2 Neurones & 1 Camera

In exactly one month, I will be hopping on a plane to London (UK, not Ontario) to join a new job, a new city, a new life.

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How a blog post got me to talk with the Dalai Lama on the CBC. Sort of…

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Il y a 10 ans aujourd'hui, j'embarquais sur un Paris-Tokyo

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On getting lost when you first join an Open Source project

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The Facebook "like" button, in the wild

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In the past weeks, my team has been using a live subject for experiments. Unethical, I know, but how fun! We are basically taking the Pheromone Lab, now almost a venerable blog with a year or so in existence, and seeing how we can push it in a completely different direction: as a blog it was a very nice repository of thoughts and ideas. We knew some people were reading, but it felt like a museum in there.

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An article published this morning in the NY Times, titled « To Win Over Users, Gadgets Have to Be Touchable» notes how quickly tactile interfaces have been adopted by consumers, so quickly indeed that they now are frustrated whenever a device does not react, as they would expect, to a swipe or a tap.

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At a turning point in the movie, we are shown a room where a dozen people, all hooked to a machine that lets them share a collective dream, come to sleep a few hours every day. Those people are us.

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After moving on my own to 4 large cities in the past 15-ish years, and visiting quite a few more, I can start to list a number of behavior patterns which say a lot about myself, obviously, but also about the urban systems. As a puzzled, stressed and curious newcomer, whether I quickly and fully embrace a system, or whether I avoid it for a long time is an interesting measure of how “usable” the system is. Take public transportation for example.

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The back-alley of my Montreal appartment has been, for the past month, an observation deck to the work of three different crews adding an extra floor to buildings on the other side of the alley – going from two storeys to the more Montreal-usual three.

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Three reasons why I am completely in love with the team behind the Paris Web 2010 conference

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in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence

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Three children play in a field, not far from some ruins. The place is beautiful, eerily quiet.

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Stereotypes in work-roles and groupthink within company subcultures.

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The Web as an information ecosystem is not in danger. On the other hand, the paradigm of the web "site" as a space you travel to is, I believe, moribund. It is a major shift that finds its origin, among other things, in the development of mobiles.

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I don't care where you are right now. I really don't.

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On the iPhone/Flash hooha.

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How can a company remain innovative through its growth? Most simply fail – with a bureaucratic management style that thinks that innovation can be achieved by having bosses yell “be creative” at their staff; other use turnover as an innovation tool: hire creative minds, squeeze out whatever can be squeezed in, then throw away the burnt out zombie and hire new people. But what about companies that seem to succeed in being – and remaining – innovation centers?

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Mashups were all the rage but a few years ago! Fast forward a few years, and the world mashup is hardly ever uttered - or at least, very seldom without a hint of sarcasm. What happened?

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Years ago, when I was part of an improv theatre group, we had to abide strictly by one rule: never say "no", but rather, always say "yes, and". The rule was meant to ensure that no-one would kill the flow of improvisation and that everyone's effort would serve to push the skit further and further forward. The "yes, and" rule has been wonderful guidance for my communication style ever since: whenever I stuck to it, I found that I would resolve conflicts and get teams moving forward much easier.

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As the landscape of web-ready devices become less segregated between “Desktop”, “Smartphones” and “Mobile”, and as we advance towards a more continuous ecosystem, we need to learn to design flexible interfaces that can adapt to a wide range of size, resolution, capabilities and modes of use.

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