The GSM protocol family will soon reach 4 billion connections. And no end is in sight. The Chinese TD standards so far cannot technically compete it seems but that could well change in the next few years; half of these connections are in China. The winner was and currently is GSM-based technology though and as GigaOm noted:

GSM has economies of scale working for it; that’s why it’s gaining traction in fast-growing teleconomies such as Brazil, India, Russia and Africa.

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Hot off the press: Ericsson buys the CDMA and LTE business in NA from Nortel for 1.1 bln USD. While NSN lost out in this deal it is Motorola and (Alcatel)-Lucent who will not like this at all. Ericsson will double its revenue in NA with this deal and also buy a profitable business.

As we have seen at the Mobile Wireless event in Barcelona, Nortel’s LTE development was quite advanced, having been able to leverage its WiMAX technology (shares OFDM with LTE) to gain a lead I think.  Their LTE system was showcased jointly with LG and T-Mobile. See our videos on this as well.

Funny side note: we did this video by simply walking around and cost us zero. Goal was to be as authentic as possible. T-Mobile had their Marcom department run a very expensive video with professional graphic animations on this as well but got only double the viewers (3000) that we did (1500).  This is how the social web works, it us all about being authentic. Next year we plan to invest a little more than zero, but then strive for 10-100x the viewers: stay tuned.

I installed now the newly released Firefox 3.5 and I am impressed. I think it is about twice as fast as the 3.0 version. I had also recently tried Chrome but had noticed significant stability issues when I had many tabs open and the speed also seemed to suffer. For some reason I never used Opera other than checking it out briefly. No idea why, but I guess the web surfing experience on the mobile - prior to the iPhone coming on the market - was so bad that I simply did not want to try it out on my laptop, too. And then of course there was always Firefox.

These are exciting times - from an innovation point of view - for web collaboration tools. The last weeks brought major news from Google and Adobe who are both pushing hard on web tools now.

Over the last two weeks I have been trying out GoogleDocs and using it as much as possible. While it performs well and loading pages is very fast, there is still some work ahead for Google to make it a mainstream daily business tool. For example, the file upload limitations were a big problem for me as our presentations are usually big and to have an only 500k doc size limit means I cannot use it other than for creating new presentations. The text editor is usable, although I had problems here too uploading our company Word template. It did not do that properly, which means I would have to create a new theme as well to be able to use it. I did not try yet the collaboration functions but will do so shortly. Overall this was a promising but not fully satisfying experience.

So when Adobe announced its acrobat.com platform, I was ready to try it out as well and see if it is more suitable for daily work.  The presentation tool did not allow me to uplaod any presentations at all, though. Maybe it is because that they have not opened up that feature to international users or it is not yet supported. I did not further investigate as I had no time to fiddle around with something so basic. To create new presentations though is - WOW - very, very cool. Excellent graphics and templates that make creating a presentation a very enjoyable experience. The GUI is Apple-like but as far as I can tell (I am still not a Mac user) even better. The best was the sharing function, though that provides nearly the same features as a GoToMeeting or Webex but also here looks actually nicer and impressive. Not surprisingly for Adobe the PDF online viewer is fast and very well done too.

So as a first and not final summary of my excursion into a very interesting new web collaboration software world, I must say that Adobe’s online sharing ConnectNow is something we will use for sure and I can highly recommend. The online text editors have not yet convinced me, although I will keep GoogleDocs here on my radar screen and if they manage to do even more good things then maybe it can replace Word. For now it won’t be able to do that though.

Last, but not least, if both companies could combine the best that they have then I guess they could really threaten Microsoft. Of course that won’t happen as you can also see with the fact that Adobe’s acrobat.com does currently not support Google’s Chrome browser. Which is a sign that they see each other more as competitors than partners.

Google’s developer conference seems to draw a lot of Android folks this year according to Android Central. We have also been told first hand that Google takes Android very serious and that is reflected in the give-aways too, every attendee gets a free HTC Android development phone. Smart move to give the techies some “toys” to play. And the numbers of deployed Android phones are catching on too. As I mentioned not too long ago Opera, NOKIA and others will probably suffer from this. Only the iPhone will keep growing and has not much to fear I think. Looks also like China Mobile will take on an Android phone from HTC which will give it some lead even over Apple’s iPhone who is still only available as a jailbreaked version there. But that with a good size market I guess.

No CSR does not stand for a UK-based short-range wireless chipset vendor but stands for “Corporate Social Responsibility”. And what it is basically is a company’s ethical responsibility towards its own employees (e.g. don’t fire while making big profits), but also towards other topics in the areas of Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy and of course Charity.

