Today IBM announced a software platform that is supposed to work as an online market space for high-tech companies. The project is called Innovation Factory. This is what IBM says in a press release today at the US largest wireless industry event - the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, Florida:

Innovation Factory uses a blend of Web 2.0 social networking technologies to help companies rapidly conceive and test new products and services, accelerating a launch process that often takes years down to mere days.

We have not been able to write too much recently as business has kept us globetrotting since the beginning of the year and seems to be continuing that way.

In short order we have seen some of the beauties of the North repeatedly, such as Helsinki and Stockholm. Of course this time of the year they hide a good part of their beauty behind bad weather.

This week we had a chance to see the train station and the office of a client’s client in Västerås. Half way West between Stockholm and Linköping. We were told the area is beautiful and has hundreds of well maintained castles. Yes hundreds. This sounds a bit unreal but it is true. In a few months one should be able to enjoy this area more. Wikipedia says this about the major town:

Västerås is one of the oldest cities of Sweden and Northern Europe. The name originates from Västra Aros, which refers to the estuary of the river Svartån. The area had been populated from Nordic Viking Age,

before 1000 AD. In the beginning of the 11th century it was the second

largest city in Sweden, and in the 12th century became seat of the

bishop.

I am currently in the process of obtaining a new 10-year passport. While I am still a German, though living in other countries for more than 10 years now, I was prepared for a horribly bureaucratic experience. To my surprise so far this has turned out to be a pleasant (since very efficient and quick) process. OK, I still don’t know why I need all this stuff:

• birth certificate
• marriage certificate
• “Abmeldebescheinigung” of the last place I lived in Germany

I have now made about 30min of calls to Berlin, Baden-Baden, Gaggenau and Munich, and was helped immediately - in one case they even volunteered to fax the “Abmeldebescheinigung” right to the Consulate here. Wow! That is a hell of a service.

Of course I don’t yet have my new passoprt, but things are looking good, and who knows, maybe it all will indeed go much more smoothly than I expected. So far I am truly impressed, and thought that was worth a blog post to encourage others as well!

An average of 130g per kilometer CO2 pollution is what the EU will request from the car manufacturers after it became clear that they will fail to cut the emissions themselves to that level by 2008.

The fact that FIAT is the best currently with 139 g/km comes a bit as a surprise to me, I would have expected the Japanese to lead. But even more surprising is Volvo from Sweden where they have ambitious goals to use bio fuel, but its own car manufacturer comes in on second last place - only Porsche is worse, which was not a surprise of course.

After a fair few months of speculation Apple has finally announced its iPhone. Comparing this device to the N800 mentioned a couple of posts ago makes the latter look even more overpriced. According to Jobs’ keynote speech Apple’s iPhone seems to offer almost everything the n800 does and a whole lot more for US$499 for the 4GB storage model (recall that the N800 has a mere 128MB built in flash).

Of course we will have to see whether Apple can actually deliver, and it isn’t due to really ship until July, but it is no surprise that dedicated smartphone vendors such as RIM had a bad time on the stock market yesterday. In theory Nokia should be able to build a similar product and have a massive cost advantage when it does but recently Nokia has seemed to go down the Microsoft route of ever more features rather than the sleek UI of Apple.

