Homo Viator

....to www.homoviator.tv


See you there!

Obama's trip to the Middle East and Europe and a funny Stewart Clip on the media hype it attracts. Obama will speak in Berlin tomorrow and I will go watch his speech. History in the making?!

Application usage going into maturity phase?
I bet tomorrow at the facebook developer garage in Berlin, people will neglect such statistics. The problem with facebook apps is not that they distract you from the things you really wants to do on facebook (communicate and connect with friends), but rather that most applications offer little no zero value. Unless you find a superpoke super valuable in streamlining the effectiveness of your communication flow. Anyway, I am looking forward to the garage tomorrow and will start promoting the plattform I am currently creating: Scoolix.

JibJab rocks, not only because they make use of Dylan songs to perfectionize political satire. Great animations...!

Time for some Campaignin'


This Land is your land

Four out of the top five most beautiful girls at the Miss Universe Contest are spanish speaking latinas. Tailana Vargas, Miss Colombia, Dayana Mendoza, Miss Venezuela, Marianne Cruz Gonzalez, Miss Dominican Repuplic and Elisa Najera, Miss Mexiko. The fifth one is from Russia by the way. And all of them are dark-haired. Interesting.

I wonder whether Latinas really are the most beautiful women in the world.
Or is the jury affected by the importance these contests play in participating countries? These Miss elections generate much more public interest in Latin America than they do in Europe, for example. I have been in Colombia at the time of election and the public interest was so enormous that it resembled the hype a European country experiences when their national footbal team makes it to the EURO-Championship's Final. If I had time to research I would check whether the contest's share and reach of the TV market that night was similar to the share and reach a footbal final gets in Germany. I bet it was. It certainly felt like it, when I was there.

I would argue the former though. ;-)

You may not believe it, but the origin of SPAM really does lie in a sketch by Monty Python.

I am quite liberal, but I think that the idea of being able to sell your vote i simply anti-democratic. The guy either has quite some balls or is incredibly stupid, as he faces up to five years in prison and a big fine now. He is being charged with one count of bribery, treating and soliciting, a felony under an 1893 Minnesota law that makes it a crime to offer to buy or sell a vote.

Apple Co-Founder Wozniak (maybe he is related?) sees teachers as the biggest challenge to a speedy symbiose of the internet and education.

For the site we are creating, we are looking at ways to communicate things visually, in an abstract form and in a way that is apealing to a young audience. The following two videos are great inspirations, the first one for its animation and the second one for its interactive approach.

A History of Evil



The Story of Stuff



To check out the whole video and the interactive part of it, you gotta click here. Well worth it!

Sorry to have once again been lazy on my posting. The reason for it however is my non-lazyness on other fronts. Together with my loooong-time friend Alex and within the terrain of Zeitbild, we are in the process of creating a website that should become the most innovative site Germans have seen to date. Alright, easy tiger, don't get ahead of yourself here!
But seriously, we are planning to incorporate innovative internet functionalities that currently simply don't exist in Germany and so far are mostly restrained to alpha or beta phases in the US.

At the moment we are a small team: Alex and me, Jan (Junior Art Director), Sebastian (Senior Art Director) and Viet (producing the shows for us; yes, this will be a Video-Platform). We are still looking for programmers and this proves to be the biggest current challenge. But today we have a round table with eight potential programmers (Web Developers with skills in Ajax, PHP, Red5, CSS) and so we hope to be ending our search for good talent tonight.

At the moment it is too early to blog about the core features of this site, since you never know who is listening. ;-)

It is an exciting time and we hope to be able to overcome the second biggest obstacle in the future: Financing. Since this site will have a heavy video component, it will also be quite expensive to produce and run. For now we are creating a prototype that will work, but have a limited set of functionalities and that won't be able to handle a lot of traffic. It should be ready by the end of this month. In August I will venture off to Mongolia for some long needed vacation and when I come back start selling show and channel formats to potential partners (thinking of Zeitbild clients here) and also approach some VCs for equity financing.

And yes, we are also working on my new blog, which shall become an integral part of the promotion of the site.