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.

Germany has selected three universities as Universities of Excellence. Among a group of ten (Berlin, Bremen, Aachen, Würzburg, Heidelberg, Tübingen, Freiburg, 2x Munich (LMU and TU)) the committee selected three. And the winners are: Karlsruhe (TU) and the two in Munich (LMU,TU).

Although politicans were not in the majority in the committee, the selection has a lot of political sensitivity of course. Now three universities in Germany’s south - which is already a much better off region job-wise than all the others - have been selected, which keeps the rest in the shade.

Now what does that really mean if you are selected as a University of Excellence? Money. In this first selection process 900 million EUR will be granted to the winners. A second selection is in spring 2007 with then another 1.1bln EUR.

The Technical University Karlsruhe (BTW the place where I studied, I had to mention that of course ) is already forming a new name “KIT” which - on purpose - looks a bit like “MIT”.

Whether this is all well-spent money or simply a quick rush into throwing some money at a problem without much concept has to be seen. Clearly of course in the US Stanford University and MIT play major roles for both Silicon Valley and the New England high-tech region. It’s also clear that the universities are only one piece in the puzzle: much more is needed but today is probably not the day to talk about that, instead to congratulate the winners and tell the others that they simply have to improve to become top. That is what excellence is all about.

BenQ, the Taiwanese company that bought Siemens’ cell phone division for €250 million has decided that there is no point in continuing in Germany. It’s German subsidiary will be declaring bankruptcy and pulling the plug pronto.

I wonder what will happen to other European players such as Sagem (France) which have smiliarly small market share and (presumably) high labour costs.

It took me a really long time to finish reading this book. Now I have managed it, I am still unclear what this book is really about and what it was telling me. Maybe my expectations were wrong? I thought the book would give me some ideas on the big problem of finding information and also how to be found in cyberspace, sort of provide me with some hot to-do lists and practical scenarios. It clearly did not do that. Now what is this book actually about? It tries to give a - mostly historical - overview on everything that has in some way to do with finding information online including location information (e.g. via GPS). But it completely avoids digging into any subject it touches (location-based information, Internet search, mobile communications) in enough detail to give real value to readers. I would not buy this book again, that is clear, and waste my time on an often over-theoretical writing style too. Here two examples:

“So, what’s this book about? That’s a tough one. I could tell you it’s about information interaction at the crossroads of mobile computing and the Internet, or claim it opens a window onto the singular cultural revolution of our time. I could invite you to look up its Library of Congress subject headings or its Statistically Improbable Phrases in Amazon. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll ask you to read it, for aboutness lies in the eye of the beholder.”

“Have you heard of the hippocampus? It’s one of the most ancient parts of the brain, located deep within the temporal lobes and adjacent to the amygdala. This horseshoe-shaped structure plays a central role in learning, memory, and wayfinding. We know rats rely on the hippocampus for maze navigation.”

In short. A book that has no clear target readers in mind and no clear topic to talk about will most likely end up talking about everything and finally nothing really…

As to be expected Bertelsmann completed a large sale, since they need the cash after they spent 4.5 bln EUR to buy back a 25% stake from the Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (GBL) in May this year.

This is of course the end of an era for Bertelsmann, whose name was associated with both its book clubs and its music label (Sony) BMG.

The sale brings in 1.6bln EUR and transfers the rights of more than 1 million songs. Ex-BMG stars are e.g. Christina Aguilera and Robbie Williams.

Also resolved are the legal issues with regard to BMG’s purchase of Napster.

As Die Welt reports today, ProSiebenSat.1 - the German private TV channel - is investing 30% into MyVideo, a German community website similar to YouTube. They also have the option to acquire 100%. This move fits the TV channel’s strategy of expanding into the non-TV related business from currently 6% to 15% in the near future.

• Whether Universal Music Studios has the right approach offering free music downloads was certainly the talk over at Apple this week. It is an interesting move and shows that the music labels are starting to digest the “shock” of the Internet and are trying to embrace it as an opportunity rather than look at it as the end of their business. It is also about time since they have been looking at this for probably now 10 years or so.
• The other major topic at Apple is probably the soon to be expected launch of movie downloads on its iTunes (Sept. 12 is rumoured will be the day). The major DVD resellers (Wal-Mart has 40% of the $17 bln US DVD market!) seem to be fighting successfully so far against Apple’s Steve Jobs, who - it is said - could only convince its Disney Studio’s (he’s the largest shareholder) to sell DVDs for $14.99. The title in “Good Morning Silicon Valley”, sums this up nicely I think, also because only with FTTH does it seem to make sense to download movies in my opinion, and we are far away from having that rolled out anywhere. So here’s how a film studio CEO’s day might start: Morning, sir — you’ve got Apple on Line 1, Wal-Mart on Line 2, and the Advil is in the top drawer
• In an attempt to talk sense into current wireless mobile Internet, tech celebrity Dave Winer, as TechCrunch reports, has set up some mobile friendly websites. They also think it makes sense that people post blogs from mobile phones. While I am bullish on this in general it requires Wifi or WiMAX speeds before this makes really sense. Unless you have the time to wait all day for your picture blog to be uploaded via 2.5 or 3G slow data networks, taking the very likely multiple time outs into consideration as well…
• During a business trip this week in Finland I could also walk into a Nokia store and play a bit with the new camera phone N90. With its really big size (weight seems Ok) I don’t think it is ready for the masses to adopt it. The quality of the display and the built-in Carl Zeiss optics are outstanding and truly impressive though. I think one can - with some patience - make good videos with it and if the networks get faster also submit them in a feasible amount of time. Now for once the slogan is telling the truth “We don’t sell phones. We sell multimedia computers”.
• In Silicon Valley there have been quite a few investments into alternative energy ventures including of course solar cells. Now Vinod Koshla is behind a $200 million investment into the just three months old startup Cilion. The company aims to build eight plants by 2008 capable of producing a total of 440 million gallons (3.8l) of ethanol a year and has partnered with Western Milling - a grain milling company near Fresno California - a few months ago. The size of this investment is substantial and it’s maybe the biggest so far into an alternative energy startup.
• Finally Forbes announced that German chancellor Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world. I’ll check with my wife on this but I think anyone who looks as confident like her deserves this title.

We are currently planning a new event within Nice Ventures Online Marketing event series.

The topic will be “Community Websites- Hype or New Trend?”.

Invitations have been sent out. We have also started to use the “Beyond Bullet Point” book’s advice, at least for the intro part of the presentation. We hope this really does grab people’s attention - that’s our aim…

Airlines have reacted in various ways to the recent safety measures after the London incident and Dell’s recall of 4 million laptop batteries from Sony.

Ryanair for example shows on their website that they don’t like it at all. See their website for some naked truth.

Qantas Airlines today announced -on the other extreme- that they are banning all Dell Laptops from their flights.