Fines for SPAM

Dutch Goverment's OPTA fined several dutch companies and even one dutch individual for SPAMming in the Netherlands. In one case even for unsollicited SMS SPAM, with a fee of 1,10 Euro per message. Opta's complaint website Spamklacht is only readable in Dutch and only fines Dutch spammers. So the lesson here: never SPAM in your own country. Bomega's Junker next version automatically sends a spamreport to the OPTA on your behalf ;) Now all these fines should be donated to S-E Asia and it's really a good start.

SMS to donate.

The Chinese alone send 195 Billion SMS messages this year and counting! A staggering amount if you think that it boils down to just 2 messages a day per person. The European and US ratio must be at least double that amount per day.

That made me wonder....What if we just had a global SMS relief number accessible locally? People could send as much SMS messages as they like to the SMS donation number: all revenue excluding actual costs for the provider, would go directly to the designated global or national disaster like the one in South-East Asia now. Everybody with a cellphone can afford at least one SMS message. It's fast, easy, cheap and you feel that at least you did something about it. However tiny your part, you helped! Period.

Update:
Ideabroker.nl donates the idea to the world and tries to let it be picked up by a global consortium of Telecom providers, in conjunction with major relief organizations like the Red Cross, the U.N and governments alike. We would however appreciate to be mentioned as authors of the idea.

Ideabroker has send a press release to all worldwide news desks, parties and governments involved this morning, in order to get the idea executed quickly. If you know persons in key roles in relevant organizations who could help build the initiative please let us know or forward our press release which will be up here shortly. We thank you for your cooperation!

Social Network TV

Again it's the porn industry that takes the lead in cool technology. This time a "adult' flavoured online TV station Adultinternet.TV using distributed streaming TV by Abacast.

Abacast: "Our technology is such that an Abacast server will serve direct connections to a small portion of the total audience. For example, if you take a total audience of 100 people, only 10 of those will directly connect to the server. Of those 10, half will be serving the other 90 people in the distributed network"

The technology opens up a slew of new possibilities for online TV networks and new media businesses. There's much to be learned from the technological innovation, marketing, customer, U.I and businessmodels of the online porn industry. Regardless.

Work longer

In a press release the Dutch ministry of social affairs and work stated that they initiated a subsidie program for the comming years to stimulate "experimenting with stimulating older people to work longer." The official info is found here.

In short, 4.4mil euro next year in goverment grants for projects to experiment stimulation of making older people work longer. 21.mil euro untill the next elections. Minimum age for the employees is 55, but could be lowered. Maximum fee is 40.000 per project. You need at least 30 people working in the organisation, or a branche organisation needs to apply on behalf of more companies.

Since I personally think we throw away a lot of knowledge when older people quit, and specially if they do so prematurely, I think it's a good project. I specially like the text: "projects experimenting with stimulating". This means you should be able to actually try stuff out without having to pay everything yourself. That's what subsidies should do, stimulate experimenting.

Innovation is usually brought to us by young minds, but utilizing innovation is often done by older people. They are great advisors and generally have great networks. Use it to utilize your ideas and stimulate innovation.

Technology versus Happiness

Lenghty but very interesting article about happiness versus technology: Give your customer options but not too much or it backfires on you, the Amish are the happiest in the US, and this is a nice quote to remember before developing our brilliant ideas: "Considering how many decisions about new technologies are based on little or no concrete evidence and involve guessing about the future, it seems plausible that people can get stuck with technologies that don’t make them happy but that are hard to get rid of..." Now there's a good one: without visonary thinking there's no innovation , but who knows now, how it will work out in the future? See gunpowder, atomic fusion.... Gotta love the challenge.

Open Source..mobile

A great article about Firefox and security compared against Microsoft. Seems to me Open Source is the way to go, heck even Japanese Telco NTT DoCoMo announced three of it's newest phone's will run on Linux and invested 3 mil in U.S. Linux vendor MontaVista . Palm will also make a Linux port for their platform. With the smartphones we'll see a whole slew of viruses coming up. There's even a virusscanner for mobiles now. Talking mobile: Open Source vendor Linspire made the first under $500 laptop possible. It's no beauty but hey it's a laptop and it's dirt cheap.

