The Ardennees Fox Head is an old rare Belgian sheep breed. They are very strong sheep, disease resistant and able to withstand cold winters without too much shelter. The meat (although I must admit I haven’t tried it yet) is said to be very aromatic like game. Own pictures of my 2 ewes, named ‘Pitta’ and ‘Kebap’, will follow soon on this blog. Below a beautiful one by Frank De Smedt

The organisation taking care of Belgian ‘living heritage’ is SLE, on their site you can find more old Belgian breeds.

author: Frank De Smedt (vhgs.be)

And no, not just the regular ones, I planted some old rare Belgian varieties. The fruit often doesn’t look that ‘commercial’ (hence the varieties became rare) but they are often unbeatable in taste. Moreover they are much more disease resistant, by which I can ban chemical pesticides and insecticides in my garden of Eden !

To come to my selection, I first shortlisted varieties with the ‘RGF’ (‘Ressources Génétiques Fruitières‘) label. Varieties with this label came out as excellent resistant to common fruit diseases, after years of observation (the project started in 1975) in the agricultural research center of Gembloux. Second criteria was taste and tenability after which I came to this selection of old Belgian apple varieties:

• Président Roulin
• La Paix
• Joseph Musch
• Keuleman (no RGF label, but a beautiful tree)

Trying not be not too chauvinist, I added some varieties originating from other countries but with similar ‘attitude’:

• Alkmene (German)
• Colapuis (French)

Good websites (in Dutch) on this topic are VELT, Nationale Boomgaardenstichting, Guy De Kinder’s site

An English reference is the website of  the University of Reading, who has taken over responsibility for the curation and maintenance of the National Fruit Collection. The National Fruit Collection is one of the largest fruit collections in the world, it includes over 3,500 named Apple, Pear, Plum, Cherry, Bush fruit, Vine and Cob Nut cultivars.

Aardvark (previously known as ‘Mechanical Zoo’) is a social search service developed by some ex-Googlers.  Concept is simple though ingenious.  Essentially, when a user sends a question to Aardvark (via email or instant message), the service analyzes the question and categorizes it, then distributes the question to those who have self-appointed domain knowledge in that category, who can then respond while retaining some level of anonymity.

Interesting aspect is that Aardvark doesn’t use search engine like algoritms to match a question with a topic somewhere stored on the internet. It uses its algoritms to match a question with PERSONS who can (potentially) answer the question.

For ‘local’ questions, it is obviously important ‘local’ potential answer-ers are also subscribed to Aardvark. So far you can only join by invitation, so mainly US residents will be registered. I’ve applied for being invited though … so come on, some Aardvark-er out there must be looking for answers in the domain of Belgian beer, chocolates, medieval cultural cities Leuven/Brussels/Gent/Eksel/Bruges/Antwerp/…

Digging a bit into the subject,  I ended up in the domain of ORM or ‘Online Reputation Management’ and SERM ’Search Engine Reputation Management’ and the growing importance for entreprises investing in this. Just to give an idea on the market potential, the UK  market for ORM in 2008 had an estimated value of +/- € 60 million (source: Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer’s Guide 2008, e-consultancy). 

With the growing popularity of social networking, there are even companies offering ‘personal’ reputation management.  Pioneer in this area is ReputationDefender. For € 14,95 / month, you can ‘protect’ your online reputation or that of your teenager.  Interesting indeed if you know that about 77% of the executive recruiters will ‘Google’ you as part of the first screening.

Time for a refresh I thought. I’m now carrying my little Spanish pocket phrasebook (Assimil) with me all the time again, but also decided to look for a good online language learning site.

Interesting online initiatives I came across are:
- Busuu (good reviews and free)
- Woxswap (social networking approach)
- iTalki (integrated in facebook)

With my weakness for niche online market places, my attention got drawn by Myngle though. Essentially it is an eBay like marketplace for languages. “Rated” teachers and students can connect and start an online course (via Skype) after an online payment via Paypal.

Coincidentally there was a message on Techcrunch today that Myngle, has just secured nearly €1 million euros in the form of a bank loan which is fully backed by the Dutch government through an innovation program. The company is also nomitated as one of the 20 finalists of promissing startups at the Plugg conference in Brussels.

Using RFID technology ‘Touchatag’ provides consumers, businesses and third party application providers an unique service to link items of the ‘real world’ with online applications and information sources. It opens up new and richer experiences in a variety of areas: information retrieval, entertainment, registration, ticketing, e-payments, time or service registration for mobile workers, etc.

Let’s have a look at a simple example of a possible implementation. A museum can physically tag (with RFID stickers) all art pieces in its exhibition hall. All you need now as a visitor is an NFC enabled mobile phone (and quite some new 2009 mobile phone models will have this feature). Your phone  reads the tags on the artifact and you will get all its related info (artist, date, style, possible interpretations, references to other works, …), all stored somewhere on a web server, on your mobile. 

The product /solution comes with a complete developers API and hosting platform … so all the means are there for working out some interesting niche business.  

Check out the ‘Touchatag’ website for more detailled info.