That this can go far beyond simply donating to a charity organization shows Max Gladwell with his list “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media“. In case you are thinking about your CSR activities you should definitely read this article as it contains some really great things. What I liked a lot and could be used for ICT companies as well:

• Use your company’s Facebook (or other) page to have people vote on a list of charities that you donate money to. Done so by Target in the US where $3 million were donated according to the public vote.
• Host a social media event. In light of marketing reductions, traveling expense cuts, global warming, and swine flu maybe worth a try?
• Use Drupal to build your community. It is supposed to be a scalable, user-friendly and cost effective platform.

To close this post. We decided ourselves last Christmas to spend money for a charity instead of sending out postcards or Christmas gifts. Most recently, the income from a new e-book that we wrote on ICT Marketing in Europe interviewing marketing experts and that will come out mid-June, will be donated as well to a charity.

WolframAlpha is launching the service over the weekend, and it is planned to be available on Monday as a public service. Of course, it is still up to us all to decide if we’ll add WolframAlpha to our list of daily online tools to use - I started taking my first steps just now and don’t have an answer yet. Now what I have to note as remarkable is that they’re showing the launch live on TV. This adds a nice personal touch, I think, and could perhaps be taken as a model for other projects. Why not do so for your very own launches? At the very least, it is quite brave to do this, I must say, and of course a nice PR activity that reminds me a bit of a Space Shuttle launch. To add to the show, there is a tornado warning in the area around the control center. It looks almost as if they had been waiting for that to happen to add some drama to the story.

MarketingSherpa’s weekly survey chart shows what many of you know quite well: how to measure the success or failure of social community marketing is quite difficult. Many of the social business software vendors tell us this is straight forward: just make sure you pick your very own meaningful ROI measure but as this survey shows this does not reflect reality. Our experiences so far show that you are better careful when a SBS vendor makes this sound like a piece of cake.  Also quick remote installations and setups without having planned a social marketing activity onsite properly by talking to many people in your company and doing some initial trials will almost certainly end up in a failure. And worst of all you cannot even quantify if it is one or not. Uuups. Does this sound familiar to measuring the impact of broadcasting press releases?

About a year ago I bought two inexpensive Asus Eee netbooks, one for me and one for my colleague Francis, to check them out and see if they are of any use for work on the road. While mine ended up with my kids  because I did not think it was useful for business traveling really, Francis has installed Ubuntu on it and seems to use it.

Looking at the recent vendor announcements, it seems though as if the netbooks are up for a new round of innovations and become more of a real, inexpensive business travel companion too. Here some of the latest developments in case you are also in the market for a netbook:

• ASUS Eee PC 1008H Seashell will come on the market now shortly and is a slim MacBook Air look alike but of course for the price of a netbook
• Dell MIni 10 is coming soon, they for once have even colors in their program and a 6-cell battery pack option too for ultra long battery runtime, it has Windows XP and not Vista installed which makes a lot of sense
• Sony Vaio P, a real beauty, but as mentioned in an earlier post you better wait for the XP Windows version to come out, Sony has not thought this one through properly shipping it with Vista who slows down the netbook making it not much fun at all
• Recent rumors have it that the Google Android could become the chosen OS for many netbooks, latest one is saying that T-Mobile and HTC will announce one shortly
• HP jumped on this bandwagon too and seems to have done a good job with the soon to come HP 2140, Laptop Magazine’s top pick for road warriors; this was back in January already though
• Acer’s Aspire One gets good reviews as well and is in the same league as the Asus Eee, a new model the Acer Aspire One D250 is coming out shortly now
• Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10 is more of real business netbook as people report unlike the Aspire One and Asus Eee who are considered as “toys”, but as mentioned above new models are on its way from these two vendors
• Samsung NC10 and MSI Wind are two other earlier netbook models that have many fans who like the spacious keyboard and solid builds, a new model the MSI Wind U123 got just announced and Laptop Magazine review mentions: “At $379, the MSI Wind U123 is easily one of the best netbook bargains around.”

The semantic search engine WolframAlpha got my attention this morning when it was featured in an article in the German newspaper FAZ. So I went to their website thinking that I could check it out myself but no, it does not work although it says “Launching May 2009″. Today is May 5. Maybe someone should tell this knowledge engine people that their PR is ahead of their product launch? So I maybe will come back next week or so if I don’t forget. Also their logo reminded me of some virus animations that you can see right now in all the media. I only hope for them that their product is actually better than their communications. Also Stephen Wolfram announced in this blog post back in March that it would go live in 2 months, commenting:

I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.

Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task.

So Steve let’s see what “time machine” you’ve got… my colleague Francis Turner just pointed out that Steve is a smart guy for sure; so now I am curious. Update: RWW has some screenshots at least from a web presentation that they attended a week ago here.