I assume you have heard about Flipboard, and bet that if you own an iPad you may be a Flipboard user just like me. For those not familiar with Flipboard, think of it as your very own personal social magazine. The Flipboard app pulls information from the web, both from news sources and from your friends pages and services, like Facebook and Twitter. All this information is presented automatically in an appealing magazine-like format. Needless to say the content of your magazine is updated continuously.

Personal settings travel with you
Recently Flipboard released a new version and introduced Flipboard Accounts. I believe this is a big deal in those environments and households where not every single individual has its own iPad. With Flipboard accounts you can share an iPad but still have your own very personal Flipboard magazine. As the company states; “With Accounts, your reading preferences stay with you no matter how you access Flipboard. For example, families and friends who share an iPad can log into Flipboard and find their favorite sections.” Read further >

If you read this, you are most likely a regular internet user. Without a doubt you exchange sensitive and private information with many different websites on a regular basis. You have been told that in such cases you should look for, even demand, a secure internet connection. But how vulnerable is that system? Read further >

Without a doubt the internet, and with it websites, have brought about a change in how publishers and advertisers can ‘track and trace’ readers behavior. If you are into web analytics and have heard about cookies you probably know what I am talking about. Recently I had the pleasure to attend the Adobe Omniture Summit. One of the talks was about the ePrivacy Directive, Adobe’s Chief Privacy Officer, Meme Jacobs Rasmussen, has posted an extensive blog post on the European ePrivacy Directive. While this puts the Directive into perspective for Omniture customers it is a must read regardless if you use Omniture. Read further >

Recently I started to see QR codes become more common. In case you wonder what a QR code is: Wikipedia says “A QR code (short for Quick Response) is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.” Read further >

Everyone knows that data and information are subtly different things. Data is worthless unless it can be turned into information. General consensus says that data turns into information when it is analyzed, interpreted, enriched, redacted etc. The moment data is touched by one of these processes, value is added and magically raw data becomes meaningful, and in the right context valuable too. Obviously he who manages to get access to or produces raw data and masters the process of adding value, can build a business because people are willing to pay for access to information at the right time and in the right format. Read further >

Some 25 years ago a revolution hit the publishing industry. Desktop Publishing became a reality with the Apple Macintosh, PageMaker, Postscript (the page description language created by Adobe), and, of course, the affordable Laserprinter. Suddenly it was much cheaper than ever before to create high quality publications. An important side effect was the availability of fonts (typefaces) to a much bigger community of graphical designers. At last designers could create both beautiful, high standard, practical printed material without any restrictions. Even better – in the slipstream of established type foundries, smaller, specialized type foundries emerged who designed many more fonts which in turn evoked a whole new graphical language. Read further >

In my recollection in Philip K. Dicks’ famous novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,’ humans differentiate themselves from others (animals and androids alike) by the sophistication of their tools. In today’s digital world the success of devices and platforms rely for a large part on the tools to make compelling content available on the device. Read further >

Do you read this blog because you know what you’ll find, or do you want to be surprised, or both? Regardless of what you answer I invite you to read on.

Search is everywhere and it’s not just because Google is such a dominant force on the internet. When I say search is everywhere I mean that all information that we engage with or gain access to is brought to us by some sort of a search query. With relatively simple queries, search as we know it today works wonders. Read further >

Making something into a succes takes a lot of decition, devotion and a willingness to fail and learn. Let me appologize upfront: this is not the (nor my) first blog contribution about the iPad, and I am certain it won’t be the last. Let’s look at how the iPad phenomenon occured. As I suggest in the title there can be no success without some failure. Read further >

Software is a strange product when you think of it. Because of its immaterial nature the manufacturer of the software usually sells a license, a right to use the software. On top of the usage right the buyer pays a support and maintenance fee. The latter will in theory insure that problems discovered in the software are fixed (via a patch) and when a new version of the software is released the buyer has the right to upgrade to this new version and benefit from new features. The software vendor owns the program code and won’t allow you or others to make changes to this code and enhance the functionality. Read further >