LukasRos' Blog

Web Montag Frankfurt Meeting #38

Sat, 19 May 2012 16:41:43 +0100

On Monday, I made a trip to Frankfurt in order to visit the Web Montag Meeting Frankfurt #38 (web monday) at the Brotfabrik. I have attended this event a couple of times starting back in 2006, but I haven’t been there for more than a year.

It was great to feel the vibe of the geek crowd at such an event and overhearing people talk about hashtags and checking in with Foursquare. That alone was worth it, since I haven’t been at any similar event lately.

At 19:30, Ali-Pasha Foroughi, one of the organizers, took the stage, thanked the sponsors and welcomed the first presenter. Every time he spoke, Ali put a lot of emphasis on the local nature of the event, reassuring everybody in the audience that there are things going on in the Rhein Main area, not just Berlin and Silicon Valley (“Rhein Main rules!”).

There were four talks on this evening:

Surviving re:publica - report from the “school trip”: Jan Eggers a.k.a. @untergeekDE (who is doing social media for the public broadcaster hr) told about his experience attending the re:publica conference in Berlin. He said journalists are trying to grasp this event and describe it with one headline which is not (or no longer) possible. Thus, he didn’t try it and rather told only a few highlights and anecdotes. Aforementioned journalists also keep on using the term “Netzgemeinde” (net society), which is totally inadequate to use since there is no working network at the conference … . His highlights were @RegSprecher (representative of German government), scientific analysis of personalities in comment threads (trolls, anyone?!) and the poll for the worst web video. What I personally found interesting is that Twitter was the biggest corporate player at this “blogger conference” and the company was placing a lot of emphasis on being “the second screen”, probably in an attempt to find a distinctive feature over Facebook.
The Cloud - you’re deeper in than you think: René Büst, a technology analyst for clouduser.de, told the audience that everyone is in the cloud. Then he proceeded with an explanation of cloud computing, describing terms such as public vs. private cloud, IaaS vs. PaaS etc.. The presentation was focused on the fundamental basics, maybe too high level for the attending crowd?! I had the impression the people around me already knew what they were told. One interesting remark, though, was about the cloud challenging corporate IT departments, which often cannot act fast enough and so other departments bypass them and purchase resources directly from external cloud vendors. At the end of the talk, the CloudCamp Frankfurt was announced. I’m curious how this partly barcamp-style event will turn out and how they broad topic cloud computing will be packed into one day.
Designtage Wiesbaden: Did you know that the small town of Wiesbaden has over 600 design agency?! I didn’t. Those agencies celebrate themselves and connect with local SMBs at the annual design days. This was the second report from another event on this evening, but it was presented in a quite different style. The speaker, Tina Rötter, is a print designer, but was qualified for speaking at a geek event by her dog (who also took the stage with her) having his own Twitter account …
Oli.TV - an online concert portal: This talk was different from the others because it was a startup pitch. Still it was maybe the best and most engaging talk of the evening, thanks to the passionate and very likable founder Sebastian Knoll who really knew how to pitch his idea of streaming concerts online. They’ve already signed major artists (such as Alicia Keys and 50 Cent - “my brother is the tour organizer for 50 Cent”) and they have a clear business model in terms of pricing and marketing. However they are still at the start of building the product and looking for developers, on both this evening and at Startup Weekend (which was also announced at the event). What I’m wondering is why I missed this company at the code_n CeBIT booth …

All in all, the talks were not mindblowing but nevertheless interesting. I’m planning to go next month as well, since it’s a great way to feel as part of the “Netzgemeinde” :-) I hope I’ll find more networking opportunities then as well.

In case anybody wants to attend the other events which I’ve mentioned: When signing up for Startup Weekend, the code webmonday gives you 25% off.

Everybody knows there’s a movie about Facebook and Mark...

Fri, 18 May 2012 19:48:27 +0100

Everybody knows there’s a movie about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, but on this #FunFriday you learn there’s a musical, too! Happy weekend :-)

There hasn’t been an acoustic cover on #MusicMonday for...

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:02:07 +0100

There hasn’t been an acoustic cover on #MusicMonday for some time, so come and see Noah’s cover of Sexy and I know it by LMFAO.

