May 20th, 2013 § § permalink
Children playing Paperboy on an Amstrad CPC 464 in the 1980s (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am proud to be part of a group of enthusiasts, who have 10 years ago started systematically collecting and exhibiting computer history in Slovenia. the pinnacle of this first decade was the recent exhibition Goto1982, prepared in collaboration with MNZS, that covered the cambrian explosion of home computers extensively.
Today, we are hosting a closing event for this exhibition, which is moving on to be hosted by Technical Museum of Slovenia for the next 12 months. We are extremely proud to be recognized and trusted by both institutions, and by thousands of visitors who left very optimistic comments, like “omg, this was my first one!“, and “this is confusing, i feel young and old at the same time“. thank you all!
We are more sure than ever, that technology is not just part of everyone’s lives today, but essential ingredient in everyone’s personal story. Each and every one I talk to these days doesn’t feel intimidated or bored by the idea of this Museum, quite the contrary – with glitter in the eyes, everyone starts listing objects from their past that they have been safely storing until now.
We are opening a new chapter today – we will be announcing the founding of Computer Museum Society, and inviting new members and supporters to join. Our plan is to build a different museum – one that will not only educate about the past, but also think ahead, educating the youth and bringing together professional communities.
To do this next step, we first need your help. We need you to raise your hand in support and basically say: “yes, computers and other contemporary technologies have made me what I am today, I don’t want this to pass by unexplored.”
You can support our efforts by:
- showing up tonight, at 6pm in MNZS
- becoming ‘supportive member’ with a donation, which gets you the right to wear exclusive t-shirt, learn about our next steps in real time and your place on our wall of fame
- thinking of 10 friends who might support our cause and telling them about it
Thanks!
March 18th, 2013 § § permalink
I gave several book interviews since starting Zemanta and moving to NYC, most of them in the last 18 months. Lots of authors are exploring the technology revolution that we were fortunate to participate in.
Books are coming this year, discussing it from various angles – comparatively with .com boom, the rise of entrepreneurship Europe, new entrepreneurship as a lifestyle, … It is no surprise to me, that the first book to actually publish is the one specifically celebrating NY tech community and agility and resilience.
Tech and the City became available on Kindle two days ago, and hardcopies are coming in April. I received the notification from the authors this morning, and already I’m half way trough it. It’s that good.
It starts with an amazingly inspiring foreword by Fred Wilson, which alone is worth the $2.99, as it perfectly outlines the mental model of the greatest city on the planet. After that, the book only gets better, weaving the story trough fragments of conversations with participants in the ecosystem, rather than lazily throwing together yet another series of interviews. This enables the book to read like a travel diary, rather than a self-hype-help business manual.
For the finish, the authors have collected a very comprehensive list of the NY tech ecosystem institutions – vc’s, events, co-working spaces and competitions. They have also published them on the official blog of the book.
It’s cheap and it’s short, and it’s awesome. Go read it and learn how you should be thinking about helping entrepreneurs in your cities / countries.
January 25th, 2013 § § permalink
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
reading a great summary of 17 equations that changed the world. great stuff, go check it out.
I love how each of these formulas captures en entirety of a part of our world into a simple 2-d graphic 
however, there is one formula missing here, a rather important one. it’s an equation, that sums it all, well, almost everything. everything that we could have summed up so far in the history of science. the grand, unified theory of everything.
GUT is a theory that connects three of the four forces that shape our world. Only gravity is missing in this connection, before we can claim we really can model the world. and my mind was blown when i first realized that we can write it up into a single page-long formula. here it is, in all it’s glory.
September 4th, 2012 § § permalink
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S Truman, 33rd president of US (1884 – 1972) source
I heard this quote a while ago, and was shocked by how accurate it is, and how overlooked it is most of the time.
One reason is probably, that everybody likes to be patted on the back. But if one needs it all the time and publicly, it creates some friction in the system, that slows everyone down. That friction comes in the form of envy, being secretive, not helping ‘just because’. In short run it gives some emotional satisfaction, but in the long run, the one’s vicinity is slowed down compared to other communities.
On the other hand, there is a trap for those who don’t pay attention. This quote reminds me somewhat of another one:
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?“
Which I think sums up the fear of the person affected quite well – if I don’t take credit, I’ll never have anything. A naive response to this is the one that we described earlier. Smarter response is being humble, but keeping a close watch on actions of others, and preempting situations in which the reality might become permanently distorted.
Clarity and transparency is what everyone should be fighting for, not individual’s achievements.
- Three Ways to Look at Leaders … (strategiclearner.wordpress.com)
September 3rd, 2012 § § permalink
i whole-heartedly agree that this particular gender inequality should be fixed in the future, but are all women really so fond of wearing knee-long dresses that they can be the only representative of the ‘business dress’ ?
This weekend, we celebrate women entrepreneurs for all their hard work! By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) In the past 15 years, women-owned businesses grew by 54% – there are more women entrepreneurs than ever. The 8.3 million women-owned businesses in the United States account for nearly 30% of U.S. businesses!
via: www.women2.com
August 25th, 2012 § § permalink
Planet example (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So, everyone is talking about a balloon accident lately, but my Blogspire sent me a version of the report that blew my mind – hungarian project that maps all emergency events on the planet, from major traffic accidents to fly-by-objects.
