The role of social media in the entrepreneurial process

By Erik Hekman on 20 June 2011

There is an broad array of initiatives and experimentation with social media by entrepreneurs and businesses. ‘We have to do something with social media’ seems to be the credo and emphasize lies on ‘a race to the market’. There is a great deal of trail-and-error and knowledge on how social media works is often highly tacit. One can also think of this as a ‘probe and learn process’ of entrepreneurs and businesses trying to use social media to their advantage (Groen et al, 2008). The degree of success however differs.

tagged with: phd, entrepreneurship, social media

DeBeschaving

By Harry van Vliet on 18 June 2011

Today, at the festival DeBeschaving members of the Crossmedialab were present to promote their concepts (among them BandSpot). Also a survey was held among the festival visitors, a survey (the ‘eventmonitor’) that is being developed by researchers of the Crossmedialab. A publication on the experience of festivals, with data from this survey will be published shortly. Furthermore, we also had fun watching DazzledKid, Kensington and so many other acts (a snail race, and of course Elvis lives….)

tagged with: festivals, debeschaving, experience

Like! part deux

By Matthijs Rotte on 16 June 2011

As I promised, I’d think about liking. And so it came to pass that I did. For weeks I pondered about liking. I have come to realize that the “like” has a lot of aspects to it. I’ve been thinking about liking. How liking things helps us make sense of the world surrounding us. In a way, what we like defines us. If you are surrounded by things that you like, does it make you happy? I can imagine it will, so we tend to collect likable things and people around us. So we can create a personal utopia, built out of the things we like. We teach our kids to like certain things, so that we can share the pleasure of our liking. We meet new people and friends in places we like. Or we go to places people we like, like. Liking is emotion. 

tagged with: emotions, social media, like, facebook

Expliced pictures - communication through posters in Malawi

By Dennis Ringersma on 13 June 2011

A bloody diaper of a baby. This gruesome photograph is well known throughout South Africa, as it is depicted in hospitals, police stations and other public buildings throughout its provinces. Originally targetting the belief that sex with an infant would cure HIV/Aids, the poster later was meant to open the general public’s eye concerning child abuse. This is not the only poster that will make your stomach make a 360. Here in Malawi posters that adress crime issues are graphic as well. On one poster we see a woman burning her child’s hand and on the other we see a man who has just defiled a small girl. Looking at these posters from my Dutch point of view, I cannot help but think that posters like that will never be hung up in the Netherlands. I have been trying to find out why I feel this way. I think there are a couple of reasons.

tagged with: africa, media

The paradox in iCloud

By Kees Winkel on 9 June 2011

I’ve been sort of following WWDC, You know: what the sentiment was, what the novelties were and, obviously, what Steve Jobs oracled that fine day at the West Coast. Steve Jobs was, could it be any different, the ultimate keynote speaker and his brilliant master stroke that day was: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device, we’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” With this bright future claim, Jobs introduced, what Apple refers to as iCloud. And this is how it works: iCloud is integrated across Apple desktops and Apple mobile devices to ensure that all of your Apple computers can synchronize contacts, calendars, email, apps, music, photos, and more. Most likely, iCloud can be integrated not just in Apple machines but in machines that run on any given OS. So Apple is offering a fully integrated service while at the same time other companies offer parts of the service (i.e. Amazon’s latest music service, Google’s Gmail inbox, Youtube, Dropbox, Wiggio, Flickr) no one combines it all into one seamless service that also works across a set of hardware devices. And it’s free. Now, isn’t that nice?

tagged with: interdependency, hq, icloud, media, paradox, apple

Our man in Africa

By Harry van Vliet on 5 June 2011

One of our team members is on a mission…in Africa. Dennis Ringersma travels through Africa the coming three months, researching a new educational method on HIV/Aids. He will blog on his journey and experiences on edutoy.wordpress.com. As a simple way to do some ethnographic research I asked Dennis to take a picture each day of his journey of his ‘confrontation’ with (new) media. His first observation is from Malawi.

tagged with: ethnographic, africa, media

Charges on services as Whatsapp, no charges, and then again, charges. What about the end user?

By Kees Winkel on 31 May 2011

Last Tuesday, secretary of state Verhagen (economic affairs) decided that carriers may not charge consumers for the use of certain Internet services on their mobile phones. Originally, the purpose for these charges was that it would guarantee ‘net neutrality’. Effectively, this means that consumers would not be allowed to decide what Internet services to use or not use.

tagged with: subsription, t-mobile, vodafone, verhagen, kpn, charge, internet, mobile

Gamification of Education

By Harry Smals on 27 May 2011

One of the trends that came forward during the Media Future Week 2011 in Almere, was Gamification and Chris Crawford gave a very inspiring presentation about game design. In his vision a game designer is god of the universe that he creates for the game. What could this mean for education?

tagged with: quality, determinism, gamification, education

Like!

By Matthijs Rotte on 23 May 2011

I like a lot of things. I like snowboarding, I like to have a drink with friends, I like to have a good conversation, I like lobster, I like good wine, and so on and so on. People that know me well, know what I like. The basis of friendship is liking each other and doing things together you both like or love doing. Friendship starts when you’re doing something you like doing and meet someone with the same “likes”, we call the “interests” mostly. The same counts for doing things you loathe doing as well. This of course fits in the day and night equation(if there’s nothing to loathe, there’s nothing to like). This is the basis for fraternity or sorority initiation, make a bunch of people do stuff they loathe and the start liking eachother. This is also known as teambuilding.  My point? Liking or loathing is a very big part of our social life, maybe even the very base of having one.

tagged with: like, social network sites, facebook, social media

Bringing the Past to the Present: The use of tagging and storytelling for the enrichment of digital cultural heritage

By Erik Hekman on 18 May 2011

Together with Harry van Vliet I recently submitted an abstract to the International Conference on Knowledge Work and Innovations. In this paper we address the use of social tagging and storytelling in order to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. The purpose of this conference is to deepen the co-operation between the members of the strategic partner network: HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and Polytechnic University of Valencia by discussing the new practices of knowledge work and innovation creation. We submitted our paper to the Applied Arts track. Let’s hope it gets accepted.

tagged with: roots2share, ikweetwaditis, social storytelling, social tagging, cultural heritage