Paper

While most apps force the user to work within a restricted interface these days, Paper allows you to fill the blank notebook in front of you in the very way you want. You can use it to draw, you can use it to take notes, you can use it to convey messages etc. All that you need to conquer the world is a stylus (see this nice one on Amazon) or a finger and a pinch of inspiration. Once your masterpiece is ready, Paper allows you to perfect the way you want to present it to the world by customizing its look with faux binders, ripped edges or a new Moleskine like cover among other things. Of course, once you the merchandise is ready to ship, you can go public and share your work directly to your favorite social networks or integrate it to an existing Word document or Powerpoint presentation.

While the concept seems basic – it is after all nothing else than a user friendly and well designed version of Photoshop for iPad – I consider it as small revolution in the digital world. In a universe where users are sharing more existing content than creating original one, I am getting tired of observing the same pictures, the same posts and the jokes being shared on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter. Will Paper give me a break? I surely hope so.

On another note, I believe that Paper could bring a bowl of fresh air to the frankly boring corporate world. In that other universe, most of the disciples have long forgot about stepping out of the ferry boat and all follow the same holy rules to prepare their presentations: PowerPoint. Ironically, these are the guys from FiftyThree, former Microsoft employees, who could well start to a new era in the way we present our work within an organization. Instead of the restrictive environment brought by PowerPoint, Paper gives everyone the flexibility to quickly conceptualize his ideas on paper without having to find the right shape in the toolbar or worrying about where the right arrow type is to be found. The main difference between Paper and physical paper is that the person at the other end of the line will not have to wait for your nice little sketch to reach days later via post mail but will be able to see it at the same time as you draw it (OMGPOP Draw My Thing style?) or will receive it via email seconds later.

Bref, there is still a long way to go to see my dream world materialize but for now, at least I start to see a reason to actually own an iPad.

An interesting interview from The Verge with Paper founder, Georg Petschnigg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzlZiajRttY

My Amazon Kindle. This light item became a regular not only in my hand luggage but also in the bag I carry around every day. It is light, it is easy to carry and the eInk technology used in the Kindle does not exhaust your eyes as much as the backlit screen of a computer or an iPad. Sold by Amazon from $79. The only exception to the rule are travel guides. My Kindle has not yet replaced the good old Lonely Planet paperbacks…

Apple MacBook Air 13″. A real game changer. While in the past I merely carried my heavy laptop with me to avoid to find it into a thousand different pieces upon arrival, I must admit that  carrying my new 1.35kg machine has almost become a pleasure. The fast processor and the long lasting battery (up to 7 hours) allow me to spend a large part of my journey writing down some notes about my new business ideas, finalizing my holiday plans or  watching the latest episodes of my favorite shows. A delight. Sold by Apple from $1200.

Some more light electronics. Obviously, I would almost look like an exception if I did not carry my beloved iPod to give me to add this something extra to the air when you rise above the clouds. Occasionally, I also enjoy a game of PES 2012 on my Sony PSP (from $130) to remember the atmosphere of the big games at the Camp Nou while I am away from home.

Moleskine notebook. Thankfully, electronics are not all that I carry and I like to have something more meaningful and substantial with me, just like my Moleskine notebook. While I enjoy writing down notes on my Mac, I prefer my notebook to write down what really is on my mind. It seems like inspiration comes better once you are high in the air…

Miscellaneous. In order to look fresh and ready when I land, I also keep a fresh and ironed outfit, my nécessaire and a bunch of power chargers in the unfortunate situation of my checked in luggage not showing up on the delivery belt. One is never too careful when it comes to this.

We have been good friends for the past six years or so. You have been my companion all along. I remember those dark nights during my university life in England when cooking was not one of my core skills (yet). I remember these days when I started working in Spain and the only energy I had left was spent with my friends sharing a well deserved pitcher of beer. On all these occasions and many more, you fed me, saved me some precious time and satisfied my appetite. I cannot say I was always faithful to you. I embraced many other fiancées but always ended up hurt or disappointed. Let’s be honest for a second. You never had quite the same taste as a fresh homemade pizza from a dark and shady Neapolitan restaurant but you always did better than your other frozen counterparts. I liked you. I kind of relied on you up until today actually.

