July 1, 2009

World’s first mobile Augmented Reality browser

Filed under: Dutch first,Gadgets,Online by Orangemaster @ 10:19 am

Mobile phone Augmented Reality browser Layar, designed by Amsterdam’s Sprx Mobile has been the talk of the Dutch IT town on Twitter (we’re all friends in this neck of the woods) and just about everywhere else for some two weeks.

Layar is an application that can find everything using a mobile phone with a compass, although for now it can only be used with Android and soon the iPhone 3G S as well. As the name implies, the application provides extra ‘layers’ to reality. “You don’t have to browse on the Internet, you can see your immediate environment using Layar,” Sprx Mobile Director Raimo van der Klein explains.

For more cool developments, follow Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (@dutchcowboy) on Twitter. He twitters in English as well, and his wife Lori Lens-Fitzgerald (@lorilens) already made this blog with her photo book about world famous restaurant El Bulli.

Tags: , , ,

June 30, 2009

Folding cargo containers save space and energy

Filed under: Design,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am
cargoshell1

Rotterdam businessman Rene Giesbers dreamed up, helped design and launched an innovative container concept called Cargoshell, a fully foldable container made from composite that significantly reduces the amount of space empty containers take up on ships and trains. In fact, acccording to the report on Dutch television (RTL 4) yesterday, some 20% of all containers on ships and some 30% of all containers on trucks are just ’empties’ requiring much fuel to transport. According to a Dutch article earlier this year, some 20 billion euro is lost every year just transporting empty containers.

When the Cargoshell is folded, it takes up 25% of its actual size. It can be folded by one person and a forklift in just 30 seconds.

The Dutch often use foldable and obviously re-usable shopping crates, which I had never seen in North America, that look like this:

krat

This crate was what inspired Giesbers to do the same for containers.

Sometimes innovation is really just staring at us in the face.

(Photo: cargoshell.com)

Tags: , , ,

June 29, 2009

Older men least likely to be fired

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:03 am

Men of age 45 and older are not sharing in the general economic downturn, reports Z24 (Dutch). To the contrary, in May of this year 9,000 more men of that age group were employed than in May 2008.

Statistics Netherlands economist Michiel Vergeer explains to the financial news site: “These are the people who have been in their jobs for a long time, you just cannot get rid of them. But once they have become unemployed, it becomes very difficult for them to find another job.”

In the Netherlands jobs are ‘protected,’ meaning that you have to get permission from a court to be able to fire somebody. Although mass lay-offs are possible, courts tend to spare older employees during such procedures. Unemployment has risen 8,000 from April to May, a number Vergeer calls “still modest.”

(Photo by Erich Ferdinand, some rights reserved.)

Tags: , , , ,

June 28, 2009

Hans Koning’s aphorisms online

Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 10:36 am

Hans Koning (1921 – 2007) was one of that rare breed, an author who successfully traded his native tongue for another, in this case Dutch for English. A member of the Dutch resistance and a writer for the Groene Amsterdammer weekly, Koning emigrated to the USA in 1951. His publisher has put his book of aphorisms online, Hans Koning’s Little Book of Comforts & Gripes:

The tool for judging by those who don’t understand a thing about the arts is: categorizing. “What kind of books do you write?” they ask. “What kind of painting do you do?” It may seem harmless until art becomes dependent on money controlled by these ignorant men. Recently some people made a motion picture ‘based’ on Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” They hadn’t really understood much of the book and the film was a disaster. Now Hollywood producers know that “Dostoyevsky movies don’t sell.”

(Slide 53. It’s a pity that the book is published as images rather than text, and that it is riddled with spelling errors.)

See also: his New York Times obituary; his ever changing Wikipedia entry.

(Via Eamelje.)

Tags: , , ,

June 27, 2009

Tricycle car company Carver keels over

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 1:20 pm

Carver Europe, producer of the tricycle car with the same name, has gone bankrupt, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The Carver is a cross between a regular car and a motor cycle, of which the cockpit and front wheel can roll (or list if you are nautically inclined)—something the Reliant Robin never quite got the hang of.

CEO Willem Verheul told the paper that there wasn’t enough of a market for the 50,000 euro vehicle: “We were hoping to sell 300 per year, instead we only managed 200.” The ‘s Gravendeel, Zuid Holland based company will lay off nine employees.

One company that is going to be distraught at the news are flying car / vaporware makers Pal-V, who based the design of their eponymous vehicle on the Carver One. When earlier this year Pal-V promised a demonstration of its technology, it disappointed the collected international press by showing a gyroscope and a Carver, but not the hybrid that everybody has been waiting for these past years.

