Fall in love with the journey and get the most out of any moment. Set goals, commit yourself and pull hard.

Keep positive and give your best shot!

Today, live for tomorrow.

Ask Jeeves (now known as Ask.com) appeared around 1997 and gained lots of buzz. The site encouraged users to search, by ask one question and the keywords were filtered by company personnel in order to present more relevant results, just like if you have a personal steward who gives you the answers to your enigmas and requests.

Despite its relative success, at the end of the decade, a startup called Google erased all that market competition.

Is interesting to note that more than 10 years later, new applications where questions are asked, grow every day just like mushrooms. Of course they are adapted to the present reality and use technologies and concepts that just weren’t there in the beginning of the Web, but the concept is quite similar. Supported through a social network based architecture, sites like Yahoo Answers, Formspring, Quora, the all Stack Exchange Network or Mahalo allow users to ask questions about particular subjects, usually categorized in different domains, and obtain results, answered and ranked by the community. This kind of services are already being outsourced (like Qhub) and they can leverage some business opportunities based on third-party applications.

I also believe that there is much to explore in some non-technological fields such as arts (movies, music, etc.), sports and economics. And of course all the niches within each of these areas.

Collective intelligence communities allow an effectively knowledge management when you live on an information society. The dissemination of electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets increased the group of information junkies. In urban places and big cities of modern countries, is now unthinkable for an individual not to be connected 24 hours a day.

While mathematical algorithms processed by computer, such as Google, are continuously being improved, I also believe there is a lot to explore in areas such as artificial intelligence and semantic web. So for now, nothing better to have humans answering my questions.

The first thing that pops into my mind is that I didn’t blog here at all and instead of that used twitter daily. I’ve also done some writing for TheNextWeb Portugal.

In August I’ve started to talk about some technological weekly news at Patrulha.TV with my fellow friend André Tavares. Since both of us were doing a video podcast for the first time, it was a very good experience where we’ve learn a lot about communication, we’ve met a lot of new people, played with some gadgets, and above all, had lots of fun while doing it.

I don’t think that independent online video is very relevant in Portugal but I believe teenagers will consume more video content that TV in the years to come. That being said, the way content is produced and consumed is beginning to change and internet platforms will play a major role in this chenge.

At Patrulha.TV we want to be a part of this revolution.

Another achievement I did this year was the completion of the Master in Innovation and Technological Entrepreneurship.

I’ve also started an event social network TYMR.com. During the last months it has been responsible for 95% of my time and were I spend all my focus on. I’ve traveled thousands of KMs, stole hundreds of hours to my sleep, met dozens of people and made some of the toughest decisions of my life, but finally now it’s taking shape.
This SaaS is currently in a very active development process and more features will be released very soon.
Someday I’ll write a more detailed post about all this entrepreneurial experience, that still lasts and I hope it’s only in the beginning.

I’ve attend some conferences and talks like Codebits, Portugal Empreendedor, SWITCH Conference, TEDx O’Porto and BarcampPT, among others, where I had the opportunity to meet inspirational individuals that I admire for a long time and mainly to enrich my network of professional contacts.

I want to believe that 2010 was just a warm-up year and that 2011 will be the year where the game really kicks off, that’s why I intend to be more active than ever and to keep on growing my skills.
I feel that I have to push harder and that’s why I’m taking again the Red Pill.

I started to think about what happened this year that had impact on me. Well, a lot of good things happened but the truth is that 2009 was a meh year.

I spent most of my time thinking and working on what may happen in 2010, so at the end of the year I feel like I’m awaking to reality!

I do have some great expectations to 2010 and today while sincroWEBing the Christmas stream I found this piece of art that express my feeling…

Scott Dunbar – One Man Band Singing Tin Foil Hat

This year the purpose is a bit different since I’m more interested in networking and observing some tech-trends and the competitions ideas, but expectations are higher than never.

Now let’s pack the stuff and get the ticket train with 20% discount (SAPO keeps surprising participants with these small details).

Tim Brown give us some examples why designers should think big while creating their projects. This kind of thinking can make a significant difference in the evolution of technology and societies and we have to know that taking chances is more important than failing!

We need more creativity in the world and everybody has some. That’s all the motivation we need to live our lives thinking on changing the world for the better!

Windows: Do not lend or make illegal copies of this software.
The more you take, the more you lose.

Post-it are a revolutionary product and you can use them to be creative and innovative in other fields. But in the last years I’ve heard a few stories from different friends, teachers and conference speakers, about how post-it was originally created. Maybe everyone adds a little of their personal taste to the story just like any urban myth, but I think this is the real one:

Most people love them.

But Post-it® Notes were not a planned product. No one got the idea and then stayed up nights to invent it. A man named Spencer Silver was working in the 3M research laboratories in 1970 trying to find a strong adhesive. Silver developed a new adhesive, but it was even weaker than what 3M already manufactured. It stuck to objects, but could easily be lifted off. It was super weak instead of super strong.

No one knew what to do with the stuff, but Silver didn’t discard it. Then one Sunday four years later, another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church’s choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver’s adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. Success! With the weak adhesive, the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the pages. 3M began distributing Post-it ® Notes nationwide in 1980 – ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive. Today they are one of the most popular office products available.

My experience with FriendFeed started a long time ago, but only in the last couple of months I’ve started to using it more extensively. The main reason is because of the redesign the company did on the service. Yes, this new design (with some minor new functionalities) made me fall in love with the application. You can get a better feeling of it at VentureBeat: FriendFeed’s redesign combines publishing and IM better than Facebook or Twitter.

Twitter vs FriendFeed

I have to say that I’m a huge fan of Twitter and that’s probably the reason I don’t blog more often. But Twitter has become a bit of a problem to me. I like to follow people that I think that are relevant to my interests, but I also like to follow back people who think my tweets are interesting. I could well follow about 50 different individuals to keep me updated about web stuff, but when I passed the 150 followers my stream become unreadable and full of non-interesting information. I could use some Twitter client to organize all those people into groups, but I’m a huge fan of open-source and most of those apps are built under Adobe Air.

Where does FriendFeed fills in?

FriendFeed has some unique features that solves my problems. On FriendFeed you can add all you social profiles, so when you follow someone you don’t subscribe only to his Twitter account but you can also see their YouTube favorite videos or Flickr photos. You can also sort your contacts in different groups and you don’t need to refresh your browser for updates. You even don’t need to click on external links to watch videos or photos. Another big advantage is that you can comment others content and consequently do a better track of conversations. You are not limited to 140 characters and you can integrate your account with all others social networks such us delicious or Facebook. FriendFeed also has some other really sensible and useful features such as lists (a specific list of friends or people you subscribe to). You can get it all at the help page.
With FriendFeed you can get all the juice of an occasional chat.

The verdict

Right now I’m using FriendFeed has the main source of information and I see some growth in the number of followers on Twitter. If you haven’t tried already, spend a few moments on it and give it a try.