It is in general better to talk about the good things and best practices rather than the bad ones. This holds true even if one can often learn more from the bad or the things that went wrong.

But today I am sitting for the second time this week at CDG airport in Paris, and using the Wifi login from Hub Telecom. They seem to have a sort of monopoly here, as I could not find other service providers to use - in public areas, at least. Lucky for them, as I would certainly have dropped them by now and never, ever used them again in my life. Reason for this is that it took me a totally frustrating 30 mins to figure out how to log in using their entirely user-unfriendly website. The screenshot below shows you the starting screen; now, guess which button you have to press to be able to sign on using your credit card?

The answer is: you need to click on the red bar that looks like a normal menu bar. The fact that they then switch from English back to French again was not a problem for me, but I would guess that many non-French speakers dropped it there and then, despite being the “smart” ones who managed to actually clear the first hurdle. Particularly as they made the biggest button on the credit card form page the “Annulation” (Cancel) button all in red. Even more of a problem for me was that they had the form field for the bank card number that you find on the back of the credit card also sort of hidden on the page, so that I got stuck there for a couple of minutes, too!

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We know Moore’s law and others telling us how fast microelectronics gets more powerful but this is often not as visual as seeing how things changed over time. The Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger shows a nice selection of old time computer ads that are funny today but were dead serious not too long ago.

This is our response to Techcrunch’s upcoming event Plugg and request for comments (click on the PPT cover below and enjoy):

We’re giving away two free tickets to the conference, which will go to the commentators that can best give us a humorous take on why they think European entrepreneurs can compete with Silicon Valley’s finest … or why not. Don’t forget to add your e-mail address and to make us smile.

Only today Google’s iPhone voice search capability was made available to us in Switzerland. A simple iPhone Google apps upgrade in the App Store was needed and voice search was there. The official launch was on November 18 already so they let us wait for exactly 2 months. Curious to check it out myself, here a quick test with some words and what Google voice recognition understood me saying. Motion sensing worked well so when I moved the iPhone to my ear it changed into the voice reception mode automatically, great. Now here the test results: (Yes: recognized it right away, Yes (2): recognized it after 2 trials, No: did not recognize it even after 5 trials and show what it recognized instead)

Barack Obama - Yes
Hillary Clinton  -  Yes
Angela Merkel - Yes
movies - Yes
Switzerland - Yes
Zurich - No (sumif, jewish, souvenirs, houston tx, spanish)
Zurich city - No (sylvan ct, sudanese ct, tualatin ct, siliceous ct)
Bern - No (belmont, bedouin, bem, denmark, dan)
Basel - No (buy, mazel, boston, boces, usa)
Wikipedia - Yes (3)

Ok, well after all the buzz on their own blog site I thought it would be better. But at least it works for simple English expressions. If I will use it we will see, most likely not as it would have to be much more accurate to be a day-to-day tool and the advantages of using voice recognition vs. typing it in are not that great on the iPhone. Thanks anyway for a free new gadget.

I’d like to start this series and let you know every time I come across a great online marketing tool to give examples of how to create buzz on the web. I think most of us have not yet fully realized what possibilities online media offers. So get ready to be surprised — and note, all this is done simply online. This first one is from the new Intel ad agency Venables Bell & Partners located in San Francisco. Its a small ad agency with only one location, but size does not matter as you can see in this and many other examples. Here they created buzz with a website and funny animations for the Napster relaunch.  Click on the picture to see the animation and how they get people to subscribe with their e-mails.

Favicons are the icons in the browser URL line that are small versions of companies’ logos (typically) and as such an important part of a their corporate identity.

Google was not entirely happy it seems with its last favicon redesign from mid-2008 so decided to tap into volunteer help calling for submissions. The outcome is this new favicon:

Update: as Francis Turner pointed out this new Google favicon resembles color-wise that of AVG, a security software vendor, which has been around since 1991, suspiciously well:

And another guy had a lot of fun pulling together 24×24=576 favicons into a “modern art” favicon gallery.

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.