Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
Follow @bmf on Twitter. If you have comments, email bmf@le.mu.rs.
For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
If you’re ready to bring your startup to the next level, there has never been a better time to come to Amsterdam. It’s the prelude to a New Golden Age, as dark clouds abroad bring entrepreneurial showers, followed inexorably by incubators and accelerators popping up like mushrooms after the rain.
These are programs that package all the things you need to level up in business, like connections to experienced mentors, opportunities to secure funding, and access to a variety of assets. Being in Amsterdam means building your business in a thriving, well connected city with a skilled and diverse labor pool surrounded by world-class universities.
If your startup involves apps, its a no-brainer. The Appsterdam community is a tangible support benefit for you and your family, as well as your employees and their families. We help you find the people you need, help you make friends, and help you find your way in the city. As curators of the ecosystem, we also help people who help App Makers.
We met the organizers of the Rockstart accelerator at last year’s Startup Weekend Amsterdam, which they also organized. Rockstart is a new accelerator born right here in Amsterdam that offers 6 months of office space and a road-trip to Silicon Valley.
We’ve also gotten to know the founders of the Amsterdam branch of Startup Bootcamp. These guys are a pan-European accelerator (and a Techstars Network Partner) that is also running in Dublin, Copenhagen, and Madrid. In Amsterdam, they are also offering 6 months of housing, 6 months office space in the new Vodafone HQ, and access to the new Vodafone Innovation Lab.
Both teams typify the passion for startups and desire to give back that are required to build something like an accelerator. They seem like good people, our kind of folk. As such, the Appsterdam Foundation will be involved with both programs, as part of our ongoing commitment to training the next generation of App Makers.
Both accelerators are accepting applications now for inaugural programs in the spring. The city will be beautiful then, a spectacle of bicycles, boats, and street cafes, as locals, tourists, and tulips soak up the long day sun. Find inspiration in our museums, find relaxation in our parks, and find yourself in our Amsterdam, the city at the intersection of creativity and commerce.
One of the problems the Occupy movement faces is the fact that most of the “other 99%” of Americans typically fall well within the 1% by world standards. I think the only way to reconcile this is to press for change not just for the first world, but for the whole world.
The same group of unindicted criminals who used junk securities to steal pensions from American workers after shipping their jobs overseas also stole pensions in countries like Greece and used offshoring in countries like China to set working conditions back a hundred years.
As I listened to This American Life’s excerpt of Mike Daisy’s investigation on conditions at Foxconn and others’ factories, I couldn’t help but wonder why this was specifically marketed as an Apple problem when the same factories are churning out goods for Apple’s competitors.
Ten years ago it would have been expressed as a Dell problem or a Gateway problem, and the Apple faithful would have felt a certain unjustified smugness. Now Dell is an also ran and Gateway is a footnote. The Apple folks are in control, which makes that smugness difficult.
We are in an uncomfortable position when our favorite electronics company is called out by name, but we need to see it not as an attack, but as an opportunity. We could easily miss that opportunity by taking refuge in the fact that every other brand’s manufacturing stories are just as bad.
We could do that, if we are ready to admit that Think Different was nothing more than a marketing campaign. But I ask you, when was the last time we allowed ourselves to be “just as bad” as the next guy? We have always, and should always, demand more from Apple.
When we hold Apple’s products to be the best on the market, we point at their usability and the impact it has on our experience. We point to their durability and the impact it has on our environment. Should we not expect to point to their manufacture and the impact it has on our humanity?
I used to work on this really cool Twitter client. I wouldn’t have made a Twitter client, since I have friends who already make a great Twitter client. I inherited the project, but I am who I am, so my team adopted it wholeheartedly, and made it into our favorite Twitter client. When someone helped us make our tableviews smooth like butter, we payed it forward and passed it along to our friends.
That act is what separates the community of App Makers from most other industries. We do not have competitors. We have colleagues. It’s OK if we have similar projects. We each have our own visions, and our own way of doing things. If we wanted the same things and thought the same way, we would merge the projects. You can never find enough skilled people to work with.
The reality is there’s plenty of work to go around, plenty of customers looking for lots of different things. If they think like us, they’ll buy our app. If they think like them, they’ll buy their app. Regardless of how they think, they deserve buttery smooth tableviews. We fundamentally reject the practice of hoarding every morsel of advantage. We win races by running our hearts out, not by tripping the other runners.
