Alexander Chalkidis

Author: alexanderchalkidis

  • How to know when not to buy the latest gadget

    It’s almost a decade since I bought my first DSLR.   A Canon 10D.   “Barely” 6.3 megapixel resolution, most smartphones I would consider buying these days have more than that.   But it used all my EF lenses and has served me well.   Too well in fact.

    For all of us in technology, the words “early adopters” or “gadget fans” imply the opposite of zombies.   Fast moving, fickle creatures that can’t resist the smell of fresh tech flesh.   Can’t be seen with a device whose specs are outdated.   So how has this old camera survived so long?   And, more to the point, how have I resisted buying a new one for so many years?   Especially during visits to Photokina and other photo tech wizardry shows?

    If you check out the rate with which I put pictures up on various blogs, flickr or panoramio you would say I am a pretty heavy user of the device.   In fact these are a small proportion of my camera clicking activity.   The DSLR came just in time for my first child, and now that I am up to three, there are more than twenty thousand pictures of them.   Then there is work photography.     Most marketing departments are too stingey to pay for a good photographer and too boring to take a good picture so I often try to fill the gap.   I have enjoyed taking it along to consulting projects and shooting anything from jewellery to coffee.

    New DSLRs have tried to entice me.   Almost immediately after the 10D came smaller and lighter cameras.   But not that much smaller or lighter to make it worth changing.   Resolution increased but most end up being seen on computers anyway.   Even photos of mine which have been used commercially in ads by Saab and the like have never suffered from lack of resolution, even in print ads.  Higher sensitivity for shooting in low light situations enticed me.   High Definition video makes sense so you don’t need to carry a second device for that.  Included time lapse features would be useful.   The tables are turning…

    Alex vs photo marketing crowd = 1-0 I would say!

  • Interface time (again) – supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

    You know that something is changing when Google talks about a “beautiful interface”…   As the world tries to figure out how to keep their day job and still find time to check up their facebook, twitter, linked in and Google Plus accounts, it seems we are going full circle to the operating system debate again.   Whether it is thin clients, cloud computing, mobile or whatever.

    Google and Microsoft have shown which way they are going, trying to make it all “seamless“.   Same buttons at more or less the same place.   Get used to it.  Literally, that is an order:  “Get used to it!”  and then “buy our stuff, not the competition!”   That is what the interface wars are always about.   More than a decade ago I publicly predicted Nokia’s demise based on the premise that their interface couldn’t make the upgrade to a smartphone world.   Even things that seems minor, like the way Google real time operates, quickly become addictive, our brains just demand them afterwards.

    And now I would put my money on…Wordpress!   Not the interface so much (yet, though they are improving) as the design of a personal publishing platform.   I don’t want Facebook to organise the presentation of my information.   Nor Google or Microsoft.   Tumblr is very pretty and visually entertaining but no, I want a no-nonsense environment in which to make decisions about the stuff I care about.  I don’t want folders of Google Docs.   I need what comes when you put together the dynamic development rates of wordpress.org with the user friendliness of wordpress.com with…all that social stuff.   I don’t want comments from my friends to be in Facebook OR Google plus OR anything else.   I want them under my blog post where I can collect them and control them.  Without having to log in and out of ten different systems or hope that Hootsuite will get it right.

    My nieces just started a blog, just for the family, all about their holiday in Greece and what they are doing in the three weeks they are over from the U.S.   Nope, they couldn’t do it on Facebook, they don’t have accounts and I don’t think they should have accounts in a social network at their age anyway.    I have used WordPress for collaborating with just one other person (writing a kids book) or for a group of people on a work project which ended up running for more than a year and now has more than 150 very useful posts; it has become an internal resource to them.    To me it is testament to my skills as a consultant.   Beats a powerpoint presentation on many levels and it is alive.   But it couldn’t be done without Worpdress.   It is the business model as much as the technology.   You can start up a free personal blog one day for fun and end up at whatever other side of the publishing world the next.   I put some basic FAQs about electric bikes simply because I was tired of people stopping me to ask the same questions.   A few months later it is the No1 resource (and any Google search in Greek on the topic will get you there) for ebikes in Greece!  It’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:

    Mary Poppins:  “You’d better use it carefully or it may change your life. ”

    Bert: “For example, one night I said it to me girl, and now me girl’s my wife!”

