Inspiration blog - by PaperNotes

Rabobank

At the IBM Innovation week, I blogged the session by W. de Jager (Rabobank Netherlands) live. He gave me really something to think about here: Is 'physical' money really going to disappear?

- Am going to do some real thinking about this later, my brain is not working properly anymore at this time -

Mister De Jager has a very good insight in youth and new media I must say. Very interesting to see the numbers of for example people visiting bank offices in the past and current time (which has degrared a lot!). - And yes, I had this assumption for quite some time, as I find internetbanking very useful myself as well. - Also very interesting: 100.000 elderly Rabobank customers do internetbanking... My grandma does it at Postbank ;-)

Anyway, thanks for sharing these insights!

"Met stip"

By Yvonne Zomerdijk

Visiting family - my grandmother

I always get a lot of energy visiting my family and friends. Last week I read in Psychologie Magazine (dutch) a lot of people think visiting friends and family is very important for them personally. And a lot of those people think they don't do this as often as they would like to... And I just think that's stupid. If it's really a big thing in your life, you can always make time.

For me it's very important as it gives me the opportunity to talk about the things that are really on my mind. Being able to share my feelings and go into some deeper discussions and so forth.

A person in my life that inspires me a LOT is my grandmother. From when I was two years old, I used to live at my grandparents' house with my sister. My grandmother cares greatly for family and has always been supportive, nurturing and 'just there' when someone needed her... Also for me and she never stops. I visited them this evening, and as she knows I very much like playing boardgames, she askes me what I want to play (not even if I want to, because she just knows)... Might sound like a normal thing, but if I stop and think about what she really means to me that's a lot!

Since I'm writing about her, I must mention the coolest thing about my grandmother. She uses the PC a lot! She started with playing cardgames many years ago, but now uses e-mail, Marktplaats (and other internetsites), MSN Messenger and has a webcam. The thing she still does most is playing Kolonisten van Catan and Netgames. I must say I'm really proud of her!!

Being part of an innovation event is quite tiring

But it's also a lot of fun!

Last week I've been at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven for the Next Level event, IBM Innovation week. About six weeks ago, a collegue from the Next Level team asked me to start a blog for the event, so we set it up with a small team.

Before the event started I was on holiday. I was already tired (had 4 hours of sleep sundaynight because we arrived late at the airport), but was really looking forward to see the results of all the preparation and hard work, so felt honoured to be a part of the event the whole week.

Now, I think the hard work certainly paid off! I worked mostly on the blog during the week: keeping it up-to-date, adding photo's, doing some 'live blogging'... We've been working very long hours the whole week and this saturdaymorning I'm blogging again (I must really be crazy, but it just gives me a kick).

Especially the 'live blogging' gave me a lot of energy (although it costs a lot too!). The coolest thing about this was the speed. We blogged a photo of the morningsession of 'Innovation in Finance' while the speaker was still talking, for example. When our guests came out of the auditorium, they could see this post immediately at the 'blog stand'.

After we blogged one of the presentations of the Healthcare innovation session, one of the attendees wanted to give his comments directly. And at the marketingsession we even gave some advice to a marketing director of one of Holland's biggest companies!

I think this was one of the first 'big' blogging experiences of IBM Benelux, and I definitely think a big group of IBMers learned a lot about blogging. I personally think that's quite a good thing, because IBM can do much more with new media!

We're probably going to keep the blog, but it's not decided yet what we're going to do exactly. So, we might continue blogging on innovation in another way.