By the way, I featured the same song before on FunFriday as an Obama remix.

It’s #FunFriday, and here’s the true reason why cats...

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:23:41 +0100

It’s #FunFriday, and here’s the true reason why cats walk on four legs and not two like humans. Happy Weekend :-)

German Hip Hop and German Brass Band Music combined on this...

Mon, 07 May 2012 18:30:46 +0100

German Hip Hop and German Brass Band Music combined on this #MusicMonday with Shopping by Moop Mama.

At first glance, this #MusicMonday tune is a simple laid-back...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:01:25 +0100

At first glance, this #MusicMonday tune is a simple laid-back “summer feeling” track. But Jahcoustix feat. Shaggy - World Citizen (which originated from a social project in Berlin of the same name) has an important political message: Our origin or religion shouldn’t matter, because we are all citizens of the world!

Google+ vs. Facebook

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:20:02 +0100

Is Google+ doomed to failure or will it be a Facebook killer? These are the observations from an active user of both social networks:

Nerds vs. Non-Nerds / Men vs. Women

If I compare my Google+ circles with my Facebook friends however, there is a striking difference: Most of my college friends from computer science and IT colleagues are on Google+. And many of them have have abandoned or even deleted their Facebook account, or they had none in the first place. On the other hand, none of my family and few others are on Google+. I have only two women in my circles and none of them are active. My Facebook friends, on the other side, contain a broad range of different people and gender is balanced. Interesting. Let’s see whether we can find a cause for this observation!

Circling vs. Friending

Facebook friendships are always mutual, confirmed by both sides. Managing lists etc. to group one’s friends is optional, a featured tucked on and rarely used by the majority. When adding a person on Google+, though, I have to decide which circles to put them in and circling is a one-way connection, with no obligation for the other person to follow me back. This does not only make it easier to connect with strangers due to the lightweight, less binding nature of circling, it is also an important psychological difference. My theory is that especially girls may find one-way relationships creepy and “stalkerish” and even if they search for an entourage, this is no replacement for the mutually-verified friendship. Geeks (both male and female) may be attracted by the idea of grouping relationships into circles. Men in general will see the opportunities for networking (Psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister has a talk worth reading called “Is there anything good about men?” that explores differences between men and women without judgement and he basically says something similar).

Quality vs. Quantity

Google’s Vic Gundotra says a write access to Google+ for external applications is “not coming anytime soon” as he’s afraid of “polluting” the stream. So far, Google+ is no secondary usage place, there’s only original content. This leads to less, but more meaningful content. A focus on quality. Facebook, on the other hand, has focussed on quantity with their launch of Timeline and Open Graph. Even if I’m not visiting Facebook for days, my timeline will fill itself with music from spotify, foursquare checkins, Tumblr postings or even just content generated about me by other users through “frictionless sharing”. This way, they achieve a true ambient intimacy for some, while others will just go “meh I’m not interested what my friends eat for breakfast”.

Professional vs. Personal

I think Google+ looks like the typical Google product: A clean, well-thought interface but not as creative and simple as many others. And to me it looks much more professional, but not in a LinkedIn-this-is-my-CV-kinda way. It looks like a place for conversations with peers, both known and unknown, and many early users said that it’s much better than Facebook for this purpose; also because the stream is really focussed on original content and no secondary usage. Google+ has games but they made sure they’re separated from the main feed of updates. Users who have been bombarded by FarmVille, CityVille and “WhateverVille” requests in Facebook may sigh in relief when using Google+.

Conclusion

Being able to write a long blog post about the differences of Facebook and Google+ proves the fact that one is not merely a clone of the other (and I haven’t even written about the largest unique feature of Google+, the Hangouts). They seem to serve different needs for different people. Some need one, some the other, and social media pros will use both, propably with a third party aggregation tool. Maybe Google and Facebook, while obviously being competitors in this space, will hurt themselves more when trying to copy the other instead of focussing what they can do best.

What do you think?!

If you were bullied in school for being a geek or nerd, this...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:01:28 +0100

If you were bullied in school for being a geek or nerd, this #MusicMonday brings you Felicia Day’s anthem for paying back your old enemies - because you know now you‘re the one who’s cool!