    Sure, there are other platforms which do some of this stuff well.   But I will be looking at “My Dashboard” on WordPress.com with renewed hopes that if “there can only be one” interface, these guys will get it right.

  • Communicational lessons from the Greek crisis

    As you watch the television coverage of riots in the center of Athens, you might find it useful to ponder for a minute on the situation.  Not for the conspiracy theories or the endless economic analysis we are all tired of.   From a practical point of view the items which might appear in your country too sometime in the future:

    1. What to do with millions of unemployed people?   That’s a lot of time and energy available from a lot of people.   If it doesn’t get channeled into something, some is more than likely to end up in riots.   If religion was the opium of the people in bygone times, soap operas later, what is taking up the slack now?

    2. Who is the enemy?   Again, if the bad guys are not defined, everyone is up for the part.   Many modern economic crises featured politicians’ focusing on some “other” to blame.   Used sparingly in politics or business, this strategy can in fact be useful to help foster social solidarity towards a common goal.

    3. Everyone’s an expert.  Social media and the internet have dislocated any traditional way of controlling the agenda.   Government inaction makes it even easier for a minor event on Twitter or Facebook to grow disproportionately to its true impact.   The only way to stay ahead in the internet age is to run faster than everyone else.   All the time.

     

     

  • I miss those old IBM laptops

    The keyboard was magic.    You didn’t realize quite how good it was until you fumbled around with anything else.  I can touch type in the dark almost unconsciously on one of those IBM keyboards.   Then again I didn’t have to because they had that cool little light built in the top which would light up your keyboard for just enough light to see in a dark airplane cabin or children’s bedroom.   IBM laptops were always under the specifications of other laptops in their price range.   They looked boring.   You didn’t ask for one so much as find it on your desk as the company IT guy seemed to love them for some boring IT reason…

    Yet somehow they performed better.   And they always lasted longer. You wished they would fall apart so you could get something with a new CPU that looked better but they plod on.   In fact they hardly ever die!   That hidden partition for system recovery they have makes sure you can always bounce back and get a brand new system in an hour or so.

    Maybe some other manufacturer has similar quality and attention to detail nowadays.   I haven’t bumped into it.   Macs are cool but not a work-horse like those IBM laptops, so much as a style or fun pony.  HP top end models are impressive in specs sometimes but the component quality varies enormously from model to model.   IBM laptops consistently included features which came out of serious research.   Sure, they often got their marketing wrong and some models were just plain silly.   But I very much doubt anyone, ever regretted the money they spent on any laptop IBM made.

    This is not to say that quality is dead or to lament ages bygone as tech dinosaurs often do.   But for people like me that will always have at least one dual disk, RAID, SSD, as-many-core-processors-as-possible, massive graphic card and all the bells and whistles type laptop, it seems like there is a bit of a gap in the market.   Laptops are commodities which is great since they cost less but not so great when they don’t help us produce more.

    So I watch my kids play on old IBM laptops and sing their praise retrospectively.  Machines ten and fifteen years old running amazingly well.   (I think we have to give some credit to Microsoft for the fact that Windows XP is still so widely supported.)   I love technology and enjoy trying out the latest and greatest.   I just miss those seriously scientific IBM engineers that gave us these gems and hope to find more of their spirit somewhere down the line.

  • www.eshop.gr – The Greek version of an internet bubble

    While the rest of the world ponders if this spurt of activity is a tech bubble or not, in Greece one of the oldest ones is about to pop.   Now you could say that a company that has been around for 13 years doesn’t really qualify.   In fact in the tech industry, they should perhaps get a medal for surviving that long!   But I have been one of those annoying cleverclogs who publicly stated objections from their beginning.   So it is my pleasure to be finally vindicated by recent developments.

    Sort of.

    www.e-direct.gr was a clear cut case of a scam.   And a well executed one at that.   But Eshop.gr is much more complicated.   In internet economy terms you could almost say it was a perfect example.   It had growing turnover, even physical stores.  And – as traditional distribution crumbled from vanishing margins and credit differential – they even took genuine market share.   But they never made sense.

