Comments for buckminster

Comment on Layout, the challenge for web publishers and CMS builders by Johan van Mol

Johan van Mol — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:22:49 +0000

Yep. I like the full magazine overview, it gives a reader the same kind of visual cues as flipping through pages.

Comment on Layout, the challenge for web publishers and CMS builders by kristof vandommele

kristof vandommele — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:48:36 +0000

Johan,
have you checked the iPad-edition of Wired Magazine already?

kvd

Comment on The difference between men and boys… my first iPad experience by Marc vb

Marc vb — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:54:03 +0000

Ik heb er ook net ėėn uit de US laten komen.
Je kan er niet mee bellen, het is trager en heeft minder capaciteit dan mijn AirMac, mijn SIM-kaart past er niet in, het opent geen flash-sites, het scherm is kleiner dan ik dacht.
En toch: hij is geweldig!!!
M.

Comment on Forget about spelling and grammar by JorisVD

JorisVD — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:12:14 +0000

Surprisingly fast that this topic appears on the blog.
Some remarks:
1/ There is a difference in the public acceptance of the correctness of spelling between daily communications, which is transferred to new media like email, … and the languague of media we use to get information from, like books, journals, newspapers. I cannot imagine that you accept a book which is written with a lot of spelling errors. Sometimes you won’t even be able to understand the message exactly. Intellectual people read a lot of these stuff in correct spelling, so why then creating errors while writing your own texts?
2/ There is a big difference between making a language simpler from a grammar point of view and just introducing anarchy. The trend in the German languages towards the English is quite logic; there you see that the simplification in spelling is compensated by the huge expansion of the vocabulary.
3/ The knowledge of languages and especially of your mother tongue is not a competence comparable with cooking. It’s more a competence like counting, it is basic development. You can also claim that the lack of time and the resulting erosion of life quality allows us to say that 3+1=5, but I believe in a lot of cases this will not bring us to the right decisions.
4/ The richness of a language is strongly pronounced within the domain of rhetoric, which is a step beyond just controlling a language. With Obama and some other world leaders, we have great examples that rhetoric and thus language expertise can be a differentiator for leaders.

Comment on Forget about spelling and grammar by Miss Puntkomma

Miss Puntkomma — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:01:13 +0000

A correct spelling and grammar is just a form of respect for your readers. Doesn’t matter if your texting or writing an article in a newspaper. By the way, who is going to develop your spelling checker/writing assistant you think, if nobody writes properly any more?

Comment on Waiting to pay for my sandwich with social currency by Waiting to pay for my sandwich with social currency | buckminster – The Facebook News

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:50:34 +0000

[...] Johan van Mol wrote an interesting post today onWaiting to pay for my sandwich with social currency | buckminsterHere’s a quick excerpt [...]

Comment on Is social lending a threat to retail banks? by Tim N.

Tim N. — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:10:16 +0000

I believe in this system for smaller amounts (less than 25 k EUR), but…

1. What about the anonimity (not the same as privacy) on the internet?
2. As soon as it get’s serious with larger amounts, both customer and banker want to see faces and gain trust. Are you willing to open an internet tender for let’s say 500k EUR? Is a bank willing to accept a deposit of 500k euro or lend money of this amount without ever seeing the customer before the closing of the contract: no way!
3. What about the black money? Tax and anti-money laundering authorities will have an ideal platform to monitor the tenders. I never believe you will reach this kind of customers, alltough they represent a very large market.
4. What about the opportunity cost? Often, instead of a good rate, you can receive from the banker a personalised service or other commercial benefits, such as leniency, etc.

Comment on Is social lending a threat to retail banks? by Johan van Mol

Johan van Mol — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:06:21 +0000

@JorisVD
Suppose a bank offers 3% on a savings account and you can borrow money at 5%. This leaves 2% for the bank. If 2 parties agree on 4% – without intermediation – then everybody wins.
Of course trust is a big issue. But the internet is killing privacy and people can get a trust-rating from other users who they dealt with (e.g. Ebay). So if you mess up once, everyone will know and you’ll have to pay more interest.

Comment on Is social lending a threat to retail banks? by JorisVD

JorisVD — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:27:15 +0000

This is a very interesting business model. What is not really clear for me is how the rates, you can fix, compare to market rates from retail banks. What would be the reason to pay more or to receive less than what you get from a retail bank? Is the game played only between the market lowest rates for borrowing and the market highest rates for lending money (eg savings account). Those two market extrema are moreover determined by supply and demand of money, which is regulated by the central banks and hence the authorities. My question is, how self-sustaining this game can be.
Another question I have is for which kind of consumers this will work. I believe the crisis learns that the extreme leveraging by debt financing, mainly by people who are hardly able to pay back their loans (eg bad mortgages), is not the right way of developing the consumer market. If you assume middle class people only borrow money for houses or cars, I believe for that kind of loans banks will remain the preferred partner for the coming decades, if they are able to regain the necessary consumers’ trust.