Wenn ein Unternehmer Jahre nach der Unternehmensgründung wieder ins operative Geschäft eingreift, ist etwas schief gelaufen. (free translation: when an entrepreneur after the successful founding and developing of a company again enters operational activities something must have gone wrong.)

They also mention that Shai Agassi - who is now trying to overcome the limitations of car battery technology with country-wide battery replacement stations - would have been a Silicon Valley like entrepreneur. Now SAP picked a double heading the company. A Danish and American with long-time experience working for SAP have been selected to run SAP- as it appears - by Hasso Plattner who will oversee it all again.

I must admit that I never warmed up to SAP. When I had to pick a ERP solution while with Bertelsmann (BMG) in Asia I felt that Oracle would be a better solution that is less dependent on experts and as such offers a better deal. Of course the company’s IT department already purchased many licenses forcing them to “convince” the rest of the company to use SAP so that they could apply the already purchased licenses. While this model has worked extremely well for SAP it seems to also be its limitations and the now replaced Theo Apotheker was a guy from having excelled with that business model.

Europe would need successful IT companies since the future will be much more driven by such companies than by car manufacturers. But apart from SAP there is only one other good-sized company that is known on an international scale: Software AG. These guys I know even less but they seem to do quite well around the buzzword “XML”.

Back to SAP: In my opinion they need to be much more aggressive in innovation and also need to reach out to new areas. This could well be by acquiring promising technologies from startups. So far SAP has not applied acquisitions much but I think they should do much  more. Also I think SAP needs to expand into areas where Oracle and Microsoft are active. There is no reason why they should not be able to offer their own relational database or offer enterprise software office solutions. In what of the currently hotly debated IT subjects is SAP present? social private communities, mobile enterprise solutions, real-time communications, mobile advertisement, virtual software, cloud computing, unified communications. Hardly anywhere. This needs to change if they want to have a future.

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Also read the Skype blog post.

YouNoodle Score is a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a startup’s progress and traction based on its traffic, funding, employees, buzz and other activity. The score is based on information pulled in from thousands of online sources: traffic sources, mainstream media, funding sources, the blogosphere, conversations on Twitter, and other key factors.

Personally I have a problem with such attempts to rank startups based on - as it seems - online buzz simply because it says practically nothing about how viable, close to a good exit etc. the startup is.

Any algorithm is highly subjective and open for BIG manipulation. I don’t want to suggest that Techcrunch or YouNoodle supportive startups are higher ranked than the ones who could care less about them but at the least questions remain and that should not be.

Therefore I call to either publish the algorithm and make it transparent or do no scoring at all. Better would be to rank the startups by simple metrics alone like funding, revenue (already tricky since this can be manipulated as well by private companies), number of employees. Or, what I would consider the best for a social media blog like Techcrunch, let the crowd do the ranking.

There are many voices out there that say that only a few mobile OSs would survive and among them Apple, Google (Android), RIM, and Microsoft (Windows Mobile). Nokia’s OSs are not mentioned. One of the major reasons brought up is that Nokia is not a SW company but a hardware manufacturer only. I am not sure though if that is correct. In particular if Nokia continue to make the right moves like this free SW GPS, and acquires SW companies, then they have their current market leadership behind them. Also, unlike both Google and Apple, Nokia have a very strong relationship with the mobile operators as their distribution partner. To change a working infrastructure is a tough thing to do and typically requires really big differentiation and benefits. Of course Apple is able to deliver them but also seems to be the only vendor out there with that capability. That would reduce the battle for Nokia to one company “only” which is Apple. And to do that they need to do more than provide SW. Nokia have known that for a while and that’s the reason why they launched their Ovi platform, offering free music downloads and now free GPS capability. Of course free is not a good business model for a CE vendor and that’s why they have to really integrate this all well so that they offer an alternative to the Apple platform (touch phones, iTunes store, music player, apps, ebook reader). Looking at their website that’s exactly what they are working on but you can also see their main deficiency: while maps are free, network download charges for synchronization are of course not, and depend on your operator and your mobile plan. Apple would have provided deals with the major operators offering a complete end-to-end user experience (and if it is only that you can conveniently buy/activate it through iTunes). So still some way to go for Nokia, but first steps look promising at least.

One additional question now is what will happen with GPS vendors when what they offer is essentially a freebee on mobile phones. Worth a new blog post I think…

While GoToMeeting still has no smartphone app, which I consider as pretty weak, Webex has that too. MightyMeeting’s approach is to upload your presentations (the limit is 20 MBytes per presentation) and then run it from there. So it is the SaaS version of these two other web presentation tools.

