Pulse Smartpen: quick and dirty review

**** (that's 4 stars out of 5)
Potentially life changing gadget

I believe the Pulse Smartpen is a fantastic platform for many day-to-day applications. The working principle of it just makes so much sense!
Fortunately, there is an SDK for external developers, unfortunately, file formats and communication standards don't seem to be open, but I am no software expert.

But back to the pen. Very well crafted, looks serious and professional. I can really use it in a board meeting. Although it is kind of bulkier than I expected, but maybe my expectations were too high. On the other hand, it is smaller than many highlighters in the market.

The screen is very good.

Interface quite intuitive everywhere: pen, software, notebook.

Writing recognition works fantastically well! Not only is the transferred "image" very detailed and looks natural, the software recognized my handwriting without any previous "training" when using the search function.

I do seem have to have problems transferring the audio sessions, which can be a deal breaker, but Customer Service has been very responsive so far and I hope to clear this soon.

All in all, I am very happy with the purchase, as long as the audio part starts working properly. I believe there is room for improvement and further development, especially in extra applications for it and am awaiting eagerly to beef up the functionality of my pen.

Written for: http://www.amazon.com/review/R374WV94NBJ5C8/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

An encounter in Brussels

Written on my phone on the plane coming to Brazil.

The Belgian who took over my apartment in Brussels is an ex-TV reporter who has once been to an extremely remote area in Brazil to cover a story about seringueiros, castanha-do-pará and indians trying to live in a sustainable way. He said that reality isn't as romantic as it sounds.
He has been living in Congo for years now, working with NGOs rebuilding bridges. More than 80. He told that you just had to free things up, and people would do the rest. He rebuilt the bridges and saw the business men coming, and thinks profit is a good thing to bring on development.
We talked about living with few things. Me with only what fits in a suitcase, him with what he had available in two years of living in the jungle. Less is more.
Another thing he told was that, in his experience, the best thng NGOs could do was to dissiminate knowledge.
Cool guy, this Jan. Good way to leave Brussels.

BusinessWeek's slideshow of Queen's School of Business

My colleague Manish sent us an interesting link to this slideshow at BusinessWeek:

Queen's School of Business Tour

Je suis arrivé au Brésil.

Temperature at 9 o' clock in the morning.


At my uncle's in the middle of São Paulo. Yes, it's true.


Tomorrow, the beach! See you in 2009.

Last day at DHL

I spent the last 3 months in Brussels, Belgium, working in the finance department of DHL Service Parts Logistics, in Vilvoorde.

If there is something that I am taking with me from this experience, besides what I learned about billing and invoicing, is the openness and friendliness that I found in this company.
I also have rarely seen such an international ambient, where each one was accepted because of their skills, regardless of origin. The number of countries represented in this office of 150 or so people certainly rivals what I have seen at my MBA term in Warwick, and that was already extreme!

It was a good time to put things into perspective and I am glad I came. Now I just have to pack and wait for the plane to Brazil tomorrow.

A good MBA reference site in Germany

I just received another newsletter from the http://www.mba-channel.com/ website. It is a relatively new website, started this year, and it has developed nicely.
What I like most in that website are the reports they write about different topics with a very critical view. From time to time they actually critic or put some school in check, which I think is very healthy.

One of the things that I found out during the MBA is that there is MBA reality and what I call the MBA "media hype". MBA schools are very clever in using the media for publicity. Of course. Positive reports go hand-in-hand with paid advertisements, as is usual in any industry. This gives MBA candidates a skewed impression of how an MBA develops, what one can expect of it, the job market reality afterwards. This gets reinforced by the fact that those owning an MBA title, like myself, will very seldomly critique the title and its institutions in a negative way. After all, we don't want to diminish the value of our degrees, do we? We have to care for our brand.
I continue to be extremely happy with my MBA experience, don't get me wrong. I met a lot of great people, visited interesting places, learned a lot, had lots of fun and, all going well, will double my salary in February.

Anyway, I just though of writing quickly to endorse the mba-channel.com website, which has also an English version.

Ah, they also tried to build an MBA community, which is commendable, but it hasn't really picked up yet. Maybe it is because they are offering features like blogs, photo albums, polls, etc., that people already use in other sites which are not MBA-specific. Maybe, instead of trying to create a whole new community environment, they might focus on getting content from elsewhere together, or focusing user interaction around their best features: their specialised stories and information.

Mannheim, Queen's and BusinessWeek

OK, so I checked out BusinessWeek's slides on the top non-US business schools, knowing very well that Queen's School of Business had grabbed the first place for the third time in a row (2004, 2006 and 2008). My surprise was to see the banner on the top of the page:

Mannheim is investing quite a lot in marketing. We have seen them on Facebook, I have seen them on the schedule leaflets on the ICE trains to Mannheim and now, BW.
I guess that all is good, after all, the better the Mannheim name is known in the business world, more valuable my Mannheim MBA degree gets.