    At first it was their approach to business which worried me.   They had made a parallel import of Pinnacle TV tuners back then and I visited to discover what was on their mind.   Nothing it seemed.   I had never seen a sales director less in touch with the actual products he was selling.   Tech support?   Non existent.   Infrastructure?   Let’s say “problematic” to be polite!  Then I started monitoring their media spend.   Ridiculous.   They were regularly spending as much as Plaisio, even though their revenues were but a small fragment of the market leader’s.

    So it looked like a perfect example of a company grooming itself to be sold.   As long as everybody thinks they are the No1 Eshop in Greece, sooner or later someone will buy them.  Some Greek businessman who suddenly gets itchy and worried that his empire doesn’t have an e-something.   Rumours flew around about Panos Germanos (owner of such permanent money losing machines as Multirama and Public).   But here remained the problem:   nobody really knew.

    I tried to explain this all to one of Eshop’s founder, the wonderful Apostolos, back in 2007.   It was a dinner during Retail Vision at Paris and we ended up talking about our common passion of fast cars…  In 2008 I wrote a blog post urging them to sell.  “Last chance is now…”   It may be that in Silicon Valley having a failure is considered a medal for venture capitalists, but only for quick mistakes in genuinely new business ventures.   Eshop was drawing out, parallel concepts were emerging, even the founders started up other things, again in extreme secrecy.

    The Greek business scene is in fact highly political.   ie too many companies are in fact not related to the business of making profits.   Private TV channels  have been like that from their beginning, supported by some business man (personally even!) in order to influence politics.   So the occasional press release of Eshop.gr breaking this or the other record in sales was a red flag to me in communication terms.   My verdict:  guilty by omission.   Extremely selective presentation of subsets of data, it takes one to know one!

    It doesn’t really matter whether or not they survive this crisis.   In a way it gives them great cover to lay off people, close their pointless retail locations and make any other cuts necessary.   Blame it all on the economic crisis.   But without more transparency in financial and strategy matters nothing will change in the long term.

  • Πλήρες κιτ μετατροπής σε ηλεκτρικό ποδήλατο από την Shimano: Αλλά πού’ν’το;

    Όλα τα εξαρτήματα του κιτ μετατροπής της Shimano

    Ακούμε από το καλοκαίρι για το εκπληκτικό πλήρες πακέτο μετατροπής ποδήλατου σε ηλεκτρικό της διάσημης εταιρείας.   Η φωτογραφίες είναι δελεαστικές, το marketing καλό.    Είναι ένα μόνο μοντέλο, όχι ιδιαίτερα δυνατή μηχανή, αλλά για τις περισσότερες εφαρμογές επαρκέστατο.

    Με την σωστή τιμή, η κίνηση θα είναι ίσως καθοριστική για όλη την αγορά.   Η Shimano έχει ήδη μονοπωλιακή θέση στα περισσότερα εξαρτήματα και διανομή παντού στον κόσμο.   Το όνομα είναι γνώριμο.   Θα φέρει ίσως την σταθερότητα που λείπει από την αγορά στο θέμα των κιτ μετατροπής.

    Επιπλέον θα μπορεί να εγγυηθεί για την συμβατότητα με άλλα υποσυστήματα του ποδηλάτου όπως τα δισκόφρενα.

    Η καθυστέρηση όμως είναι ύποπτη.  Ίσως να έγινε κίνηση από τους κατασκευαστές ποδηλάτων να σταματήσουν την Shimano για να μην τους μείνουν όλα τα δικά τους μοντέλα στις αποθήκες!

  • Why a modern Greek should feel like Achilles at sea

    While everyone gets used to what most of us saw (and wrote) all along and the Greek debt sooner or later gets restructured, the road ahead is pretty clear: we have to actually produce something!   While the media and most of the population rolls over slowly, fat and lazy from so many years of a bloated public sector, someone has to go to Troy to fight.   Much like the Greeks back then though:

    1. We are naturally skeptical. When I first saw the press release about a Greek company in the Innovation Parc I automatically assumed it is yet another scam.   So many years of seeing pseudo-business ventures makes a genuinely world standard effort hard to believe.

