Silberbauer Says:

…er min frues nye blog på Politiken. Very good food, blot på dansk og med en lidt anden vinkel. Web 2.0-baghjul til Silberbauer.

BT og Berlingske har puttet et lille script på deres side, der kan se, om du anvender Adblocker til at fjerne bannerreklamer. Hvis du gør, så må du ikke bruge bt.dk eller berlingske.dk, næh nej.

Umiddelbart er det jo en forståelig reaktion fra et annoncedrevet, og absolut hårdt presset, mediehus. Og det er ganske i Berlingskes ret at håndhæve visse vilkår for brug af deres nyhedsservice.

Men er det smart? Jeg tror det ikke. Det er vel nemmere, at vælge berlingske.dk og bt.dk fra, end at leve med spam-agtige bannere på andre sites. Desuden kan blokeringen nemt omgås med Yesscript, hvor man blokere for BT’s blok af blokkeren. Og sådan kan våbenkapløbet optrappes. Det eneste Berlingske opnår, er et fald i trafik til skade for annoncepriserne.

Jeg tror det er en stakket frist for medier, der med en anklagende pegefinger skal gøre opmærksom på, at reklamerne skam er der for min egen skyld. De kan jo alligevel ikke tvinge mig til at klikke på dem.

Til gengæld lykkes det til fulde for Berlingske at reklamere for produktet Adblocker Plus, som nu ganske givet bliver installeret på adskillelige browsere landet over, efter at Markedsføring bragte historien om adblocker-blokaden på bt.dk og berlingske.dk.

Jeg holdt for nylig et foredrag, hvor jeg spåede bannerreklamens snarlige død. Jeg tror, vi er taget et skridt nærmere. Nye forretningsmodeller skal til. Jeg kan ikke give opskriften, men det er helt tydeligt, at god gammeldaws display-reklame har det meget, meget hårdt på nettet, simpelthen fordi de meget nemt kan vælges fra.

Exhibit 1: Kunde&Co‘s campaign for the referendum on changing the Danish constitution. Paid for by the Danish government an thus pure royalistic propaganda. And a ripoff at the same time. This is wrong on so many levels:

Exhibit 2: Harry Enfield‘s “Women Know Your Limits”:

…looking forward to the lawsuit from the BBC.

June 11 the City of Copenhagen will launch World Climate Community. This project needs all the publicity in the world.

World Climate Community will collect ideas and voices on climate from all over the world to let the politicians know that we’re for real and that this planet is too good to waste. The world’s leaders will gather in Copenhagen for COP15 in December and World Climate Community will help set the agenda.

Right now you can join the Facebook page and invite your friend to join too. And of course, after June 11 you should join the community and participate with your opinion, ideas and projects.

The community will launch at www.worldclimatecommunity.com

Baekdal is absolutely right. Audi fucked up: Why only publish their (probably pretty costly) documentary on Les Mans 24 on iTunes only, and thus only in the US? A European brand makes a movie about a European event, and then only makes it available to recession-struck Americans. Dummkopfen.

The movie is paid for – why not just push it on Youtube and every other available channel? Get it out there!

Here’s the trailer, but you can’t see the real thing, unless you’re American. For some reason, Audi doesn’t want you to.

When everything is looking bleak, and the R-word is everywhere, it’s inspiring and important that mankind still have the ability to look towards more distant horizons.

Kepler is designed for finding eart-sized and earth like planets out there in the void. In a few years we might finally know the chances of life existing elsewhere.

Imagine, that while greedy speculators and naïve CEOs were busy raping the global economy, sending this planet tumbling into recession, some people sat down and designed a machine to answer one of the ultimate questions: Are we alone? I really wish I was smart enough to be one of the boffins that put this together.

Excellent video from The Onion introducing Apples new HCI invention

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Picasa 3 is out (has been for a couple of weeks, I know. I’m a so late-follower).

Anyway: It’s splendid. It’s even smoother and faster than v. 2. Especially the new image preview, that if you want it to replaces Windows’ horrifically slow built-in image previewer is very, very cool. Almost Mac-like – which is, of course, good.

But, but, but… I so hoped that Google had fixed the network support so that scanning folders on servers (like my beloved Cubestation where my photos live) would work. But alas – Picasa still gets the hickups badly when trying to access a mounted drive letter.

It’s a shame. Picasa is an immensely good piece of software, but with the whole world going submicro-nano-laptop more and more people will have a NAS at home for important stuff that need a lot of space and that you don’t use everyday – and that you thus don’t want to lug around on your astronomic-cost-pr-MB solid state memory in your cool, new subnote.

Photos are exactly such stuff.

Tomorrow at this time we will know if the Large Hadron Collider in CERN will create a black hole as some scientists think it may do.

According to the guys in lab coats, it’s not very likely that this will happen (PDF). But these are the same kind of guys that invented niceties like asbestos, the h-bomb, CFC gasses and the thorium toothpaste.

So, If tomorrow you feel being very rapidly compressed into something just a little larger than a singularity, together with the most of the mass of our solar system, it’s a tell-tale sign that some CERN boffin didn’t do his algebra quite right. In that case: Remain calm and enjoy the feeling of being so attractive that even light and the fabric of space-time itself time can’t resist you. Revel in the feeling that McCain, Palin, and global warming can’t harm you any further.

Have a nice day.

[UPDATE]

Here’s a live webcam feed from CERN

There seem to be no limit to what politicians will do to get a bit of airtime.

Right now Danish TV2 is broadcasting a reality show in which our Defence Minister visits the Danish Hollywood King of Beauty Ole Henriksen. We just saw the minister getting his feet washed and massaged, and now he is in session at a hypnotist. WTF? Denmark is currently at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our Defence Minister is having a foot massage on television. Am I the only one who finds this just a little bit disturbing?

What on earth was his press advisers thinking when they okayed this? Even Sarkozy wouldn’t be so stupid as to get himself filmed in a spa!

But then again, Minister Søren Gade is the guy who in 2005 chose to pack a 9mm Neuhausen for at formal visit to Afghanistan. Very… Castro.

The problem that Apple never saw fit to comment on – the terrible playback stutter has now disappeared. Whether it’s due to my total removal of iTunes 7.6 (in anger!) and thus a clean install of 7.7, or if Apple has in fact fixed something, I don’t know. Maybe it’s simply because I removed DRM from all my AAC files to play them through Winamp?

Nevertheless, it means that I’m back to iTunes for now. I used Winamp for a while, but sadly Winamp has become pretty bloated and its interface is… well it’s not iTunes’. Besides, Winamps built in iPod-support didn’t do it for me.

