A blog about the philosophy of technology

  • AI and the City

    Artificial Intelligence is currently being touted as solution to most problems. Most if not all energy is put into conjuring up new and even more exotic machine learning models and ways of optimizing these. However, the primary boundary for AI is currently not technical as it used to be. It is ecological. Here I am…

  • Data Is the New Oil – Building the Data Refinery

    “Data Is the New Oil!” Mathematician and IT Architect Clive Humby seems to have been the first to coin the phrase in 2006 where he helped Tesco develop from a fledgling UK retail chain to an inter continental industry titan only rivaled be the likes of Walmart and Carrefour through the use of data through…

  • Information System Modernization – The Ship of Theseus?

    The other day I was listening to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell. It was about golf clubs (which he hates). Living next to two Golf Courses and frequently running next on them this was something I could relate to. The issue he had was that they did not pay proper tax. This is due to a California…

  • A Citywide Mesh Network – Science Fiction or Future Fact?

    I recently finished Neal Stephenson’s excellent “Seveneves”. The plot is that the moon blows up due to an unknown force. Initially people marvel at the now fragmented moon, but due to the intelligent analysis of one of the protagonists it becomes clear that these fragments will keep fragmenting and eventually rain down on earth. The lunar…

  • The Data Deluge, Birds and the Beginning of Memory

    One of my heroes is the avant garde artist Laurie Anderson. She is probably best known for the unlikely hit “Oh Superman”  in the eighties and being married to Lou Reed, but I think she is an artist of comparable or even greater magnitude. On one of her later albums is a typical Laurie Anderson song…

  • Pragmatic Idealism in Enterprise Architecture

    Being an enterprise architect I am not insensitive to the skyward gazes that project managers or developers make when being “assigned” an architect. The architect is frequently perceived as living in an ivory tower of abstraction in perfect disjunction from the real world. At best he is a distraction, at worst a liability The architect frequently lives…

  • Architecture – Turning Fiction into Fact

    I am an admirer of my compatriot Bjarke Ingels who is a real architect. His buildings always stretch the boundaries of the possible. For example, can you create an idyllic ski slope in a flat country like Denmark and put it in the center of a  city with more than a million inhabitants? Sure, just put it…

  • How to come up with a product that is truly unique

    How do you come up with a product idea that the whole world is not already selling? This is an interesting question that I think every entrepreneur asks him or herself regularly. I don’t have the answer for it, but I can tell you something about how to end up with the answer. Ban TechCrunch  The…

  • Building a Product Strategy for a Backend Product

    When you learn and read about product management you will quickly learn how important it is to engage with your customers, be agile and make experiments, but when your product is a back-end system with no end users, but just other applications and it is considered key infrastructure that others depend on to work in…

  • Wyldstyle or Emmet? Lego lessons for product managers

    This holiday season offered a chance for me to see the Lego movie once again. Since I had seen it once already, my mind, not so tied up with following the action and intricate plot, was free to see the deeper perspectives in the film and put it into a product management context. At the…

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