Envelope / Develope

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash Podcasts are having a second life in the current media environment (2020). People are reviving the old habit of listening to stories on different subjects and being close to interesting or "out-of-normal" events in a disconnected-when-I-have time manner. Podcasts are the new way to be informed with specialized info channels, when your life allows it. If Apple managed to monopolize and to spear-head the streaming music industry with the iPod/Apple store, some new companies are trying to grab the audiences build by niche players in the podcast world  - Spotify, Soundcloud. On the same vein, the broadcasting companies are trying to have a second wind from podcasting their shows, by making them free and then getting money from advertising by having millions of listeners. I compare the podcast industry with the auto industry of 1920s: many attempting to break the ice, a few with an effort to monopolize the streams. My predict...

Here in Toronto, there is an intermittent radio show called "White coat, black art" about being a doctor nowadays or the dilemmas of the health system in Canada. The whole accent is about how difficult is to navigate the current medical problems when in fact, almost everyone is more interested about the ethical questions, economic factors (why some procedures are supported or not) and obviously the transparency of the personal skills of the medical staff. The public services are served as a "block" for everyone when the reality is that it counts on whose hands are you under medical care. What is not touched in any way (the guest making the show is a doctor) are conflictual and controversial views about doctors. The show is mostly about raising big questions, not touching constant slippage of the system and the self-empowerment of the job due to the social contract of how the doctors and the medical system are provisioned in Canada's economy. In this post I...

unsplash-logo Filip Mroz I used to watch the grand slam tennis matches and to observe the emotion of the players. Body language is a good indicator of what is happening with most of them. Their reaction on tense points or after long rallies is also an important indicator where their mind is. Small triggers based on spectators' reactions or referee's decisions are playing a role on their mind. You can see the maturity or the adolescence in some of their behaviors.  But you don't know how they judge and adjust during the match, what is crossing their mind and when the decisions are taken to employ a different tactic than before. And here is where the interviews with mass-media are shining some light about other side of their personalities, besides that of being a fantastic tennis player (because the majority of them are). We judge a sport based on the TV broadcasts instead of judging it based on the effort they put on to reach that level. If you have ever watched a...

Microsoft just announced that the digital library they launched when eBooks were in vogue is closing the service, with a whimper and a small print saying that they will reimburse the buyers (which if you don't know, some of them already lost their devices and books). For me, besides the physical act of discovering and buying a book, it has a network effect starting to unfold: I read the book and post about it I recommend the book to my friends and sometimes they borrowed it from me (SOME friends, not any...) sometimes I write small ideas or thoughts spurred by ideas presented in the book I hope that my kids will enjoy some of the books I bought With an eBook, the problem seems to be that the usage period is your lifetime or the lifetime of the service ( the minimum of them). Yes, you may be able to borrow your book to friends, for limited periods and you can copy and paste, in case you need some content from it. But the bottom limit is that you are paying for a period of ...

After a few years of not paying attention to my sport life I decided to see how well I fare measuring what can be collected with a sport watch sensors - heart beat, distance, speed, pace and (bonus) my sleeping patterns. After a few deliberations I acquired a Garmin Vivo Active, first edition and started to use it. On that path I discovered some shortcomings which became annoying and funny sometimes: for sleeping you had to start/stop the cycle in order to have a relevant time frame after running a few laps, sometimes, I forgot to stop the timer and jumped in a car and drove home. The smart watch could not detected the speed change and sometimes I ended up with a few good tens of kilometers on my running book. My friends called my "the unknown Ethiopian champion runner of Toronto" whenever an update of the firmware occurred, my customized screens disappeared the wake-up function/ring is effective only if you sleep with the watch; there is no sound but mostly a trembl...