Viacom vs. Google. I guess you’ve heard about that case: Viacom, in all its stupidity, wants to sift through all of Youtube’s log files to find out who have watched what. And the US courts approved that. So don’t be surprised if one day a slick lawyer turns up on your doorstep asking you to pay $2.000 for having watched excerpts of Friends on Youtube back in 2004.

It’s sick, and Viacom is making a stupid move. You can’t win the media wars by sewing and harassing your own target users. You simply must provide a better product than your competitors. It’s really that simple. But just like most of the record labels, Viacom doesn’t get it and, thus, will fail.

This destructive and pathetic struggle of a dying giant made me think of why the web is so more intriguing than the old telly, and why we choose to watch the pixelated, lagged streams on Youtube instead of buying yet another satellite HD decoder box.

It’s not just because the web is free (it isn’t, you know. Broadband connections do cost money). It’s definately not because the quality is better (HD on cable looks stunning – Youtube videos pretty much look like shit.) It’s because it’s fun! And it’s there when you need it. You don’t have to order a satellite package seven days before the race or the fight that you want to watch. And most of all: You can share the experience with hundreds or thousands of other viewers. Real time. Right when the action is happening. It connects you to the reality. That’s why it rocks: It’s all in the interaction with other individuals of the Homo Sapiens.

A few weeks ago 24 hours of Le mans was on. And Danish driver Tom Kristensen was behind the wheel of no. 2: The Audi diesel R10. Something not to be missed. But none of the two national networks in Denmark chose to transmit the whole 24 hours of Le Mans – or more correctly: None of them could afford to buy the rights.

Being at my weekend cottage (no cable) I had no way of seeing the race on Eurosport. Luckily I have a 2 MBit internet connection, though.

I found a page made by a guy called Crizzzie (yes, three z’s) who has put a tuner card in his pc and somehow manages to make this signal into a Flash Video stream with only 30-something seconds of delay. Normally Crizzzie streams rugby, but this day Le Mans was on for all 24 hours of it. My hero.

Furthermore, and this is where it gets really clever, he had embedded a IRC style chat chat next to the stream. Here, Le Mans aficionados chatted away about the drivers, the cars, the tires, the pitstops – in sync with the stream. And most of the guys on the chat seemed to know more about racing than do the lame commentators on Danish tv. One of the chatters actually has participated in Le mans himself with an American GT1 team).

Now, Crizzzies stream was without commentaries (I guess he somehow has access to the “raw” stream from Le Mans) and I knew that the official Radio Le Mans (broadcast on the track) is supposed to be quite entertaining. So I found the official audio stream of the Radio Le Mans in another browser tab. Real time lap times and the overall standings came from a third site. And voilà: The perfect Le Mans cocktail in three browser tabs: IRC, a video stream, audio from Radio Le Mans and real time updated lap times, pit status and so on. No television network can compete with this no matter how hi def the signal is.

This was the funniest and most intense tv experience I have had in a long time. It was like sitting in the couch with some good (and very race-savvy) friends. People argued about tire choices, Peugeot’s strategy – and we all tried to help poor Dave when his laptop started running out of juice. (Poor Dave didn’t make it, though. He disappeared from the chat 5 minutes before the checkered flag).

A short video grab from a great Le Mans “tv” experience

As long as the web gives you this much added value and as long as pay-per-view networks insist on charging a fortune for a single race, people will stream from the web and thus embedding the content in their own social context. Simply because it’s more fun and more meaningful an experience.

Viacom and other distributors must face that the value of content in itself is falling rapidly – even that of the good stuff. But the number of people that will attend a single event online, like the Le Mans, is on the rise as more and more have access to broadband and as services like Youtube and Google Video matures. The good parts of a race like Le Mans 2008 will circulate the web for years and be watched by millions.

Come on, Viacom and all you other boneheaded media dinosaurs. There must be a clever way to capitalize on these dynamics by acknowledging that it’s not the content in itself that carries the value, but the context in which it is watched. Think advertising, product placement, targeting, measuring, viral, instead of thinking trials and lawyers.

Spam comments are seldom worth mentioning, but this is kind of fun. It looks like it’s a “muslim” spam attack against Danish blogs. It lists about twenty Danish people known from the media cartoon debate and then reads:

[...]
FUCK U DANES! DIE IN HELL!!!
Danmark er lort-
Denmark is shit.
stop danmark -
SUPPORT al – q AEDA!
thank 2.6.
FOREVER AGAINST DENMARK AND DANES-
FUCK YOU DANISH NAZI PIGS!
LET’S STOP DENMARK!
Stop danish nazi society

Oh well.

Yesterday was C-day at Creuna. We launched our new identity and brand platform, and it rocks. Our Danish marketing department and the former Cobra part of Creuna Norway has toiled getting the ID ready. This is a great day for Creuna, as our new profile defines us as the Full-service Digital Agency that we are, and not as a dreary IT Consultancy as we were four years ago.

It’s cool, it’s creative and it’s bold. We no longer have a logo – we have a symbol that can vary indefinately. Every coworker at Creuna soon has the possibility of creating his or her own “skin and bone”- C-symbol with a software tool.

Visit creuna.dk or creuna.com to see our new, more simple websites.

So, finally I had some time to work with Axure 5. And yes: It’s worth it. I don’t have time to do an extensive review, but features like Shared project (yes, with versioning and with no need for server support besides a LAN drive), improved flowcharting and a generally improved interface makes v5 a LOT cooler than v4. Also, the use of variables and the option to move around panels makes for some great effects. If you have the time, that is. Using these features WILL make your prototype pretty complex pretty quick.

Especially I like the palette undock feature. Now you can really use those 3 21″ monitors of yours

I have a few requests, though: Now as the flowchart feature is maturing and finally getting usable, please include support for Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary. Only a few more symbols are needed. And, if possible: We need more glue points on the shapes – like in Visio.

Grab your trial here:www.axure.com.

As I told you earlier, my wife blogs about gourmet food. She’s been blogging for a little more than a year now, and her blog has turned into one of the leading Danish gourmet blogs with a huge network of friends and blogs abroad.

Last week the Danish paper Politiken called for an interview and did an article about food bloggers in general (see an English version translated by Google here). The conclusion was that food blogging is a serious competitor to the more established food critics. And they should be. The best of the bloggers know as much (or more) about food than does the critics. The article also lead to a podcasted interview on K-Cast, a pod cast on communications (in Danish).

