Stuff I’ve watched or that’s still to watch…

Source. More here: how Gene Sharp’s nonviolent tactics came to Egypt via Serbian anti-Milosevic veterans http://bit.ly/egwT7M.

Practical and candid (really rare for business presentations…) on starting and growing a software(-as-a-service) business.  The most original idea: Customer Happines Index, an metric indicating the likelihood a customer will stay.  The formula (specific for your business) is determined and refined by comparing the metrics for customers who leave and those who stay.  By contacting customers who had a high drop-out predictability, they were able to lower the churn.
(Via Pieter)

You can try the Google Suggest visualisations for yourself at http://hint.fm/seer/.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg lead Google’s "Big Picture", and used to work for IBM’s public visualization platform Many Eyes.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Shows the possibilities of a digital information overlay on top of reality…  Assisted perception (what you see and hear is enriched with other data sources and sensors), real-world actions that trigger contextually relevant changes in the interface as a side effect, subscribing you to notifications of future changes to objects relevant at a given moment.  Oh, and advertising on top of that all….

This video is illustrative for the fantastic (“TED-like”) presentations you often get at Mobile Monday Amsterdam (free to attend!).  Watch the question time as well, as the speaker absolutely demonstrates he knows what he talks about in his improvised answers…

What’s so great about Mobile Monday as well is that they publish their videos as a vodcast, so you can subscribe and watch them at your mobile device when time and place suit you…

Watched this tutorial to see Google Apps script could solve simple workflow problems within Google Apps.  Described functionality and use cases reminded me of the “Enterprise Application Integration for the Cloud” startup runmyprocess.com.

The language used is javascript, but everything runs serverside.  And of course the question of lockin is crucial here…  only commit projects to this platform that you would not have been able to realise otherwise, or projects with a life expectancy or importance low enough that you don’t care about the continuity of Google Apps Scripts.

More at the Google Apps script resources page.

Victim of the Brain is a 1988 film by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos, loosely based on The Mind’s I, a compilation of texts and stories on the philosophy of mind and self, co-edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. The film weaves interviews with Hofstadter with adaptations of several works in the book: Dennett’s Where am I?, The Soul of the Mark III Beast by Terrel Miedaner, and also the short story The Seventh Sally by Stanisław Lem. The film was shown several times on television in the Netherlands in the late eighties. (Wikipedia)

Came across it because science journalist Steven Stroeykens called it his favourite Youtube moment (the embedded version is Google Video, Youtube only allows fragments up to 10 minutes).

You might know Dan Pink from A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.

“Internet of things” is one of those metaphors in tech that is causing more harm than it is useful as most people see it as a technology/trend in itself and not a holistic description of a co-evolution of both technological and organisational developements.

This short movie by IBM does a good job in explaining the meme (via).

Interview with the 2 guys that introduced “Monkeyfist”, a tool that automates the process of doing cross-site request forgeries (via).

The guys who talked last year about hacking MySpace are back. They’ve got a new tool that automates the hacking of user-generate content across a bunch of sites. Listen to these security researchers talk about the implications of unsafe Web 2.0 security.