Facebook as the Mixed Reality which really matters

This blog remained silent for more than a year. I continued writing my column Legrand Inconnu for my newspaper De Tijd – about the impact of technology on society and the economy. Part of my writing is about Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality. I’m still fascinated by VR and… Continue reading

Are our attention spans becoming longer again?

There has been an eerie silence on this blog for the past weeks. I was immersed in various learning projects. I had to focus for longer times, and this made me switch my attention away from social media streams, unless I could focus on certain topics via Twitter lists for… Continue reading

“The ideal technology is invisible and ambient”

I did not make it to the LeWeb conference in Paris, France, but I’m looking at the abundant streams of tweets and blog posts about the event. I won’t talk in this post about the Instagram-Twitter drama – it has been covered widely on so many other places. My personal… Continue reading

Microsoft has its own Project Glass

“Microsoft has it’s own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs. It’s an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game. ” The information is based on a patent application, so don’t expect a Microsoft… Continue reading

Pilot Your Own Robotic Sub And Explore The Ocean With AcquatiCo | Singularity Hub

Another great story from Singularity Hub. If this Kickstarter project is successful, it will enable us to explore the oceans by just using our laptop or tablet.  Which in a way reminds me of those cute iPad-robots enabling people to move around , see, hear and communicate from  whatever distance…. Continue reading

Find out about the future by looking at Defense

The computer visionary Doug Engelbart designed in the 1960s the NLS – the “oN-Line System” – a revolutionary computer collaboration system implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The NLS system, so explains Wikipedia, was the first to employ the practical use… Continue reading

The deconstructed journalist

(this post reflects what I told during my presentation at the neojournalism2012 conference in Brussels, Belgium). I remember it vividly. That particular day during the never-ending euro crisis I was covering a European Summit. My newspaper colleague was attending briefings, I was at the newsroom, monitoring about 300 people we… Continue reading

Quants aren’t like regular people. Neither are algorithms.

“Everyone there was a “Quant.” No one cared what the underlying company represented by a given stock actually did. Apple or General Motors, CAT or IBM… Everything boiled down to a set of statistical observations that, when assembled into the proper algorithm, delivered a portfolio that beats the market.” I… Continue reading

Mobile telepresence via an iPad on wheels

So how can we transcend as seamlessly as possible the restrictions of distances and geography? Affordable telepresence can be achieved using virtual environments, or by an increasing array of cheap or free videoconferencing tools, but there are emerging new possibilities which are very exciting. I’m looking into the possibilities of… Continue reading