In the past few weeks I have been playing around with a number of interesting new mobile apps on my iPhone. I have started calling them “Lifestyle apps” for a number of reasons. First of all they are primarily mobile and as such I have them always with me – ready to be used when I whip up my iPhone. Second, they have a very basic and simple use  case – they collect information about how, were and with whom I spend my time. Third, they are inherently social – I can share the above mentioned information with my friends, family and anyone else who cares. They may have different approaches to how they do this but one way or another they know more about my lifestyle than anyone else. So what are they?

OINK
This is a little new app from a company called Milk, started by entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose. The main idea of Oink is to allow you to rate anything, anywhere. You go around places and Oink stuff. Slowly you build up credibility in certain areas (I am going after hamburgers and coffee) and with the amount of Oinks growing, your opinion matters more and more in rankings of products, services, etc… I guess what the creators are trying to build is a universal ranking system for any experience by mining the user generated Oinks (sounds dirty). The app is beautiful and rather easy to use. There is not much content in it yet (in Europe) so I wouldn’t go there looking for recommendations just yet. But the experience is great and I think they are on to something.

Path
If there was a contest for the most beautiful app on the iPhone (now that I think about it, there probably is) I’d vote for Path. The user experience and design on the new 2.0 version of Path for iPhone are amazing. The core job of Path is to track your life via different types of content you share with the app. At any point in time you can open the app and take a picture, share your location, say who you are with, just write a note and other things. This content is placed on a simple timeline with date and time tags that track you better than the FBI. The idea attracts me because it is much more personal in a sense that you are collecting this information for yourself as a kind of journal. You could in theory go to the app in 20 years and track where you have been and scroll through your encounters and experiences. I don’t see any rankings, recommendations or algorithms that would hint at a business model for the company which actually makes me feel better about the app.

Foursquare
I guess most people have heard of Foursquare by now. If not, know just that it is the first successful location based app that won the contest for THE check-in app against Gowalla (acquired last week by Facebook). This app takes a different approach to your lifestyle than the others – it is about gamefication. You check-in at different locations, score points for various things (100th hamburger joint in 100 days,…), leave tips about them and share with friends. The point I guess is to be the go to place for location. What attracts most people is who leads in the rankings of most check-ins and points, which to be honest is not that big with me. I do check the app for interesting tips when I am traveling though.

Instagram
The last of the apps I will mention may seem more of a photography app than lifestyle. But don’t be fooled – Instagram is one of the most popular iPhone apps because it combines a classy design, artsy feel and easy to use user interface. Taking a picture with it and making it look great is very easy and many people use it as a consequence. But most people don’t realize that an important part of Instagram is the fact that you share your location (if you want) when taking a picture and that you are sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and others. As such Instagram has a trail of where you have been and what did you experience in the form of a beautiful stream of pictures shared on social networks.

So why did I just spend a lot of your time with a simple description of these apps?

Once you start using them you will realize that there isn’t space for 4 of them and trust me there are a lot more of them on the App Store. I felt ridiculous at dinner today, checking in with 4 of them, taking pictures with each and writing different statuses. And I don’t think people want to take a picture, write some text and share their location with each service in the same way. They want a specific simple experience of tracking their lifestyle and sharing it with friends. So I think we will experience a boom of these lifestyle apps in the near term after which there will be consolidation in the market and we will have a few winners and a lot of losers (Gowalla was maybe the first to go, though being acquired by Facebook isn’t bad I guess).  What I do find interesting is the different approaches the four I mentioned have to tackling the same problem. Will the less complex single use case apps like Instagram beat the more sophisticated ones like Path or Oink?

What do you think? Do you track your life in an app?

One more thing: I found really surprising is that I did not use Facebook to check-in, take a picture or write a status update. For me Facebook is not a mobile app. It is too cluttered, crude, generic and confusing. Maybe it is just me but I don’t use it to create content, I just feed it from the other apps. Should that worry Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe, maybe not – he always said Facebook is a platform for sharing and connecting.

Today I am leaving my twenties behind and am embarking on the next stage of my life. It does feel odd. My father used to say that most people who achieved something in their life did so in their twenties. Thank god that pressure is gone now.

I will spend the day working on stuff for Piano from my home and I’ll maybe find some time to reflect a little bit. While I would have wanted to achieve more before I turned thirty, I am thankful for the family I have, the friends that have accompanied me throughout life and of course my wonderful Cosmic Girl.

One interesting data point – it didn’t hurt.

I just returned from my two and a half week holiday in Spain. I’ll maybe post more details eventually (I still got a backlog from China, meh) but we basically planned a bit of surfing and a bit of sightseeing. It ended up being most of the time surfing and my body will be recovering a few days from the strain.