Here is an example:
EDIS Number: VI-20120823-36303-SVN Date / time: 23/08/2012 14:30:44 [UTC] Event: Vehicle Accident Area: Europe Country: Slovenia State/County: Capital City Location: [About 6 miles south of Ljubljana] Number of Deads: 4 person(s) Number of Injured: 28 person(s) Number of Infected: N/A Number of Missing: N/A Number of Affected:…
via: hisz.rsoe.hu
and they have another project, mapping all grobal warming events.
Both of them are a great addition to a growing list of real-time global dashboards of differenti aspects of the Planet. I’ve been collecting them for a while now, and it seems it’s time to create a dedicated page for them.
Please feel free to submit any dashboard you know of that I’ve missed in the comments.
August 17th, 2012 § § permalink
We live in amazing times – in a couple of years, we will have digitized all books every published (that survived), and we will be able to apply machine learning to the past. It will spur a whole new era of historiography.
#linguistics With millions of books scanned and digitized by Google, a new type of linguistic analysis has become possible – as people are able to delve into hundreds of years and millions of books’ worth of data.
via: io9.com
… that the research has been done by a fellow Slovenian is not a coincidence – lots of talent over here 
June 2nd, 2012 § § permalink
I saw this poster for Brooklyn Northside Festival:
… I was as surprised to see ‘entrepreneurship‘ there as the designer who had to find a way to put it there. It seems we are merging with Arts and creative industries, which I believe is an underestimated revolution. Of course SXSW and TED did that years ago, of course Wired knew all along, but Brooklyn Northside?
don’t get me wrong, I think that’s great. I think entrepreneurs really are rock stars of this age/generation, I think it’s up to us to solve big problems that this Planet is facing, and leave it to our kids in a better shape. I think we are looking to complete the capitalism’s promise, and upgrading it with what we’ve learned from globalization and new age.
And I think that we need to join forces with Arts and Creatives and Everyone else, to make this happen, because if we are to replace a broken and unfair economic system, we have to breathe the same air. Financial industry increasingly feels like new age bureaucracy, pushing pieces of paper around, detached from reality. It won’t survive the century.
A capitalism’s social pyramid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Related articles
June 1st, 2012 § § permalink
Ólafur_Ragnar_Grímsson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Business Insider has a great interview with Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who has been President of Iceland since 1996, and announced last month he would be running for a fifth term.
It is an incredible read, because he is obviously very smart and very ethical person, a rare gift for politician these days. I wish everyone in Slovenia read this and adjust their expectations on how a public leader should behave, react, lead. He makes several super-insightful points, that clearly come from a lot of experience and thought.
For instance, about the importance of the banking sector:
As everybody knows now, we did not pump public money into the failed banks. We treated them like private companies that went bankrupt, and we let them fail. Some people say we did it because we didn’t have any other option, there is clearly something in that argument, but it does not change the fact that it turned out to be a wise move or whatever reason. Whereas in many other countries, the prevailing orthodoxy is you pump public money into banks and you make taxpayers responsible for the banks in the long run, and somehow treat the banks as if they are holier institutions in the economy than manufacturing companies, commercial companies, IT companies, or whatever.
…
Capitalistic financial markets can exist in many other parts of the world, even without democracy. So in my opinion, Europe is and should be more about democracy than about financial markets. Based with this choice, it was in the end, clear that I had to choose democracy.
… and one positive story on journalism – i wish more media aspired to be this fair when they are judgmental:
One has to hand it to the editorial board of The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, that they supported Iceland’s case all along. And if The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, who have never been special friends of Iceland, saw through this argument by the British and the Dutch government, why on earth didn’t the other European governments do so?
… and a match point for creative industries (which includes startups btw):
the Icelandic banks, like all modern big banks in Europe and America and all the other parts of the world, are no longer banks in the old-fashioned way. They have become high-tech companies. High-ranked engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, programmers and so on and so forth. And their success depends largely on how successful they are in hiring people with this education and capability, not necessarily those trained in business schools or finance, but in engineering, mathematics, computer science and so on.
…
So the lesson from this is: if you want your economy to excel in the 21st century, for the IT, information-based high-tech sectors, a big banking sector, even a very successful banking system, is bad news for your economy.
… about the inherent problem of all ‘ecosystems’ – clubbing
And I said to myself — I know it’s a mistake now — in early 2007, if all the credit agencies are giving the Icelandic banks a clean bill of health, these pillars of European banking are doing integral business with the Icelandic banks, these critical voices are not really onto what’s happening.
… and an example of true collaboration, going on without the media really noticing it…
Fortunately, during this time when there was very little attention to the Arctic, the eight Arctic countries were able peacefully, almost off the radar, to develop co-operation within the Arctic Council, and to consolidate the peaceful and constructive dialogue among Russia, the United States, Canada, and the five Nordic countries.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-iceland-2012-4
May 31st, 2012 § § permalink
ifttt is like programming language of the internet
it’s what bash and perl were for unix,
it’s what ubiquity was for browser
it’s like pipemania and the incredible machine all over again…
San Francisco-based startup ifttt (If This Then That) has built a framework that lets you harness the full potential of the Internet and your web-connected devices. By “listening” to various channels (weather, stock prices, RSS feeds, SMS messages, and many more) ifttt can carry out actions when certain criteria are met.
via: www.businessinsider.com
