Play Blast Quit, escape from planet Smokey or Bin’um here below !
If you like our games, just go to QuittersArcade and get them on your blog too !
Emakina launches new LiveSite technology
We have already launched a first website using the LiveSite technology for a major bank in Belgium : www.ingliondeposit.com
Letter from Emakina President Brice Le Blévennec
Dear Emakina Community,
For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for an Emakination keynote.
Unfortunately, my decision to have Denis deliver the Emakination keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.
I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Emakina community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.
As many of you know, I have been gaining weight throughout 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000 and before. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.
Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “storing†in me the fat my body needs to get rid of to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.
The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun diet. But, just like I didn’t gain this much weight and body mass in a week or a month or a year, my doctors expect it will take me until late this decade to loose it. I will continue as Emakina’s President during my recovery.
I have given more than my all to Emakina for the past 17 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Emakina’s President. I hope the Emakina community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Emakina first.
So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.
Brice
(source)
Bon an neuf !
(english “Good New Year !”, but a pun in french as ‘neuf’ means both ‘nine’ and ‘new’)
My top 10 iPhone wishes for 2009
- Wi-fi detector that detect fully open hotspots by testing access to a webpage
- Search function in emails by sender, recipient, subject and content
- Tethering using Wi-Fi to share the connection with my MacBook Air
- Cut & Paste at least between emails, SMS and ideally between applications
- Viewing, editing and sharing of Keynote, Pages and Numbers documents
- Keynote presentation mode using iPhone TV output and touch interfaceÂ
- Video recording, simple editing and sharing with MobileMe and YouTube
- iChat client with sound and video support at least over Wi-Fi
- Hardware : SD card slot, zoom, flash, compass and +5 Megapixels camera
- iTunes additional Services : Books, Magazines and Porn
How often do you switch off your mail and phone to think or create?
Sim D’Hertefelt ask us on Linked in : “How often do you switch off your mail and phone to think or create?”. His thesis is that “For innovating ideas to emerge -in design, business, management, technology development…- you have to switch off your mail and phone for at least a day.”
He also ask “Do you agree? What helps you to create and innovate in your job?”.
My answer :
Innovative ideas rarely appear ex nihilo, unless you’re a real genius. They are often the result of the combination of several items. This is why at Emakina we enjoy brainstorming in a groups made of people from very different background. This is why I actually enjoy the flow of interruptions that provide me alien items that collide with my current flow of thinking. Like a lot of scientific discoveries, many of my ideas results from accidents, completely independent of my will. But don’t tell my customers 😉
My only talent is being able to notice interesting collisions and having the instinct to feel the value or novelty of a new combination in a fraction of second, before the thought is lost. I take notes in my bed, record ideas on my iPhone, write email to myself a lot, just to avoid forgetting valuable ideas.
What help me to create in my job is people very different from me, the flow of random items that populate my mails, rss feeds, tweets, and conversations on all media. Also I read a lot of magazines specialized in many different subjects (from Monocle to Wired, from CanardPC to Stuff, from Keyboards to Psychologies, …)
In summary I think that the great creative genius thinking in the silence of his Ivory tower is a cliche that only non creative people believe in.
All creatives knows that creativity is a talent “inné” that you cannot learn, but you can force yourself being open to the flow of items (subscribe to as many flows as you can), train yourself to observe new combinations, practice systematic checking of novelty and value. In the end only the good ideas counts.
Imagine a wiki for collaborative musical composition
There is one lingua franca that is understood around the world by most musicians, disregarding their origin, mother language or style : the musical notation.
Let’s create a wiki (read & write pages), that would be able to display musical notation, for example using a combination of special musical typefaces and flash similar to sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). To edit the pages you could write using keyboard keys (A, B, C, …) a piano scale, or click in a rich interface to draw notes on scales, like in early musical composition softwares.
Music is by essence the collaborative effort of composers and musicians to achieve a common piece of art. Now imagine what musician around the world could do with a wiki web based platform to share their compositions, collaborate across space and time to create global symphonies, improve each other compositions, rework existing pieces, …
This idea is now free for anyone to pickup. Please mention me in the credits, so my kids can be proud of me 😉
Being Brice Le Blevennec
For those of you who toughs that Spike Jonze’ Being John Malkovitch was a fiction, I must now confess that this cult movie is a ripoff of my biography. Many years ago a belgian puppeteer took control of me. This is why often during brainstorm at Emakina I seems to behave like if I was completely insane, pretending to invent mad concepts, sometimes even pitching them to very conservative customers at the risks of loosing all my hard earned credibility.
The truth is that there is somebody in my head, seeing reality through my eyes, manipulating my body, makes me behave strangely, … this is not really me. I’m actually a very boring person, with little imagination. My favorite past time is Solitaire on Windows 95 and I hate burgers. But nobody believe me when I tell the truth!
Sometime, he leave my mind, usually during football competitions or Formula 1 races. During one of those relief periods, I could do some research, and look what I found now…
This puppeteer is actually an digital creative, frustrated by miserable studies, who use me to seek revenge by achieving a successful career as digital creative. According to my sources, he found a portal to my mind between floor 2 and 3 in the Belgacom Proximus building around 2001. During a few years he just spied my boring life, trying to emulate me, but since 2005 he took control of me and use his talent to fool the world !
I know it’s hard to believe this story, but after an gigantic mistake, probably due to his sizable ego, I could finally locate his secret blog… On which I found this picture as an indisputable proof. I hope it’s convincing enough for the doctors to let me go now. I want to go try Solitaire on Windows Vista… and eat a salad.