What are the advantages of doing that? The biggest advantage I see is in being able to run an online presentation simply from your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or other smartphone and not having to be at your laptop or PC. Of course you can run it from there, too. While it is also possible to run a presentation and advance the slides from your smartphone while your laptop is connected to an LCD beamer, I was not then able to select a full-screen view, which is not ideal of course as you always see the border of the program and the browser. The program is in beta so I hope they add full screen view as well in that operation. One can expect that they will add better usability and communication features such as VoIP (a basic chat function is already supported) over time too.

This tool is free right now. No idea how they plan to commercialize it. One approach could be to come out with an enterprise version that they charge for the same way the others do. MightyMeeting btw won the last event of Founders Showcase run by TheFunded in Silicon Valley where every 3 months about 200 entrepreneurs and VCs come together to listen to pitches from very early stage companies and then vote for the best one that evening.

The success of any company largely depends on how much better they can bring new or improved things to the market. This is not a sole function of product management and R&D in product and service innovation though but actually of everybody in a company since there are so many touch points with employees, clients, partners, products, services etc. that can be improved and lead to competitive advantages.

In fact I am convinced that the future in about just any industry in light of the strong competition from Asia and here of course in particular China is how well one can motivate and leverage each employees know-how and skill towards a joint goal: innovating better and faster. Innovation has to be seen in a broader sense here encompassing all company functions but of course products and service innovation are key since they pay the bills.

But as it turns out in day-to-day business these improvements, ideas or innovations are difficult to collect and often even difficult to create in many in particular big companies. So how could one revive or jump start an internal process that leads to a culture where people love to come up with new ideas? Before being able to answer such a question I collected some of the reasons why it is difficult for so many companies to innovate, here are some:

• there is simply no time set aside for employees to collect ideas or even communicate them
• there are no or only hardly achievable incentives defined in case someone has a nice idea
• how decisions and new products/services are created is a non-transparent process and only clear to a few
• hierarchical barriers make it difficult for lower ranked employees or departments with less visibility to communicate ideas up, one might simply not listen to them
• innovation is in the hands of a few so called experts and not a grassroots motivated approach
• being wrong with an idea does not mean that was bad, in contrary it needs to be made clear that it is much better to be wrong many times trying than not proposing anything at all, unfortunately too many companies are still not encouraging to try out something new
• there are no software tools available on companies and made part of every employee’s work tool that foster an innovation culture

This is a very small list. A bigger (50) and more comprehensive, also with a positive angle, list you can find here: 50 WAYS TO FOSTER A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF INNOVATION.

Read Quantcast’s statistics and you know more details about how the mobile web developed in 2009. There are a few spots in the world where cheap phones and with that NOKIA still dominates. Mostly it is all iPhone and iPod Touch dominated already.

• Apple enters the e-book reader game and might well kick e-books into the mainstream. I hinted about this quite some time ago but with the Apple tablet rumors getting quite concrete one target market seems the e-book and with that a new category, the multimedia e-book. To use e-ink readers with b&w only always seemed dull.

• social communications for the enterprise is a hot new subject. What Apple is for consumers, salesforce.com is (a little bit) for enterprise. Constantly trying to innovate, in salesforce.com’s case more re-coining the same buzzwords (SaaS, cloud). But with its latest announcement, to offer social collaboration capability starting some time in Q1 2010, this will get high visibility, and enterprise CIOs, productivity experts, online channel experts as well as marketing&communication departments will have something to talk about and do.

• the mobile Web will grow even more. With Apple’s iPhone the whole mobile phone industry dramatically changed. Suddenly the mobile Web was not only talked about but became a reality. Fast mobile data networks are becoming a necessity to be able to serve these power users. Blackberry e-mail push like services have worked with simple GPRS quite well for a long time already but mobile Web surfing not, and that requires fast mobile network infrastructure. Interesting to see that also here Apple is shaking up an industry that they have not served at all in the past. Nokia and all other mobile vendors will come under tremendous pressure and with Google entering with its own phone (selling it directly and via a few operators) this will only intensify. But most importantly with the growth of the mobile Web (eBay had record Christmas sales for mobiles) enterprises need to make their websites mobile ready and keep them up to date with new mobile browser developments as well.

I was quite surprised when I saw this chart today as there are a few companies in this top ten list of biggest corporate R&D investors that I would not have expected. I expected Toyota there, the Swiss pharmaceutical companies Roche and Novartis but for sure not GM and Ford. Guess they kept it a secret what they all do with this huge amount of R&D money. Also surprising was Nokia being ranked second even. Also here the pure amount of the investments says nothing about its quality and success.