Unfortunately, a few days ago you disappointed me for the first time. Once again, I came back home after a long and exhausting day at work, I enjoyed a jog along the Austrian mountains and thought I would treat myself with a movie and a premium frozen pizza bought on the way back. I started the same ritual as always. Pre warmed the oven for 10 minutes. Unpacked you from the carton box in which you were sleeping. Placed you on a comfortable tray. You were looking good. Cooked you in the oven for 20 good minutes until you edges were crusty and the cheese on your body fully melted. The pepperonis and the salamis you used as a topping looked first-class, as always. I then sliced you in 8 equally sized pieces and started eating you one piece after the other. Just like I had done over the past 6 years…

Until then, my evening was going rather smoothly. Your taste was not deceiving, the movie playing on TV was decent and no trouble could be foreseen. Unfortunately the world around me collapsed half an hour later. My stomach started making unusual sounds. What started to be a mere discomfort turned into a real pain. The rest of the night became darker even. The discomfort in my stomach forced me to continuously turn around in my bed, obviously preventing me from getting any sleep and recover the energy I needed to perform at work the day after. The pain in my stomach then grew stronger and could only be resolved in the bathroom I had to visit many more times throughout the night.

At last, many hours later, the pain stopped. Some sleep, some water and and a lot of attention from my loved ones seemed to have put me back on the path of recovery. I am today in a much better shape, thank you for asking. Nevertheless, I am saddened to inform you that our friendship shall not survive this incident. Dr Oetker, I thought better of you. I had hopes for our friendship to last for the years to come but you let me down. You let me down big time.

May our friendship rest in peace.

Sincerely yours -

Nicolas

Acer Aspire S3-951-6646 13.3-Inch HD Display Aluminum Ultrabook (credits: Amazon.com)

Better late than never. It seems like the monopoly of Apple and its MacBook Air on the ultrabook market is slowly coming to an end. PC makers are finally realising that in a world where users are increasingly mobile, there is a real need for portable devices that can actually be used without having to come 2 inches away from your screen to be able to decipher the text that is being displayed (damn you netbooks!).

Acer recently made a huge step in that direction with the launch of the long awaited Aspire S3. While I have never been a big fan of the Taiwan-based company in the past, this new device might encourage me to reconsider my position. Its design is sexy and perfectly combines some very elegant lines with a solid body made of an alloy of magnesium and aluminium (not plastic!). The Acer Aspire S3 is only 0,5″ thin and just under 3 lbs. It has a wide 13.3 HD display and is equipped with a powerful i5 1.6 GHz processor. Acer also included The Instant On feature supposed to wake up the beast from its deep sleep in less than 1.5 seconds. Oh, and it also comes at a price of $899, $400 lower than the MacBook Air.

But do not run to the store just yet, Acer is not the only one trying to dethrone Apple in the Kingdom of the ultrabooks. Asus is also keen on grabbing a piece of the pie – and possibly a lawsuit or two against Apple – and also revealed its very own ultrabook, the UX21. This long saga might only be starting…

Choose yours well and keep walking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be honest, it starts to look a little old when you compare it to the latest generation ones. Nevertheless, this is only a secondary issue. What is so special about it is not its appearance but what really is in the inside – like beauty right?

To start with, I am not exactly the type of person storing an infinite number of albums in my iPod. I generally enjoy a limited number of songs from the same artist or from the same album or from the same genre and these are exactly the ones I want to be with me at any point of time. It also sometimes happens that you discover a song that you like years after you first heard it. It might have even made it into your iPod at some point before being dramatically erased from its limited memory. Back in the days, you were probably not mature enough to really enjoy what was so special about it. Inversely, you sometimes think you actually like a song and put it into your all-mighty iPod straight away but then realised after a few days that you actually do not like it LIKE IT. And so it needs to be erased and forgotten for the rest of your existence.

In a word, building a perfectly optimised playlist is a complex and never ending process involving a constant flow of more or less great and more or less famous songs coming in and out of the device. Trust me, the ultimate goal of this sometimes tedious process is worth the efforts. In the end, the iPod you will eventually adore will simply contain all of those songs exactly matching your unique moods and all of the events punctuating your unique life. You will have exactly the songs that reflect your very own personality and your very own life – for the best and for the worst. Today, after years of efforts and countless nights of synchronisation, my iPod is finally optimised and losing it would be like losing a little part of me.

Ralph Lauren Black Label - Chunky Shawl Collar Cardigan (photo by MrPorter.com)

When you spend the early years of your life selling ties to your high school classmates, elegance is something that surely runs through your veins. No matter what Ralph Lauren worked on ever since, his lines always embedded this clean and sophisticated image so characteristic of the designer. Of course, that is naturally true when we think about his prominent Polo but it may be even more evident when we look at his Black Label – bringing elegance, business and leisure altogether since 2005.

