Ever wondered what a blog in Germany is worth? In a bit less than a week we will know when the auction in eBay closes. Robert Basic, one of Germany’s most read German speaking IT bloggers, is selling his blog site on eBay and currently the highest bid has reached 22,550 EUR. (update: the blog sold now for EUR 46.902,00) The auction is open for another 6 days. Why he is selling the blog site he explains in an interview. I must admit that I have not heard of him before so was reading this interview and he seems to be a nice guy who kept a good amount of modesty and irony both of which typically US tech blogs like Techcrunch have entirely lost - maybe never had. Example: Question: If you could decide what the blog would be worth how much would you say? Robert puts a finger on his lips, smiles an says “One million dollars”. (please click the link)

While even this amount would let the US tech blog community smile and pretend to yawn, I think that they will actually watch this auction quite carefully. Why? Well it is interesting to see what an IT blog sells in Germany as you can then apply (Michael Arrington for sure has an Excel sheet prepared for that ) factors for viewers, location etc. and can come up with  what their blog would be worth.

As it turns out in  the interview he is not a friend of Google also because he sells links which is against Google’s policies.

Der Maßstab von Google ist nicht dieser bullshit wie “dont be evil” oder gar der Mensch letztlich, sondern ganz einfach Geld. Was ist das aber für ein Maßstab? Das wäre mir egal, wenn Google nicht zu diesem Infodealer mutiert wäre, dessen Rolle in Zukunft weiter zunehmen wird.

(The measure of Google is not this bullshit “don’t be evil” or even the human being at the end, but simply money. But what measure is this? I would not care if Google had not mutated into this info dealer whose role will increase even more in the future.)

Being asked if he would sell out to Google as well, he smiles and then says: ” That would not work as I sell links, which is against Google’s policies, and they would not break their own policies of course. ” and smiles again.

We use web presentations a lot and so it is great news that WebEx is now available on the iPhone as well. I hope that others like GoToMeeting are following suit. I would also think that Apple should be getting into this.

Today’s keynote at the Macworld event was filled with new announcements and following it on CrunchGear in near real-time my mouth started watering and a decision that has developed over the last year came finally through: my next laptop will be a Macbook for sure. They are now light years ahead of Microsoft that I think not using a Macbook and its OS would mean a severe competitive disadvantage.

Now back to my heading. It is pretty obvious that Apple has stolen quite a few ideas from Google. The funny thing, though, is that while Google seems good at coming up with good new stuff only Apple is able to make money with it.  Google still today has “only” managed to commercialize its search and I do not think that they will ever be able to do anything else really - commercially speaking.

Here the list of things that I have seen Apple borrowing from its friends in Mountain View and others:

• face detection in iPhoto (Picasa started that a few months ago)
• GPS geotagging in iPhoto (a clear Google maps domain)
• iMovie UI seems to be taken from Blackberry
• iWork.com is clearly using ideas from Google’s iDocs
• remote Keynote application app over Wifi on the iPhone is a copy of an existing app, i-Clickr, thanks guys!
• over 75 million accounts linked to credit cards, aha, I can smell what is coming here soon, Amazon’s of the world fasten your seat belts

One nice thing that maybe has not been noticed as much as it should have due to its possible impact on the telecom industry: iTunes music store now works over 3G and offers the same pricing model. At last the mobile operators have a smile too on their 3G investments. Thanks, Apple.

While it is not surprising that YouTube dominates US online video viewing, it is interesting to note that people watch four times longer on Hulu. (12min vs. 3min) Hulu can only be streamed in the U.S. right now though.

While the current economic downturn might also play a role for this increase of course, still, it shows how the importance of video and multimedia on the web has increased.  Time to include video into your product marketing planning? From the comScore press release:

More than 146 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 87 videos per viewer in November. Google Sites attracted 98 million online video viewers, or approximately two out of every three Internet users who watched video during the month. Fox Interactive ranked second with 58.1 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (40 million) and Microsoft Sites (35 million).

is a former East German technology firm that seems to be in relatively good shape, according to its chairman who also said that they want to invest into innovations in 2009.