In the Politiken article, several chefs were asked about the food bloggers. Most of them seem to have understood that bloggers are here to stay, and that a good blogger can be your best friend as they know how to work the net and how to get the message through, in a way that your own website never will be able to. And so it is. One dedicated blogger can advertise your business or products more efficiently than you can yourself. And a network of bloggers will easily outperform your PR agency. Why? Because consumers trust fellow consumers and friends over slick PR guys.

To make a successful business you need ambassadors. Someone unbiased that will recommend your product to other people within his network, and who’s words carry some weight. Several food bloggers are just that: Authorities on gourmet dining that people turn to when they want to go out without the risk of being disappointed. And this goes for all other business areas as well.

Consumers has always talked about products and businesses. The only difference from 20 years ago till now is that today the conversation is taking place on the web for everyone to see. And that’s what terrifies some business owners. But they should be thrilled instead, now they can in fact hear what their customers are saying.

You can’t keep the bloggers away – because they are your customers. But you can win their hearts with great service and great products (as two-star Michelin restaurant Noma and it’s Chef, René Redzepi, has won Trine’s) and then you have made yourself a very influential friend and ambassador.

My best estimate based on traffic on the Very Good Food blog and considering the network effect of blogs, is that Trine’s blog in average may produce up to five new customers for Noma a week – directly or indirectly. She and her blogger friends have put Noma on the virtual land map, and as more and more consumers are relying solely on the web for decision making the impact is quite substantial.

Other businesses must learn from the approach that Noma has to the bloggers. Instead of shooing them away and telling them not to photograph the food, they are made friends of the restaurant. In that way Noma has managed to turn the conventional customer/business relationship into a ambassador/business relationship, and that’s good for business.

Do not as a business owner underestimate the networked power of a well written blog. You can choose to fight your ambassadors or to embrace them. But don’t go over board and bribe them, that will spoil everything. Treat them well with a hint of V.I.P., and show them that you care about their opinions.

There’s a flipside to this: It’s very important for bloggers to realize their own power. With the ability to make or break a brand or a business, bloggers should be careful only to write about things that they truly understand (note to self: Stop the raves…). Blogs have a very real impact on real life – for better or for worse.

A real life moment: Trine and blogger friends Laurent and Guillaume were introduced to Heston Blumenthal (Chef and owner, The Fat Duck ***) who happened to be dining at Noma that evening. It’s Mr. Blumenthal in the middle – René Redzepi, Chef of Noma, is the second from the right. Both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Redzepi are incredibly nice and dedicated people with a overwhelming passion for quality and food.

Where I am? Well, someone had to operate the camera

Most recent version of iTunes stutters like a madman. What’s happening? Apple just rendered their player absolutely useless.

The rumors says it’s Quicktime that’s the problem. Way to go Apple – you just surpassed Microsoft in crappy software.

I’m not the only one having this problem – and it’s an issue on Macs too.

[UPDATE]

Ok, to get a bit more contructive now: http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/2004/06/itunes_for_wind.html

This might do it.

Some time ago I ranted about the HTC Dual Touch which is, imho, a bloody useless device. Not so much because of the device itself but because it is infected with Windows Mobile.

Now, I’ve gotten the Nokia E51 and I like it. Partly because I’m used to Nokia, of course, but mostly because: It’s a phone. It’s not a PDA. It actually rings when people call me, it’s in fact easy to, like,  call someone from, and the interface is properly designed to work on a small screen. The 3G is fast, it’s got Wlan (the HTC didn’t).

+ It has push mail (seems faster than the HTC), calendar, contacts etc. from the Exchange server at work.

It’s slender, nice looking, seems to have a long battery life time (unless push mail is constantly active in which case the battery drains within 1½ days).

Yep – nice device.

Spend most of my evening going through one of these heavy demand specs that only governmental institutions are able to make. Hundreds of demands, ranging from the very abstract (“The solution should be easy to use”) to the very concrete (“The user presses a button that brings up a preview…”).

Hidden among all the text it states that the vendor must use all the fancy usercentric methods of design and do it all in a very dialogue-based and agile way. … but why? All the design decisions are made (poorly, though) by the specification. To go out and ask the users will result in hundreds of change request for the project managers and laywers to fight over.

Could we please stop making these lame specifications? They’re a bloody waste of time and money. Collect your organization’s needs (that’s needs, not wants), put down a core team in your own organization, call your UX consultants, and together we’ll make it happen.

Boston Dynamics is working on a kind of robot horse/dog hybrid. It’s called BigDog and is supposedly meant to carry payloads (military and other kinds) over rugged terrain. What makes this both cool and scary is that while the robot is probably as stupid as a toaster, the way it walks makes it seem almost intelligent. That gait really makes it look alive.

Have a look at this video – and please note the part where the scientist kicks the robot to try to get it to fall. I instinctively felt sorry for the beast until I remembered that it’s a machine. But the way it tries to keep its balance (and suceeds) is so animal-like that it’s kind of freakish. BTW: The noise is coming from it’s on board petrol engine – I guess it’s not quite stealth yet.

[UPDATE]

Oh, I just found this one. The BigDog Beta version – before they got it house trained

I have a Garmin Nüvi 660 – a splendid GPS unit. If you are looking for a GPS unit for your car, the Nüvi series is the way to go.

But this is not about GPS units or mapping updates as such – it’s about the hellish user experience that not thought through installation procedures and futile attempts to protect software from piracy can lead to.

For Garmin needs a serious lesson in service design. What ought to be a simple update of the maps inside my Nüvi 660 GPS unit has been made into an hour long waste of time. It all started when I tried to purchase the map update:

1. I week before Easter I got an e-mail from Garmin telling me that the Map update 2008 for Europe has been released. I’m a gadget freak, and firmware and map updates are the salt of my tech life. The mail pointed me to the (very badly designed) Garmin website.

2. At the Garmin website I had to enter the serial # of my GPS unit to find out what update to get. Bad funnel design here – why not just show me a picture of the different units to make it easy for me to spend some dough? Luckily for Garmin, I had the unit with me.

3. I found the right update, and the website told me that it could be purchased directly from Garmin. Nice, I thought, and broke out the Visa card.

4. But alas – after putting the update in the shopping cart and entering all my personal info, I found out that Garmin only ships to the US, UK and Ireland. It took me some browsing to find the Danish dealer of Garmin hardware.

5. Nowhere on the website of the Danish Garmin dealer could I find out how to buy the update. A few products were listed – but not the one I was looking for.

