører gammeldags tungrarbeid ved å bære posene selv i neste etappe. Eller skyver en tralle slik gruvearbeiderne gjorde på syttenhundretallet. Utføres ikke dette arbeidet med flid og plikt vil alt bryte sammen. De trygdede utgjør en stor del av denne arbeidstokken. Trygdede er i...

Revaliente in Innovate!2010 Masterclass in Zaragossa in May Jeg, (@Revaliente), har jobbet som selvstendig næringsdrivende i mer enn ti år, og la det bare være sagt: å være med på dette prosjektet, det å lage iFacuras, og gi andre muligheten til å føle friheten til å fakturere raskt og enkelt, er rett og slett herlig! Tid Med iFacturas vil enhver selvstendig næringsdrivende  enkelt  kunne registrere fakturerbar tid med iPhone. Han/hun kan sende fakturaen fra der jobben gjøres. Det er ikke lenger nødvendig å gjøre dette om kvelden eller i helgen. Du slipper også å gjøre istand fakturagrunnlag for andre. På under et minutt vil du kunne fakturere og oppdatere regnskapet! Kostnader Da vi started me å utvikle iFacturas var målsetting gangske enkelt å lage en hensiktsmessig app for iPhone og andre smartphones. Vi har klart det og litt til. Idag er iFacturas ikke bare et ok verktøy, men også en app som sparer deg tid og penger. Denne produktivitets-egenskapen gjør appe...

Jason Cohen is an angel investor, and tell you why the only thing he wants is customers willing to pay. That´s the proof of the pudding for him! Read his post here !

An API is not just an API. Alex Willian in ReadWriteCloud goes through the 10 things you could do wrong with your API. It´s enough to remember the famous twitter whale. Read his article here .

Is Google Voice, ScanToPdf, TextPlus, Evernote and Sure Payroll Mobile Payroll wouldn´t suite me, because I´m a European. However they are what Entrepeneur in Venturebeat will suggest here. But if you change to Skype, Simplenote, Messenger and drop the payroll I could agree.