2008 was a profitable year despite acquisitions. And the company wants to grow more in international markets such as China, India and South Korea where they opened offices. Currently its export ratio is 60% which is relatively low, showing that dependency on the German market is still very high.

One of the reasons for its 2008 success is the fact that they restructured already in the past few years selling off units, and also diversified their product lines.  E.g. laser systems for the booming solar cell industry have been offered which helps to compensate for the chip industry downturn.

Still, the company announced work reduction in January in some areas. “Kurzarbeit” is a way to reduce production while still keeping the salaries and people in their jobs. This is a common way in Western Europe, where the government pays part of the salaries to the company, at least for a certain amount of time. I don’t think such a protective labour system exists in the US, and for sure not in China or India.

While Europe excelled in old style industries such as automobiles (which are now facing lots of problems), it seems to be a much smaller player in IT, Internet and - data-communications. So is that perception based on reality or just what we read and see every day? Let’s first look at what I experience daily - and I might not be so untypical, I would think.

Lenovo laptop used. OK, this is a shared China-US domain. Now Lenovo is a China-based company, manufacturing is done in China but I think still designed in the US. Lots of components are from US companies like Intel CPU, NVIDIA video processor and the Windows operating system. The software I am using is mainly a US domain too: Mozilla Firefox, Seamonkey e-mail client, Microsoft Office, online calendar, web collaboration, VoIP (Skype is US owned now), web presentation, photo sharing, online CRM; Ok I think you’ve got the picture (for the record: my security software is from Europe).

Now let’s look at my mobile connectivity: Apple iPhone, Samsung D600. Sorry, Opera guys, but you do not show up, although you need to be mentioned here as the number one mobile browser vendor. Noteworthy is one of the biggest success stories here though: ARM, the Intel of mobile phones and of course Nokia - who will face quite some challenges from Apple mainly.

Things look a little bit different, though, behind the scenes. While my Swisscom last-mile provider is definitely a Cisco shop, they work with Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent I think for the mobile infrastructure. OK, here we are still present but Chinese guys are on our heels (Huawei and ZTE).

So overall, a mostly lost game, although things look a bit more friendly in business software with many local “no-name” players and SAP as a powerhouse even now. Of course Oracle, HP and IBM are rolling up the little players here, too, and will do so more in 2009.

Looking at the above, while we do not have the same problems with basic infrastructure such as airports, railway systems or mobile and fixed line telecom systems, I think we also will need a reboot for the IT, Internet and datacom industries.

I therefore call for a bail out plan for the IT industries in Europe. Use the money to catch up again and set ambitious goals. Along the same lines are recent calls for supporting the space programs in Germany with a plan to fly to the moon. At first I had a good laugh, asking myself “when was it again that they first landed on the moon? Why would hundred of millions spent to do something that is the same as others did nearly 40 years ago be any good for general competitiveness? But the good thing is that for once they are trying to come up with a general plan for high-tech too (and not only for the bank and automobile vendors)- Even if the first ideas seem a joke maybe it could lead in the right direction once they start thinking some more?

One thing I can say for sure: If the US. thinks they can reboot from their total current mess, then it should be possible to have a reboot of the IT industry in Europe and come back as well.

Come year end, you start reflecting on what happened in the past year, and of course what to expect for the new year. Here’s my very personal list of some of the things I enjoyed most in 2008. This list is only a way to show what I liked and therefore not a “list of 2008″ as many of the things I only discovered this past year but had been around for much, much longer, without me knowing about them before…

Best gadget

Also for me as for many others, the iPhone was the highlight. I still have the 2G version as I do not like the ultra-short battery run time of the 3G model. The iPhone apps are simply revolutionizing mobile communications and for me lots of great applications have already totally changed the way I do things. Mostly, travelling has become easier as you can find many great apps for the major locations. Also, I started to listen more to podcasts with Stitcher and, lastly, could find some nice language tools as well (Chinese e.g.). And of course it stores hundreds of pictures and songs and a few videos as well, helping to make travel times on long distance flights seem much shorter.

