In anticipation of Thanksgiving and wonderful plentifulness, crowds hustle and bustle around the city today, buzzing with palpable tension. Even here, one of the most consumerist nations on the planet, *all* stores will be closed tomorrow. Fermé. Thou shall stay at home and eat and laugh and drink. [more]

I flipped through an impressively thick US Wired Magazine today – unfortunately, it’s not thick with content, but rather with ads… Loads of them. For a paragraph of content, I have to turn about ten pages. That’s not so cool, and definitely not a great user experience. I [more]

Xmas spirit on Union Square; ice skating in t-shirts, and a cone-shaped Xmas tree.

There’s this point in your life, when you say to yourself: right, that’s it, now there’s nothing left on earth that I haven’t tasted yet, that I still want to taste, and that I believe will thrill me. Every now and then, you might visit some 3 Michelin [more]

According to Vint Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist, and one of “the fathers of the Internet”, Privacy is an anomaly. His view-point is that privacy is an artifact of technology in the first place (in the olden days, everyone knew all the time what everyone else was up [more]

http://vimeo.com/78124534

And then it started to rain… You slip on smooth surfaces you never noticed before. You have no clue where your umbrella is. You actually need to *think* which shoes to put on. People comment on the weather: look it’s raining! Like in Europe, when the first snowflakes [more]

One thing that I haven’t quite yet gotten used to here is the weather. The last two weeks, I have found myself looking up the weather forecast regularly – but in vain! Because nothing ever seems to change. The ten day forecast features a flat line like this [more]

Behold the fearless flyer. Modern-day marketing meets post-modern story-telling. No grocery store flyer has ever convinced me more than the fearless flyer from Trader Joe’s.

Stack-Ranking in the news (Microsoft / Yahoo).

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I went to a coffee shop (to have a coffee). I gave my order and made my way past the counter to wait for my drink, scanning the space while doing so. A guy in one of the corners of the room caught [more]

In a few hours, Twitter will IPO. The price of TWTR shares has finally been set ($26), valuing the company at roughly $18 billion. The question now, is, what will TWTR do with all that money?

The thing with tiles is that they *fit* perfectly and naturally onto our rectangular screens. Whenever I interact with an interface that is ’tiley’, it just clicks, it just makes sense. Tiles are inherent to the device they’re sitting on. The bricks in our walls are rectangular. For [more]

It looks like phone makers are arming their models with enhanced ergonomic form factors. Two recently launched specimen include the LG G Flex and Samsung’s Galaxy Round. Both models feature flexible OLED displays – the former with a curved vertical axis, the latter with a curved horizontal axis. [more]

Content publishers are not ready for 4K HD TV just yet – this recent (beautiful) ad campaign will spur the movement… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kdfaBS4rA

10 mins – 5 mins – 2 mins – 1 minute. Anyone can be an artist.

Today, I gave myself 2 minutes.

Today, I gave myself just 5 minutes.

I gave myself ten minutes to create this (surprising) piece of virtual art – on a digital app called Paper. As their slogan says, the app is Simply Beautiful, unleashing the artist in the most unexpected of us.

Überpractical, übercomfortable, überfriendly, überefficient – Uber, the übertaxi. Yesterday I used Uber for the first time and I was pretty impressed. Uber, I want you überall.

At GMIC today, I stumbled across a rather interesting thought. At a panel on ‘Connected Cars’, the speakers threw around the idea that software companies will rule the car industry of tomorrow. As a matter of fact, cars that are being developed today already run on hundreds of [more]

I recently attended a meetup centered on the future of the book. How will our digital future accommodate the current notion of a ‘book’? According to one of the evening’s speakers, we read (and write!) much more today than we did a decade ago. However, what is changing [more]

I almost didn’t notice it. Right across from Mocca’s, on 140 Maiden Lane, is the Xanadu Gallery, or what was formerly known as the V.C  Morris Gift Shop. This building is a very special construction – it was entirely designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Its facade is unique, [more]

After a long day walking and running errands in the city, there’s just nothing better than slumping into a sofa at home, relaxing, watching a movie, and having some American comfort food. Tonight’s comfort features a 16” Red Eye Pizza, with pepperoni (translate: spicy salami), red pepper (translate: [more]

Blue Bottle Café @ Station, Financial District SF. Cortado à la Espagnole. And who said Americans don’t know how to do coffee?!

Undeniably, tech accessories have always been fashionable – this is nothing new. This year’s New York fashion week went berserk over Google Glass. The epic September issue in US Vogue featured a photo shoot by Steven Klein, with the beautiful Raquel Zimmermann looking icily in-control wearing her Glass. [more]

I recently attended a meetup in the center of San Francisco. The focus of this gathering was to learn about the 3D printer world. The evening’s speaker list featured a couple of young startup CEOs. Meetups are a big deal in Silicon Valley, not only for the tech [more]

New Yorker’s Nathan Heller reports on San Francisco’s tech culture, in a thought provoking article: On how the ecosystem is funneling lots of talented people into lots of experiments On how San Francisco has become the capital of the three-business-card culture On how the tech space is moving [more]

Ahead of Twitter’s IPO, rumors spread across town that it is planning to expand it’s offices on Market Street to the adjacent building. The current offices are in a sketchy district, on the outskirts of Tenderloin. The developments would inject large amounts of money into the neighborhood. Will [more]

As Transamerica towers The people below cower Waiting for the mending Of a duty long pending

In Silicon Valley you don’t talk much about the weather (which is always roughly the same). Instead, you small-talk about the 101: ‘So how was traffic today?’. ‘D’you see any accidents?’. Highway 101 is Silicon Valley’s notorious spine, consuming as much as 3 hours of a commuter’s life [more]

I had to send a parcel, so I went to a US Post Office. Unfortunately, the contents were wrapped in a commercial box, which wouldn’t do. And so when I arrived at the post office, I covered it with the largest official US Post Office envelope that I [more]

America is big. America’s cars are big. The streets are broad. The underground garages are so vast that you get lost, searching for the exit, until finally another car shows up, and you eagerly sneak up from behind in the hope that it will lead you to the [more]

Completely unexpectedly, squeezed in between the likes of Chanel and Hermès on a small pedestrian alley just off busy Union Square, lies Mocca, an Italian deli. Its cluster of little round tables and garden chairs dominates most of Maiden Lane. A musician jazzes away on his double bass. [more]

The first thing that strikes you, coming to Silicon Valley from Switzerland, is that the ‘valley’ isn’t really much of a valley: there are rolling hills in the far distance, but most of the scenery that is laid out all around you is desperately flat. The term ‘Silicon [more]

You’re moving halfway around the globe, and you have 1 day to pack your whole life into 1 bag. How d’you do it? Well, as simple as it may sound – it isn’t. Never mind the clothes, the toiletries, and all those electronic chargers (one for each device, [more]

From Microsoft’s ‘live tiles’ in Windows 8, to Google’s new logo: the digital design world is getting flatter (small exception: Yahoo). With Apple’s most recent iOS7, it seems that Ive has given us the official nod: Skeuomorphism is decidedly dead. Flatness is taking over: no more textures or [more]

Dear Pebble, Your sleek, black plastic is wrapped quite elegantly around my wrist. Who would have thought that your overly simplistic purpose, bundled in a stylishly retro design, would end up as one of the most highly coveted tech feats of the last 12 months? The demand for [more]