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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. We also heard good things from others (merchants and users) - fantastic to see our ideas validated this way. ...

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. We counted on being reviewed and approved yesterday evening, with another day to spare (the conference starts tomorrow). Worst case, we still had the old version in the AppStore that was missing one noteable feature, but still was fully functional and usable. Then however, one of our customer found a problem. And it turned out, that this problem was much much bigger than it first seemed like. In effect, it would have prevented everybody with an iPhone set to regional settings that use a comma for decimal separation to crash. And two countries that have this are France and Germany. Not good. Especially because the crash happened in the version that was available and the one that was in review. ...

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. There is a (logical) reason for every glitch, error and problem. ...

Living a life can be difficult. Many things can go wrong, work different than expected, lead to problems and sorrow. I’m thankful that I can share all of this with my wonderful wife - and I appreciate how down to earth she tackles all the problems that come our way. Thank you, Daniela!

Every couple of months, we get a visit by one of the great Aikido masters in our Dojo. This weekend, Stéphane Benedetti, the “lazy Aikido” master. 5 hours of Aikido today for me - and I can feel every muscle and bone. Obviously, I’m doing it wrong. Here’s a video from our Dojo, from 2008 where he demonstrates principles. Enjoy (and I will take it easy the rest of the evening) ...