What else do you need to start the winter in style? This chunky shawl collar Ralph Lauren cardigan ($1,300) is probably as comfortable as it looks, can be matched with almost all of your wardrobe (we do love that don’t we?) and no matter where you are heading, you can be confident that you will have this casual chic look others are just trying too hard to get.

On the one hand, Facebook is proposing a social network very much based on the people you (want to) know or you have met a couple of times and are curious about. Even though it introduced the possibility to like celebrities, sports clubs or other characters through pages, most of the content I look for and consult daily is about my real Facebook friends. Who got absolutely trashed during her last holidays in Spain? How was my old friend’s wedding whose invitation must have got lost in the mail? Wow, are they really still together? All that I care about on Facebook is the information related to a limited group of people I know. As innovative as Google pretends to be, the same goes with Google+ – the wannabe-next-big-thing whose success I still have doubts about. From a personal experience, I believe that the FDOA (Facebook Degree Of Addiction) regulating the intensity of a user activity on the social network has a decreasing strength over time. In the first few years, it was amazing to discover a new side of the life of people you may have known for years. But over the years, I trust that most users realised the importance of keeping a certain level of privacy or intimacy in order to give their real lives a genuine sparkle. And subsequently, the quality and the crispy character of the information shared with others lost a great deal of value for the rest of the users.

On the other hand, Twitter has a very different offer. The content shared by most of the users is a lot more public than on Facebook. I do not need to be approved by the person whose activity I want to follow. I do not even need to be friends with him or her. I do not actually even need to like them at all. It is simple as pie. I follow you and I will see what you are up to. You follow me and you will see what I post. If you do not want everyone to see what you tweet about, then you know you do not need to post it over there, post it on Facebook or protect your tweets.

The features offered by Twitter are simple, they have not changed much since its creation in 2006 and they do not require the user to deal with the tortuous complexity of the Facebook privacy settings. In the same way, because of the limited amount of information one can actually share on the network, it is easy to make the information you do not want to see disappear from your virtual world once and for the rest of your existence.

While this lack of functions and possibilities initially seemed disappointing and kept me away from using Twitter, it soon turned out to be my favourite aspect of the product. What can you really say in 140 characters? Not much really. On the one hand, a large part of the Twitter users still uses this format to let the world know they are about to shave or that they just came back from a run. I could not care less and I do not follow them. If I already follow you and you start posting such nonsense, I can easily unfollow you in just one-click. On the other hand, another portion of the Twitter users understood that in order to convey a strong message in 140 characters, you should rather be brief and go straight to the point – no matter the topic you want post about. You are witnessing The News? Go straight to the headline. You have just met your favourite celebrity? Tell us where and post the picture. You have read an interesting article on a blog? Do not bother to write anything and simply share it directly from the page where you read it. Or retweet (RT) it.

Over the years, this simple concept attracted the attention of a rather large audience. Movie stars, wannabe movie stars, out-of-the-market movie stars, football players, but also journalists and other influencers able to provide me with first hand information or good quality secondary data matching my political preferences, my passion for a football club (I’ll let you guess which one) or even my culinary tastes.

For all these reasons, Twitter seemed to be much less centered around itself than Facebook and much more oriented towards the rest of the mighty World Wide Web. While I want to see where my friends are going out tonight on Facebook, I want to see what happens outside of my circle of friends in real time on Twitter. If Apple is about to launch a new tablet, I do not expect to read about it first on Facebook from every crazy fan boy out there but from a more unbiased source I will have previously decided to follow on Twitter. I will therefore be very likely to receive the information I desire at the same time but from a perspective I prefer.

What Twitter is doing is a small revolution in the great world of social media. It is reinventing the way we receive, read and share the news. In a word, it continuously updates us on selected topics tailored to our lifestyle in real time. And cut the crap.

In brief, they believe users are seeking a more authentic experience in the way they interact with social networks and the Israeli based start-up designed a Facebook app translating your life on the website into a 3D environment. They give you the opportunity to move around and mingle with people you know and people you might be interested to meet in various virtual worlds – ranging from a fancy lounge bar to a rooftop terrace or even at the beach. Watch their video and their pitch at the last Techcrunch Disrupt SF for more details about how it really works.

Does it ring a bell? More than an attempt to create a copycat of Second Life, Shaker founders claim that their platform will allow you to bring your very own self into this virtual world instead of being stuck in the body of a strange-looking character in Wonderland.

