IT Facts for president

IT Facts? This very helpful and clear blog collects all kinds of data and analyses of IT research projects. With links to the original research webpages, so that you can always find out more or go deeper into the topic.

I made exhaustive use of the blog the past few days while preparing a presentation about mobile internet. Thanks to IT Facts I have really interesting and above all recent data about the topic.

I will talk about mobile phones in general (I called that part ‘mobile phone love’), and mobile 1.0 versus mobile 2.0. My colleague Koen then takes over and discusses possible business models and the choices our company made regarding mobile internet.

The presentation will be given to a group of cmd-students at the 24th of October from 1:30 pm onwards. Every Friday, they get their ‘experimental media’ class @Kaai 16, Hasselt. Normally there’s a livestream, so you can always follow and/or support me (especially that last one would be really nice 😉 ) . I’m not sure yet where to find the url. And when you don’t live too far from Hasselt, you can always come to Kaai16 since the class is open for everyone.

About Girl Geek Dinners, Barcamps and Spacecowboys

Hmmm, much too long ago since I’ve written an entry. Which is my fault. Completely. And which makes me realise there’s quite a lot I haven’t been talking about on this blog.

So, back to the past.

1. Yesterday. Girl Geek Dinner number 5 already. I’m a geek not a freak. Out of the 5 Brussels Girl Geek Dinners, I have attended 4 till now. Luckily I missed out one, otherwise I couldn’t defend myself anymore when people call me a freak 😉 . Anyway, it was great to see some ‘usuals’ back like Clo and Smetty ànd to meet new people like Pimpajoentje. Moreover, we got ‘speculoospasta‘ in the goodie bag. I’m staring at it right now with hungry eyes 😉 but I am patiently waiting for the right moment to try it out.

2. The 6th and 7th of May. A friend of mine organised quite an interesting event for people who are involved in arts and culture. During this so called ‘hybrid spaces’ event, the participants were challenged to think, talk and work around four thematic issues:

• local/global,
• private/public,
• narrative/creative
• visible/invisible.

Those ‘borders’ can be looked at in many ways since the coming of ‘new media’. More information on the Spacecowboys website.

3. Way back in time, at the 29th of March. Barcamp Ghent and Girl Geek Dinner number 4. Apart from meeting lots of interesting people in Ghent, I was very proud that I had been able to pursuade some colleagues at City Live to join me there. And very relieved that they enjoyed the event and came back with new contacts and great ideas as well 🙂 . Furthermore, I discovered the wii. Which wasn’t only very funny, but which brought me into contact with two great people: Ywein and Filip. Ywein was my opponent, Filip the one taking pictures while we made a fool of ourselves 🙂 .

After the Barcamp in Ghent, the fourth Girl Geek Dinner took place at the offices of Netlash. Not only again a nice place to meet interesting people (at or in between the cocktails and French fries I met Britt and also Bart), but also the place at which I won…YES, I won…a microsoft webcam. Thank you!

Me? A geek?

Never really thought of myself like that, but being @ the Barcamp in Ghent, live twittering and blogging on this blog and the CityLive blog, I guess skolgen is right when he’s naming the picture below (with me on the right)…

 “geeks doing their stuff”

 ouch 😉

 By the way: all the barcamp pictures via this link. Enjoy!

Citylive blog: take a look and please react!

At my new company Citylive things get busier and busier. I’m working on quite a few projects, among others on the one and only Citylive blog. Take a look. And if you have any suggestions or questions, please react, via this blog or via the Citylive blog 🙂 Thanx!!

PS I cannot add new pages yet on the Citylive-blog (there should still come an about-page). In other words something like ‘this blog wants to inform you about Citylive, the people working at Citylive, events we organise,…. ‘So if that’s one of your suggestions, it’ll be there next week (fingers crossed it will 🙂

ASLPage goes mobile, the test

This week, we have invited our first test users at CityLive: 18 crew members of the online community platform ASLPage received a pda, in order to test some mobile features.

So what can they do? Among others check their ASLPage guest books via their mobile phones, post messages in other people’s guest books, see which friends are online…Of course this is only the beginning, since CityLive wants to be very innovative providing mobile and locally relevant information. But it’s a start.

And what’s really fantastic: the ASLPage crew is really enthousiastic, spamming our forum and making their peers jalous, which is exactly what we had in mind. One small remark: only two girls were in, hope more and more girls will also embrace new technologies 🙂

Three kinds of platforms

 So much I want to write about, because of the manymany new ideas, ways of thinking, methods etc I discovered during my first week at CityLive.

Above all the marketing and business model part is new to me, since I worked in a research environment at my former job. One thing I discoverd today (and is possibly not new to a lot of you, but yes it is to me), is the fact that there are ‘three kinds of platforms’. More information via this interesting blog post.

It’s quite a lot information to deal with this first week. Completely forgot how that felt after 3,5 years at my former job.

I made up my mind

I’m gonna move to Canada, yeah I made up my mind. My favourite (Belgian) singer of the moment, Milow, is singing about big dreams. About making up his mind. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes I didn’t and sometimes I did.

This week I have made up my mind: I’m not moving to Canada, but I decided to work somewhere else.  Big deal?, you might think. Well, being the project manager of HasseltLokaal was my first job, so it was a big deal to make my decision.  Especially since it involved much more than one might think.

Since I was 10, I have been interviewing people in the neighbourhood and selling my self-made newspapers afterwards, convinced to be a journalist one day. I studied languages and journalism, and got to work at the newspaper Het Belang van Limburg, among others on the HasseltLokaal project. So goal achieved. But now I had to realise (and that took me quite some time) that this big dream wouldn’t make me happy anymore. I want to move on in project management.

And thus from next week onwards, I will be the brand new community manager at Citylive, working with test users on the one hand and the Citylive marketing team on the other. I’m really looking forward to this, although I’ll miss my job, the citizen reporters and my colleagues big time. Luckily, they’re never far away thanks to the internet 🙂