I would like to point out one thing. Our constant companion for the whole trip was the Cosmic Girls iPad2 (3G, 64GB). I can’t over-emphasize how great this device was. As in London earlier this summer, we bought a prepaid data sim card for the iPad (12 €, 500 MB) and used the thing all the time. The number one used app was Maps but we also looked up plenty of information on the thing wherever we went. Whether it was surfing conditions, info on sights, restaurant recommendations or different surf schools – there was an app for everything – and if not – we still had Google.

Now why would you use an iPad over an iPhone or Android Phone?

Well reason number one is battery life. The iPad2 can go through 2-3 days of heavy (and I mean heavy, lots of 3G use, video, routing on maps using GPS) use and charges really quickly. This made it the go to device for all of our information hunger.

Reason number two is the screen size. The screen allows you to display maps in all their beauty and get a sense of a large area. If you are planning your time and trying to figure out what to see first, where are the restaurants you want to go to – the screen real-estate helps a lot. Also reading information on it is much more comfortable than on my iPhone 4.

I haven’t bought an iPad yet just because I am a power user and felt that most of the things I do require a keyboard and laptop power. Indeed I worked a few days and my MacBook Pro was very helpful. But the iPad won me over with some of the use cases I mentioned above in addition to being a great email and surfing portable. I’ll still probably wait for version 3 though.

Since when I was a little kid I loved superheroes. Spiderman, The X-men and others have inspired me to look beyond my petty self and be a better person. I looked up to them and envied their ability to deal with tough challenges and keep faith and courage in difficult situations. They had cool powers too. Over time as I grew older and a bit more experienced I slowly started to move towards having real life heroes. My parents come to my mind but there were others.

At some point I learned about Apple, Steve Jobs and his keynotes. At first I was not an Apple fan, nor owned any of its products. I am from the generation of people who got to know Apple from the iPod. Once I owned one – I fell in love with it and started following the company. Over the years I came to learn more about Steve, his vision, his values and his darker side from stories I read online. I guess I fell for his reality distortion field. I treasured his no bullshit attitude, his righteous approach to dealing with things, his passion for technology and what it can do for the world. I started believing he does have super powers too. He became my hero.

The thing you have to know about Steve is that he had the uncanny skill to make this reality distortion field reality. He did not sit back and wait for his vision to come to him, he made it happen. There is a lesson to be learned from that. Truth be told – there are fewer and fewer like him around and now more than ever we could have used more of him.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you Steve!

I really loved the Blackberry. When I got my first iPhone – I switched within 2 weeks to a Blackberry Bold and for a time I was happy. These days I use an iPhone 4 (check out the What I use page) and while I believe it is the best smartphone currently available I remained a fan of the Canadian fruit company.

The Cosmic Girl is a Blackberry user and I got her a Blackberry Torch a while ago. She is most of the time happy with it. Yes the software is quirky, slow and crashes regularly but the keyboard, BBM and powerful email has kept her satisfied. She spends a lot of time using the phone and it keeps us well connected.

In recent days she had troubles with battery life and that by itself would not be that surprising. Few of today’s smartphones last more than a day. But I investigated and found a significant update was available for the phone. While she has purchased plenty of apps from RIM’s App World I thought based the experience with iPhones and Android phones that when you upgrade the OS or change the device you just login into the App World and get your apps back.

Well the experience was horrible. First of all  the whole software update thing is slow and works basically in the same way as 2-3 years ago. At some point during the installation it seemed as if the whole process has crashed or stalled. I was already considering restarting the device and trying again when it continued (the ticking clock icon makes me go nuts). After a while the OS upgrade was done and I logged into App World. Not only was the app update process slow and confusing (progress bars with some apps showed the status 110/100, wtf?) but when completed some apps had only trial licenses! Now she has to search through her email and find the license keys to re-register the apps.

This is just bad user experience and even for tech person like me – very frustrating. Not only is RIM releasing phones that are immediately obsolete (can’t be upgraded to the newest OS) but the experience on the flagship devices is CRAP. I love the keyboard, I love BBM but once you get over those (you can type fast on a touchscreen, iMessage – nuff said) it’s game over. RIM do something!

Last week, 2 days before my graduation, Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple. It was in what  I have come to understand – his preferred way – with a simple email stating the facts without any pompous speeches or big statements. His letter to the Apple Board can be found all over the internet and I will not repost it here.

I want to address 2 things in this post. First what does this mean for the industry and Apple. Second, what does it mean for me.

The internet is full of praise about Jobs. I do not need to reiterate all those statements but it is clear Apple without Jobs was dying and when he came back in 1997 he turned it around and made it the biggest company by market cap in the world, not to mention the most influential one in terms of consumer electronics. But he did not do it alone. In light of all the things Apple achieved over the years – Steve’s biggest one may be the company itself. It is impossible that a single man could achieve all those things by himself. No, he built a fantastic team of people and embedded what makes him special in the company DNA. It is up to them now to continue executing on the vision and strategy.

