Leaving the firm, exit Jonathan

June 7, 2009 at 1:22 pm · Filed under Branding, Consumer Products, Leadership, Manifesting, Marketing, Reputation Management, Social networking, VC

Change – Yes we can! ~ Obama et al

Yes,  after 12 years working for a well-known consultancy I have decided to exit at the end of the month. I have learnt a lot and gained a lot of experience helping customers, inspiring people and helping the sales staff.

The crux is this: I came to the conclusion that I could never meet my ambitions and goals working within the limitations and expectations of my employer. The roots of the tree I nurtured to labour past fruits needed change to get the results I am expecting.

The stuff I have being involved with at my employer was rather, dare I say it, mundane. Yes it served a purpose, I got some very good results and helped clients. It even kept a roof over my head. However I found the environment very much risk averse, missed fun, lacked engagement and passion that comes with entrepreneurial flair.

I need to be setting my own direction, working with people who believe and are proud of their product, free where I can spend time with inspiring people in start-ups’ situations and provide venture capital to people that want to make a difference, to differentiate and make something remarkable.

So, I am turning that all around, rather than consulting about it I am walking the walk, talking the talk and focusing on generating business on the mass consumer market in terms of bringing remarkable products and services to market, the marketing and branding around this using the more modern social media and networking capabilities. The old school way of marketing and advertising is dead.

I’ve got a lot of feedback along the lines that I must be very brave considering the current economic problems. I have being through at least 2 recessions to learn that these periods bring a lot of opportunity for change. Yes it’s risky, but if your not prepared to take the risk and change then you’ll never be in charge of your own destiny. Take the bull by the horns, or to put it another way “Just Do It”.

It is great to be based in Amsterdam which has become a melting pot, a sort of mini silicon valley, with lots of bright startups and established companies. A city, yet small enough to be a village where I have and am still meeting inspiring people that want to make something remarkable, something that differentiates from the rest.

I have to admit that the change in focus feels like a major step forward and a breath of fresh air.

Welcome to the new adventure and remember… Who Dares Wins.

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Pushing paper around with Computers

May 20, 2009 at 10:48 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

I always find myself getting frustrated whenever I visit the local council offices in Amsterdam. Today I was in the Zeeburg area trying to renew my driver licence.

It was pretty busy with almost 40 people waiting and 3 desks serving people. The automated ticketing system was not working so they had resorted to a manual system. I measured that the average closure per client was 10 minutes. No wonder there was a big queue developing. After 30 minutes I decided to leave … it was a beautiful day outside and there was no way I was going to stay inside.

Have the government really changed there fundamental processes with computers?

Everything still remains paper orientated pushed by computers. Is this really where we are today… no wonder our taxes are so ridiculously high. Is this the way of the future? I certainly hope not.

I am a regular skier and whenever I visit the Ski Amade area of Austria they are very well organised with a fast turn around time from registering your application for a ski pass, taking a digital photo graph while you stand there to printing a pass with your photo on it. BTW – This photograph is displayed at any one of many of the ski lifts as you walk through the gates.

Why then does the Dutch government still resort to paper based photographs? Yes, first one has to visit a shop; pay and have your photo taken to the required specification. Then take the photo(s) with you to the council. The photos are then pasted onto a paper form and onto your identity pass. Is this productivity? Not only is it costly in terms of administration and time to process but it is not environmentally friendly.

Its time for change! Don’t put up with it. Rebel! Lobby your incompetent council members.

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Emotional Guidance System

February 20, 2009 at 8:09 pm · Filed under Personal Development ·Tagged , ,

I just love the EGS – Emotional Guidance System from Esther and Jerry Hicks book

Ask and it is Given : Learning to Manifest the Law of Attraction

Ask and it is Given : Learning to Manifest the Law of Attraction

It is a pretty simple and effective concept. Your emotions help guide you where you are in relation to where you want to be. So if you feel a discord or angry for example then you are simply not in line with where you want to be. Below is a scale from page 114 of the book to help you gauge where you are:

