É que o SAPO ficou um bocadinho mais global! Que neste caso é mais ou menos o mesmo que dizer que o SAPO já não é só .PT mas também .CV:
O SAPO.cv é um projecto marcante aqui pelo SAPO não por ser o primeiro SAPO fora de Portugal mas por todo o impacto que teve na forma como se desenvolvem os serviços SAPO. Foi necessário pensar em tanta coisa! Desde de as limitações técnicas próprias de uma sociedade insular ao simples facto de que diferentes culturas correspondem diferentes necessidades e formas de ver o mundo, pelo que uma simples cópia do SAPO não iria provavelmente ser suficiente
Custou mas está aí! E até vem bem preparado, ora confirmem só:
os (…) foram mesmo só preguiça é que há mesmo muitos, muitos serviços localizados para .CV pelo que se querem um conselho vale mesmo a pena dar uma vista de olhos!
UPDATE: O Celso escreveu um post com (quase) todos os detalhes técnicos envolvidos neste projecto! Vale a pena ler…
Dean Kamen, to me one of the most brilliant contemporany inventors of our time (know segway? AutoSyringe’s?, Insulin Pumps? and so much more…) seems to have come up with something extraordinary that might as well solve a lot of today’s health problems, have a look at his demo on the Colbert Report for the Water Purifying machine:
Singularity is an amazing idea by Aral Balkan, which many of us know from his open-source project SWX and other amazing works as Flash developer.
The idea is all about active networking and knowledge sharing, but one of Aral intentions will probably really make the difference! Aral wants to engage local groups to setup little singularities happening everywhere around the world at the same time and in parallel with the online event!
I’m so sold out to the idea that I’ve joined the speakers ranks and will be giving a presentation on my Community Design Patterns project:
As a side note, just two very quick and interesting aspects of Singularity: 1) it will represent a screenshot of the Web in 2008 and 2) by saving so many flights it will be a very green conference right?
It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’sTwitter / jaiku feeds.
Some of Leonel Moura’s works have made it to the covers of this years MIT Artificial Life magazine. The first one is out and features one of his works from the ‘Swarm Paintings‘ series.
Leonel is one of my favorite ‘Geek’ artist and so it’s expectable that I believe he is a man ahead of our time (and especially ahead of our country). Leonel gets to be my favorite simply because he manages to combine two things I really love: Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.
One of the things that really fascinates me on his works is the fact that he doesn’t simply combines them, he actually helps us visualize and feel the products of such combination, what he calls ‘Symbiotic Art‘. His works aren’t just something we get to see on a computer screen, they’re for real: real live sized canvas full of colors!
If you manage to take some time off in Lisbon I strongly recommend taking some time to check Leonel ARTe gallery in downtown Lisbon, if you’re not around you can always browse thru is portfolio and get a glimpse of his works.
Following my first day short notes and even now that I should probably be sleeping before my early flight back do Lisbon, I couldn’t resist and put up some more of my rought-notes about LIFT’s second dayt.
Disclaimer 1: I just wanted to confess that I was quite tired which implied that my attention span was, hum… somehow less than ideal. I didn’t even listened to all the day presentation’s somehow Skype back-channel seemed so cosy!
Disclaimer 2: as all personal notes, this ones also reflect my own thoughts about some of the conference presentations and as such they shouldn’t be taken literally!
Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! Holm and Philipp created the socialistic-capitalist joint-venture Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin as a way to showcase and experiment on new forms of cooperation and collaborative in work environments. They’re Hedonistic Company is grounded by 7 simple, yet powerful, principles:
Rule 1: 7 NO’s
no office
no employees
no fixed costs
no pitches
no exclusivity
no working hours
no bullshit
Radical, hein?
Rule 2: Work-Work balance
This is a particular interesting rule, since according to this guys we MUST engage client work and self-induced projects with equal energy and effort, knowing that some of the client’s work isn’t always as dear as we wish you shouldn’t really let them take over our energy and attention, meaning that you should somehow balance your client work your other personal projects in an attempt to not let any of them fall short or be corrupted by the other
Rule 3: Instant Gratification - ¥€$
Money is an incentive, but they suggest a less traditional approach to it’s ‘use’, reuse the money of each project immediately, use it as a direct incentive to your collaborators right after the project finishes, pay all the bills there’s to be paid and reserve 10% for the ’cause’. They’ve actually made a very clever suggestion regarding those pesky yearly bonus: no bonus at the very end of the year! The end of the year might fall short if you consider employee motivation, when the bonus arrives he might had just left
Rule 4: Pluralism of Methods
engage your company in trying different approaches to everyday work, experiment, tweak and perfect each ‘modo operandus’. Use collaborative platforms, online and offline and find technical solutions for social barriers/problems within the ‘company’. Real Life Meetings are so last century, take your teams to the next level online meetings!
Rule 5: live up to your intellectual obsessions
I sort of lost my self at this point… but in the end I suspect what they meant was allow and support everyone’s intellectual obsessions. We all have them! They’re a BIG part of our inner self and assure our inner balance. By supporting your teams intellectual needs, you’re in reality helping raising the integration and acceptance levels of people within and towards the ‘company’. More Motivation => More Results
Rule 6: Responsibilities without Hierarchies
There’s no eternally assigned boss, each project needs to have someone in charge, just make sure that everyone gets a seat every so often. Foster off-site team reunions!
Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination
Don’t exhaust yourself in trying to be too efficient for it sometimes has the downside effecting of reduce productivity for all the effort that goes into CONTROL! As all things in nature, so will good ideas adapt and catch on even if you neglect them for a while.