For me Steve represents something I strive for. In one of his famous “stevenotes” he mentioned that Apple is at a crossroad of Liberal Arts and Technology. I find that to be a sweet spot. I think humanity got too fascinated by numbers – speed of your processor, size of your bonus check, speed of your porsche – and we forgot how to enjoy life and surround ourselves with beautiful things and experiences. He always argued that even the most mundane task can be made easy if you have fun doing it.

I even wrote my Leadership paper about Level 5 leadership and Steve Jobs. There my thesis was as follows:

Few would define Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc. as anything but a rock star CEO. However, I would ask you to bare with me as I will try to make my case why Steve Jobs is actually a Level 5 leader who has unintentionally garnered a lot of attention and his presentations have become a media event earning him the unwanted rock-star CEO status.

I still think this to be true. Apple has learned how to make use of these presentations but Jobs was never a rockstar CEO, well not in his second term anyway. And he has my respect for that. To get a feel for his modesty, the ability to set standards, make tough decisions I recommend watching the following 2 videos. The first one is his famous Stanford Graduation speech from 2005

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

and second is his interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D8 2010:

Steve Jobs D8 2010

In the end he is one of the early Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and I think all feel a bit saddened by the end of his tenure as CEO. But as he said himself – moving on, clearing out the old and replacing with the new is one of the most important things in life. I look forward to what Apple does without him and I wish him all the best.

About 14 month ago I wrote a post that resurrected this blog called Heading to business school soon. The idea was to try and document the life me and the Cosmic Girl chose here in Belgium. I wrote:

“it’s not about “jump starting my career” or “taking my career to another level” it’s about doing something I am really passionate about and changing to a really international environment.”

Well it’s over. Last Friday I graduated and got my MBA degree after 11-12 months of work. I was reflecting a little bit on my expectations and this sentence in the initial post seemed stand out. I love learning and new ideas and Vlerick has proven to be a place with plenty of both. While we could debate the merits of one course or the other the fundamental question is – did I get new insights and understanding from the experience? Do I now have a broader business context? Yes and yes. But even this pales in comparison to the most important part of an international education program – the people. I met some of the most interesting people and it was a privilege to work with (most) of them on papers, projects and extra curricular initiatives. And the parties.

If I can I will post some of the papers I wrote on the blog just to get some feedback. Actually – a number of posts you may have read were parts of my papers – especially some of the posts about the mobile computing industries like the Nokia post (part of my highest graded paper on Strategy).

Now I am on the look out for an interesting opportunity in North-West Europe – ideally in Belgium or the UK. I am not 100% sure what that opportunity should be but I already have some ideas. If you are doing something interesting feel free to contact me.

A few weeks ago I started the In-company project module of the Vlerick MBA. The idea is that the students (us) spend 8 weeks consulting/supporting real companies doing “real” work. It means that after almost a year it’s back to work.

My project is consulting on near-shoring at a leading bank here in Belgium. After a long time I put on my suit every morning and go to work. Initially I thought this unavoidable transition back to a normal work life from the student version would be easy. After 3 weeks I have to say it isn’t. Maybe it is because I am working at a major corporation, maybe it is that I have so many meetings or the byrocracy that I am so tired every day. Maybe it’s that I have to use windows and internet explorer…

So this made me think – what are the criteria based on which I’ll choose my next job? Is there such a job that would fit me? Anyway – here they are:

Things have to make sense

I must be allowed to use a Mac

International

Full of smart people

Great product or service

Potential to grow

Freedom to make a difference

Technology

Inspirational boss

I will update the list if I feel like it. Anyone willing to share theirs or suggest interesting criteria I should consider?

I mentioned my classmate Michael Finelli on this blog before. I think he is one of the most creative and smartest people in our MBA and has kick ass writing skills. He is profiling the class, documenting the MBA experience, as a part of his blog and today is my turn. I find his unique style in terms of the profiling intriguing and accurate. Check out my profile here.

I have recently been part of a group that attempted to start something new. I will avoid disclosing details but lets just say it was a great idea. I was not involved since the very beginning but as soon as I got into the group I felt enthusiastic about the idea. There is something addictive about working with smart people on great ideas. 

At first I felt there was no stopping us. We met often and discussed in great length what we wanted to achieve and how. I did not notice when we first started falling of our track. Initially we just had different opinions – something to be expected when doing what you believe in. Slowly but gradually our work changed from step by step completing tasks to endless discussions, missed meetings and few with the courage to compromise. 

As our deadlines passed one by one with us little to show for it I realized we have failed. While the idea is not dead and with a little bit of luck something still may become of it – I wanted to stress a point I learned from Seth Godin's books - SHIP! As he says:

"Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly."

We have discussed some issues for so long, went into so much detail that at some point we lost ourselves in the process and lost the will to ship. Death by a thousand meetings and discussions.

What will I do? I will ship. And so if you find grammar erros or logical inconsistencies in my posts – comment, critique and dis me. At least I shipped.

Do you?