Appsterdam is an organization of volunteer gardeners. We tend to the ecosystem because we work in the ecosystem and we want it to be nice. We organize events and provide resources for App Makers, but we’re just as happy to help other people make their events awesome, and to help other people provide resources for App Makers.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on awesome, and Appsterdam doesn’t have a monopoly on collaboration. There’s plenty of work to be done. If someone else wants to pick up a shovel, fantastic. People who think otherwise obviously didn’t read Ars. If 2012 is to be the year the App Makers unite, we have to work together, whether you wear our T-shirt or not.
The other day I had one of those realizations that is inevitably followed by a deep yawn and a pop of the ears. Not too long ago, there was a piece of data produced that was so powerful, so undeniable, that anyone who saw it and took a moment to truly ponder its meaning was forever changed. While it arrived at a time of great change and to a certain extent, great liberation, it didn’t have the long-lasting effects that it should have.
That piece of data was a photograph, popularly known as “Earthrise,” that was taken 43 years ago, on 24 December 1968, by the Apollo 8 astronauts, of the Earth from the Moon. To see our situation, seeing all that we have for what it is, a rock floating in the middle of a vast and almost entirely empty space, so small in the grand scheme of things, so frighteningly fragile—how could that not forever change who we are?
We’ve been looking down at the Earth ever since, reproducing that same idea in higher resolution with greater detail. In 2002, NASA produced the most spectacular image yet, the famed “Blue Marble.” It is baffling to me that we can look at that picture, with an impossibly thin layer of gas that is all we have, and continue to behave the way we do.
The information coming from space in 2011 has been the kind of incredible stuff that makes me grateful to be alive to see it. I can’t help but notice these incredible videos coming out of the International Space Station, like the one huge time-lapse of Earth from Michael König on Vimeo.
Electric lights, fires, and lightning, all go whizzing past the camera. Thunderstorms, as experienced on Earth, are monumental occasions, inspiring an entire pantheon of gods for myriads cults and superstitions. Now they are so many tiny electric crackles, harmless and beautiful. The everyday bickering and ludicrous materialism of life on the surface seems so petty.
When I was in elementary school, we were taught that there were no other “solar systems,” no other planets like Earth, that we were alone in the universe. It seems like yesterday the Drake Equation described impossible odds. Then we got better at looking at the sky and suddenly the heavens lit up. It seems pretty obvious now that we’re not alone.
Quite the opposite. With what we now know about extremophiles, meteors, and the tenacity of life in general, it seems clear that life or its precursors are scattered around the galaxy like the seeds of a great tree. Every time the seed of life lands in a habitable zone, it sets off a timer as evolution races to reach a stable state before exhausting the available resources. Those that do get to move to the next level. Those that don’t….
There is a threshold and we are very close to not making it. There’s a non-zero chance the carbon dioxide we pumped into the air has set off a methane cycle that accelerates global warming, that we’re already too late, and that we might not have 100 years. We need to start thinking on a global scale about our place in the galaxy. Who cares what kind of sneakers you’re wearing? Why are we still killing each other?
We cannot move to the next level until every person on the planet has the same opportunities, enjoys the same liberties, and controls their own destinies. As long as people live at the suffering and expense of others, as long as the system is geared toward turning us against each other, as long as we remain distracted by every glittering thing, we will remain stuck in one place while the timer keeps ticking.
So much of what we are surrounded by is the people in control trying to distract us from reality in a vain attempt to delay the inevitable. Change is coming. The system is obsolete. Feelings of anger are misplaced. It’s not a question of good or bad, it’s simply a feature of the universe. We would all do well to refrain from pettiness, cruelty, and violence. History is watching.
Life has its waves. There are ups and downs. My not insubstantial gut and my lucky stars both are telling me 2012 is going to be an upswell. Let us do as we do where I grew up and catch that wave. Put aside your fear and cynicism. The future is ours to create. The system is ours to debug and refactor.
Then it turned out Josh Clark was in town. Josh is the author of Tapworthy, the definitive explanation of why your app sucks. Josh graciously agreed to speak at next week’s lecture.