Best places

Living in one of the best places to live in the world - in Zurich - makes traveling a bit harder in the sense of measuring everything against what you take for granted in your home town. I still enjoyed going to places such as Stockholm, Shanghai, Barcelona, and this time around I even had a pleasant stay in hectic and traffic-jammed Paris. One of the most surprising places I went was in the US during a family reunion: Northern Michigan. It was picked by our US relatives and turned out to be a great place to go to, and not only because of the so-suitable summer hit song from Kid Rock.

Best countries did business with

This is a tough one to call as it typically depends much more on who you can do business with than on the place. One would e.g. imagine that it should be easy to do business in Switzerland compared with places in Southern Europe like Italy, Spain or Greece, but my personal experience showed that this is actually not always true. A very mixed experience we had with Israel where the range is from very bad to excellent so it definitely depends on the who rather than the where. China is of course the same: if you do not know the people well and are not able build up a trusting relationship, you should not enter into any business relationship at all. But my personal best this year was Sweden. Interestingly, in Finland, where you would expect things to be much as they are in Sweden due to the proximity, my experience was rather negative and I got confronted with lots of local protectionism and not very trustworthy managers. But maybe in 2009 this will change when I can finally meet the right people there as well?

Best business books

I stopped reading business books that are not based on very concrete first-hand studies or personal experiences or interviews. They turn out to be too theoretical/academic and do not add much value for me. This year I read two very practical books that I can highly recommend: Entrepreneurial Success in Shanghai and YES! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion.

Best food

When it comes to food the best places for me are in Italy. If you like seafood you might be surprised to hear that Milano is a great place to have excellent seafood. Milano is a trading hub for seafood even if it is not at the coast at all (1-2 hours drive way) which is the reason why you find some of the best seafood restaurants here.

Best blogs I enjoyed

I have subscribed to many blog feeds and try to check them daily. Unlike some US VCs who seem to have nothing else to do all day long than read and write blogs, I have to restrict my time to maybe 30 min per day which is not as much as I would like to but as much as I can spare. I have checked out some of the blog posts with the announcement of Google’s Chrome browser and tried to take a snapshot on the quality of the articles. Of course this was only a snapshot and not representative of what they write about all year around. Still it gave some flavour of what you can expect and could run into. Blog post quality can range - not surprisingly - from excellent to total rubbish and all coming from the exact same blog (not on our blog site of course ). Ars Technica won that snapshot contest while quite a few other highly visible ones turned out to be pretty bad. My favorites typically are: Techmeme, I, Cringley (now he has a new blog), and Seth Godin. Lots of press recently has gone to Valleywag with is celebrity (both bad and good) co-founder. For me Valleywag reads quite boring, lacks deep practical experience with anything I would call marketing and sales and also has no technology understanding. It is from an analyst who turned into a writer, and that is what you get. Interesting of course is how he looks at it from a pure financial point of view, as this is what you can expect VCs and financial analysts would do as well, so still worth looking at it once in a while. It’s the money speaking…

Best airline

Swiss is still in a class of its own and seems to be blossoming nicely ever since Lufthansa put their protective arm around them. The leather seats are simply the most comfortable I have found in any airline and the service is always excellent. Most pleasant surprise in 2008 was the fact that pricing is now also highly competitive, to the point where flying with a no-frills, zero-customer service airlines like Easyjet is not worth it any longer on certain routes.