SPAM update

The SPAM laws of the Netherlands are going to be updated, according to yet another letter send on the subject. Yesterday there was news on the issue from the ministry of Economic Affairs, now there is more it seems. Anyway, they are thinking of another code for B2B SPAM. This new code seems to be illogical, so I guess it'll be the one they adapt. I guess Boris' solution to the problem seems more and more appealing. Specially since "unsollicitated, yet welcome" e-mail is usually personal, so will be able to make it trough. I'm still concerned on the newsletter problem this solution faces, but it's obvious once again we should not hope for a proper legal solution to the problem.

Off the shelf

Logo generator: Imagine a Logo generator that needs a few keywords about your business, select some existing styles, logo's and colors you like and it come's up with different logo's for you to chose from. Also applicable to website layouts.

Changing electronic banners on those electronic traffic boards above the highway, (nice if your in a trafficjam) also handy for guiding you (sponsored) to major events like Dancevalley, Superbowl or whatever. Saves some road tax too.

Memory lane

Take a trip down memory lane and have a look at '96er versions of Yahoo, Amazon,Webcrawler , NASA, The Whitehouse (look they got a text version too..) and who remembers the Well "the Whole Earth Lectronic Link"? Those where the days!

Two wheel balancing act

Here's a DIY Segway.. Remember the much hyped and overly expensive two wheel urban miracle? This guy even made a one wheel version and all the guidelines to make it yourself...now that's sharing an idea! They all look nerdy though, take ages to get to the office, but if ya wanna be cool? Go build one! Look Dad what i made you for Christmas, ...no no no, the other button ...ouch.

The end of SPAM as we know it...

The site isn't launched officialy but I want to share this service with you before the rest of the world hears about it. Junker is a new way and method to stop ALL spam. It's not a filter. It's not something that tries to be smart. It doesn't read your email. This is the future of anti SPAM services. Junker uses challenge/response technology to determine the difference between a human and a computer. A human being can take 10 seconds to go to a website, look at an image with 4 characters on it and have the ability to type those characters in a form and press submit. It would take a very sophisticated computer to do the same thing. And more importantly, it would take several seconds per message which would make it impractical and to expensive. Spammers send out hundreds of thousands of messages per day. They hope that 0,0001% of all receivers do something with their message. If they would have to take 10 seconds between every new message that just wouldn't add up. This is the vulnerability that Junker exploits. When a Junker user get's a message from somebody who that user hasn't corresponded with before, the service sends a simple message (for a demo send a message to demo@junker.nl) with a challenge to this new sender. If that sender is human, it will take him a minimum of effort to answer that challenge and identify himself. A spammer will just ignore the message. Only verified email will arrive in the mailbox of the Junker user. I started to use the service on monday and haven't received a single SPAM message ever since. My whitelist of approved people has grown to about 50 people. This might just be the end off SPAM as we know it...

And since I started this company that would make me very happy, and rich.

Snowmobile..

Surfing for some snow picts, i stumbled upon this great product. OK, it still needs some designing (Phone'm all you designers out there!) but hey look what they allready came up with for utilities! They even got a 4x4! No wonder they've got happy customers. Add some blades on the wheels a rudder and presto, you've got yourself your own watercraft. Who takes Mom out for a spin this Christmas? Simply Brilliant!

SPAM

The Dutch minister of Economic affairs wrote a letter concerning SPAM today. He expects several fines for SPAM this year. So it appears that goverment officals are still working the last weeks of december. Also he states that the main focus areas for 2005 are the small and medium businesses and the senior citizens. And he wants more money invested in R&D for techno solutions for SPAM. I think there will be a subsidie awarded for a senior citizen SPAM filter.

