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.

Le Petit Prince

A few days ago I once more read Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I read that book more than 15 years ago in French class and it made some impression on me back then. Turns out it still does. While technically a children's book it holds a lot of wisdom. In taking a child's perspective towards life the book's quite telling as for many aspects of everyday life we usually put up with without questioning their sometimes utter laughableness ...

Natural Language User Interfaces And Internet Search

Recently, there was an article at Wired about IBM’s Watson and how IBM might be able to supersede Google as the dominant search engine by providing a question-answering kind of search engine. Every few years the idea of a natural language / semantic / question answering search engine crops up again. Indeed, natural language understanding is quite relevant for the crawling and indexing part of information retrieval systems and Google is very good at that. Just look at their quite formidable automatic translation ...

Sunday November 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

37signals works remotely

37signals works remotely - why doesn't your company, too?

Sunday November 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Business

SEPA: Nutzerfreundliche Eingabe von IBAN und BIC

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.In 2014 wird die Nutzung von SEPA für Banküberweisungen und Lastschrift endgültig Pflicht. An sich ist gegen eine internationale Vereinheitlichung des Zahlungsverkehrs nichts einzuwenden. Allerdings lässt die Nutzerfreundlichkeit des ganzen Verfahrens deutlich zu wünschen übrig oder wie es mal kürzlich jemand ausgedrückt hat: "SEPA ist endlich mal etwas, das für Unternehmen und Privatleute gleich kompliziert ist." Die Eingabe und Prüfung von IBAN und BIC auf den meisten Websites ist kompliziert und fehleranfällig. Es gibt verschiedene Randfälle, die ...

Sunday October 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Great Rock Singers: Roy Khan

Well, what can I say about Khan? The epitome of theatrical performance. Such versatility and range. A warm baritone timbre:

Sunday October 20th, 2013 by Bjoern in Music

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

Sunday October 13th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.