How to become a Member of Green Hippo

Now and then people ask me how to become a member of Green Hippo. Well, actually it is quite simple and not a secret. All you have to to is to fulfill the following requirements:

1) Be passionated about Green Hippo. Get the vibe!
2) Be honest. It is the key to respect and success.
3) Have fun! No matter whether you are on the sales front or lost somewhere between bits and bytes. Remember to have a good time, all the time!

Easy, isn't it? However, there is one little thing you should know too... ...it is called THE TEST... ...and not many have successfully passed it yet...

Second Life vs. First Life

About 3 weeks ago, 'Second Life' made it into the top 10 of Google Zeitgeist. Searching the web soon revealed that I am quite old fashioned, not having heard about it before.

Second Life is a virtual 3-D world inhabited by millions of residents. It’s current population of about 1.4 million inhabitants makes it one of the fastest-growing online communities. In Second Life, people can create their own characters—called avatars—to do a variety of things they can do in the real world, and lots of things they cannot do in the real world (e.g. flying like a bird). Characters can participate in meetings and conferences, work, play and shop just as they do (or don’t) in their everyday lives. One of the driving forces is that players can create their own in-game content (it can only be created within the game itself), and you can then sell it. Such in-game content can be 3d objects (e.g. virtual clothes, jewelery, houses etc.), body motions (guess what...), or little in-game programs (e.g. a casino).

Firms like Dell also participate in Second Life. Others, e.g. Fortune, BusinessWeek and CNN, benefit from just writing about it. On the front page of Second Life, you see how many US$ have been spent during the last 24h. Right now, while writing this, it is more than half a million US$! Second Life uses its own currency - Linden Dollars - but you can exchange them directly with real money.

One evening, I gave Second Life a try. From a programmers and a conceptual point of view, the game is amazing. It is fun exploring the world and meet people, and as a programmer I instantly felt teased to also explore the possibilities of making money with creating and programming stuff and... ...but wait a minute... ...why is it called Second Life? This somehow implies that there must be a First Life too?

Second Life is a disguised one-armed bandit. Instead of inserting coins, you feed it with the time of your First Life. The more time you have spent, the more you will feel like you have to spend even more (to get anything back). And the longer you play, the harder to stop, because you then have to admit that you have wasted a whole lot of your time for what? Nothing!

Follow my example and delete your Second Life account right now, and have a good time with your First Life friends or family.

Happy End: Hippotizer in Switzerland

I have been waiting for years to see the Hippotizer being distributed and used in Switzerland.

It was in the year 2000 when my friends Chris and Yannick and I made quite a lot of presentations at Swiss branches of Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, Siemens etc., in order to make some good deals with visualJockey. We also tried to team up with Switzerland's biggest Multimedia Hardware suppliers such as Winkler, Decatron and Habegger. In best case they were only laughing about us, in worst case they exploited us.

Being a prophet in the home town is never easy!

In 2001, visualJockey and the remaining programmers (Vadim and me) were bought by Green Hippo, and a new product called the 'Hippotizer' was developed all together. About 4 years later, Hippotizer finally got its own distributor 'IQ unlimited' here in Switzerland. And the firms mentioned above are now buying and renting it from there! :-D

The Swiss don't trust that something as innovative as visualJockey or Hippotizer can come from Switzerland itself, it has to come from a foreign metropolis such as London, and needs an exotic touch. Congratulations and my deepest respect to the marketing of Green Hippo and IQ unlimited! :-)

It is never too late for a Happy End! :-)

Below some pictures from Hippotizer at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2006 - operated by Switzerlands Hippotizer master himself: Peter from IQ unlimited.

Destiny's Child Live! - Survivor

Online Videos of Live Acts where Video Projections and LEDs are controlled with Hippotizers are rare. But it seems that I have just found one at YouTube!

Destiny's Child has fallen in love with the Hippotizer in 2005! :-)

Albert Einstein was right

I recently kept an eye on Google Zeitgeist - statistics about the most recently used keywords in Googles search engine.


First of all, I have my doubts about this statistics. Everybody knows that Sex sells, as proved by statistics. There are no corresponding keywords in Google Zeitgeist. With a pigeon or two, Google seems to filter the keywords that would reveal the truth.

Second, the resulting keywords after the filtering (on an international level) are making me think. Seasonal topics like "Halloween" and celebrities like "Sandy Koufax", "Cindy Margolis" or "Mario Lemieux" (I never heard of them before!!) are dominating over worldwide politics. The cry of 16000 children that die every day because of hunger (one child every 5 seconds) remains unheard, and complex global problems such as climate change, energy, global dislocation or weapons of mass destruction are to be addressed tomorrow rather than today.

Some years ago, I remember that the following mathematical joke (which was said to be invented by Albert Einstein) was spread through EMails:

Time = Money (Well known fact)
Wisdom = Power (Well known fact)
Power = Work / Time (Physics)

This can be transformed into:

-> Wisdom = Work / Time
-> Wisdom = Work / Money
-> Money = Work /Wisdom

In other words: the more you work, and the less you know, the more money you will make! :-)


If we substitute '1/Wisdom' by 'Stupidity' then we get
-> Money = Work * Stupidity

Whereas Googles financial success and Google Zeitgeist are a direct prove of this formula.

q.e.d.