    2. Most just don’t want to fight, quite happy in their own villages.    Trying to talk a Greek brand name like Loumidis to turn himself into something with a proven success record like http://www.thegreekdeli.com/ is a task for …Ulysses’ cunning!

    3. We get emotional and miss the point.   Helen was probably not very happy in Sparta anyway.   Who cares if Paris loved her?    Business is business.   I see this now while monitoring worldwide media regarding ouzo, one of those products that is considered so Greek it hurts.  Like feta cheese, some people get too caught up in history to face the real enemy; anyone selling our history better than us!

    Much like Achilles, modern Greeks have a decision to make:   They can stay home and die poor and unknown, or they can venture forth to try and conquer the world like their ship faring ancestors have always done in the past.   It is written that Achilles beat the main force and landed with his handful of faithful warriors to take on the entire Trojan defenses before anyone else.   They could hardly keep him in the ship as it approached the well defended shore.   His enthusiasm for battle and immortality was impossible to hold back.

    Hand me that spear.

  • Scanning opportunities and inroads to social networking

    Old photos fade away.   Literally!   No matter what paper they are printed on, even in good storage conditions.   So as I started to scan a few from my vast – pre digital – collection I couldn’t help but feel there is a better way.   Not even an automated scanner would save me.   I want to cart off the whole thing.   It seems self evident that there is a market.   Why hasn’t it taken off?

    Well it is not organised.   Can you name a company that will handle the entire process?   Pick up boxes and return organised DVDs of the pictures, images cleaned up and available in high and low res.   While they are at it why not have them somewhere online for me to pick from.   It would be a great way for any company to get a leg up in social networking.   “Give us your pictures and we will start off your impressive photo blog!”   After all, your friends, coworkers and relatives are all in some picture somewhere.   Tag them and we email them to join!

    For anyone with more than an amateur interest in photography it is also a possible revenue source.   (Or so they think; which means they will pay more for it!)  If you have a collection of slides from travels around the world or whatever your pet interest was, they are possibly useful.   If only someone would scan and process them all…  Again it would be a great Trojan horse for someone to get your hosting business. 

    A final word of advice:  if you do scan old pictures there will inevitably be some of old girlfriends.   Give the job to a professional agency or else your wife will give you serious grief!

  • Master Chef’s “insanely delicious” ouzo sauce

    Master Chef material!

    “Insanely delicious scallops&shrimp on eggy noodles w creamy ouzo sauce @my FAVE Manhatt greek resto #Pylos. Their tarama DE-stroys all others.”  If you are not from the U.S. you may not know Kelly Choi who Wikipedia says “is the former host of Bravo TV‘s Top Chef spin-off, Top Chef Masters, which premiered on June 10, 2009.[1] Choi is also an Emmy-award winning Korean–American television personality on NYC TV, one of the broadcast stations of NYC Media Group, the television and media network owned by the City of New York.”

    In any case, she needs to improve her photography skills or get a better phone because this surely doesn’t look very appealing!

  • Don’t get drunk: drink real A grade Greek ouzo

    Following Twitter references to ouzo and #ouzo there is a very specific group of people with old bad memories of ugly hangovers associated to ouzo drinking.   This is commonly the result of improvised cocktails or slammer abuse but more commonly I would guess due to low grade pseudo (non distilled) ouzo or non A brand ouzo.

    Here are some things to look out for:

    1. Properly distilled ouzo is absolutely clear, you can’t really tell it isn’t water.

    2. It also goes milky white  in a balanced way when you add water.

    It says "ouzo" but what is in it?

    3. The aroma is mild, it shouldn’t blow your nose away!

    4. A whiff of aniseed, phinocio, gum, cinamon, kakoule and even chamomile are possible ideas as you bring it to your nose .

    5. If you know your wines, good ouzo is semi dry.

    6. The after taste on a good ouzo is smooth.

    The two brands used as a reference point for most experts are Plomari as indicative of a common (No1 brand worldwide) ouzo and Adolo which is the ultimate in ouzo experience, by triple distillation in very limited production runs.

    All this doesn’t mean that a local ouzo might not be great, just that it is difficult to be sure what is actually in it.   And how you will wake up the next day.   As emphasized in ouzo etiquette guidelines, this is generally a social drink enjoyed with company and food.