Today I watched a presentation by engineer Michael Pritchard. He has developed a technology that has the potential to solve the problem of access to safe drinking water. His Lifesaver water-purification bottle could revolutionize water-delivery systems in disaster-stricken areas around the globe. The bottle uses nanotechology to filter even the filthiest water into sterile, safe drinking water.

Truly life changing technology

Perhaps even more amazing: according to Pritchard, it would cost about 8 billion US dollars to hit one of the Millenium Goals of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. That is a lot of money, unless you put it in perspective: the UK government alone spends 12 billion UK Pound or 20 billion US dollars on foreign aid each year. That money would be sufficient to give every single human being on the planet access to safe drinking water. It would change the lives of 3.5 billion people and save the lives of 2 million children, every year!

The video below will explain it all in just 10 minutes.

This video was filmed in July 2009, at the TED Global conference in Oxford, UK.

When I became a self-employed consultant at the beginning of 2008, it gave me the wonderful opportunity to work from the convenience of my home office. It also allows me to bake my own bread every day.

I know you can buy bread in bakeries, shops and supermarkets, and there are household appliancies that will make the bread for you, but I bake it from start to finish. There is a mill close to where I buy the flower. I have little packets of yeast. And every morning before starting to work, I make a dough, wait for it to rise and then put it in the oven. The result is that at lunch time I have a very fresh bread, still a bit warm. The satisfaction from eating your own bread is a great feeling, both physically and psychologically.

Today I watched a video that explains what happens when baking bread. The metaphors are truly awesome.  Bread is the staff of life, but in order to make it you first kill it (harvesting the wheat), then you bring it back to life (adding the yeast) and then you kill it again (the backing process).

Peter Reinhart is a master bread maker. He can present this tale with much more passion than I ever can. Enjoy the video, and your daily bread!

After my previous post about working with clients in many time zones, I was wondering in just how many different parts of the worlds they are. So I put some markers on a map, and here is the result:

Time Zone Check shows the time zones on a pretty map

Since I started my company, I’ve worked with many people from all across the globe. Five or ten years ago, this would have been virtually impossible, or at least extremely expensive. My telephone bill would have gone through the roof. But today, with e-mail, instant messaging and Skype, it’s easy and affordable to communicate with people everywhere.

So now that distance and communication costs are no longer an issue, I’ve found that there is a new challenge: finding the right time to talk. With clients in many time zones, this sometimes takes a lot of calculating and planning. Fortunately, the web offers nice tools to manage this too. One of the prettiest I know is Time Zone Check. This site shows me a map of the world, with my own current local time. Then, when I point my mouse at the location of someone I would like to talk to, the map shows me what time it is in their part of the world. I can even search for cities by name if I don’t know the exact location.

The map also shows me where it is night and where it is day, the places in the world where they’re currently enjoying daylight savings, the abbreviations of the time zones and the time difference between those time zones and my own time zone.

I wanted to share with you a video that was published today on TED.com. It’s a talk given by Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired and well known author of many books on biology, business, technology and the internet.

Mr. Kelly talked about the fact that the world wide web we know today is only 5,000 days old. He describes how it was impossible to imagine the current day web back then, and also that we are unable to image what it will evolve into over the next 5,000 days.

Instead of me trying to describe what’s in this talk, why don’t you view it yourself? In less than 20 minutes you’ll get a birds eye view of the development of the web, looking back 5,000 days and 5,000 days into the future.