• Apple - not long ago - officially announced that they weren’t working on an iPhone. Now it appears though as if this was an official lie. The world’s largest contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. leaked that they got an order from Apple for 12 million iPhones. If it is now indeed true then this will be an attack on some of Nokia’s and in particular SonyEricsson’s music phones. From a product management point of view this makes a lot of sense and could well be the start of a next - even bigger - wave for Apple. Mockup pictures have been out for quite some time of course too.
• Allot Communications - an Israeli QoS data network company - had a successful IPO on the Nasdaq, raising net 78 million USD with a market cap of 300 million USD. Quite interesting to see that QoS has become hot again. It was already supposed to be dead back in 2000 when many Silicon Valley startups were into this. Timing is everything, as we can see here clearly once more.
• Germany’s biggest print media company Axel Springer Verlag has changed its business strategy for four of its newspapers (Die Welt, Welt kompakt, Welt am Sonntag, Berliner Morgenpost) to “Online first” which means that all relevant news will go first and immediately onto their websites. So they realize that there is no point in reading 1-2 days later about something in a print edition when before that it has already been spread on many online portals, not to mention the fastest guys covering it even sooner, via blogs. This strategy will become the norm for all newspapers.
• After Silvio Berlusconi had been firmly told that his company Mediaset was not welcome to bid for the German private TV channel ProSiebenSat.1, FTD has now reported that Do?an Holding has moved into the final round of bidders and seems even to be holding the highest currently (not sure how they were able to find that out, but it makes for a good story at least). Do?an Holding is a Turkish conglomerate. Interesting also to see that Do?an today announced the sale of a 25% stake in Do?an TV Radio (DTVR) to Axel Springer, which makes the two partners. The Do?an Group has more than 11′000 employees and is active in the energy, media, industry, trade, tourism and insurance sectors. If you click on their website you might have some funny moments watching the animation that leads to their logo…
• Ever since the private equity company Blackstone took a stake in D-Telekom, things seem to have been moving much faster, and more seems to be happening than in the last 20 years or so combined. Looks like they are now pushing to spin out (to some extent at least) D-Telekom’s systems integration arm T-Systems.

Eight German multinational corporations are on a fundraising tour in Dubai trying to collect up to 15 bln EUR. The CFOs are from Siemens, SAP, Daimler Chrysler, Lufthansa, EADS etc. Goldman Sachs has organized this roadshow. Dubai Holding’s finance arm, Dubai International Capital (DIC), is keen to invest some of its last petrodollars (in 4 years Dubai will have no oil left) into German companies that are relatively cheap right now but promise good returns. Dubai’s ruler sheikh Muhammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum already owns real estate en masse in the US, has bought hotel group Travelodge in the UK, and of course invested heavily into Dubai with the vision of having 10 million inhabitants some time soon. The head of Dubai’s stock exchange is a German, who may also have helped with the roadshow behind the scenes.

Since the US is no longer so attractive for investments, European companies - and now in particular the Germans - are on their shopping list, next to million dollar racing camels and gold jewelry. The difference will be, though, that the latter are longer-term private “investments”, whereas the German companies will serve as short and mid-term speculations, with good ROI expected.

In Germany politicians -like in most places elsewhere- are known to produce new laws while hardly any are cut (have a few 10k tax laws still!).

Now this one here of course is required since TV and radio broadcasting over the Internet (IPTV) or onto a mobile (radio or mobile TV) is a -relatively- new media. Everybody who is not already paying a fee for radio/TV will have to now pay about 5 EUR per month if they have a PC with Internet access or a mobile TV, radio capable phone.

What was striking me today is the fact that in Heise Online, see here, nearly 1′000 people added their comments in its dicussion forum and practically all of them negative.

Not sure where this “everything has to be for free” mentality in Germany is coming from, but it is a dangerous development in my opinion. I am observing this phenomeon for quite some time now when dealing with Germans and German companies. The last 10-12 years have been -economically- overall tough for them and that lead to a culture where pricing got ruined and many are trying to move from one “clever” freebee to the next. eBay e.g. is hugely successful in Germany because it fits into this mentality of course excellent since it provides a tool to get things cheap or to sell things to a wide audience quickly and with low cost. Now at the same time Germany is developing into a society where 10% in the west and 20% in the east have practically no disposable income.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, because what is developing here is a vicious circle that is hurting the whole country. If a society is not willing to pay for services or hardly pay for them then of course this takes out interest in investing into new technologies on the one side and kills many potential service jobs on the other side. The source of the problem is the same for both. How this can be resolved I don’t know, but the overall threat is that Germany will further loose attractiveness to do business with and fall behind other European countries that 10 years ago would not even have been on the radar screen such as Austria or Spain e.g.