Now after I set up all my SaaS links, imported my contacts, synced the calendar with the Mac iCal and put all my PC data onto a 2.5″ super small portable hard disk from where I will use it in the next few weeks whenever needed, I was ready to go. I did not think a VMware installation would be necessary to make the switch from Windows.

My first working experience was awesome. The screen is a beauty and so are every other detail. Hard to understand why it took me so long to switch.

The Safari browser is quite fast which is important for me since I have lots of software in the cloud. I don’t see the need for any other browser - sorry Chrome and Mozilla. Now I am thinking to maybe get MobileMe so my iPod Touch and MacBook stay automatically synced and data is stored in the cloud as well. The only thing I did linking me back to the MSFT world was to buy Office for Mac as I don’t think Apple’s office suite will guarantee 100% backwards compatibility to my long list of MSFT Office files. So that’s it. I think Apple will make life for MSFT, PC vendors and mostly mobile phone vendors a tough one in the coming years.

Startups continue to have a hard time getting funding, in particular if they are with more unknown VCs, as those might simply not get new funds from their institutional investors anymore who prefer to use the money for something else. If you are with a top VC firm, though, there should not be a problem. Focus is on getting revenue and with that proving that you have a viable business. Not so exotic for the rest of the world of course. It seems that Silicon Valley is becoming more mainstream.

There is still very interesting stuff being done that will surface in a few months from now and IPOs are being prepared as well, although not knowing if they will then really pull the trigger and go public. I have also seen startups who have just received a new round of funding and are now super busy with tons of work racing to be first in the market with new features. Such setups are fun to work for and reminded me of the high (and unreal as it turned out then) times end of 1999.

There are still the smartest and most ambitious entrepreneurs to be found here, it seems, but you also meet people who feel tired of the constant rush and begin to wonder if there are better things to do in heir lives than work.

Now if you are ambitious and love technology I am sure there are great opportunities and some that one only finds here. Being asked what they think about Europe, most will tell you that the focus is on Asia and China, and Europe is often seen as second priority. Of course this entirely depends on the product market, where some require a more mature customer base or where the conservative approach in Europe towards adopting new technology is easier to deal with than the super cheap but maybe not that advanced competition in China who can still sell there but not in Europe.

On a personal level I had some funny experiences. E.g. I clearly had the impression that food has got better. It is still about one third to half the price of what you pay in Switzerland and, when you choose to go to an expensive place, it will be a very pleasant surprise to get really excellent food. Competition and fewer people going out has led to this positive effect, I guess. I also discovered more of San Francisco on this trip. It is technically speaking not Silicon Valley of course but has now some also interesting startups and some tech companies (Adobe) who tap more into designer types than engineers. I really like the office space there in SOMA which are old totally renovated brick warehouses with wooden beams inside, which makes for a very pleasant working atmosphere. And one really funny fact I heard from an ex-colleague who works in San Jose but lives in San Francisco. He said that for a man looking for women you need to go to San Francisco as the ratio of men to women is still healthy there, while in Silicon Valley you find many more men than women, which also has a certain negative effect on their attitudes (details of that I won’t reveal here but I am sure you can guess :-))

So instead of looking how many people go to a site, this list counts the number of blog posts that mention those sites. The thinking behind this is that since bloggers are influential this translates into real popularity. I think this makes sense and also makes the analytics manageable without needing a supercomputer to do it fast. Blog sites themselves start btw at position  22 with Techcrunch. We just hope Michael A. has not also invested into this site here.

The site also shows the most popular Buzzwords “parsing 154,527 blog posts”. The Obamas made it three times into the top 10 (”Barack Obama”, “Michelle Obama”, “President Obama”) and “Sarah Palin” at position 10. So this one is definitely not interesting outside of the US.

This morning on my flight to Oslo I had such an experience too with an airline. Swiss, the local airline is showing lots of new things and promotes them heavily on billboards at the airport and also insight the planes on the LCD screens. Examples are:
- use of the new A330 fleet on selected routes to the US and Middle East
- super convenient first class experience
- mobile check in with sending your boarding pass that is then scanned in from your phone so no more printing of boarding passes anymore, available also in Germany and soon at man more airports

The mobile check in would have been possible since a long time but now it is introduced during times where also Swiss has to leave planes on the ground. But this is in my opinion the right thing to do especially if your business is in a commodity market. (of course with this service most likely they will save money too I guess by needing less personnel) And who will get out of this market slump stronger I am convinced is clear: the ones who used these times to offer better and differentiating products and services. By the way this does not only apply to products and services but also to the way you do product marketing. There are great new opportunities using online marketing tools such as private social communities to expand your out reach. Now is the time to explore and launch trials that are in full swing when the economy bounces back.

