Just to update readers of this blog. Last week, Alchemyst with the Roomware Project picked up a golden Spin Award, for best mobile concept. A lot of thanks goes to the whole team behind the Roomware Project.

Tijs presented to a unexpectedly large audience and jury at the Spin Awards inspiration day. He was actually expecting to talk to 3 jury members in a small room. Surprise!

We were nominated in the category, best mobile concept for our Roomware Hyves Party application. This event driven application was put together to help celebrate Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, reaching 5,000,000 members. You can see some pictures of it here and here, with some video here.

We realized we needed to have fine-tuned our presentation more towards marketing then technology. The jury was made up of experienced marketers who really wanted to see passion and impact reflected in numbers (how effective campaign or action was). Hopefully they picked up on the fact that we just demonstrated a way for advertisers to link with Hyves in a powerful new oblique way. Companies are just crying out to mine the power of social networks. It’s of course how you do this that is important. No-one likes getting spammed. As for Alchemyst and the Roomware Project and speaking for myself. I’m into creating collective experiences in physical spaces, something i predict we’ll be seeing a lot more of.

This last weekend i arrived at my girlfriend’s house and as i walked in the door i noticed she had a box sitting on the stairs. It was sports monitoring gear to help her in the gym or running. It monitors your heart beat and then can create a series of workouts based on time. I tried it on and could get the watch to register the heart monitoring belt. I wanted just to see my beating heart registering on the watch screen. After pressing a few buttons, i was still unable to get my heart beat showing. Pissed off i scanned through the manual which was complicated with no entry on “press button to see heartbeat”. Perhaps i am stupid user, or perhaps the kit was just too complicated. What i would like is my heartbeat delivered to me all the time.

All the time. Yes, all the time. Why do i want a continual stream of data that contains my heartbeat? Well, after discovering heartbeat sensor technology, it dawned on me that there is presently a distinction between autonomous body data and that produced via cognitive processing(taking pictures, writing text, saving links, search, responding in speech). The data feeds that we have only very recently been able to create are in 99% of occasions processed via the brain. Where is the body? When was the last time you had to remind yourself to breathe?

The obvious choice for a body feed or bleed, would be the heart. We have reasonably cheap technology to measure it. Wait. It’s still locked up. Well sort of. A brief google later. Most heart monitoring kits (sensors and software) are embedded within medical or sports contexts . Only one company i found was porting this to the web, although there must be many more. I suspect that hospitals are using some kind of tool to record heat beat and blood pressure wirelessly. Will anyone help pipe us our heatbeats in a feed format? Sure it will need some hardware but please lets bring it out cleanly stripped from any specific context. Let’s see what people would do with that. It starts to get interesting when we overlay out heartbeat feed over the rest of our attention-stream. Hmm.

(thanks for the CC-Sharealike pics people split-milk radek reks rev dan catt)

I just received some mail, from a group called glasvezelamsterdam (glass fiber). They tell me that my neighborhood is getting an infrastructure upgrade and that i’m viable for glass fiber, allowing me to reach speeds of upload and download 10x faster than broadband today, up to 100 Mbps theoretically. I went to their site and found a list of companies selling fiber connectivity in multiple forms from single(Internet connection) to double(+telephony) to triple(+iptv) play. What was interesting was to see their prices and also compare these to my present dsl provider.

So right now i spend:
8 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload speed - 55,86 euro/month
telephony - one phone line - 12,56 eur/month
tv - 16.80 euro/month

So with new services i could get:
20 Mbps up/down - 35 euro/month
telephony - 5 euro/month

So i could already save about 30 euro a month and get double the speed, a huge improvement in speed all round. The truth is that i don’t really experience a huge lag in download times right now. Although perhaps if i were connected to an internet tv experience that might be so. It would be fun to try out a fiber connection. I’m actually more interested in trying WiMax as that allows for all my mobile devices to be connected using just a wiMax box at home to send me my own bandwidth to up to a few kilometers away. Shazaa!