Your best advertising is NO advertising. Good products, services and ideas market themselves. No PR! Let you and your team be the best possible PR’s
Henriette Weber
Henriette is a long time friend and still my favorite Danish girl we sort of share a peculiar set of special Brainwaves (more on this on a next post) as I joked about, so I’m pretty aware of her ideas on chaos… anyway I’m drifting… Henriette managed to be selected to present a short open-stage at LIFT and as expected I thought her message was not only compelling but also impossible not to overlook again and again at this current times.
Enjoy the Chaos was the motto for the conversation, according to her we’re all part of a silent revolution, the fact is that in a consumer world, much of us (including myself) don’t fully grasp the dimension that consume has in our lives… even if it clearly isn’t making us more happy! So in the end we’re witnesses of a new reality pop here an there about where people opt-out for less as a way of becoming not only more free, but essentially more happy.
According to Henriette the same is happing in business and in particular in marketing these days and it’s of vital importance to them. The normal business approach, of business is business doesn’t seem to apply all the time anymore. But why are the companies so afraid of introducing more chaos on their processes? Aren’t they leaving out the creative revolutionaries at door?
People want relationships, a one on one relationship, whether it’s with a brand, a product or a service, so new forms of dialog are needed, the internet has surrounded us all and we simply cannot afford to leave that proximity goes by untouched.
Robin Hunicke
Robin Hunicke is both an academic and practitioner and works for Electonic Arts, it’s hard not to listen when a girl talks passionate about gaming, right? But besides being currently working on BOOM BLOX for the Nintendo Wii and having worked on My Sims, Robin pretty much took us on a journey about the Playfulness of Games and Apps.
When designing a game, a program, a Webapp, some sort of social networking platform or pretty much anything this days, it’s impossible (or should be) not looking at the importance of the Real vs Non-Real. How many games/apps have made us feel like we’re loved, important or helped us show our love with someone? Well in fact, not many according to Robin Hunicke, but at least some, being the top example of one that does: Facebook!
Facebook is a GAME! Facebook is:
Chatty:
Social:
Automatic:
Selective:
Quick:
Repetitive: adding friends, chatting with them, adding friends, chatting with them, …
Rewarding: what are the rewards? more friends? gifts? hugs? stars?
for all the above reasons, Robin stated and I could only agree that Facebook is indeed one if not the biggest social online game ever! Facebook works on rewards: lets me decide how to use it, which rewards I might wanna collect, by using it I’m bringing it more and more closer to reflecting my which makes the game in a sense pretty much about ME, like a one-on-one game and not about US or the rest of the crowd. People keep jumping into the Facebook bandwidth because of personal interest not in the interest of others. Facebook makes us feel like:
“I am a person living a fun life and i am LOVED” - Robin Hunicke
One peculiarity in Facebook and on all the so called social apps, or social networks is that is about the people that use it and not about who designs or owns the platform, pretty much reminding me my own quote on the workshop whether when me, you or someone is developing an online community, we should focus on facilitating the conversation and not controlling it in any possible way! The conversation should flow within the community freely at any given stage, for not guaranteeing it would be to sentence it to a time-delayed killing.
People are intrinsically and last time I read biologically drawn to games! No one likes chores, chores like the things we do everyday, wether it’s work, hobbies, house chores or even a relationship can become a sort of chore (which is obviously bad!), what’s missing in all of this ‘chores’? REWARDS! People need the positive reward, that price when they’ve reached the end of it, they’re goals!
Robins conclusions rocked actually and kind of made me envy her passion on what’s she’s working: Put people in the center of some universe, give them space to create and smile and something extraordinaire will pop up! It’s possible to smile at work! We just need to find our rewards!
Britain’s Prince Charles gave a speech on Monday at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, and instead of actually be there, he actually used a 3-D holographic projection of himself, recorded last year in the United Kingdom:
It will take quite some time before it becomes a mass media, but it’s already interesting to see how much we’ve evolved in the holographic field. Also interesting, is the relation between the use of such technology and the environmental savings we can get from it, we could save quite a lot of unnecessary trips by using holographic projections instead of having the real person on site, truth is, one does not need to be there to make an impression, not to mention the absence of Jet Leg
It’s obviously not the real thing, it still lacks a bit more of quality I would say, but it’s still impressive hein?
Maybe in the future, conferences and talks will actually be leverage by the amount of present or holographic speakers?
Just read on Bruno’s blog TEN golden rules/principles that I couldn’t really agree more! From his visit to Google Zürich’s headquarters he managed to collect “TEN principles of Google Engineering/Software Development”:
Single-source code repository for all Google code (G has a rather big repository, and all engineers have access to the source code)
Developers can checkin fixes for any Google product (an “open-source” approach)
You can build any Google product in three steps (get, configure, make)
Uniform coding standards (how should code “look”) across the company
Mandatory code reviews before checkin (if a developer fixes a bug in Gmail, the fix needs to be approved by the Gmail team)
Pervasive unit testing (a “unit” is the smallest testable part of a program; unit testing validates that it works properly)
Test run continuously, emails get sent (automatically) to developers if any failure is spotted
Powerful tools that are shared companywide
Rapid project-cycles, developers change projects often, and can devote 20% of their time to pursuing whatever idea/project they want (if it gets somewhere, Google will then throw some more engineers at it and turn it into a product or a feature)
Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:
and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!
The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!
We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:
Hoje é um dia importante aqui pelo SAPO! 
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! 
we sort of share a peculiar set of special Brainwaves (more on this on a next post) as I joked about, so I’m pretty aware of her ideas on chaos… anyway I’m drifting… Henriette managed to be selected to present a short open-stage at LIFT and as expected I thought her message was not only compelling but also impossible not to overlook again and again at this current times.