6. I Called Garmin Denmark and after being on hold for 5 minutes a guy told me that Garmin Denmark does not sell map updates. The update must be bought in one of the physical dealerships. I apologize to the support guy for being a bit angry at this point – but for Pete’s sake: Why don’t you just write on your web site that you’re your not selling to private customers? Why don’t you compile a list of online shops that sell your stuff?

7. Refusing to waste my time going to a Fona or Merlin store (the Danish equivalents to Radio Shack: They mostly don’t have what you need, and they mostly don’t know anything about what the do have) I managed to find the update on a webshop and ordered it.

8. A DVD sized package should be perfectly able to fit through the letter opening in my front door, but to my surprise the Garmin DVD didn’t arrive. Instead a note from the post office told me that I had to get the package at the local post office. But I have left for Easter holiday and the package had to wait for a week. Those of you that like software updates as much as I do will know that a week is a very long wait.

9. Today – picking up the package – I realized why the postman hadn’t been able to get it through the letter opening: Garmin has for some spaced out reason chosen to wrap the DVD with an A4 sized clam shell (you know: the environment damaging PVC packaging that’s impossible to open without shredding your fingers to pieces). So, absolutely unnecessary packaging delayed the DVD a week.

10. After using a pair of heavy duty scissors I got the DVD out from its casing without blood shed and booted it up. It immediately halted with an error message saying that the setup program couldn’t detect an active internet connection (and such is needed). All I could do was to cancel the setup. Now, all other programs had no problem finding the internet connection – the pc was as online as ever. After 30 minutes of trial and error and searching the internet for help (using my supposedly non-existing internet connection), I found out that some setting deep inside Internet Explorer had to be changed for the Garmin update DVD to see the connection.

Now: The only reason that this connection had to be available was for the DVD to check my Garmin registration number with Garmin’s servers. So 30 minutes of my time was wasted because a product WHICH I LEGALLY BOUGHT needs validation. Arrgh. Of course the problem with the missing internet connection isn’t mentioned on Garmin’s support pages although more than one GPS forum mentions it. I guess Garmin’s employees doesn’t read the forums in which their loyal customers discuss Garmin products. Why should they…

11. Finally – after me tweaking Internet Explorer, the setup program continued – just to grind to a halt again when the DVD suddenly couldn’t find my Garmin unit. Strange, because the unit was perfectly connected to the pc, though, and the screen of the Nüvi shows the “connected to a pc” picture. The Garmin website suggests that I try another USB port – I do. No go. I try another USB cable. No go.

It turned out that the unit conflicted with a network drive letter on my pc. Thank god I’m not a pc novice – a lot of users wouldn’t have been able to locate this error (when did YOU last check your locigal disk setup using the Disk Manager inside Computer Management inside the Control Panel?). Of course: It’s not Garmin’s fault that I have a network drive called G:, but again: This must be a very common problem and Garmin does not mention it on the support pages on its website. And the moronic setup program does not suggest any way of solving the problem – all I can do is to press “Exit”.

12. Finally: The GPS is connected, its firmware updated and the unit restarted. I entered the validation code for the map (located on the jewel case of the DVD), and … the updater halted again. The server which was to validate my validation vode is down. “Please try again later” it says. All I can do is press Exit. I’ll just have to wait until some geek in the US gets the server up and running again.

13. By now, I was pissed. I bought this product (although it was hard to find) and now it seems that I’m not allowed to use it. So I wan’t to write to the Garmin support and tell them that their software sucks. But fortunately for the poor supporters, the support site crashes when I try to access the mail form…

Dear Garmin. This is not the way to do it. It’s not OK to be more concerned with copyright laws and data safety than to the user’s experience. An update procedure for an expensive product must be tested over and over again to make sure that the user (all users – not just a geek like me) can complete the procedure.

Multiple pieces of software, services, support functions and content has to play together to ensure a nice user experience. The service has to be designed all the way for the user to be satisfied. If that is impossible (and it seems that it is to Garmin) then at least let go of the paranoia and all the safety measures and focus on providing decent support all the way through the update. In that way the installation procedure will be simple and less prone to errors. All you do is irritating legit customers. The pirates will find a way through anyhow.
Now – after spending almost two hours and waiting for that quirky validation server to wake up – the setup procedure finally runs and is updating my GPS unit. Meanwhile it shows me ads for motorcycle GPS units (Why? I have a GPS unit – that’s why I’m updating it – morons!) and reminding me, that the little blob on the GPS screen that indicates my whereabouts can be changed to another kind of 3D vehicle. Gosh.

If all that energy had just been used on testing and improving the setup procedure and updating the support pages.

I think the whole rating/censorship ordeal has come too far when Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are is rated Explicit by Apple Music Store.

Parental Advisory! Too damn cute a song for your kids! Buy them a 9mm Glock instead so that they may defend themselves in school… What a twisted country.

Someone please point me to the juicy bits, ’cause I just can’t spot them:

Don’t go changing, to try and please me
You never let me down before
Don’t imagine you’re too familiar
And I don’t see you anymore
I wouldn’t leave you in times of trouble
We never could have come this far
I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times
I’ll take you just the way you are

Don’t go trying some new fashion
Don’t change the color of your hair
You always have my unspoken passion
Although I might not seem to care

I don’t want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you.

I said I love you and that’s forever
And this I promise from the heart
I could not love you any better
I love you just the way you are.

My Land Rover-crazy uncle sent me this one. It’s clear to see where the designer engineer behind the Defender 110 found his inspiration.

Land Rover Defender 110. In some countries used by the police as weapon against hooligans. Only the chick go faster-stripes raise its aerodynamic properties to just above those of a…

Typical Danish cobblestone, mid-nineteenth century. Typically used by Copenhagen hooligans as a weapon against the police.

Let’s continue our design comparison quest.

Hummer H1. American inferiority complex. Kills trees – and people too, if you mess up.

Husqvarna Chainsaw. Swedish sturdiness. Kills trees – and people too, if you mess up.

Outselling American brands for years, Toyota is ready to deliver the final punch to Ford and General Motors on their own turf. The concept is called A-BAT and it is, by any standard, ugly as hell. But kudos to car designer Ian Cartabiano for understanding that the ultimate American car have to look like a hand gun. So simple – why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Cartabiano says that the A-BAT is inspired by miltary trucks – yeah right. It looks more like a big, chromed 9mm to me. If Toyota decides to put this beast into production, I think it’s gonna sell Alan Mulally’s pants off.

Toyota A-BAT concept. Made in Japan for the American market.

The .357 semi-automatic Desert Eagle. Made in Israel for the American market.

