Fast Cities 2007
In today’s highly linked world, one might say that the geographical location of a business does not matter anymore, after all, the Internet lets you work with anyone, anytime anywhere, right?. Wrong, businesses still depend on good locations and there are people out their that want you to help with finding the right one.
Fast Company, just published their 2007 listing of Fast Cities. The list is essentially a guide on great (perfect?) places to start your new business:
You’re smart, young, newly graduated from a university with the whole world before you. You could settle in a small town with well-tended lawns, pancake suppers, and life on a human scale. Or you could truck it to the big city, with all its din and dog-eat-dog lunacy. Your choice?
While the list in itself is pretty interesting and contains good advice on the various hot spots, I wonder why so few European cities and especially not one Dutch city made the cut.
Yes, there is a kind fright amongst European companies as far as innovation and great business ideas go, but still, we aren’t doing that bad, are we?
Microsoft choose to beta test their Live service in the Netherlands first. Why? Because we have the highest broadband penetration in the whole western world.
Whenever you check out new technology, there is some kind of Dutch influence. Be i that we helped produce the product, helped support it or just am the nation with the most users of said product.
We might not always come in first, but we surely are not the last ones to finish, so why are we not on the Fast City listing?
Let’s have FON!
While enjoying some drinks with Dick Hardt at this year’s The Next Web Conference, a random guy approached us and handed us a business card each. On first thought, I took it for a feeble attempt to get his name out and just put the card away.
The next day, after reviewing the stash of goodies that I collected, I took a better look at the card and it turned out to be a voucher for a free FON router.
I’ve been playing with the thought of setting up a La Fonera for quite some time now, but always decided not to proceed with my plan, because of the initial cost.
Long story short: I’m now running the (currently) only FON router in this neighborhood and if you happen to be a FON user too, feel free to stop by and snag up some of my WiFi.
Sophomore year, finished!
On Wednesday, I officially finished my second year in college and I’m kind of glad that we finally got some time off. Our learning environment is highly competitive and filled with stress, especially in the final days, hours, minutes of a project. While I don’t have any problem coping with the stress and actually enjoy it, at times, it’s quite nice to not have to get up way too early and not have to prepare something.
The second year provided me with interesting insights, especially in regards of Flash ActionScript (still AS2 though), Processing (a powerful little IDE) as well as interaction design. We’ve conceptualized and built a great many things, some better than others. All in all however, it was a good year, not as great as it could have been, but definitely not sub par. The end of year 2 also marked the time where our groups split up to specialize in one of four areas of expertise:
For all those that are interested in creating the visual part of a CI, love to play with typography and create posters, media design is the way to go.
For those looking to create concepts for great ideas and better understand the psychology behind selling a product to customers, interaction strategy will be the profile of choice.
For those that are training to be interaction designers, with a deep understanding of user interface and user experience design, information and interaction will be the best solution.
And, finally, for the (rather small) group of people that wants to specialize in the development of Rich Internet Applications and web services in general, as well as interactive setups and discovering new trends, creative technology is going to be the name of the game.
Given my interest in technology, I opted for the creative technology set of classes. After talks with people who already work in the very field I plan on working in, I realized that a strong understanding of the technical side, paired with a sense for marketing is the best way to go.
We’ll see how good (or bad) a choice this will turn out to be…