Sunday, January 30, I competed for the first time as a black belt in the 2011 European Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Championship, in Lisbon, Portugal. My category was light weight (under 76kg), Senior 2 division. The good news is that I received third place (bronze medal), as you can see from the podium picture above. The bad news is that I got beaten by both those other guys. Adimilson Brites (nickname ‘Juquinha’), from Gracie Humaitá Brazil won gold, and François Deniau (Team Megaton Lyon, France) won silver.

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Last week, after seven months of design and development, we launched RaceSplitter, a high quality race timing application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. (It will also run on an iPad, in 2x mode; although, we are planning on a native version for the iPad as well.)

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SPRINT ARE BRINGING OUT THE BIG GUNS, with this truly powerful advertisement for the, uh — not sure exactly what it’s called, The Sprint HTC EVO 4G? Doesn’t matter, just have a look:

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Daring Fireball just linked to an article about how Toshiba’s new teaser site for its upcoming tablet sends a message to iPhone users. Well, here’s my message to Toshiba:

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It seems Apple has no competition these days, and judging just from advertising, I’m thinking we’re a good ways off from seeing any. Why? Try as they may to copy, companies like Samsung just don’t get it. My colleague Alex and I today were discussing the striking difference in advertising, in the latest issue of Fortune magazine (which is full of Samsung Galaxy ads.)

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In his excellent book, “Innumeracy,” John Allen Paulos presents a number of surprising and important consequences of our general lack of understanding of the principles of mathematics; particularly, statistics, probability and the influence of large and small numbers.

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Recently, a potential new customer expressed surprise when I told him that we at Makalu usually don’t sign NDAs. Mentioning that he’d found plenty of other companies willing to sign his NDA, I restated commitment to our position, and acceptance that we’d unfortunately have to miss the opportunity.

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I recently watched this interesting video from Amy Jo Kim about the application of game mechanics to functional systems — in particular social systems. For reference, here are the brief notes I took.

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