"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
- Steve Ballmer, USA Today CEO Forum, April 29, 2007

[Update January 4, 2011 4:29 AM: I seem to be onto something. Being featured amongst the 3 Top Presentations of the Day again.]

What will happen this year? We can only speculate and look forward to the continuation of digital history into 2011. Let's turn our attention to Steve Ballmer's CES preshow keynote on January 5 and to the Mac App Store opening on January 6 for first hints.

35. "The inventors will invent, for that is what inventors do. The technology will come first, the products second, and then the needs will slowly appear." Don Norman

34. "A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary." Jef Raskin

33. "Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is on paper." Alan Cooper

32. "The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said." Peter Drucker

31. "We are currently not planning on conquering the world." Sergey Brin

30. "Basically, our goal is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful." Larry Page in Businessweek, March 13, 2001

29. "If I hold you any closer, I'll be in back of you." Groucho Marx as Dr. Hackenbush

28. "Nine women can't have a baby in one month, no matter how closely they coordinate their work." Seth Godin A saying that has been around since the ice age

27. "Opportunity is missed by most because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison

26. "IT is not comparable to a fully sequential engineering system in which deliverables result from planning, designing, building, testing, reworking, retesting, and finalizing." Mark D. Lutchen

25. "Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast." Peter Drucker

24. "One has to do something new in order to see something new." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

23. "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." Clay Shirky

22. "A line is a dot that went for a walk." Paul Klee

21. "The term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. [...] The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people." Jyri Engeström

20. "Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features." Steve Jobs

19. "The long silence - the interruption of the human conversation -- is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day." The Cluetrain Manifesto

18. "Rather be dead than cool." Kurt Cobain

17. "These are issues that we are going to have to address, because they are significant." Ben Bernanke

16. "One finds limits by pushing them." Herbert Simon

15. "If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin." Ivan Turgenev

14. "I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted" George Best

13. "[...] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Herbert Simon

12. "Eighty percent of success is showing up." Woody Allen

11. "Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other." Kevin Kelly

10. "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five." Groucho Marx

9. "I apologize for writing you a long letter but I didn't have time to write you a short one." Blaise Pascal

8. "Fail early to succeed sooner." Matt Hunter, Product Development, IDEO

7. "Implement solutions, not features." John Geleynse, Software Technology Evangelism, Apple

6. "Don't open a shop unless you like to smile." Chinese Proverb

5. "The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." David Ogilvy

4. "Before I speak, I have something important to say." Groucho Marx

3. "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Niels Bohr

2. "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." Henry Ford

1. "Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." Jeffrey Zeldman

Thank you all for your interest, favorites, comments, downloads, and contest votes in 2010. Pls keep them up in 2011 and view the presentation! | Watch the CES keynote address! | Visit the Mac App Store opening!

"Books are an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them is an arbitrary decision on the part of the author's, making individual facts
difficult to locate."
- Paul Otlet

[Call-to-action: Make sure to thumb me up for the contest - with the BIG BLACK thumb directly below the slides on http://slidesha.re/aNOCpZ! My 2nd contest entry: http://slidesha.re/b4vAjt. Simply use your Facebook login in case you are not on SlideShare!]

The 3-year old son of a Belgian business man looses his mother early, is kept out of school, and develops a love for books and reading. Together with Henri La Fontaine he will develop the world's first search engine--on 15 million index cards!

Pursue your dream--and never accept a proven solution. View the presentation!

We have 6 months Google Buzz today.

And I have to re-phrase what I stated on the first day: I am lost.

Back then I wrote: "I used to use Google Reader. Like. Share. Share with notes. Almost a Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon. I have friends there. They share with me. I share with them. Via Friend Connect I have friends that are not necessarily my friends from Reader nor from gTalk. In gTalk I could do IM if I wanted to.

Now you tell me that I should open Gmail to do IM or IM to the world (=Twitter) in Google Buzz!? Confused. Really ...

I am receiving my first buzzes via email in Apple Mail. Spam growing. And where is Wave in all that? I need help."

At least, Google Wave seems to be gone and being integrated into the other services. A starting consolidation ...

But this should be only the beginning and I am asking for more: Google X. A service that has an integrated approach, combining Orkut, Buzz, Reader, gTalk - and everything revolving around my one and only Google Profile!

[Update November 16, 2010 5:58 AM: Welcome, Google Hotpot! Are we one step closer to Google X? At least Google seems to begin to understand the importance of "joy of use" instead of pure usefulness and usability. Or is it just another separate face - now heading Foursqare, Gowalla, Facebook Places ... What about Latitude? Confusion growing or decreasing ...]

Here come Ada Lovelace, Andra Keay, and Prezi.

Introducing her as Lord Byron's daughter and Charles Babbage's wife somehow comes counter-thematic - providing context relative to two men - as she became an international symbol for the achievements of women in technology and science more than 100 years after her death. Her notes on Babbage's Analytical Machine, the first mechanical general-purpose computer from the 1840's, are regarded as the world's first computer program.

That's right, boys, today's IT departments might be packed with men; the first programmer ever was a girl! [The debate about Babbage's contribution to the algorithm left aside.]

Andra Keay - in her own words

"Woman Warrior of the Inner West. Convergent interests in culture, scifi and computers. Excited by Newtown Kids Robot Club and Sydney Trampoline School. Passionate about TED Talks. Punk Feminist Surfie. The Personal is STILL Political."

For those unfamiliar with Sydney - including me - just looked it up in Wikipedia. The Inner West is a general term which is used to describe the metropolitan area directly to the west of the Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia.

Prezi

Credit for pointing me to Prezi goes to Rafael Azzati - mentioning Prezi was one of those living-under-a-rock minutes despite all the channels I consume every day.

Prezi takes off where PowerPoint and all other sequential presentation tools leave you alone. I.e. with the information architecture questions:

1. Where am I? [Use the circular icon at the bottom right.]
2. Where have I been? [Use the back arrow at the bottom left.]
3. Where else can I go? [Zoom out - preferably in full screen mode - and click anything.]

Follow Andra Keay! | View the Prezi!

"We'll miss him in the daily brainstorming meetings."