Iskander Smit - Issue #28

A week full of things, connected things, from Eindhoven to Delft and back to Amsterdam.

Three specials events last week worth mentioning. On Tuesday I attended the second edition of the Things2Things workshops on predictive materials. The theme was ‘Blockchain for designers’ which delivered a nice little exercise on trading value and values. I need still to process the meaning, will keep you up to date on that.

On Thursday I drove to Eindhoven as I was invited by Lorna Goulden to talk on our Civic City project at the IoT Eindhoven meetup. The project was located in a neighbourhood in Eindhoven so that was an extra good fit. We had some good discussions afterwards.

For an article Erwin Blom wrote for Het Parool (Blendle) I was asked to my opinion on the smart city, in line with the things we did in the Civic City project, and also is the basis for the contribution to the BAMBEA project we are part of. Keep an eye on the IoT Olympics that will be kicked-off this Wednesday and the week after with a hackathon on the 23rd. 

Like Google who filed a patent for self driving delivery trucks. The battle with Amazon continues. More Google on AI, the new focus of Android man Andy Rubin. Amazon is launching a gaming platform called Lumberyard.

Snapchat is growing and growing. Storytelling is a new interaction form. Teenagers use it in an extreme way, that was well described here.

Facebook at the same time create some controversy with their new colonialism. 

A new app by website Quartz is launched based on the hippest conversational ui trend. And it works rather well. Another form is the Echo conversation of course. It seems to give you a sense of the future.