(The A-BAT Found on Top Gear website).

Just before Christmas I got to test a HTC Touch Dual with Windows Mobile 6 at work. It was partly my own idea to introduce HTC Touch or Touch Dual as a possible alternative to our mainstream Nokias. That’s why I chose to ignore my mobile-savvy colleague as he offered his condolences when he saw the black HTC box on my desk. He was right, though. Windows Mobile and mobile phones don’t mix.

This was my first hands-on experience with a Windows Mobile phone as I’ve always used Nokia. I have used Windows Mobile devices before, though, as I’ve owned several WM based PDAs. They weren’t perfect but I could live with them. But, as I was to find out, the usage of a PDA differs a lot from that of a phone.

I was looking forward to the WM6 Exchange server integration (“push mail”) and to have an always updated calendar with me. And these features did work fine-ish. Except for the crummy calendar design that forces you to use the stylus constantly, that is. But even so: After five days I gave up the fight with Windows Mobile 6: What a genuinely stupid OS for a phone. Bad, bad UI design.

I think Microsoft has made a huge mistake to try to move an OS from a pc to a phone. Already after a few hours I got very tired indeed from having to get out the stylus just to close a window or to cancel an error message on the ridiculously tiny close-box in the corner of the dialogs. I don’t care if it looks like the GUI on my Windows pc – it just doesn’t work on that little screen. On a device that tiny you do one thing at the time – you don’t need the windows metaphore to allow for multitasking (it hardly works on the pc anyhow).

Also, several times when I was trying to phone someone, WM6 – being absolutely clueless about my priorities – would pop up with some reminder or other alert that really shouldn’t popup at all while I’m dialing. Just like Windows XP does, WM6 made me feel that the system comes first and the user second.

I soon started feeling that I was spending time fighting the system instead of using it. Exactly as I feel when trying to get Outlook 2007 to start in less than 15 minutes or that thrre to four hours every month I spend massaging my Windows XP into working without too many alerts or errors. Yep, Microsoft surely has succeeded moving the Windows experience to a handset. And that’s a pitty.

Three times a call simply didn’t come through (it’s a phone for crying out loud!) and four times I dialed my fathers number by mistake because of a design flaw in HTC’s TouchFLO interface (which has been added to patch some of the even bigger flaws in WM). The device insisted on merging all my Live! Messenger contacts with my professional contacts making tons of duplicates and adding a lot of contacts without phone numbers to my phone book, making finding the right version of the contact  (the one with the phone number) annoyingly difficult.

I have the feeling that Microsoft’s brand managers have had too much influence on the design. A lot of stupid compromises have been made to make the phone interface look like Windows, instead of genuinely making the OS work on a tiny screen and in a mobile user context. The design flaws combined with the Touch’ sluggish response and not always too precise touch screen makes this gadget a big no-go to me. WM6 doesn’t seem mature and personally I think it’s fundamentally flawed. I think it’ll need a complete rewrite.

One thing is spending time in front of the pc tweaking and tuning. But to have to combat your mobile phone just to get it to work the right way – that’s not OK.

I felt that I could not trust this piece of hardware to work when I needed it to – and as I rely heavily on my mobile phone I’m now back on my trusty old Nokia 6230i. No push mail – but no wasted time, missed calls or hypertension either.

This should have been an e-mail to Sterling Airlines but as Sterling is so discount that they don’t accept e-mail – it’s going on the blog instead. Well, you asked for it.

This morning I found a parking ticket in the front window of my car. I spotted it from my apartment (4th floor) and as I knew that my car was legally parked and that my residential parking permit is paid for until January 2008 I got pretty pissed. Danish parking fines are at almost $100, so it’s a real pain to get one, and I’ve been fined before without reason.

I ran down the stairs to my car, just to find that this was no parking ticket. It was a flyer from Danish low-cost, low-end airline Sterling Airlines made to look exactly like a parking ticket. I mean: You really have to read it closely to find out that it isn’t.

Some fuck up at Sterling’s agency somehow had the great idea that to get more people to fly Sterling, we must piss them off. ‘Give them a real rotten morning, then they fly with us, just to extend that rotten feeling’, they thought. It might have seemed real funny during the creative brainstorm but guess what: It isn’t in real life.

I have flown Sterling twice: The service is appalling. If your loose your luggage they couldn’t care less (my parents tried that and Sterling pretty much told them to fuck off). If you want to move to a free seat with better leg room, that’s ok – if you pay for it in cash. Their planes are very often delayed … Sterling just sucks.

Now, Sterling feels it’s ok to fondle my car to place their ridiculous flyer under the wiper and fuck up my morning. The ad even tells me to place it on my neighbour’s car ‘just to tease’. Hell I won’t! I hold no grudge against my neighbor – why should I tease him?

I really don’t need Sterling to make my day more stressful. So fuck you too, Sterling Airways – and keep you goddamn hands off my car the next time.

Logging into WordPress I discovered two almost finished drafts that I never got around to publish. One was about the launch of Axure v. 4.6 (old news now), and the other was about the European Galileo project that sadly may never fly, mostly because of some left wing politicians who can’t see the need for a civilian, European satellite navigation system (and for some reason thinks it’s better to trust that the US Military kindly keeps the GPS running for the benefit of all mankind).

Anyway, that debate is also over, so that draft went in the bin too.

I guess that what happens to a private blog when work takes up too much of your time. A few months ago I was offered a position as Head of User Experience as a part of our new matrix-organisation. Of course I couldn’t say no, although I had very little idea of exactly what a Head of User Experience does. No regrets, though.

The last month I have been working on a new (and hopefully improved) process for our interaction design and visual design phases. It will be quite simple as we do a lot of different projects and it has to fit them all in some way, but of course such a process cannot exist on its own. It needs to be tied into sales, project management and development – and anchoring just takes time and a lot of talking to different people.

My team (and all of my colleagues at Creuna) has been extremely busy too. Creuna Denmark has grown tremendously and while taking in a lot of new people we have also won lots of new clients and exciting, challenging, and sometimes difficult, projects.

While I have been fiddling with process diagrams in Visio my fellow UX-consultants (IA and AD alike) have been working like madmen (and madwomen) to meet the deadlines. Shoutouts to an extraordinarily dedicated team -  I’m seriously looking forward to having some well-earned crabfish and schnaps with you on Friday! Cheers guys.

Be afraid, be very afraid. If this was footage from a Soviet young pioneer organisation camp in the 1980′ies, just imagine what Reagan would have said – something about an evil empire, I guess.

