[Photo by Clark Little]

Last night Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President Operations & Google Fellow, wrote in the official Google blog that they will stop the Google Wave project and the attempt to try to create a product out of it.

Some have foreseen this happening already in October 2009 such as Robert Scoble in his highly visible blog post “Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype“. He criticized the total overload of information that Google Wave creates making it unusuable as a practical work tool. Of course Google hoped that the developer community would fix this and come up with creative ways but that has not happened either.

Product development can be supported but not totally handled by the public community. What Google should have known and for sure learned from the Wave project now is that you need to set a clear direction still and have a strong product to start out, with a clear value.

What amazes me about this end is the fact that many got caught by total surprise with this announcement. I could still hear just a few weeks ago during a client meeting that also Google Wave would possibly be a candidate for a community platform solution and some folks predicted even the end of email and collaboration tools when Wave is in full swing. Nope, not so fast.

Failed innovations often make you learn much more than successful ones. That remains here now as a positive and of course some valuable public source code also that can be used in other projects to come.

Google keeps innovating and also stopping failed innovations such as this one or the NexusOne mobile phone business model. This approach is much better than sitting and waiting for others to make a first move and then copying it. Only with such a pro-active approach can one land the next big IT wave project and failures are a common part of active innovations not to be feared at all - in contrary.

This week’s EURO mess showed a few things that one might have suspected beforehand but only became evident when the crisis hit, and there are good chances now to fix issues finally.

• German - French friendship seems more for political show than something Europe could rely on in a crisis.
• In contrast, the Swiss showed where their real interests lie and supported the Euro heavily with their national bank which already holds two thirds of its reserves in Euros.
• Deutsche Bank and others are actually more interested in making tons of money in such a situation than stabilizing the markets. Total trading transparency and control are inevitable in the near future meaning NOW to show who follows what interests.
• Even though the UK has just had a change of government it also became clear that Europe is somewhat a club without them. If one looks at the fall in the British pound in the last few years the Euro is a safe currency in comparison. I think the UK needs to decide if they want to really become part of a European system or stay isolated on their island somewhere in no man’s land between Europe and the US. It is their call.
• Without strict fiscal control of Euro countries and punishments when needed this will not work; it looks like Germany is taking on the role of watchdog, which might be a good thing for all in the end.
• Countries can become bankrupt and the financial institutions who lend them money can’t hope anymore so that the taxpayers pay for eventual losses; the same will be true for big banks.
• update: This here is a good contribution in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. The author suggests that the EURO countries include into their constitutions a maximum debt threshold. That way - assuming the countries respect their constitutions -  each country can separate the discussion from politics since it becomes a law. Germany followed last year Switzerland doing exactly that.

I had asked not long ago in a blog post here “SAP - Quo Vadis?”, raising the question why they don’t get a database and also invest more into mobile enterprise software suggesting they should do acquisitions. And voila, SAP will buy database and mobile application specialist Sybase for about $6 billion.

Competition is heating up in the tech sector where the big ones need to offer most solutions that enterprise customers might need. This is also triggered and accelerated by e.g. Google who is increasingly becoming a software application player making its web-based Google Docs more robust and adding missing features to catch up with Microsoft. Microsoft itself needs to look for other software opportunities such as enterprise resource planning interfering with e.g. SAP. The list goes on and on and one can expect that Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Google and IBM will continue their acquisition strategy and become increasingly more competitors.

Yesterday Microsoft launched at a press conference event in New York SharePoint 2010 which offers better social collaboration features than the former SharePoint.

Compared with other pure social collaboration offers Microsoft is quite late, lacks key features, will be expensive to implement, make you vendor dependent and will still be bought by most corporations IT departments who don’t care much and just want to add a check mark at their users’ requests for better collaboration tools.

Forrester commented in a similar way:

At the end of the day, Forrester clients seem to be falling into one of three buckets:

• Those that are committed to SharePoint and are planning to take the native social capabilities, even if it means being a bit behind the cutting edge.
• Those that want the latest and greatest in social technology in their enterprise and will pursue a pure social technology offering.
• Those that want both and will look for a pure social offering with deep integration with SharePoint.

