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.

Named Entity Recognition: Tools And APIs

Named entity recognition is a subtask of information extraction. It deals with extracting the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages etc. from unstructured or semi-structured data such as eMails or web pages. These are few useful tools and APIs that provide named entity recognition functionality: AlchemyAPI: REST API that provides a number of natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction features DPpedia Spotlight: Automatically links DPpedia resources OpenCalais: NLP API / web service by Thomson Reuters

Designing For User Delight

Adam Berrey wrote a nice article about why a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) often falls short of meeting users' needs. He argues that by focussing on a product's gestalt (its core features and experience, i.e. its essential characteristics, such as Google's search bar or Facebook's friends feed), design and quality truly successful product designs delight the user to a degree he or she falls in love with the product.

Sunday October 6th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship

Great Rock Singers: Damian Wilson

Arjen Lucassen has a particular talent for not only choosing the best singers for his projects but also for bringing out the best in them. Damian Wilson of Threshold is one of those singers. While his work with Threshold is great already, his performances with Arjen's Star One and Ayreon are truly marvellous. His voice has once been described as 'indestructible' by Arjen. Damian's masterpiece - in my humble opinion - is 'And The Druids Turn To Stone' from the 'Universal ...

Sunday September 29th, 2013 by Bjoern in Music

Autumn

Today's autumn equinox, which made me remember a speech from the terrific, yet unfortunately short-lived TV series called Space: Above and Beyond. Though corny in its 'We're going into battle tomorrow morning." kind of way back then it made quite an impression on me and still does:

Sunday September 22nd, 2013 by Bjoern in Ideas

Great Rock Singers: Matthew Barlow

In my little series about rock singers I consider to be truly great I just can't help but mention Matthew Barlow, who had sort of an on again off again relationship with Iced Earth in the recent years. Regardless, Matt Barlow displays an awesome technique and versatility. He's one of the few bass-baritone singers in the rock and metal genre: Finally, you might also want to listen to this great rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' by Matthew Barlow (who at this time ...

Sunday September 15th, 2013 by Bjoern in Music

Practical Typography

Under Butterick's Practical Typography you'll find a highly interesting, comprehensive online book by Matthew Butterick about typography and how to put it to use. The book can be read for free. However, the author suggests a variety of ways of paying him for his work. So, if you find this resource as useful as I do, please don't hesitate to compensate the author for his efforts so he'll be able to keep up his great work.

Sunday September 8th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design

TimeSheets: Stundenzettel für mite.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.TimeSheets ist ein Tool, das mit mite erfasste Zeiten tabellarisch darstellt. Nach der Eingabe des mite Kontonamens und API Keys können Zeiten nach Projekten und Zeitraum abgefragt werden. TimeSheets basiert auf Bootstrap und Angular mit verschiedenen Erweiterungen für i18n, localStorage und Co. TimeSheets kann unter https://bjoernkw.github.io/TimeSheets3/ genutzt werden. Der Source Code ist unter https://github.com/BjoernKW/TimeSheets3 verfügbar.

Wednesday September 4th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

MemoEasy – Termine online buchen

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Terminausfälle sind für viele Unternehmen ein erhebliches Problem. Ärzte, Friseure, Versicherungsmakler - für diese Dienstleister und in vielen weiteren Branchen läuft ein Großteil des Geschäftes über vorab vereinbarte Termine ab. Nicht wahr genommene Termine sind daher nicht nur ärgerlich, sondern führen auch zu teils erheblichen Umsatzeinbußen. Solche Umsatzausfälle müssen dann erst einmal wieder aufgefangen werden. Ausgefallene Termine können kurzfristig nicht wieder neu vergeben werden. Oft werden Termine einfach deswegen nicht wahr genommen, weil Kunden ...

Tuesday September 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Great Rock Singers: Zak Stevens

Having started this little series on great rock singers with James LaBrie naming him as my all-time favourite I must now admit that actually Zak Stevens of Savatage fame comes close to that status. Also being a very talented, technically apt singer, Zak was lucky to be lead singer for Savatage during the better part of the nineties - a band that was both well-known for the awesome feel for melody as well as an unfortunate tendency to be inexplicably underestimated ...

Sunday September 1st, 2013 by Bjoern in Music

Less, but better

Great design is long-lasting. - taken from Dieter Rams' ten principles for good design. This particular principle is especially true for Rams' perhaps most seminal design, the record player Braun SK 4 that's commonly know as 'Schneewittchensarg' (Snow White's Coffin) in Germany: While the product itself is more than obsolete the ideas and concepts behind this design can still be seen in many modern day devices. This is especially true for most of Apple's designs, which draw heavily upon Rams' work.

Sunday August 25th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.