Category: Innovation

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Force touch is the new multi-touch

When I first saw the video demonstrating Force Touch on one of Huawei’s new phones a few weeks ago, I found the feature pretty much useless. You have this amazing new sensor, and a scale application is the best you can do with it? Supposedly, the Chinese manufacturer has beaten Apple at introducing this new feature, but the fact is, Apple has done something completely different. The Force Touch 3D Touch - iOS integration has the potential to change the way we interact with our phones, in a similar way than multi-touch gestures did years ago.

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written 23:12 CET on chronolog
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Cool Slovenian brands, part 3: The rise of the Slovenian hardware startup

I've been writing about Slovenian startups for years now. In a post I published in the beginning of 2012, I've highlighted a few Slovenian companies there were able to gain global traction, and as you can see, all of them are focused on software. About a year later, I wrote on the topic again, and this time, the spotlight was on a new generation of companies, which were fueled by Kickstarter and the crowdfunding movement. These businesses were able to find their market with niche products that were interesting to the public mostly because of their innovative design. This year, I'll focus on the third generation of Slovenian technology startups, represented by companies that were able establish something that actually seems so logical today: the rise of the Slovenian hardware startup.

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written 9:55 CET on chronolog
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Me vs. IT 2.0 vs. Enterprise 2.0

In 2009, I was very excited to present a few funky things we've been developing with Neolab, at the largest independent IT conference in Slovenia. The world was obsessed with "2.0" back then, and we were determined to join that hype. Facebook was already big at that point, and it was becoming clear they will make a huge impact on the future of technology. Tim O'Reilly wrote a seminal article on the topic, arguing how Web 2.0, the new generation of the internet (and software!), has changed everything.

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written 21:41 CET on chronolog
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Cool Slovenian brands, part 2: The stars of Kickstarter

Kickstarter got my attention back in 2010, when Diaspora successfully raised $50k. This is the amount they required to develop an open source alternative to Facebook, where people would have full control over their posts and multimedia. It was a good idea, but too complex to easily implement, and the guys never managed to make it fully work. But there are other projects who did manage go big, making Kickstarter and crowd-founding an everyday thing. Today, numerous ideas, products, and even movies are financed this way, while statistics tell an amazing story: in 2012, Kickstarter pledges topped $300 million.

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written 23:25 CET on chronolog
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Reinventing the blog, part 2: The challenges, the opportunies

After the initial dissection of the most innovative and well designed blogs, it's time to go behind the scenes. We've seen how some of these blogs look like, but there's even more value in understanding why they look like they do. Every good user experience analysis needs to have a clear overview of the goals and good insight into the problems of the situation, and I will try to outline these by using my blog as an example. A lot can be deducted by monitoring the basic Google Analytics reports.

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written 13:42 CET on chronolog
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5 reasons why I won't steal your idea

Since I'm a software architect and a web developer, I get often approached by people with their new ideas. In most cases, for some quality feedback, and on lucky days, for a rough quote about the costs of such a project. These people are usually very secretive about what they have, making me explain to them that it's far from my interest to steal that idea. One time, a guy even made me sign a Non-disclosure agreement before I could make him an offer for a service he was thinking about. After bargaining with me, he chose a different contractor, but ended up doing nothing, at least to my knowledge. He was obviously focused on the wrong things, instead of getting feedback from as many sources as possible, he was investing energy into bureaucracy and protection of his idea. Let me tell something to him and all others out there: Focus on your product, and don't worry about me stealing your idea. I won't. I have at least five reasons not to.

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written 10:22 CET on chronolog
27916 views   •   4 likes   •   13 comments  •   Like   •   
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A case study in agile development: the algorithm for Ljubljana Realtime's event discovery

When we started working on Ljubljana Realtime, we decided to approach it in an agile way. Amongst others, we wanted to use a few interesting lean concepts such as rapid development, Minimum Viable Product and the Build - Measure - Learn iterations. Less than two months later, the results are in, and they are very pleasing. The MVP in the shape of an activity map was developed in a few weeks, only to show there is a lot of social noise which will somehow need to be taken under control. But that's currently low priority, since the first pivot is already taking place, slowly shifting the focus from the rich map application towards an event discovery algorithm and stream. That's where I see the most potential of Ljubljana Realtime, and in the last weeks, that's where the most work was done.

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written 21:01 CET on chronolog
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