Best movies

It should have said “best DVDs” here as I hardly ever go to the cinema, and if then only with my kids. Madagascar 2 was great and actually also entertaining for adults as the dialogues are written for us grown ups as well. The kids loved it and the “movin, movin…” song gets you shaking for sure. Some of the others are actually not from 2008 but I saw them this year for the first time so that’s why they show up here still. A Good Year with Russell Crowe, directed by Ridley Scott, is a great movie making fun of both the French and the Brits but at the end they come together nicely. Letterheads with George Clooney and Renee Zellweger I enjoyed on a long-distance flight and liked how the main actors enjoyed making this movie themselves. The German comedy “Männerpension” made by Detlev Buck with Til Schweiger was macabre but very refreshingly unconventional and not US style at all. For action Mr. & Ms. Smith was surprisingly top when I saw it on the plane. The story is dull but the action scenes are outstanding and also I think it becomes obvious that this was the beginning of the Brangelina story…

Now in case you like Abba (come on admit that they are not so bad at all, ) then you HAVE to see the movie Mamma Mia. One Abba hit after the other and quite well matching each scene in the movie. They had real fun making this movie too, that is for sure and it shows. Great! So I say “Thank your for the music, the songs I am singing, thanks for all the joy it’s bringing - and thanks for giving this movie to me.”

Best music

Sophie Zelmani was my very personal discovery this year. The other favorite turned out to be The Killers. Don’t take the band name literally, in fact I have no idea why they picked this nonsense name, but still their music and latest album is simply fantastic IMHO.

Location-based services are at its very beginnings and the sky is open for new ideas and mobile services. This time around it looks like as if Vodafone wants to grab part of the business and not leave it to faster moving startups. Good move. Their new service seems on the right track. Check it out for yourself, I will when it is available on the iPhone. The video is nicely done and a good example of how product marketing online can make a difference!

Come year end, all kinds of predictions are made for the next year and beyond. Of course, right now with economic challenges ahead, so-so priority technologies will be put on hold or disappear entirely from the radar screen. My personal list is also a wish list, as it would make my business life easier and I am sure yours, too:

Instant-on PCs
This one is very high on my wish list as it would reduce quite a lot of daily frustration. Being a power user I manage to crash Windows frequently so that I have to reboot which takes (seemingly) forever. Also, an instant-on PC would reduce electrical energy consumption as it would let people shut it off when not using it instead of leaving it in standby mode. In 2002, a Cornell University study calculated that the US could switch off seven power stations if TVs, videos and computers were not left on standby.
When to be expected?
This is clearly coming now. Phoenix Technologies (BIOS vendor) and Opera (web browsers) have announced a partnership that will lead to a first step into this direction. Their approach is to allow critical applications to start instantly while the OS is still booting. Of course what I would like to see is that the OS is instant-on as well. That might well require a new company. If Microsoft does not deliver it, then maybe an opportunity for an aggressive innovative startup?

12+ hours laptop battery run time
Everyone on the road would love to be able to work for a full day without having to hunt for one of the still rare power outlets at airports.
When to be expected?
This is a very tough one to call. Already years ago you could read press releases from major Japanese vendors announcing fuel cells for laptops providing a mind-blowing 40 hours of battery runtime. Of course, these systems were heavy and super expensive. And this is the challenge in battery technology: to find a technology than can be mass produced relatively inexpensively. Safety and recycling also plays a role, not to mention a supply chain needed if you were, for example, to use a refill mechanism such as methanol cartridges. Now Toshiba has announced they will bring such a battery to the market by the end of this year. But similar statements could already be read 3-5 years ago. So I’ll believe it when I can see and use it myself.