We’ve been misled as to the benefits of social networking sites. Many of us are finding that these tools do not live up to the hype, especially for small business. Once we start digging deeper, we’re finding a lot of challenges. Are you thinking of using Facebook, Twitter, or the like in your business? Before you go any further, consider the following myths:…

Most of the marketing departments who start using social media marketing think that they need to get onto Facebook and Twitter first. Actually, there is a much better way, which also makes use of the social community advantages for your market ecosystem: private social communities. Of course many might also mistake social media marketing with Facebook, StudiVZ or Twitter only and see - rightly - no point for their target audiences engaging. Marks also makes this point here (which I also agree with except that I don’t like the examples he has chosen):

Where, then, should a small business owner go online? Often the best social networking sites are specific to business owners. For example, Intuit’s (INTU) social media people are on their own small business community. Another good one is Bank of America’s (BAC) small business community.

The reason I think these are not such good examples is that they start out with the idea to create “small business communities” when in fact there is no such thing as people looking for small business advice but they are looking for accounting, investment, IT, etc. advice. Both do that in effect, of course, but should change their headings I think.

To make the same point less controversial sounding he could have asked “when to use public social media services and when to build your own?”.

I think this will be the start of much more social media relevance and for sure also the use of private social communities (disclosure note: that we also offer as a service to deploy and manage) where companies built their own communities that are relevant to them and the stakeholders that they see as relevant.

At the same event Web 2.0, the most commented on presentation was btw exactly about this topic where Sean Parker, an entrepreneur who was founding President of Facebook and founder of infamous Napster and others and at the age of 27 was already a VC at Founders Fund, talks about a paradigm shift away from information services towards network services: “Why companies like Twitter, Facebook, Ebay and Apple (but not Google) will determine the future of the Internet” or “Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people”. His slides can be seen here.

In general I don’t like such talking events as they are a platform for great speakers and not surprisingly are ideal for politicians to show off. Now these Comdays were no difference, with one exception:

A group of utility companies presented in a side room of the event (all supported by the BAKOM) how they plan to roll out FTTx.
I found these talks much more interesting and informative and thought that they should better run such events at these Comdays where they pick one topic and have key stakeholders give presentations.
Now as it turns out Switzerland seems to become one of the first countries in Europe - after Sweden and Asian countries - where utilities will invest into FTTx network infrastructure and then open the network to service providers who offer then Internet, voice, TV or any other telecom/datacom service (Open access model). Of course this has not been an overnight decision but took as in the case of the Zurich EWZ utility nearly 3 years of discussions and at the end a “Volksentscheid” (people’s vote) meaning that they will now be investing 200 million CHF into a fiber network over the next few years. Also other utilities such as in Basel, Genf, St. Gallen and Bern have decided to do the same and formed a cooperation between each other where they will use/apply what the EWZ with its “Zürinet” learned and uses. Also they decided just last Friday to establish some common service rules which will allow them to share technical standards and possibly even OSS solutions reducing the overall planning/rollout/operations costs.
The local incumbent Swisscom acknowledges this development but of course does not really like it.
This investment is a good start for Switzerland to become one of the leading countries in the deployment of high speed broadband access via fiber networks all the way to the  homes, companies and organizations.
The work for all these utilities and many others who will now follow has just started, though, and there is lots of work ahead still. One of the things ahead will be e.g. to explain to the end users what high speed data actually means for them and why this will be needed. Not an easy task for this industry, which is more used to talking ICT lingo between experts rather than using easy-to-understand analogies. Maybe an online community site is needed to do just that and also bring the key stakeholders (utilities, telcos, service providers, system vendors, system integrators, regulator, politicians, end users) together on a discussion forum where they also find excellent information on this topic.

