Lost in Madrid

How can one forget to bring the map to get to the Usability Course? Me and Ivo got lost this morning trying to get to the course. We had an idea of the address (thankfully!) and after looking for a hotel for 60 minutes and not finding it, buying a big 4€ map that didn’t have the street name, meeting a Taxi driver that didn’t knew where the street was (neither his radio friend), we were saved by the Taxi GPS that clearly showed where the Calle of the course was. Incredibly, we arrived here on time.

February 26, 2005 | Tags: | 3 Comments 

It will be nice to JOIN 2005

Monday I’ll be in Braga for the JOIN 2005 conference. On day 1 Michael Schwern will give two talks about Lessons in Testing from the Real World and Design of Everyday Interfaces. Following that a talk by two other guys about Software Accessibility Analysis and Web Services. Ending the day another two talks about Entrepreneurship and Creating a Company: real world cases.

JOIN 2005

I’ll join Cog and few other people there. I’m still a bit worried about how I’m going to be able to get to Braga on monday morning (9:30) after driving from Madrid on sunday night. I guess I’ll have to do a lot of shared driving.

February 25, 2005 | Tags: | 4 Comments 

Methodologies of Usability Course in Madrid

Despite the heavy snow, this weekend I’ll be in Madrid for a course on Usability Methodologies. The course will cover User Testing, Heuristic Analysis, Card Sorting (an Information Architecture technique), Interface Prototyping and in the end a glimpse on Usability for other types of interfaces as mobiles, ATMs and tactile screens. This will be is a very practical course with 50 % of the time filled with exercises. Eduardo Manchón, Miquel Gallardo and Jose María Ocaña will be the hosts for the weekend.

Hopefully, next week I’ll be able to tell you how it all went. Stay tunned.

February 24, 2005 | Tags: , | 1 Comment 

The Midas List and where are they investing

Forbes published a list of the top 100 technology dealmakers. Google (and its IPO) is the company that enabled John Doerr, Michael Moritz and Lawrence Sonsini to be at the top 3 investors that made more money from tech ventures in 2004.

The 2005 Midas List

I have read a few interviews to second-place Michael Moritz who is a well known VC where he explains how he sees the Web. His opinion is much more relevant when you know that his investor successes include Yahoo, PayPal and RedEnvelope. According to Forbes his latest bets are online shoemonger Zappos and storage-hardware firm Netezza. Should we follow him on this ones?

Other companies funded by Midas List investors include Quigo that makes software to track Search Engine Marketing campaigns, Coremetrics that has expertise in web analytics, Jotspot an Application Wiki on top of which you can develop a lot of things and Bowstreet that develops Enterprise Portal Solutions.

February 10, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Rebranding TAP

TAP (Portuguese National Air Company) is one of the most recognized brands in Portugal. That’s why they are putting so much effort in a new rebranding. Brandia is the company behind the new face-lifting. The process will take around 2 years and will start by implementing the new logo on all TAP aiplanes and then all the other brand objects like uniforms.

TAP airplane

According to a Brandia spokesman the idea is to eliminate the air portugal from TAP’s image and to:
build a more agressive and more modern image that will carry the Portuguese flag all around the world without loosing nationality.

This rebranding is one of the actions that TAP is taking in order to integrate Star Alliance.

In such a big and heavy company we should aplaude Fernando Pinto (TAP’s CEO) and his team for making this and other changes that will keep growing TAP as one of the leading Portuguese brands around the world.

February 7, 2005 | Tags: | 2 Comments 

Blinkenlights: is this art or game?

This morning Ivo sent YAFM (yet another funny mail) with the link to the Blinkenlights project. It is an old project but surely it will have a long life as a icon event. So much that they did a return in 2004.

Blinkenlights Geek

Blinkenlights was an interactive light installation. Using your mobile phone, you could become a part of the event at any time. An office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz was worked out to become the world’s biggest interactive display. The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building’s front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a matrix of 18 x 8 pixels.

There were lots of different things on the display: animations, mobile driven arcade games (Tetris, Pong, Arcanoid) and you could even place your own loveletters on the screen as well. There are lots of examples in the gallery. They’ve published the complete making of including programming and electrical equipment deployment in the building.

Blinkenlights Playing Tetris

From some point’s of view this installation can be seen as art. If definitions of art state that art is the products of human creativity and also a form of human activity created primarily as an aesthetic then this installation can be considered art. Of course because of all the more basic interaction and the gaming side this can also be seen as a game. Certainly many people looked at Blinkenlights as art installation and others as a game.

It all depends on how do you look at it. I see the game as an element inside an art installation.

February 4, 2005 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

Stop. If you care.

BBC News writer Ivan Noble was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in August 2002. Since then he has been sharing his experiences in an online diary. Yesterday he died aged 37. He prepared his final column, Tumour diary: The time has come prior to his death. These are the experiences of a man that not only decided to give a fight his disease but that did it in public hopefuly helping others that read him.

If two or three people stop smoking as a result of anything I have ever written then the one of them who would have got cancer will live and all my scribblings will have been worthwhile.

As one the comments says: Your brave fight should humble us all.

February 1, 2005 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

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    andre_ribeirinho_t.jpg My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
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    Adegga - Social Wine Discovery


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