To be completely frank, I find the basic concept terrific and groundbreaking but I also believe that most of the success of the start-up highly depends on how well they will be able to face the upcoming challenges and in which direction they want to take the project over the next months. Let me explain.

Alright, Shaker seemingly delighted the judges at the last Techcrunch Disrupt SF in September and just raised $15m to pursue its development. There is no question that investors do also appreciate the idea and believe in it. Amazing news. Nonetheless, no matter how revolutionary the concept really is and how good they are at marketing themselves (I really loved the video, kudos…), the most important challenge they will face is to convince the users to use the app – and to use it more than once.

It is obviously too early to judge as the start-up is still in an early stage of its (hopefully long) life but I believe it is currently missing a key ingredient to take it to the next level: a clearer purpose. While Shaker intend to replicate a typical night at a bar with your buddies and allow you to meet new people, I believe less geeky users might simply perceive it as another Second Life or WoW filled with three headed dragons and would rather have the time of their life in a real bar with their real friends. Nothing beats that and arguably, no virtual environment can replicate how the magic happens in there and systematically predict who you might or might not develop more affinities with. Being fan of the same band on Facebook does not necessarily mean you will have a passionate conversation with your counterpart. In the same way, having 3 mutual friends might not always be a strong enough base to trigger a meaningful conversation – or at least not in Europe. How much of a friend are you with your Facebook friends anyway?

Nevertheless, Shaker already offers the possibility to join different “rooms” that, to a certain extent, seem to all serve a different purpose (just like the good old IRC days). While I believe this is currently not sufficient to efficiently segment the user base, I am convinced that this direction is the right one to step into.

When I first heard about Shaker, my first thought was “Wow, how great would it be to meet potential business partners or collaborators in the very same way”. The Internet is a much more open space than the real world and it would not only allow companies and individuals to save on heavy travel fares and conference fees, but also allow them to save an incredible amount of time searching for the right counterpart to talk to. Can you imagine a room filled with professionals working in the same sector all along the value chain, from the product designer to the retailer? Is there a better way to find out about the needs of your partners and of your customers? You could even organize workshops and focus groups in there. The system would work in the very same way but could be even more beneficial for all parties if it is based on Linkedin API rather than Facebook.

Anyway, all that I am trying to say is that with a clearer purpose, this idea could not only create a temporary buzz but also generate a bigger boom in the way businesses and individuals use social networks.

Of course, as a last resort, you can always turn the whole thing into a dating club and wait until it gets hot and funny in there. A bon entendeur.

While the Kindle gives you the possibility to see how much of the book you have read (as a percentage!), it does not and just cannot replicate this unique feeling. Besides, it does not even smell like a fresh new book… Therefore, the experience provided by the Kindle should not be seen as a substitute to reading hard books in any way. Kindle-reading is not reading. It is just a whole different thing certain masterpieces should be exempted from.

The mighty device could, however, be a convenient item to possess and be used in other interesting ways if Amazon decides to further develop its firmware. I must admit the Kindle is a well designed device. It is at first a bit awkward to hold when you compare it to a hard book but you soon get used to its shape and its light weight (250 grams). It is the perfect device for a heavily traveled man willing to sacrifice the holy experience of reading hard books for a matter of pure convenience. After all, reading popular page turners on the Kindle is not a crime and makes you look up to date with the latest digital trends while in the plane.

Besides, as I currently live deep in the middle of the Austrian Alps, getting English or French books is not always easy and what I hate most is waiting for my Amazon shipping to reach my mailbox. When I want to read I usually want to start immediately and the Kindle is the best thing that ever happened to me to satisfy this impulse of mine. 1 minute to find the book you are looking for and pay for it. 1 minute to receive it on your Kindle. Brilliant really.

The surprising technology (E-Ink) developed for the screen of the Kindle makes it particularly interesting for short reads like magazine or website articles. Nonetheless, what would be even better is the possibility to receive the articles from your favorite websites (HBR, The Economist etc.) directly to your Kindle through RSS feed for instance. It is unfortunately still a dream.

My Verdict: Amazon has developed a good product and an even better marketing strategy. In spite of my initial reticence to buy it and of my genuine attachment to good old books, I ended up purchasing the Kindle – partly out of curiosity and partly for a matter of convenience. I do not know how many books I will be reading on the Kindle or when I will get tired of it. I guess a lot of it depends on how much new features Amazon will include in the next firmware releases. For now, I am just a kid curious to play with his new toy…

PS: The Kindle is also equipped with an integrated Internet browser. I tried it once. And will never do again.