musings

Thanks to @baltasarw I spent most of today with Toni and Anneli Lengen in Stallikon, in their HolzSach Atelier carving wood - with a chainsaw… Starting with this large piece of poplar: I ended up with this: Do you know what it is? Will be revealed tomorrow…. And here are all 4 pieces…

3 intense days (and 2 intense weeks leading up to) of Lift13 are over. I didn’t have a chance to see much of the conference unfortunately, so I can’t say if it has been as good as previous ones - from my limited experience, I’d question that - but maybe some of my friends like @Stephtara who has been live bloging these conferences forever can answer for me. I have been busy with my colleagues and partners in crime JF Groff, Alex Lampis and Alvaro Fussen to demonstrate how Mobino works, talk to merchants, customers and partners and get a feeling for how our system is received “in the wild” (although it was a very friendly “wild” setting). ...

Todays takeaway of Lift13? Hackable Sextoys via the presentation by @PerfectPlum Besides showing of and demonstrating the current state of the art in vibrator technology, Heather Kelly also showed hackable sextoys (for example a vibrator controlled by an ultrasonic transducer that measures the distance of an object to the sensors and intensifies the vibrations accordingly) A great presentation, and an interesting topic (especially after Garions talk about themes in the adult industry and his social responsible adult website and his admittance that he didn’t know, what women would be interested in) ...

Lift 13 started today - early for Alvaro and me, who took the Roeschtigrabenexpress from Zurich to Geneva. Thanks Glenn and stimmt AG for a wonderful ride. The rest of the day is kind of blurry in my mind. We launched, took money from people, fixed a few small issues, and generally studied how the people reacted to Mobino. The joyous moment of the day for me was to witness one guy buying a coffee at the bar, paying with Mobino for the first time ever and exclaiming: “C’est super cool” - that makes all the trials and tribulations we went through worth it. ...

The Stockholm Syndrome is described as when hostages evolve sympathy or empathy with their captors. That’s what I felt yesterday evening, hours before an email went out to 1000 participants of the Lift Conference in Geneva where we are showcasing Mobino as the official mobile payment provider - and we found a critical bug in our iOS app that was sent to review to Apple a good week before. If all goes well, Apple currently takes around 6 days to review and approve an application for the iOS AppStore. ...

One of the things that make me incredibly happy about my line of work is the following: In every case, when things don’t work (there are errors, strange behaviours, weird things) there is a reason. And it is possible to identify the reason, find the cause for the errors and to fix them. I find that very powerful and very reassuring. There is no such thing as chance or randomness in the errors we encounter. ...