  1. Joy/Knowledge/Empowerment/Freedom/Love/Appreciation
  2. Passion
  3. Enthusiasm/Eagerness/Happiness
  4. Positive Expectation/Belief
  5. Optimism
  6. Hopefulness
  7. Contentment
  8. Boredom
  9. Pessimism
  10. Frustration/Irritation/Impatience
  11. “Overwhelment”
  12. Disappointment
  13. Doubt
  14. Worry
  15. Blame
  16. Discouragement
  17. Anger
  18. Revenge
  19. Hatred/Rage
  20. Jealousy
  21. Insecurity/Guilt/Unworthiness
  22. Fear/Grief/Depression/Despair/Powerlessness

The trick is to change your thoughts and try and move up the ladder of emotions. So moving from say Depression to Anger should be seen as a positive move even though people around you may not see it like that. The goal is to change your thoughts until your emotions move up the scale. Of course as challenges appear you will not stay at the top of the scale, but if you take notice of how you are feeling you can quickly correct the situation.

Great book with some fantastic tips.

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Pay for Use paradigm

February 2, 2009 at 5:59 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Last week Nati Shalom visited my company to present Gigaspaces and his understanding of what is meant by Cloud.

Interestingly we got to the Pay for Use paradigm.

At the moment I don’t have a car but rather I use the services of GreenWheels.nl or ConnectCar.nl when I want to travel around Amsterdam, NL.

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Greenwheels

Both these providers offer a car on a pay as use service with a small monthly contract charge. The fees are divided over time, kilometer usage and petrol per kilometer used. When I don’t need a car I don’t pay. Great.

In the IT world we have the same concept offered by companies such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing. This is getting to be very popular with my clients especially for short term usage in test environments. Also based on a per usage model, a fixed fee per hour based on the size of machine. Again when I no longer need the machine I don’t pay. I can scale up to use multiple machines and of course I have to pay per machine used but it is simple. A lot of clients have difficultly achieving this in their own IT department.

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Atomic Vario D2 DoubleDeck skis

February 2, 2009 at 5:51 pm · Filed under Ski, Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to test Atomic’s new top of the range Vario D2 skis.

Atomic D2 DoubleDeck

Atomic D2 DoubleDeck

The ski’s have a split at the front filled in with a plastic strip and are generally lighter than say the SX or SL range. The idea is that if you apply pressure it is possible to alter the radius of the ski. In practice I found this very difficult to use. If you are only busy with aggressive carving turns and can put pressure on the tips to turn then these ski’s are great. If your looking for an all rounder then my advice would be don’t buy these but go for the cheaper version, the D2’s without the plastic strip. I was pleasantly surprised by the difference. These are also light weight  but are fantastic for carving as well as in the powder, in the moguls or just general use on the piste.

My gut feeling was that both the SX-10 and SX-12 provide a more sturdy and sure ride at high speeds than the D2. The SX ski’s are certainly much heavier.

Atomic SX-12

Atomic SX-12

Try them for yourself!

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Using Multi-functional printer/scanner equipment over Airport express/extreme

January 11, 2009 at 1:14 pm · Filed under Apple

I have been playing with connecting my multifunctional printer and scanner the HP PSC 1315 to the Apple Airport Extreme unit using a USB cable.

The marketing features describe how one can connect a hard drive or printer using the USB conection on the Airport extreme.

Unfortunately I have concluded that this software sucks both for printers and for hard drives. I would of expected Apple to provide a proxy USB interface so to a device driver installed on the Mac it thinks the device is actually connected to the Mac and doesn’t know about a network relay to the Airport USB. For hard drives also providing a layer of intelligence to sync write caches.

What Apple have built clearly doesn’t provide this type of interface leaving companies like HP, in this case, at the mercy of Apple to provide a correct interface description specifically to use the USB port on the Airport Extreme. In my mind this defeats the whole purpose of the USB port on the Airport Express and Extreme.

The only compatible multi functional devices that are supported are WiFi based. Reading various blogs and forums I also conclude that connecting a hard drive and trying to use Time Machine is frought with difficulty. I have even tried this myself and it did not work.

Apple – please sort this out. We want the USB port on the Airport range of products to work like any other USB on the Mac!

