In a few hours I’ll be on an airplane to Copenhagen, Denmark for Reboot 9 - a conference on the intersection between people, technology and innovation (the definition is mine as there’s no official one, and honestly I don’t believe you can correctly define an event with such a broad - but amazing - program).

I’m attending both as an attendee and as a speaker. I’ve been invited to talk about my view of the global workplace and how being in a specific location does (or does not) influence the success of any endeavor (technological or otherwise). It’s as exciting as it is worrying because although it’s a topic quite close to my heart (posted about it three different times, at least), it’s also not the easiest.

It will be a blast - there’s actually quite a lot of people I know and admire heading out too, so it will be a good opportunity to catch-up. If you’re flying out to copenhagen too, might as well come by and say hi.

Note: Sorry about the lack of activity on this blog recently, I promise I’ll make up for it as soon as I get back - There’s a lot of things I want to talk about.

Something I haven’t done in a while, here’s a list of the things that caught my eye on the blogosphere this week:

David Weinberger hits Yahoo and there’s a video of a conversation between him and Bradley Horowitz of YUI about David’s book “Everything is Miscellaneous“, which you should probably grab a copy of if you fancy the thought of organizing the world of information we’ve created as a species. Peter Merholz has a review of the book on his blog too.

Chris Pirillo gets down with how to start a business online - and he has some very good advice, too. I agree with pretty much everything he says in the post but the highlight is clearly how he defends something I do too - having an open strategy.

On quite the same topic of businesses, Lane posts up on slideshare the slides from his and Thor’s presentation at Webvisions 2007 - Be like the internet. Recommended, but I’m definitely waiting for audio to go with these.

Finally, MIT’s Technology Review has a very good article by Daniel Turner about “The Secret of Apple Design“.

If I (or the rest of the guys here at Webreakstuff) have been unresponsive in the last few months, you can - in South Park fashion - blame Canada. It’s finally time to spill the beans because the project we’ve been working on with the New Ventures group at Bell has finally launched: meet Realestateplus.ca.

Realestateplus.ca provides users with several ways to find homes in Canada using search or visually using maps. Fact is Canada had no portal that took advantage of Ajax or mapping APIs to create a better home-finding experience, and that’s where RE+ comes in. The whole team behind the project built a pretty compelling product under some pretty tight time constraints, and as such, it is really rewarding to see everything fall into place with this launch.

There are a lot of lessons learned that will probably blend into posts here in a very near future - on collaboration with big clients, QAing in an agile environment, scaling Ruby on Rails, and best practices for UX in this kind of portal. We’ll likely put up a case study about the project on our site soon, to shed some light on how we worked with Bell and the guys at Infusion Dev (the team behind the mapping implementation) in building Realestateplus. For now, though, we need to celebrate and rest for a few hours.

Two weeks ago I presented before an audience of ex-colleagues and friends. I talked about several things, amongst which the notion that in order to succeed all you need is an idea and brilliant execution - and that sometimes even the simplest concept wins.

In conversations after that presentation quite a few people asked for ideas about what to actually do (looking for both new ideas and guidance with their ongoing projects). The answer to those questions is never easy, and being honest I’m a firm believer that sooner or later you’ll come into problems that lack solutions, and thus opportunities to do something about it.

I just read an article at Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog that fits quite well into this world of untapped problems and situations. Go read The awesome power of spare cycles and see do something about it. The simplest of problems (human boredom) definitely needs solving.