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson once famously said about the Carver: “Absolute, hands-on-heart, I have never had so much fun in a car,” and his side-kick whose name I forget called it “the gadget to end all gadgets.”

(Photo by Wikimedia user Detectandpreserve, some rights reserved.)

Tags: , , , , ,

June 26, 2009

Modern wood with a dash of bright pink

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

fat1jpg

Built in Hoogvliet near Rotterdam and designed by British design firm Fat, The Villa is a bold public building that does not go unnoticed. It can be found at the Heerlijkheid recreation park and it features several offices and a café. The goal was to create a modern and sophisticated building that has its own style and character. The bright pink bit is very daring and spells out the word ‘heerlijkheid’ (‘delightfulness’).

(Link: artstyleonline.com, photo: designboom.com)

Tags: ,

June 25, 2009

Fish sitters at Schiphol airport

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
goldfish1

Schiphol Airport (aka Amsterdam Airport for those of you who ‘break their tongues’ pronouncing ‘Schiphol’ – try ‘Shrip-pole’ – there, see?) has just opened up a goldfish hotel so travellers can have their fish taken care of while they fly away to warmer pastures. The hotel was the brainchild of well-known travel agent D-reizen and was opened by Olympic long-distance swimming champion Maarten van der Weijden.

The aquarium looks like a hotel, with a tennis court and a pool with a slide. “Goldfish dropped off by travellers will get private suites, so that they don’t get mixed up or get sick,” says D-reizen director Steven van Nieuwenhuizen. And if a fish happens to die while its owners are away, D-reizen will make sure they will be able to take the real dead one home, regardless.

(Link: nrc.nl)

Tags: , ,

June 24, 2009

Kite your way from Amsterdam to New York in four days

Filed under: Aviation,Gadgets,Science by Branko Collin @ 10:05 am

The vehicle pictured above consists of a kite, a cabin and a keel, and should be able to take you across the Atlantic Ocean. The 157 m2 kite should produce enough power to make you go 90 km/h, the cabin seats two, and the keel makes sure you can actually steer the thing. The only catch is that the Hydrokite so far only exists in the minds of former astronaut and kite nut Wubbo Ockels and ten of his students at the TU Delft.

At 90 km/h you should be able to reach New York from Amsterdam in four days and 1 hour, which would break the old record with three hours, although Kennislink doesn’t say what record that would be (sailing? flying? kiting?).

Laurens Alblas, one of the students, told Kennislink that it will probably “take a couple of years before a control system for kites is developed. But once we have such a system, and assuming we can find sponsors, we will build the Hydrokite and we will try and break the record.”

(Link: Kennislink. Source image: TU Delft)

Tags: , , , , ,

June 23, 2009

Man dies during Dutch ‘RIAA’ raid

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:11 am

Anti-‘piracy’ bureau BREIN, the Dutch equivalent of the infamous RIAA, scored its first kill last Saturday. Literally, I am afraid. During a raid on a market in Beverwijk, a 47-year-old man from Waalwijk accosted by the raiders died of a heart attack, reports Blik op Nieuws (Dutch). The police were presumably testing that the requisite taxes on empty CDs and DVDs had been paid, and were accompanied by a posse consisting of people from the FIOD (tax police) and the Thuiskopie and BREIN foundations.

Interestingly, the story of the police and of witnesses differ substantially, writes Noordhollands Dagblad (Dutch). According to the former, the man had a heart attack after running away from the merry band of official and self-appointed copyright hunters, after which the police tried to administer first aid. Witnesses however claim that the man did not run away, and that everybody just stood there, without helping the victim.

You have to wonder why private organizations like BREIN are even allowed to accompany the police on raids like this.

(Photo by Flickr user Sheep Purple, some rights reserved.)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

June 22, 2009

Trading private parking spaces

Filed under: Architecture,Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 9:32 am

In such a densely populated country as the Netherlands, it may appear strange that many private parking spaces are empty during the day, when their owners are off to work. Wannapark.nl tries to fill this ‘gap in the market,’ as the Dutch say, by bringing together the owners of both cars and private parking spaces.

A quick look at the Amsterdam section of the website shows that the recently started company hasn’t attracted many users yet—although to be fair, there is fairly little usable private parking space in Amsterdam. The spaces on offer in the old docklands, on IJburg and in West all seem to be in the parking garages of new buildings, with spaces smack in the city center going for 300 euro a month.

(Via press release aggregator Dagelinks.nl.)

Tags: , , ,