But no: It’s a trailer for the documentary Jesus Camp showing American children being brain washed by raving maniacs to be true soldiers of god.

Notice the camouflage paint and the pledge to lay down your life for Jesus. This is beyond sick…

Just another proof that religion of any kind can and will be exploited by fanatics. Kids: Stay clear of it. Source: www.kirstensanford.com

Thanks to This Week in Science, the radio show that fights for reason and science, the Unicorn Museum is now online at www.unicornmuseum.org. The goal of the Unicorn Museum is to raise the money for a big billboard across the street from the home of absolute ignorance: The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The billboard is to feature an ad for the (non-existing, really) Unicorn Museum. The hope is to make visitors to the Creation Museum think twice… I wonder if that’s gonna happen, but still: A worthy cause!

Now that I got your attention: Go grab the This Week In Science podcast at Apple Music Store, it’s free. It’s hosted by Justin Jackson and Ph.d. Kirsten Sanford. Besides being smart Kirsten is one of the absolute lookers of the science community. As the podcast is still audio only, I here bring you a photo of Kirsten Sanford for you to look at when listening and getting smarter. Consider it a multimedia experience. Oh, read her blog too.

Shout outs to This Week In Science for fighting for a little less dumb world.

In today’s alert box Jakob Nielsen gets angry on Adobe for forgetting the OK button on a preference dialog.

And yes, of course Adobe should have added an OK button to the Windows version of the dialog, but for Mac folks, this is how dialogs have been for ages – that is without an OK button when it wasn’t needed.

So – in this case Nielsen is right (it’s always easy to be right about obvious stuff). But with his “33 years of experience using computers” Nielsen could have at least mentioned that to exclude the OK button used to be a very common design standard for Mac applications.

Also, it seems to me that with users getting used to Ajax-style “on the fly saving” of data, the missing OK button is getting more and more normal.

Speaking of benchmarking…

Have a nice weekend.

Behold, behold! The New 7 Wonders of the world have been announced. And behold again: 6 of them are extremely old buildings, and the seventh is the horrible over-sized Jesus thing in Rio de Janeiro. That for sure is no wonder: It’s just a big ass chunk of concrete erected to intimidate people not to regress into their native believes.

The 7 wonders of the ancient world really were wonders at the time. But I think we’ve come a long way since it was wondrous to build a large statue or do a nice temple. We can do that any time we want to. But building a long suspension bridge, inventing a CAT scanner or a tunnel scanning microscope certainly takes a lot more effort and does quite a lot more good. And what about nifty stuff like the GPS system, the Arecibo telescope, the International Space Station, the Saturn V – or the internet? Nah – that’s just modern crap.

So we opt for some ruins, because that’s what they did 3.000 years ago (except that the ruins weren’t ruins then). Very imaginative, people.

IE Tab. Brilliant! It runs IE inside a tab in Firefox. Excellent if your internet bank (and too much other stuff) only works for real in IE. Simply compile a list over alle the sites that you want to run in an IE context, and you never have to start IE again – manually that is. IE Tab will embed IE into Firefox when needed.

One of those tools that just makes your life that little bit easier.

At e-consultancy‘s What’s New In Online Marketing, London June 27, Flemming Madsen presented Onalytica. It’s a tool for measuring your brand’s online impact. Like Google, Onalytica counts links, but unlike the big G, Onalytica weighs each link according to the credibility of the source. Also, Onalytica (partly) understands the context of the link and thus it can judge (with a precision about 93 %) wether the brand (or product, or subject) is referred to in a negative or positive manner.

This opens for pretty nice analysis of brand impact and for targeting those sources that are especially influential. Of course your brand have to be large enough to be discussed substantially online – in reviews, in blogosphere etc.

More from WNIOM to come…

I attended this seminar in London yesterday and it rocked. The term Web 2.0 wasn’t used at all but the whole thing was about how to link your website into the web itself and how to think outside your own site. I’ll be back with a more thorough description as soon as possible.

Must be hard work to be a pope. Imagine how much work the poor fellow must have put into his 10 Commandments For Motorists. Especially the second one must have taken some serious thinking for someone who’s work it is to bring the world back into the dark ages: The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm. No shit Padre?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not taking driving lessons from an old German guy who insists on crusing in a white cabriolet while standing up.

Like this Christopher Locke’s review of The Cult of The Amateure: How internet is killing our culture.
Quote: cult of the snotnose dumbfuck

I haven’t read, I don’t think I will.

In the late nineties the University of Copenhagen shut down the department of Humanistic Computation. Scholars and IT didn’t mix, the vice deane apparently thought. IT was about programming, scholars were all about poetry and fluffy stuff. Stupid thinking – bad, bad move. Luckily in 1999 the IT University of Copenhagen stepped in and took over the market for well trained usability specialists and designers.

The idea that IT was all about numbers and algorithms also reflected onto the IT industry. Usability, interaction design and visual design were something fluffy that you applied to the web site like icing to a cake. Systems were programmed without knowledge of the user or of the user’s context and needs, and they more often than not suffered from so many conceptual mistakes that a simple revamp of the user interface just wouldn’t do the trick. To stick with the cake metaphor: It may look nice, but if the cake is genuinely bad, the icing won’t help much. The trouble was twofold: The programmers and the management didn’t understand what design was all about and we, the designers, were really bad explaining it to them. We appeared like grumpy geeks that always talked about the users and seldom about the business. No wonder: Designers were not considered a part of the business – just a part of the cost. We didn’t earn any money from the hours we spent consulting on design and concept. The projects didn’t really start, budget-wise, until the programming began.

This was of course bad for business for the web bureaus: All of the earnings had to come from a very short visual design phase and from a large, high risk, programming phase. That the conceptual design was almost non existing made the programming even more risky, as conceptual mistakes or interaction flaws would be discovered much too late in the process. This meant that quite often interaction errors were considered bugs and that we were taking immense losses trying to fix stupid design flaws that should never have been made. Just because we didn’t design before we built.

Nowadays demands are high for well educated scholars with communication skills, technical understanding, design skills, and a ‘soft’ approach to IT. Too many large scale IT projects have suffered badly from the lack of design to ignore the need for these kinds of experts. We know that the business wil suffer from bad design and profit from great design. The clients (the smart ones) are willing to pay for great design (both interaction design and visual design) and thus to bring down the risk of the programming phases.

Although a few (often large) companies still haven’t got it (they will get it, eventually, or they will suffer a slow death), most have realized that design and design consultancy are valuable business areas of their own. Furthermore, they have found out that strengthening the quality of the design and thereby the quality of the product itself may (surprise, surprise) eventually lead to bigger market shares and that branding is also a about usability, web design and the right feature set. Who would’ve known, huh?