Today the Swiss government officially launched the so called SuisseID which allows for secure Internet transactions. Application areas will be:

• e-government, allows you to do more and more simply online
• e-signature, allowing you to sign a contract online (need an additional software for that such as SwissSigner10 and is also supported by Adobe 9)
• as a login/authentication mechanism to use web applications that support SuisseID

The Swiss Post is the official distribution partner for the SuisseID. You need to fill out a form online and then go to a post office to verify with your current ID such as a passport to obtain the chip card with your ID. There are then three ways to use it: simple USB reader that holds the chip, USB stick that holds the chip and also contains more software such as a secure browser and the SwissSigner10 software to do online signatures, or a plastic card (the size of a credit card) that works with a card reader.

I looked into it as a way to do online signatures for us but then decided that we actually don’t need it right now or the 238 CHF for this option is not worth it. Probably for a company who does many contracts this is a small worthwhile investment though. The option with USB reader only is quite cheap with 39 CHF. For doing e-government this is worth paying I think and once I am officially Swiss will probably get one to be able to vote online and use other e-government services conveniently.

Just saw this list today which claims to show the top 50 most innovative companies in the world. Of course Asia, and China in particular, is gaining traction and also it’s normal that the US has by far the most companies represented. I consider such lists to be not very helpful at all. They serve primarily as a clever way to do PR for the consulting firms doing them and other than that show the totally obvious. By slightly changing the criteria used in such lists, a totally different list would show up. E.g. why not take worldwide market leaders. There is an excellent book called The Hidden Champions that talks about unknown small to medium sized companies (some also pretty large in fact) being world market leaders in their field and highly innovative. Most of this list’s companies are from Germany since the consulting firm is based there.

What this Top 50 list though is simply doing is taking the biggest companies by revenues and/or market cap and then seem to look who is mentioned the most in the public (Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.) and  - voila - here’s the list.

As I said above mostly PR and not worth to pay too much attention to. The media should IMHO not even look at such lists unless they do a bit more research on how these lists were created as they otherwise are misused as PR vehicles by consulting firms.

To sum it up: if you are not mentioned on this list but really would like to be, then you have to increase your PR and marketing budget and most likely don’t have to do anything more in product/service innovation at all. Or you hire that consulting firm. But that was not my idea.

The EU is right now collecting lots of money for Greece to reestablish some confidence in the markets and with that avoid having to pay even more. There are also fears that the other PIGS countries Spain, Portugal and Ireland may call for help.

Now Ireland being a nation that has been through lots of economic hardship in its history but also enjoyed an EU-wide unmatched boom not too long ago, is currently hit hard as well. Being a proud nation that likes to take its fate into its own hands, its President Mary Mac Aleese is calling its citizen to submit ideas in eight categories on how the country can direct its policies. The event is called quite appropriately “Your country your call”.

I think what we see here is only the beginning of something that many other countries should and will do as well at some point. Calling for the combined knowledge of a whole country will certainly lead to new and better ideas. I consider it as a true democratic way and this even seems an improvement over what we have enjoyed in Switzerland for quite a long time already: letting people decide about their matters and not some professional politicians only with lots of self-interest, who are also quite limited in their judgements and overall understanding of most of the subjects that they have to decide about. Online Social Communities seem ideal for governments enabling them to run such calls effectively. Something Switzerland, which is otherwise probably the most advanced country in applying democracy, should also make use of. Not to mention practically all other so-called democratic countries. The eight categories plus “Other” where Ireland is asking its people for ideas are:

• COMMUNICATIONS & TECHNOLOGY
• DESIGN, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING
• EDUCATION & THE ARTS
• ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
• FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
• HEALTH, SPORT, & NUTRITION
• PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
• TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY
• OTHER

As mentioned in a GigaOm post Skype is growing by leaps and bounds with no slowing in sight. 12% of all international long distance call minutes are made with Skype now. They also rolled out recently a few new features nearly quietly such as public Wifi access (I was surprised to suddenly get the option in a public Wifi hotspot to pay through Skype, but that made lots of sense as it speeds up the sign on process), screen sharing (this feature is not made very public either and I only heard about it today, you need to enable it in the menu bar under Call/Share Screen) and then they seem to have further improved the call quality (the call quality is simply excellent and I practically hear no difference if I talk to someone in the country, in China or the US, maybe initial delays but that goes away too quickly).

And then they have currently big efforts under way to bring Skype onto mobile phones working over wireless networks.