Wireless high-speed Internet access everywhere
Another annoyance factor would be removed if we could connect seamlessly to WiFi, UMTS, E-EDGE, or maybe WiMAX without having to look out for a signal and then go though a time-consuming logon procedure over and over again.
Vendors and operators claim that the technology and service is here today, but the reality looks entirely different. Instant connectivity would mean huge roaming charges so that people wouldn’t use it unless they really had to. I think that affordable data roaming would mean more business rather than less, but still all there is now is rip-offs that leave a rude shock with the next mobile phone bill. To give an example, I decided on my last China trip to put a SIM card from a Chinese mobile operator into one of my unlocked phones and use a Chinese phone number for country internal calls. I could use the phone for one week with an initial charge of 150 RMB which is 10EUR.
When to be expected?
This is probably a more political than technical issue, and therefore even more unpredictable. One forward-thinking innovative company needs to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately the Apple of the mobile operator space has to be invented first and might be a contradiction in terms - at least, right now. So maybe we won’t see this happening ever. Too bad.

Wireless electrical power transfer
This one sounds like science fiction maybe but is actually being worked on right now and first prototypes have already been demonstrated by MIT researchers. The trials were done over 2m powering a 60W light bulb. the system looked quite experimental still, though, and not too practical yet. Intel’s set up, as to be expected, looked more industrialized.
When to be expected?
No idea. I think RF radiation issues might lead to perception problems and a backlash that everyone would have to overcome still. This could be a show stopper still, I think, or at least delay it much longer. Also there are still quite a number of technical issues, as this Intel engineer admits in this video interview.

Instant personal identification
I nearly had a terrible experience just recently when I was travelling and lost my passport, not knowing if I would get it back before a China trip. It was then that I realized how important and indispensible this paper booklet actually is. To get a replacement takes tons of paper, such as birth certificates, police certification, sign-offs from your last city in your home country, and much more. In times when we are able to hop on a plane and get relatively inexpensively to any place in the world, our way of identifying ourselves is still from the Middle Ages, it seems. Simply incredible, and quite surprising to me that this has not been taken care of in an electronic way once and for all when biometric technologies should be plentiful enough to make it at least as safe as this paper passport and, most importantly, allow you to get a new one much faster if you lose it.
When to be expected?
Technology-wise today, but governments are in charge, and privacy organizations do not understand that it would actually be safer, so plenty of room for delay.

Paperless information exchange
With improvements in display technology such as e.g. OLEDs or plastic e-reader from Plasticlogic we might be headed in the right direction. Still, even most ICT companies, whose business is digital and online, often still think in paper for their own marketing and sales collateral. You find tons of printed brochures, newsletters etc. at their booths but not one single digital format, other than a pdf file maybe. No e-books, often not even USB flash cards - only CD-ROMs have found their way into the Marcom departments.
When to be expected?
As with all infrastructure-related ways of doing things, this will still take a long time. I think my kids might start adopting it, but only their kids will really enforce it to save trees and the environment.

Telecommuting
I remember well when my CEO in Silicon Valley about 10 years ago during the boom times, where office space was incredibly difficult to find, turned down my suggestion to start doing more telecommuting. His response was: at home people don’t work; they are constantly busy with other stuff such as their cat or whatever, so we cannot do telecommuting. Back then it was heavily discussed but then not really implemented. I think that this was and is a mistake, though. Today we have even better technology around, faster Internet access, web collaboration tools such as Webex or GotToMeeting of course, chat and free IP calls and, from what I have seen, also excellent and low-cost IP video telephony such as SightSpeed, which got acquired by Logitech in October. To me the excuse that someone would not be able to work from home because they would get distracted does not really hold true. A truly motivated and reliable employee will have enough self-motivation and discipline to organize his day in a way so the work gets done. If this is not the case, then it really does not matter if that person sits in your office building or at home. Of course, face-to-face meetings are helpful, and need to be held, but they can be minimized to what is needed in each phase of a project or business situation.
When to be expected?
I think that we will see its implementation more and more in the next 3 years and that, whenever it makes sense, companies will be more open for it than in the past. We will definitely see less business travel and the use of the Internet for web collaboration, including IP audio and video telecons.

Just found this in Brad Feld’s blog post. The company behind these technologies is called Oblong and has real shipping products. I also like the way they present it (mysterious music in the background, and short high-level slides for each chapter). Take a look at the video, it is very exciting, I promise!