AWS Enterprise Summit, Frankfurt

Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple ...

How would you define the amazing companies that are so often quoted in presentations? Those companies that innovate and create and make great products… What do they have in common?

They all share a lot of small things done right. Everything matters, and everything adds up. That’s the message of this paragraph: there are no shortcuts.

What' s different about the above companies is that they are learning machines. They have an intense bias to action and a high tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and product iteration. They hack together products and services, test them and improve them, while their legacy competetion edits project plans in Powerpoint.

Now that we know, we just need to leave our own mark in the world. In the Cloud.

Zum Beispiel hier in Deutschland: Cliqz in Offenburg.

(Die Cliqz GmbH ist ein Münchner Startup mit 62 kreativen Köpfen aus 26 Ländern. Unsere Motivation ist es, dich schneller und sicherer durch das Internet zu navigieren. Die Cliqz GmbH ist eine Mehrheitsbeteiligung der Burda GmbH.)

Und hier die Presentationen der AWS Summit.

Siehe insbesondere die von Marc Al-Hames, Co-CEO, cliqz.com (Burda) und Timo-Klaus Barthelmes, Head of Digital Innovation, Aesculap AG.

Thirsty fish

The central problem is not that...

You think too highly of yourself

Nor is it that you think too lowly of yourself

Instead, it is that you think constantly 

of yourself.

-From "Aphorisms for Thirsty Fish" by Wu Hsin.

Written 2,500 years ago, and yet, it feels like it could’ve been written yesterday. 

Happy St. Patrick's day Joyce!

 

Sportlerehrung in Trossingen

Es ist ein kleines Jubiläum gewesen: Zum 25. Mal haben die Stadt Trossingen und die Sportvereine ihre erfolgreichsten Sportler ausgezeichnet. Und jeder, der herausgestochen ist mit seiner beeindruckenden Leistung erhielt als Dankeschön und Anerkennung neben der Urkunde noch einen Gutschein für den Eintritt wahlweise in die Troase, ins Auberlehaus oder ins Harmonikamuseum.

„Es ist schön, dass so viele aktiv Sport treiben“, erklärte Bürgermeister Dr. Clemens Meier. "Die Stadt gebe jedes Jahr fast eine Million Euro für den Sport aus, für Vereinszuschüsse und für die Sanierung der Hallen. Trossingen sei „auch eine Sport-Stadt“.

Ob Ringer, Läufer, Fechter, Kegler, Handballer, Reiter, Karateka oder Leichtathlet – sie alle haben wieder Großes geleistet und durften nun den Beifall des großen Publikums in vollen Zügen genießen. Denn sie verhelfen mit ihren großartigen Leistungen der Stadt Trossingen auch zu Aufmerksamkeit über die Kreisgrenzen hinaus und standen deshalb zu Recht im Mittelpunkt.

Mr. Spock

I was sad to read of the passing of Leonard Nimoy, Spock in Star Trek. In the hands of a lesser actor, Spock could easily have been a shallow nerd. But Leonard Nimoy played him as a character who was logical, sophisticated and intelligent.

In so doing, Spock in particular was an inspiration to programmers in the 1970's when it was fashionable for science fiction on TV to be mainly silly and confused. He was a good antidote to that before the hichhikers guide.

I was not a committed Star Trek fan then, simply because I was in Germany and didn't see much english TV. Star Trek was however the only TV show that was free to present ideas about humanity and society and in spite of that it was unpretentious, it did not present itself as a highbrow philosophy program.

That, of course, is part of the point of being intelligent. If you are intelligent, you can say things that ordinary people understand. If you can't, maybe you aren't.

Kicking and Screaming ..

Unfair things happen in life. You might be diagnosed with a disease, demoted for a mistake you didn't make, the ref might make a bad call, an agreement might be broken, a partner might let you down.

Our instinct is to fight these unfairnesses, to give in if there's no choice, but to go down kicking and screaming! We want to make it clear that we won't accept injustice easily, we want to teach the system a lesson, we want them to know that we're not a pushover.

But will it change the situation? Will the diagnosis be changed, the outcome of the situation be any different?

What if, instead, we went at it happy and smiling? What if we walked into our four-year prison sentence determined to learn more, do more and contribute more? What if we saw the derailment of one path as the opportunity to grow or to invent or to find another path?

This is very difficult work, but it seems far better than the alternative.
-thanks to Seth Godin once again!

Mofo remembered

"[Mofo] . . . became the heaviest song maybe we've ever written. I feel like my whole life is in that one tune."
- Bono.




"Is it, isn't it?" Yes, it is the smoothest badass entrance I've ever seen, they could not possibly open a show in any better way!

Coming in through the audience, no other band can do that, just U2.
Those who criticize U2 just haven't seen this live! (I was there, not Mexico city but Mannheim in the rain, Sommer 1997).

Fotodesignarri 2015

Wer wird meine Fotos kaufen? Who will buy my Photos this year?

Strange Noise Festival 1996

"Almost no one" is going to buy your photos. Almost no one is going to become a true fan. Almost no one is going to tell someone else about your work.

Almost no one is going to push you to make your work ever better.

But if 1% of the people in Trossingen (15177) does decide to buy, that's 151 people in the category of "almost no one."

If only 1 out of 10,000 internet users finds your photos, that's still hundreds of thousands of people.

The chances that everyone is going to applaud you, never mind even become aware you exist, are virtually zero. Most products and individuals that fail make the mistake trying to please everyone, and end up reaching no one.

So that's the wrong thing to focus on. Better to focus on making almost no one happy and proud.