SMS Wave

Today we presented the SMS Wave, a new concept/company that makes it possible to do a traditional wave with a large crowd by using your mobile phone. You send an SMS message to the SMS Wave server with your seat number. A few minutes later a sponsored wave is send throught the crowd in a wave by calling all the phones in small batches. The ringtones can be heard going around. For more information read the dutch pressrelease. Caspar Wenckebach and I funded the idea a few months ago, and did a second round a few weeks ago. This might be a concept that you will see in bigger hotspots all over the world in a few years.

The romantic Entrepeneur.

The romantic entrepeneur is innovator, organiser, stimulator, fundraiser, manager, marketeer, financial wizz, CEO and visionair all in one.

We believe this is an outdated view on entrepeneurship.
Popquiz: How many firestarters do you know with all those skills combined on a professional level? Our point exactly..

We see lots of young bright developers, researchers and creative minds struggeling to become something there not, nor ever will be: that classical entrepeneur. They are however, brilliant in their field with great ideas to match it. What they need is a team of seasoned entrepeneurs, managers, deep pockets and other professionals to make up that classical entrepeneur together.

"Dutch business needs fiscal and subsidy stimulation of cooperation between banks, VC's, participation. And it needs monitored regional markets with open information on new ventures, intermediates, banks, VC's, pm's and virgin angels." A study of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands 2004.

Supply of entrepreneurial capital whether it be bankloans, grants, informal participation, or tax cuts are all still tailored to meet the wrong end of innovation. The Law and many government policies are based on a outdated, omniscient renaissance entrepreneurial stereotype.

Ideabroker wants to rebuild the current vision on entrepeneurship, starting small by actually doing things, like mix and match skills, or provide actual funds for cool ideas....and more to come. We'll keep you posted.

Stumble upon..

The name says it all: Levitated , a beautifull clock, hilarious helpdesk files, Google's page ranking explained, The Quantum computer, Creative Commons Open books, Stereo images, and this site and this are only a couple of sites i've stumbled upon with StumbleUpon: a social network, Firefox plugin and "Recommendation based site search engine", all-in-one. A great add-on tool for OpenBC, Orkut or any social network !

Artificial life

Artificial and eternal life comes a step closer with artificial viruses, self beating flesh patches made out of rat cells, artificial blood, eyes, brains, hearts, knees and all sorts of bodyparts..Even cameraphone's are getting "liquid lenses"....When do we get them too? And camera/phone implant, able to handle Digital Thelepathy by Boris.. I just hope Microsoft will not be commissioned to make our human software, nor Intel our processors... Have your representatives ask those future questions , here or here while you take your own dolphin for a spin.

Email is old economy

A few days ago someone told me that children consider email as a technology from the past. They associate it with parents, homework and official business. It's boring and old fashioned. They see MSN as the modern equivalent of email. Chatting is a much more efficient way to communicate than email, or so they say. Until i heard that, I considered myself an early adopter for doing everything by email. I even own a Blackberry and can be reached better by email than by telephone. But now I feel like a dinosaur. An old guy, still using email! It made me look at our communication technologies in a new way. If you think about it, chat and email aren't that different. Some people even use their email to chat, sending short sentences every 2 minutes. I think someone is working (or should be) on a new communication package. A Universal Internet Communication Center. An application that let's you chat, email, Voip and VideoChat and keeps a nice log of everything you do. Organized on subject or person you would find all your conversations neatly archived. Any conversation would be easy to retrieve and every conversation would find it's optimal technology. You could switch from mail to chat and from chat to voice and back, all in one conversation with one person in one application. Why wait? I'm starting today on this project. I'll call it Digital Telepathy 1.0. You can pre-order it for just $25..

Vibrating Phone'fun

VibraExciter, Dial an Orgasm, Purring Kitty, Blissbox, and Homemade sex toys all offer ways to put the phun back in your mobile, toothbrush or other electrical applainces. Here's some hilarious FAQ on phone vibrators. Seems to me this will create a whole new buzz for mobile game developers...Imagine a mobile network game: And the winner is bzzzzz.....Yeah Baby Yeah!