Now we need to take the next step: We need to realize that analysis, concept and strategy must be discussed before design starts. That great design comes from a well defined strategy and clear goals.

Both the consultants and the clients must realize that it’s impossible to design – and build – anything if the strategy and business models are not there. …and that “just make it user friendly” is not a strategic goal in itself.

Too much money is still being put into platforms and websites without a well thought through branding and communication strategy. So to further bring down risk and to make each € spent on web count: Think strategic. Define your digital strategy and make sure that every website, subsite, microsite, e-mail marketing system etc. fit neatly into it. Spend the time and money needed to make sure that your consultants and designers understand what your strategy is about – or get them to help you define your digital strategy if you haven’t got one.

Accidentally moving my mouse cursor over the bottom of the MSN Messenger Window I triggered a hidden, brain dead happy-go-lucky video ad from McDonald’s. Suddenly the loud and annoying sound of the ad was screaming out of my earphones making my ears ring.

Do not auto start sound in any way. Not in banners, on web pages or any where else. Let the user choose when to use sound or not. You do not know how the volume levels of the user’s computer has been set, and no ad – no matter how cleverly produced – will work when blown into your head at 120dB.

Also, while the customer might be able to handle ads when surfing the web, it is very intimidating to be confronted with popup video ads and sounds in what you regard as a desktop application.

If this is the new way of presenting ads in MSN Messenger (or Live! Messenger or what ever the name is this week) I’m shifting to another IM that will leave me alone.

[UPDATE: Jacob Hage has the solution! - in Danish. It's all about getting this patch]

A McDonald’s video ad just waiting, ready to jump up and scare the minced beef out me.

Whammo – I’m not loving it.

Heads up: Geeky stuff below.

WordPress is very easy to install on your own server if you have even the slightest knowledge of how a web server is put together. But getting those old Blogger-URLs to translate to the new URL scheme was hard work for a non-techy like me.

Here is how I did it – in case others have the same problem (actually, some do):

Redirecting the RSS feed

First of all I wanted the old URL to our RSS feed to work so loyal subscribers won’t have to re-subscribe to the feed. The old feed was published to silberbauer.dk/rss.xml but the new feed is to be found at silberbauer.dk/feed/.

I tried numerous ways of rewriting the URL with mod_rewrite – nothing worked. Somehow my rewrite-rules conflicted with the rewriting that WordPress does on it’s own to make pretty URLs.

Finally I asked my very (very) smart Creuna co-worker Guan, and he told me simply to use RedirectPermanent instead. It works like a charm:

RedirectPermanent /rss.xml http://silberbauer.dk/feed/ Even FeedDemon/Newsgator accepted the “301″ and continued looking for the feed at the new URL.

Making old Blogger URLs point to new WordPress posts.

Then, I decided to make old blogger-URLs redirect to the WordPress version of the posts. First, I sat up WordPress to generate pretty permalinks that look as much like the old blogger links as possible, e.g.:

Old Blogger generated permalink: http://www.silberbauer.dk/2007/04/that-warm-fuzzy-feeling-of-web-20.html
New permalink: http://silberbauer.dk/wp/2007/04/that-warm-fuzzy-feeling-of-web-20

As you’ll notice: Only the “/wp/” and the missing “.html” differentiates the new URL from the old one. So with RedirectMatch we can redirect the URL using regular expressions:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])/(.*).html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2

Archive URLs

In exactly the same way the old archive URLs are redirected to the new archives:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2/

My .htaccess file now looks like this:

RedirectPermanent /rss.xml http://silberbauer.dk/feed/
RedirectPermanent /index.html http://silberbauer.dk/
RedirectPermanent /index.htm http://silberbauer.dk/

RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])/(.*).html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2
RedirectMatch permanent ^/200([0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])\_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://silberbauer.dk/wp/200$1/$2/

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress


I got this message from the CEO at eLounge - the e-book store entirely made in Flash that I posted about some time ago.

Now the site has been rewritten in good old html. I’m sure that eLounge will experience an increase in revenue almost immediately as the search engines are now able to see the site.

I still feel that the visual design is a bit confusing with too many details, but that’s beside the point. Now eLounge is a real website that may be accessed from search engines, bookmarked and deeplinked into, and we like that! Welcome to the web, eLounge.

Hello WordPress! Why? Because it’s niftier. The admin-interface is so Web 2.0 that we almost wet ourselves. Forgive us the default template.

And oh yeah: The Blogger RSS Import plugin by Ady Romantika really rules.

- and a brand is not a style guide.

To most professionals these are obvious statements. But definitely not for a lot of website owners who still think that online branding is all about Flash and nice graphics, and forget that branding is in every aspect of the site: The choice of features, the tone of voice, the response time, the ease of navigation (or lack thereof), the feeling of real value. And, of course, the looks.

I’ve even heard the top 120 pixels of a web page declared as “the branding area”. BS! Online branding is about using the web medium the right way – it’s not just about putting the right logo and the right colors on some out-of-the-box web solution.

You can’t limit your branding effort to a isolated part of the page – it’s an ongoing process. Your website oozes branding from every pixel, so you better in control of what kind of branding it’s oozing…

Your brand strategy must govern your web strategy and affect all important decisions in the design process – but on all levels, not just on the visual one: A website which doesn’t provide the user with any real value but only wastes the user’s time (or downright annoys the user by being stupidly designed or coded) is bad branding – no matter how beautiful and by-the-styleguide it is.

Now grab 10 minutes of nice, visual branding fundamentals and remember that they all apply to the web too.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap

Göran Karlsson On Search And Web 2.0

moblogging from Børsen: Göran Karlsson from Fast is so right: Search and web the 2.0-paradigm is closely connected. Specialized search technologies are the backbone that creates value from the user generated content.

Web 2.0 Seminar At FDIH

moblogging from Børsen: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal talks about the real values behind the web 2.0 hype. It’s about real change, not technology.

For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk

Pink Floyd: Keep Talking (The Division Bell)

Speaking about social networking and e-commerce at the Danish E-business Prize 2007 someone in the audience expressed his feelings about social networks and communities as nothing more than a hype. ‘Who’, he noted, ‘will spend time discussing and reviewing products on the web – I know for sure I wouldn’t’.

I guess people who haven’t participated in the buzz themselves don’t understand why someone feels the urge to talk online.

