my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Accessible Design: Empowering People

At the beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference, Robin Christopherson talked about inclusive and accessible design (Technology - The Power And The Promise) Robin is Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet - a company that according to their mission statement 'exists to change the lives of disabled people by helping them to use digital technology at work, at home or in education'. Being blind himself Robin provided an insightful perspective on the difficulties people with disabilities face in everyday life and how inclusive design ...

SVG is Ready For Prime Time

At the very inspiring beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference that took place from 19 - 21 May this year in Düsseldorf (I'll write another bit or two about this conference in the next few weeks), Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks fame) held an interesting talk on Scalable Vector Graphics aptly titled 'SVG Is For Everybody'. In this talk Chris explained that although SVG tends to be sidelined it's quite ready for being used extensively today. To name but a few aspects: SVG allows you ...

Sunday July 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Why Design Matters

OK, you're right. Countless articles and great books by brilliant designers have been written on this subject. So, who am I to tell you why design matters? As matter of fact I'm not going to tell you anything new. It just happened that I came across a particularly hideous example of bad industrial design that underlines pretty well that Design isn't merely an ancillary feature but quite to the contrary the most essential aspect of a product. Design by committee always fails. Less is more. Design ...

Sunday June 29th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Spucke, Klebeband und COBOL

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Kürzlich brauchte ich eine Kopie eines bestimmten Kontoauszuges für mein Geschäftskonto. Naiv nahm ich an, dass dies einfach per Online Banking zu erledigen wäre. Leider fehlt eine entsprechende Option im Online Banking System meiner Bank, also rief ich bei der Telefon Hotline an. Dort wollte man mir dann auch in der Tat direkt weiter helfen, benötigte aber das Endsaldo des vorherigen Auszugs, das Anfangssaldo des folgenden Auszugs und den Monat des Auszugs, von dem ich ...

Sunday June 22nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Greatness, luck and storytelling

Recently, I've done some reading on computer history again. If you're interested in that sort of stuff and haven't read it yet go and have a look at Ars Technica's in-depth series on the history of the Amiga home computer. It's quite a comprehensive piece on a significant part of computer history that's largely forgotten today. This series and other documents such Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil remind me of how far ahead the Amiga was in many respects at that time. I'm ...

Sunday June 15th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Huge Potential For Mesh Networking In Mobile Phones

Apple's iOS 7 contains a highly interesting but until now very much under-appreciated feature that Apple calls Multipeer Connectivity. Another name for this feature is mesh network and it potentially can change the world. Basically, a mesh network is a network topology, in which each participant is connected to every other participant. This results in a dense network that's particularly resilient towards failures and tampering from outside. In contrast to that the computer networks we commonly use for the most part employ a ...

Sunday June 8th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Transcendence

Having watched the film Transcendence recently I thought I'd use this opportunity to write a bit more about how the singularity might come about and how it might look like. I have a bit of a problem (to say the least) with the film's overarching anti-technology stance. Then again, the Luddites in the film are terrorists who aren't above killing humans for, well, preventing machines from killing humans. I suppose logic and reason have never been strong points of terrorists, both in ...

Sunday June 1st, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

How the Singularity Might Actually Look Like

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame recently posted an intriguing article on how the robots will take over (to be taken with a pinch of salt, of course). His point is this. Assuming that the singularity indeed is near and ruling out any Terminator Skynet scenarios - because those are boring and inefficient: How might the first post-singularity artificial intelligence try to control its environment both for its own benefit and humanity's - assuming that there's some sort of incentive or inherent moral imperative ...

Sunday May 25th, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

ZenQuery 1.0 is available today!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new product I'm currently developing: ZenQuery, an Enterprise Backend as a Service. I’m pleased to announce the first public version of ZenQuery today. Since the first public announcement regarding ZenQuery roughly 30 days ago we’ve been busy working on this release. Today, you’ll be able to try out ZenQuery 1.0 yourselves on your own server and environment. I really hope you like what we’ve got for you so far. For more information please have a ...

Wednesday May 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Spotified

As innovative apps and business models go on a personal level Spotify is one of those innovations that in recent years not only provided a lot of value to me but also quite fundamentally changed an important aspect of my life: Listening to music. I happen to be a music buff with a penchant for Progressive Rock, Power Metal alongside folk metal / medieval stuff, computer games themes and occasionally interesting, novel pop music. Music streaming and discovery tool Spotify has allowed me ...

Sunday May 18th, 2014 by Bjoern in Music, Software, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.