OpenBC Event @Cellspace

Thanks to super connector Bob Stumpel for hosting a wonderful evening about social networking, packed with great presentations, a mystery guest and lots of good food and drink. Ideas galore, plenty nice networking people and....1 Dog..The latter rather alone, poor thing. No doubt he's logging in here later on. Ideabroker has reached a next level this evening, it seems when kindred spirits meet, pure magic appears. It's in the air, it's in the stars. We'll keep you'll posted soon.

"eco"Bots

"eco" bots and gastrobots can eat dead flies, rotten apples, sugar and possibly cellulose for fuel. That opens up a lot of new possibilities for the world... Not sure that they are all good though. Imagine a farting, coughing or drizzling robot going about cleaning your house...And think of the 3rd World countries .. now they also have to compete with robots for food..

Dutch Tax agency closes portals

Dutch Tax agency Fiod.EDC in cooperation with Stichting Brein yesterday closed down two portals and arrested 8 people of Shareconnector.com en Releases4U.com for providing links to illegal software. Here's why they think they're allowed to. After cases in the U.S where users of peer-to-peer services like Napster, eDonkey, Limewire and others where convicted for possession of illegal software, music and films and fined with huge sums, it seems the witch hunt is on in Holland too. Whatever happened to a free Internet and sharing I wonder? Is simply linking now illegal too? And what does that mean for blogs? Even Microsoft is heavily into blogging now....Seems to me we're all gonna convert to Open Source pretty soon. Ceo of Linspire today offered their services to the Dutch government.. it saves them 144 mil compared to the current Microsoft offer.

A New Year with lots of New Ideas

2005 will see a new kind of spirit: Ideabroker's new years drink will start a series of small events in different locations, this time hosted by Lunatech & in close cooperation with Ideabroker in cool Rotterdam, that's right folks Rotterdam! A couple of young entrepeneurs with great ideas will be in the limelight for ya'll to cook and grill. Let's have a funpacked event where we can shock, shell, shout and listen to each other whilst bubbeling away. Watch for your secretcode and strictly personal invitation, no guestlists, no VIP tables or preferred seating available. Date and venue TBA.

Viral Marketing 2.0

A great article on WIRED.com about a guy who made an ad for the iPod Mini from Apple. What's newsworthy is not that this ad is being downloaded like crazy and that people are emailing it to each other, but the fact that this isn't a parody. The ad is real, real good and people like it. Some marketeers see this as a new form of Marketing or to be more specific; Viral Marketing 2.0. Not just something that is being passed around because it's funny but because it's serious and has quality. Just think about it for you own product or company; how can you make your customers love you so much that they will spend 5 months working on an ad for free. Makes you think about customer support in a different way, doesn't it?

Calorie counters a-go-go

Check the state of your diet and your saved calorie's on the go on PDA and Smartphone's. If you walk whilst pda-ing its a calorie or 40 every kilometer. Handango allready sold 400.000 copies of the Diet & Exercise Assistant software. I wonder if they also make 'm for the old style analog phones remember? That really helps burning calories, as you can see!

Innovationplatform

CEO's in the Netherlands think the Dutch Innovation platform isn't working properly so say Computable and Emerce. (articles in Dutch).
Of course they think the platform isn't working...it simply doesn't do or bring out anything. And it badly needs focus. Dutch PM Balkenende and chairman of the platform, shaped it like his own party the CDA: flirting on both sides but never choosing. In politics this works: you have plenty friends and can have it both ways. But hey guys: it doesn't work running a country nor for the innovation platform. So get focused or go see Aldo Costa for a lesson or two!

Perpetum mobile

Aldo Costa, 79 spent 5 decades and €200.000 to build his 20meter wide non-working perpetum mobile based on interplanetary gravity... Now that's determination! His family denied him further acces to the family fortune. Seems to me he can get more funds by teaching and speaking about the art of focus...

The future of News

Arjan Dasselaar forwarded me this link to a great Flash animation about the future of news. In 2014 Amazon and Google will have joined forces to form Googlezon. It will deliver automated news customized for each reader. It's a very nice story that makes you think and smile now and then. Things like the 'Google Grid' and EPIC (evolving personalized Information Construct) will be remembered!