Neither did I until a couple of years ago. Being a true child of the generation of one way communication this social networking thing seemed foolish to me. Of course, as a web professional I quickly learned to appreciate community features and social navigation as nice tools for enriching the user experience. Later on my brother and I launched this blog to be a part of it all and felt the blog-urge.

But maybe I didn’t really grasp the emotional power of web 2.0 for real until very recently when my wife started blogging about what she loves the second-most: Gourmet food.

Left: Trine in our weekend cottage – outside the April sun is shining bright, but… must blog… must blog…

She’s not watching TV anymore, she’s not reading magazines – she’s always in front of her laptop working on the next post. That is, when she’s not out photographing restaurants and chefs for the blog or busy reviewing cafés or gourmet restaurants on the (excellent) community site www.mitkbh.dk

It has been quite an experience for me to see her suddenly realize to the full extent what web 2.0 is all about. It made me realize how simple it is: It’s not about AJAX, round corners or bubble design. It’s not really about the web or the internet at all. It’s just about communicating. It’s about telling other people what you like or don’t like and about experiencing the sheer thrill of meeting new friends that share your likes and dislikes. I spend more than a day creating the template of this blog and, from vanity reasons, getting Blogger.com to ftp the pages to my own domain. Not giving a rat’s ass about the technology Trine spent exactly 10 minutes picking a WordPress template and she was on her way.

Neither TV, newspapers, nor web 1.0-sites will give you that nice feeling of contributing and being a part of it all as do blogs or community sites. That’s why old school corporate websites or web-shops that don’t hook into the buzz in any way soon will be things of the past.

For designers (and our clients) it’s important to understand that the true web 2.0 aficionados out there do not care about the fancy tech-stuff of it, or the term web 2.0 for that matter. Screw the hype and the bleeding edge technology – keep it simple. They just want to keep talking.

As the last person in the western hemisphere: I’m now able to photomoblog.

Well… I guess it is easy if you’re either living in the US, having AT&T as your carrier or being the proud owner of a blogger-ready Nokia N-series or a fancy Sony-Ericsson. But living in Denmark (not supported by Blogger’s mobile service “Blogger Go”), having Sofonon as carrier and having a Nokia 6230i (which is a lousy phone for anything else than talking) – photomoblogging is up hill.

I’ve spent a lot of time testing different approaches:

• Blogger GO (not supported in Denmark)
• Shozu (Great Java app that connects to a web based distribution service that will push your images here and there. Doesn’t work well with my Nokia and Sonofon, though, and can’t connect to the new Blogger service which I’m using)
• The Flicker->Blogger interface (works great, but I can’t MMS from my phone directly to Flickr)
• Sending images directly to Blogger’s e-mail-interface (it doesn’t accept attachments)
• Using Gmail for mobile phones (to circumvent the Nokia 6230i e-mail- and MMS-features (but alas: Gmail Mobile doesn’t do attachments at all upstream)

I finally came up with this detour that in fact makes me photomoblog by MMS’ing an image to an e-mail-adress:

How to photomoblog directly to your Blogger blog (new version):

1) Set up an Gmail-address, if you don’t have one already (Gmail accepts MMS)
2) Set up a Flickr account, if you don’t have one already (To use as a gateway between Gmail and Blogger)
3) Let Flickr make you a special “mail-to-blog”-email-address
4) Grant Flickr access to your Blogger account
5) Set up a filter on your Gmail account forwarding all mail sent to a special pseudo address (e.g. yourname+foo@gmail.com) to your Flickr e-mail-to-blog e-mail-address

Now: Put your special Gmail blog-entry in your phone’s contact list – you may name it “blog”. Now, snap a picture and send an MMS to your contact “blog”. Gmail will accept the MMS and due to the filter this e-mail will be forwarded immediately to your Flickr account’s special directly-to-blog-e-mail-address as an e-mail prober. Flickr will convert this to an image with a description and push it through its Blogger-interface, and voila: Your image has been blogged!

So it is: Nokia > [MMS] > Gmail (sub address) > [e-mail] > Flickr >[Blogger gateway] > Blogger

Easy as pie…

The Danish E-business Prizes 2007 has been awarded – eight of them in all.

The show itself was OK. The Børssalen (the main hall at the 1624 Copenhagen Exchange) is a beautiful place and the food provided by “Gammel Mønt” was tasty indeed. Katrine Ring and Annette Falberg hosted the show. Neither is quite the Danish female equivalent to Billy Crystal, though.

Jesper Kunde from Kunde&Co. talked about branding and e-commerce. I think he came trough as an angry old man who really don’t get it. I bet that some of the audience – representatives from large corporations doing quite OK online, felt a bit puzzled when Jesper Kunde told them that they really aren’t. Martin Thorborg from SpamBut hey – he’s a branding guru, I’m just a consultant, so he may be right, and I may be wrong. Who knows. In fact: Kunde is right in many ways – it’s just that what he’s saying, we’ve been saying for years: Danish corporations need to understand that a corporate website isn’t enough and that the top brass has to focus on internet strategy as well as on off line branding. And that also on the net corporation need to differentiate between brands and corporation. Aaargh – it’s so obvious that it hurts. But I guess some people need to hear from a guru.

Martin Thorborg from Spamfighter (former Jubii and Yahoo) was great fun, telling us how he helped Pernille Aalund raise her revenue 400 % on dildos. He has a very straight forward way of saying things, but I like it. It’s refreshing.

As before mentioned I did a “lounge” with Andreas Johannsen (great guy, looking forward to working with him again) on e-business and social networking. It went well, I think, we got a lot of positive feed back. About 80 people showed up and we got quite a discussion going. The 90 minutes went too quickly.

As Creuna co-sponsored the event I also got to say “And the nominees are…” and to shake hands with the Minister of Science. Wauw – my own private mini Oscars-experience. (The image to the left is of me and the Minister. The Minister is the pleasant looking fellow to the right – I’m the short haired moody guy to the left.)

The logistics were very professional. The presenters were briefed, informed, and supported in every way by the nice staff. The timing was very precise and I felt it was all very professional staged. All in all FDIH did a great job this year.

But… and being a designer I have to mention this… (and I’m sorry that I’m always so negative): The big screen graphics sucked magnificently! Unreadable (and I was placed at the table closest to the stage), stamp-sized, screenshots of the nominated web sites flickered across the screen looking like something I made on my Amiga 500 15 years ago. No wait: The Amiga would have done better. Why not hire the fabulous Bottega Areté VJ-crew or someone else in that league to kick some visual ass instead? Maybe next year the 9th show will be really cool.