Tech Blog

Earlier this week we discussed a fast food snack that is available in Rotterdam called “Kapsalon”, literally “Hairdresser’s”. According to the urban legend, the name came into existence after employees from a hairdresser’s composed their favorite meal at the shoarma place next door. The “calorie bomb” contains french fries, shoarma, cheese and lettuce, all thrown together. Unboxing pictures of it can be seen here.

Within a couple of months, it became rather popular in Rotterdam and most shoarma places include the dish on their menu, next to döner kebab and Turkish pizza. At Floorplanner we hope it will spread and become a national phenomenon. Not because the dish is so tasty or healthy, because it is not. It is, however, a very buzzword compliant meal:

• It could be described as a mashup, as it just consists of some existing dishes trown together in a unique manner.
• It is user-generated content, as the customers of the shoarma place invented the dish instead of the shoarma shop itself.
• Its popularity is because of a grassroots campaign, instead of a major marketing undertaking by one of the big Dutch snack producers like Mora or Beckers.

It’s almost a shame that the birth of this phenomenon is taking place in the city of Feyenoord instead of the city of AJAX.

I created my first Twitter account about half a year ago. I updated it every 5 minutes and in between I kept hitting the refresh button to see if there was any news from me friends. I liked the concept of Twitter but it just took too much of my time, so I decided to stop and delete my account.

After reading We Travel in Tribes I got interested again. As a social network I like Twitter because it keeps me up to date on what my friends are doing. But it’s more, like Rands points out:

I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss. I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter.

With this in mind I created a new Twitter account and added some friends to my list. I hope I can control my twitter time better then last time This is me: http://www.twitter.com/hertog

Yesterday I bought a song online for the first time in my life. Yeah, I know it sounds a little strange in these digital times, but I just never had a need for it until now.

Anyway, I wanted to buy a song and put in on a CD (yes, those old skool, round and shiny discs). So I bought the song, and downloaded it to my iMac. The first problem was that the song was in WMA format that my iMac couldn’t handle. I payed for the song… why are they giving me the song in a format that I can’t use because I’m not using Windows…?!

Luckily I’ve Parallels installed, so I fired it up to get Window running. When I played the song, it checked its DRM signature to make sure it wasn’t a pirate version. Then I found out that I couldn’t burn a CD from Parallels (don’t know why, it just didn’t and I didn’t have time to fix it). So I copied the song to another Windows computer next to me.

When I tried to burn the CD from the other PC I got an alert telling me that the song was already registered to another Windows system…. aarrggghhhh! So there I was, stuck with a song that I paid for, with a DRM security system that wouldn’t allow me to burn it onto a CD. After trying a couple of ways to get it working I gave up. I bought the song again (now from the PC), and burned it there.

Man, whoever came up with this security system certainly wasn’t thinking about the end user. No wonder the music industry is going down….

A little off topic… 2 colleagues of mine here at Suite75 (Jaap van der Meer and Gido Tervooren) play in a band called Trenchcoat. Last week they released a video clip they made with the help of Rogier Wieland and I think it’s really fantastic!

As Facebook is probably the most viral socal application out there, we couldn’t stay behind. We developed for Tjoon a Facebook application, this weekend. This application is like the normal website, but with the extension that you can show your recorded videos to all of your Facebook friends and you can also see what your friends recorded.

As you maybe know, we developed Tjoon as a fun project. You can create split screen videos with it. We hope you will like the new addition to Tjoon, the Facebook Tjoon. Here your can install the Tjoon application.

Jamming is always on our mind, we thought, why can’t we jam online? Therefore, we created a site called Tjoon.com. At Tjoon.com you can record split screen videos. Maybe you have seen such videos on YouTube. You need special video edit software, to create these splitscreen jams, but now there’s Tjoon! The only thing you have to do to make a video is plugin your webcam, go to the site and start recording. After that other people see your Tjoon with 1 track, and they can add another track, up to 4 tracks.

Tjoon is a fun project, we did it in our spare time. We had a lot of fun when Wobbo did his funny moves, Nico his burbs and Jeroen his great guitar solo’s. Well check it out and spread the word! Here is a little example of the Tjoon widget. Have fun.

Technically speaking Tjoon is a combination of Ruby on Rails and as media server Red 5, for if you wanted to know

http://www.tjoon.com/