Set up a WiFi-to-LAN Gateway

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:18:07 +0100

Do you have any devices with a LAN port but no WiFi (e.g. a TV or gaming console), yet you want to put them into places where you can’t install an Ethernet cable? There is a simple solution to this problem, and you get the extension of your WiFi coverage for free!

Extended WiFi coverage was a good hint to the solution, because actually the setup is this: you set up a second router/access point as a WiFi Repeater with WDS and then hook your LAN device into the router’s LAN port! Simple as that.

I implemented the solution for my parents who have an old computer which somehow refuses to connect to the WiFi network. An new router came with an upgrade of the DSL connection, so the old router was obsolete until I gave him new life as the WiFi-to-LAN gateway. The devices used were a Fritz!Box 7390 as the base station and a Fritz!Box 7050 as the repeater. If you use different models, you can this as a basic guide but the settings might differ.

The setup steps are as simple as this:

Connect to the router you want to use as the base station (as usual) and find out the MAC address.
Disconnect from the WiFi and connect your computer to the router you want to set up as a repeater via LAN cable.
Open the repeater’s admin page. It’s now still available under fritz.box or 192.168.178.1, but that needs to be changed, otherwise both routers will have the same IP address.
The repeater router doesn’t need its modem functionality, so set the Internet Access to LAN. (Note: In the Fritz!Box 7050 this option was confusingly called “Internet via LAN A” - the port which the computer is hooked up and thus is not the source of Internet connectivity - but it works fine!)
Change the IP address from 192.168.178.1 to 192.168.178.2. The DHCP, default gateway and DNS is set to 192.168.178.1, the address of the base station.
Set up a fixed WiFi channel and set the SSID and WPA2-Key to the same values as on the other router. Enable WDS and enter the MAC address of the router which you want to use as the base station. Be careful: If you accidentally enable WDS without setting up the proper authentication, your computer will get disconnected and can’t just connect again because there is no DHCP server. (If if happens, though, just set up a fixed IP address for your computer as a temporary fix.)
Now configure the base station for WDS. The firmware of the 7390 automatically finds the repeater and allows you to select it. If it doesn’t find it you need to copy&paste the MAC address.

While the configuration is quite simple, you have to be careful to which network you are connected while configuring. Sometimes you have to disconnect and reconnect before you can access the Internet again.

One remark security: WDS allows only WEP encryption, if you use routers from different brands, since the WPA encryption implementation is vendor-specific. My example works since both routers are from AVM.

For this #FunFriday, words of Barack Obama’s speeches were...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:42:31 +0100

For this #FunFriday, words of Barack Obama’s speeches were taken to recreate the lyrics of Sexy and I know it by LMFAO. Awesome work! Well, covering LMFAO is not only for brass bands.

What if Twitter would have been invented in the 80s? This...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:00:28 +0100

What if Twitter would have been invented in the 80s? This #FunFriday video features an MS DOS based client and authentic modem sounds. Wondering if this client actually exists.

By the way, you can follow my blog on Twitter, my username is @LukasRosBlog.

Happy Easter to all of you!

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 19:54:00 +0100

Happy Easter to all of you!

What is HTML5?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:00:05 +0100

I’ve always thought HTML5 is only a buzzword, just like Web 2.0. Well, it seems there is actually something that clearly distinguishes HTML and HTML5:

Gladinet

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:00:06 +0100

If you use cloud storage such as Amazon S3 and if you’re a Windows user, you may want to check out Gladinet, a tool which I regularly use and recommend. Basically Gladinet creates a virtual drive on your computer. Then, through the Gladinet Cloud Desktop Management Console you can mount cloud storage as folders on this drive. I use it almost exclusively for Amazon S3, but it supports Google Storage for Developers, Windows Azure, Windows Live Skydrive, box, custom FTP servers and many more. What I like about Gladinet is that you only need one software to access all of those providers and that it really works like a local drive (it has its own drive letter) from all applications, even from command line, unlike network paths or Windows Explorer extensions.

The basic version is free. There are premium versions with remote backup and other features.