It takes about 10 minutes to watch (and listen) so take your time and turn the volume up!

Funding

With Backbase getting a 1,3 million grant from the Dutch government and Marktplaats.nl being bought by eBay for 225 million it seems we're getting back to the good ole days....The land of OP.... where ROI wasn't an issue, a businessplan fitted on a stamp, design meant top-design-office-furniture-galore, and webshops had their own jet. So eat your heart out and apply for those cool grants, EU financial support and get funded for all your ideas. Contact you local supplier now! Choose from: Senter or Syntens or Innovatieloket or Kenniswijk
There's a catch to subsidizing too...

Marketing

Interesting article about pro's and con's of email versus rss for marketing purposes.
Great presentation from Ruud de Langen from Starcom at Emerce's Outlook 2005 event about where marketing money will be spent now and in the future.

Website of the year awards...

I went to IPAN's "Website of the year" awards yesterday... All the usual suspects won:
Google no 1@Search engine category, Marktplaats no 1@Trade category, Schoolbank no 1@Contact category....Heck even KPN won a award!...(for Telecom yes)...yawn.....The only bright light that evening was Richard Lamb. He presented his view on the near future in a great visual and fun packed show. And made some peculiar future statements along the way: a marriage between gaming and business networks for one?....Other buzzwords from Richard for 2005 where: prosumer and transectoral innovation....what the heck? Richard also presented the Awards, since IPAN regulars like Jort Kelder and Michiel Frackers , both couldn't make it, bizzy as they were: one checking boobs and other parts of Georgina in Miami, the other starting a blog publisher . Smart thinking Michiel!

On the workbench.

1:"Catchy"
A plastic covered magnetic bowl of some sort, to take with you when working around the house. It catches screws, saws, drillbits, nails and other bits of metal before they get lost. Not seen anywhere yet..
2:"Storyofmylife.com"
Site where elderly people are interactively helped and encouraged to put their life story in writing and online for their grandchildren and family. To learn from and maintain the family history. The database with their stories is accessible thru paid accounts by writers, filmmakers and historians alike.

Idea and concept sites

An idea a day!
Great business ideas for you to pick up.
Global ideabank.
Trendspotters
Got kids?
DIY marketing ideas.. tacky
DIY design & marketing
Idea generation software tool!
Ideas gone fatally wrong....
Things you wish you had thought of
Absurd patents

Join us @ these networks.

OpenBC
LinkedIn Jan Karel
LinkedIn Bram
Nextstage
Ipan
Orkut

Cool and crazy products or services.

Imagine walking in a metal shop with these guys
Random coffeetable conversational piece
Whatever you fancy.....
Got a message? Wear it!
To the airport information desk please..
Actionman for every religious zealot..
U drink, we drive!
Missed a fish? Get it here..
Legomaniac
Prankcalls for everyone
Alien travel agency
Every 4 years new models..!
Quote's galore
Smallest site ever
Fab record covers courtesy EDC
The end of Internet.
Levitate

Introduction Ideabroker

Welcome@ideabroker,

We strive to hook up with all creative thinkers that want to share and learn about ideas and concepts, methods, execution, businessmodels, news, guiding, mirroring, helping out or teaming up. Find your soulmates here or just comment or sit back, marvel and click. Whatever you fancy. Enjoy!

Our Future
We are firestarters in the genesis of authentic and radical new concepts, methods and ideas. Creating momentum for effective product and business development to find facts, flaws, fellows, and funds would be our essential contribution to a community of practice. Our preferred strategy: providing a platform for building shared vision around new concepts.
Shock, shell, shout and listen are the tools of our trade. Setting new horizons our goal.

Our Present
We are in the startup phase of a new organization that blends our mutual experiences, strong points, facts, opportunities, and investments in a sound and fun packed vision on innovation. Watch us.

Our Past
BA Industrial Design 1992 Rietveld Academy Amsterdam
BA Economics University of Groningen, Netherlands computer aided econometrics and business psychology.