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iPhone 3G wish list improvements

December 18, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under Apple, iPhone ·Tagged , ,

The most stylish phone on the market

The most stylish phone on the market

The iPhone is great for me it is:
- slick with a gorgeous design
- thin and light weight
- easy to clean
- brilliant colours
- designed by Apple Inc
- easy to sync
- easy to sync Google and iCal calendars using Spanning Sync

Improvements I’d like to see on current 2.2.1 software and hardware:
- That the speed and responsiveness of the phone is dramatically increased … sometimes I find myself waiting
- to be able to use the phone with my gloves on… its getting cold here
- that the GPS location positioning responds instantly … seems to take minutes. Tip: Reboot regularly!
- that the GPS location doesn’t get confused when the phone is using Wifi… for some reason it takes longer to find a position when the Wifi is engaged than not
- that I can use my phone as a navigator both inside my car and on the streets … Google maps provide limited functionality and is generally painfully slow
- that the delays when typing in the browser are removed … has become annoying
- that the problems when safari quits are resolved … have to start all over again
- that flash and other plugins can be installed … missing functionality
- that the battery lasts days rather than a few hours at best with heavy use … dissappointing
- Not be locked into a telephone provider and certainly not for 2 years
- that T-mobile increase their 3G reach and improve bandwidth and response
- that the price of the phone is halved
- that the 16Gb memory is doubled
- that more useful App’s are available
- that the current camera is replaced with at least a 5 mega pixel zoom camera … photo resolution, colour and snap shots of white board drawings are disappointing.
- that the weather forecasting provider improves there predictions… don’t seem to match local weather.
- that the speed of the stock prices is dramatically improved when using 3G … sometimes it is so slow that the phone switches off before presenting anything.

To reboot your phone press the button at the top right of the phone at the same time as the button on the flat surface at the bottom for about 5 seconds. The phone should respond by asking you if you what to reboot. You will not loose information.

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Wordle a neat utility to generate Tag clouds

November 23, 2008 at 7:47 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

A friend of mine put me onto Wordle which is a neat little utility to generate innovative tag clouds from a document, blog or rss feed.

I used my delicious tags to generate the following:

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FUD about TDD and BDD

October 7, 2008 at 10:28 am · Filed under Development ·Tagged , ,

When reading articles and visiting clients I often hear Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development mentioned but for the wrong reasons.

In my opinion a client needs to do both. Both overlap but are essentially different. We need BDD to focus on understanding key concepts that will ultimately result in a design. BDD helps clarify the requirements in terms of understanding behaviour. If its not specified anywhere then we have to hunt. TDD also helps to clarify requirements from the Test perspective.

Without any functionality built we should be in a position to verify that the target platform works and at least meets the non funcitonal requirements. This is generally a missed opportunity and generally done too late or not at all in a project. Why bother? Because during the project duration some essential components will change and we have to verify the impact. Think upgrading to a new version of Java or JBoss that can have a significant impact on how an application will perform. Deploying into different environments usually involves different individuals and organisations, think: development, integration, functional test, performance test, staging, production.

Each environment has a different configuration and we need to constantly verify that these have first been setup correctly and second that they remain setup correctly. This focus emphasizes the need for TDD to ensure that we have no surprises and more importantly risk reduction.

What stops us changing essential components is not the amount of work for the developer but rather the long testing cycles, not just functional also non-functional. In order to bring the length of a test cycle down we need to implement TDD that can be executed automatically avoiding manual intervention.

To conclude, testing, or let us call if verification, must begin from day 1 and the execution of tests needs to be as invasive as possible producing rapid feedback.

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Watching and listening to avi movies in Quicktime on the Intel Mac

September 26, 2008 at 10:04 am · Filed under Apple, Mac ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I friend on mine gave me a avi rip of the “Ashes and Snow” DVD. I liked it so much I’m going to buy the DVD for its photographic scenes and music – looks great on a flat panel screen with surround sound!

I ran into a common problems that people have whereby the playback in Quick Time doesn’t always provide the sound due to a missing codec. In this case I was missing the AC3 codec sometimes called the A52 codec. Open source products such as VLC play it correctly however I wanted it to work in QT!

After spending almost a day trying different alternatives I came across an open source version that… you guessed it … “Just works”!

Many thanks to François Planque

When I want to convert a downloaded avi file to divx I use my divx pro converter. Makes it easy.

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