What I would really like to see however is improved Picasa support (currently I can only access thumbnail-size pictures), support for Dropbox (because I’m looking for a good way to access files in Dropbox without syncing to my desktop) and also support for SSH File Transfer so I can get rid of WinSCP. Hopefully someone will read this and write a plugin :-)

This week’s #MusicMonday song is Rock, Spanish and 22...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:00:06 +0100

This week’s #MusicMonday song is Rock, Spanish and 22 years old - so all in all very different compared to my previously featured songs. It comes from Héroes del Silencio and is called Entre Dos Tierras. I blame the discovery of this song to the radio station my alarm clock is tuned into as they regularly play it.

Kidding Mo

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:00:06 +0000

Kidding Mo:

Is there a better way to celebrate #FunFriday than making a funny prank call with Kidding Mo? I don’t think so! Kidding Mo is available for download for iOS devices in the iTunes App Store in English- and German-speaking countries.

The #MusicMonday song for this week is from Iranian-Swedish...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:00:06 +0000

The #MusicMonday song for this week is from Iranian-Swedish singer Arash and is called Melody. Arash made a nice “crowdsourced” music videos with a huge number of participants from all over the world.

CeBIT

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:22:05 +0000

One week back I attended the largest ICT trade fair, the CeBIT in Hannover. Having been there in 2004, 2005 and 2007, I thought it’s about time in 2012 to go back and see how the IT sector is doing. This is my personal report.

There’s been talk about the fair struggling for multiple reasons. First of all, huge trade shows like this are no longer as important as they used to be and many companies prefer smaller private events (think Apple) or specialized conferences, such as the MWC for mobile or the CES or IFA for consumer electronics. Innovations and product announcements happen at those events, not at CeBIT, and even though I walked through the whole fairgrounds (and my legs still hurt thinking of it) I felt something is missing, compared to my last visit 5 years ago. There wasn’t any big trend, except maybe cloud computing, but that’s not really something tangible on a fair.

What CeBIT is definitely good for is to get an overview on how broad this whole IT field is and how many different people you can find, from the DIY nerds at the betahaus co-working space and pro gamers at the Intel World Championship in hall 23 over young bright startup geeks to the business and government people in suits and tie.

I was looking forward to Webciety, the place where I expected seeing “my” part of the IT sector, however I was disappointed since the area was small and the exhibitors were not very interesting. I can’t say anything about the conference part, since trying to see everything in one day didn’t leave time for sitting down and listening to presentations.

The public sector with universities and research groups (such as Fraunhofer) had a large presence on the fairground, especially in the CeBIT lab section, and they had some interesting products and concepts to show; from semantic workspaces over digital identity to connected television and Android security analysis.

My personal highlight, and what really made up for the rather disappointing parts, was the CODE_n booth. CODE_n was a startup contest under the banner “shapping mobile life” which sponsored their finalists an opportunity to present themselves at the booth. Me and my friend, with whom I went to Hannover, spent quite some time there. This booth had interesting products from semantic document management (blitzbox) over mobile payment systems (splendo) to new car sharing concepts (carzapp), but what really made the visit an awesome experience was the spirit of motivation among the exhibiting founders, and the fact that some products were still in early beta (I’m looking at you, ID-enter :-)) was rather likable.

Few other notable observations from my CeBIT visit were the fact that Google dedicated its whole presence to Google+ which resembles the whole way how they act as a company lately, wearing 3D glasses with head tracking is quite impressive (the head tracking part more than the 3D part) and that I seem to be personally incompatible with Microsoft Kinect. And also, scantily clad “booth babes” were a rarity on the fair; all except maybe 2-3 exhibitors preferred having their female staff wear professional attire or a simple company logo t-shirt. While I guess some may have been disappointed by this, I rather see it as a good thing that underlines the professional nature of the event.

What’s my conclusion?! Well, I think it was worth going, but I’m not sure if I’ll go again next year. Maybe again after few years, or when I’m an exhibitor myself :-)

This #FunFriday, go and find the hidden treasures in your #VCR!

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:00:06 +0000

This #FunFriday, go and find the hidden treasures in your #VCR!

The “epic violin girl” from last week deserves a...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:00:05 +0000

The “epic violin girl” from last week deserves a #MusicMonday double feature, so here’s Lindsey Stirling again with Shadows.