This booth tour of Imagination technology, the makers of the PowerVR chip that powers the Motorola Droid is fascinating. They announced that the chip they are currently designing and that will be found in mobile phones will provide “graphics comparable to the PlayStation 3 in three years”.

This chess set by Brandon Griffith is symple incredible. The guy is going to make one for each episode of the Star Wars Saga. This one is for “A New Hope” – Episode 4. I’d love to build one of those ! Please Lego make it happen !

Since 1999, Lego has released over 100 different Star Wars Mini figures. To give Star Wars Lego justice, I decided to build three different Chess sets, one for each original episode. This is the first of the series. Star Wars: A New Hope Lego Chess.

My goals with the individual chess pieces is to:
1. Is durable enough to play the game with.
2. Present a piece that closely represents a scene form the movie. My favorites are “Obi-wan and the tractor beam” & “Greedo”

The chess board:
1. Built strong enough to carry with out breaking
2. The playing area easily removes from the rest of the board to reveal compartments to store the pieces.
3. The detailing on the side on the board utilizes a lot of SNOT (Studs Not On Tops) techniques. This a technique that came out of the Adult Lego community.

Other Facts:
1. The chess board is built on a base of layered Lego plates.
2. Weighs 25lbs.
3. the Minifigs were the most expensive part on the chess set.

It’s true that sometimes when you think about all the intel google gets on your lives it’s scary – hopefully they don’t really care about your lives themselves and only want the advertisement money.

If this hadn’t been a blitz game there’s no way this trick would have worked! Gotta love the human factor when taking a bet. Pressure totally can make stupid plans work !

Play online chess

Apparently Verizon will be offering a Skype Option to their data plans for Skype use. Still “coming soon” on Verizon’s dedicated site.

Icrossing released a retty interesting map with the market share of mobile web browsers worldwide.
Dominic Parker from iconnect comments:

This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.
Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.
The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.
Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.
Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

Also interesting to see that in southern america Nokia still rules, and I have no explanation for Opera’s domination in Nigeria… any thoughts ?

As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve already had quite a few experiences in creating, funding, scaling and selling (or failing or stopping) businesses. A few very interesting trends have been emerging over the past few months and which got quite popular within my fellow entrepreneur’s minds:

• the “Lean” start-up. Basically the idea is that in 2010 you should be able to start up any Internet-based business with a super-low seed financing (typically a few kUSD). Use subcontractors in low-cost countries (rent-a-coder, odesk…) get a talented freelance web-designer and get started ! Release early (if you’re happy with your release then you took too long) and start making the buzz.
• Focus on less features but do them better than the competition. Steve Jobs demonstrated that it’s not the number of features that matter on the mass market, it’s the ease of use and understandability of the solution.
• Make a real business. Make a business where you have customers ready to pay for the service. Freemium is usually the way. Forget about the advertisement (limit it to the free part of your website) and focus on the transformation rate between free and paying customers. Make your business recurring, it really helps !
• Find a large enough market for your service, if Europe is too hard to address (# languages, payments methods, laws…) just move !
• Organize the buzz in your industry, blog be present and become a referent in your business. Find where the journalists look for their info in your area and make sure your messages are there visible to them. Forgen about making PRs, it’s old-fashioned, instead enroll the influential writers as advocates of your business.
• Get venture money only when you have created enough value and have enough figures proving that you will be able to translate marketing investments into new users and recurring money. If you can get profitable and that your business lets your live super-well, do not get venture money at all, and focus on getting that “4-hour workweek” dream. The moment you get venture, you’ll have to find an exit strategy in the next 3 to 5 years with a 10x return – it really limits your options for the future.

After google PowerMeter a couple of months ago, it’s not Microsoft’s turn to unveil his home automation / monitoring middleware. Called “hohm”, it all focuses around energy-savings. As US is all about the Smart Power Grigs buzz, this is yet another ecosystem with its own SDK to support. Good thing is that this now means you’ll see in the next future plenty of cheap connected devices making their way in your home and giving you those beautiful dashboards we geeks love.

I’m back from MWC 2010 and finally found some time to settle down and write a few notes about my feelings about this year’s show. Apart from the cold and rain (unusual in Barcelona), a few main points were very striking during this MWC:

• All the phones manufacturers have now taken the smartphone angle and are heavily basing their strategy on Android. LG, and Motorola and 100% Android and Samsung came up with Bada, his home-cooked linux mobile which is  very impressive. Nokia now has a clear roadmap about Symbian evolving for decent touch-screen support and it’s now clear that maemo will not be for smartphones.
  They ALL focus on the UX a lot and understood the lesson from apple – End Users want easy and smooth.
  We are heading back to a device space with a homogeneous split between the device manufacturers, and this also means the slow death of Feature Phones.
• Social is key. The whole Samsung Wave presentation was about its social integration, Motorola is pushing its own suite “Blur” ahead. Everyone ate MWC was talking about social address-book and social presence.
• Mobile payment is finally leaping ahead with Visa for instance teaming up with Micro-SD manufacturers to embed RFID payment tags in their memory card thus trying to limit the current amount of stakeholders slowing up the project (and thus bypassing phone manufacturers and operators)
• SIM Card manufacturers are struggling to protect the value in their business (Sagem adds a wifi hotspot to the SIM Card and SK telecom runs Android on a sim)

I’m getting ready to leave for MWC2010. Apparently this year Barcelona is going to be rainy and cold, just like 2009 was – but definetly 2010 is going to be a revival for the whole industry.

• Smartphone are the new standard – with school girls addicted to blackberry’s PIM and 1€ android smartphones, mobile services are getting to a next level
• The network too is evolving to support those, after AT&T network killed by numerous iPhones overloading it with huge data transfers, LTE is getting real and all the manufacturers are selling upgrades to the existing networks (AT&T just purchased it from Alcatel and Ericsson). IMS also is getting there bringin in “presence” and Softphone-based cross-media communications to the network core
• Value added services are getting bigger and bigger with the operators willing to act as a distributor to those new services and keep as much value as he can

Exciting times ahead, cant’ wait to see what’s new to be seen this year!
If you’re around, come meet me on F-Secure boot AV38A and get a sneak peek at how F-Secure protects the irreplaceable – even on your mobile!