But if you want to tackle Apple then you must take them on in a completely different way. And I think they are vulnerable because any company who is arrogant will miss opportunities or simply not do the best job possible. History has shown that over and over again. Unfortunately the Indian or Chinese style of product management, comparing spec sheet features one by one is not enough to make an impact. This has to be done differently…

Here a list of what I think makes this a great movie and what you can learn from it if you are in product marketing and also trying to run a campaign that gets attention, makes a difference and will be remembered:

• Something unknown: Africa and what to expect there are as interesting for the audience as for Karen Blixen
• Story: clearly a great story is told in this movie, and in addition Karen Blixen is a great story teller
• Adventure: going to Kenya at the time was clearly a big adventure and I suppose one of the main reasons, next to the bad weather in England, why they went there
• Love: great love story, no great movie without that
• Freedom: flying above the endless colorful African grasslands and mountains must be a fantastic experience; I always enjoyed flying across the flat land expanding from the Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevada in a small plane, but to do this in Africa must be even more stunnin
• Beauty: beautiful actors and landscape as mentioned
• Drama: love alone won’t be enough, only the opposite makes it like a real life story
• Women in work life: clearly Karen Blixen is in her time what many working women are in business life today: independence-seeking, competent, hard working, fact-oriented, apolitical, detail-observing, listening, good communicators, tough but fair…, an interesting subject for many, not only women

Enjoy the weekend.

Kenya picture, courtesy of Ben Heine.

I think they could easily also include more of what Facebook and Twitter have to offer and with that get the network growing some more. One key difference is that LinkedIn are far less willing to share their API with developers; this may be a benefit in some ways but it does limit the ways that LinkedIn can be tied into the user’s life. Another way they might expand is that they could start a LinkedIn Junior or something like that to attract younger folks as well. But whichever way you look at it, LinkedIn is a big success story and all the folks who have been involved deserve a lot of respect.

By now we all know what happened: a fruit company from Cupertino sells more than 50% of all music online and is taking the profits. Not only Bertelsmann BMG but all the other music labels lost the race to a company that had no idea about the music label business and its distribution at all.

So while the music industry shift online is done and one company dominates it, I am convinced we will see the same in the print media. And it looks like it might be the same fruit company eying for it. Read I. Cringley’s latest article on this, providing more background info. Interesting to read that he had the exact same experience in the print publication industry (in 1994 already) that I had in the music industry. History repeats itself, it seems, telling us that if you wait too long someone else will come and take that opportunity.

• take advantage of bargain-basement prices to make acquisitions (PepsiCo bought two of their biggest bottling companies, paying $6 billion)
• invest heavily into innovation (Intel’s Craig Barrett “you can’t save your way out of a recession; you have to invest your way out”; P&G is doing its biggest expansion in the company history opening 19 new factories around the world and IBM is holding a series of “innovation jams” to find new innovation ideas)
• companies reposition themselves (Cisco is buying startups, moving into services and expanding its business portfolio away from a pure network hardware provider)
• and last, but not least, entire new companies are being formed, following in the footsteps of others that were also started during recessions, such as FedEx, CNN and Microsoft

Update: nice slide from Phil Kotler on this subject.

Tools that I feel will still work are:

• video casts of products, your company; insightful interviews of your customers (needs someone doing the interviews who understands your business otherwise will be worthless small talk or high-level surface scratching); and something that you can try out as well are animated presentations with spoken text. This is easier to do as you don’t need video interview skills.
• virtual events: as VMWare and others have shown, you can increase the audience by 3-5x with a virtual event site that gives every participating company their own space. When travel costs are being cut, that seems the way to still have people engaged even if they might not physically attend the event
• interactive sites, if you are able to hook your target group with interesting discussions on hot subjects in your product market this should draw attention; and if you manage to get many to even leave comments, you have achieved the best one can expect from a product marketing tool. These social community sites require very careful and skilled planning, though. Also cultural aspects inside and outside your company need to be taken into account. You cannot just buy a community software tool and set it all up in a week. While technically possible, it will definitely not fly. Still, many software vendors try to make you believe a community is just another simple collaboration tool like chatting or project collaboration. But it is simply not so!
• fun sells: it requires a bit of courage to use fun elements such as cartoons but, if you do, it will draw attention. It’s important that the fun is linked with what you do and not simply a general cartoon or joke
• webinars save people the time and expense of attending a seminar but, as with e-newsletters, I feel though there are many webinars offered, maybe too many? The beauty is nevertheless that you need only one participant and it is still worth doing as also on your side the cost is minimal. So I would try them still. Maybe you get some initial prospects. Be aware though that you need to do a personal invitation as well, which means more than sending out a general e-mail to your e-mail list!
• banner ads: if you want to make them effective then you need to spend a good amount of money making them very big and displaying them on highly trafficked sites where you expect your target group to go. A small banner ad next to half a dozen others will not be worth the money you have spent.

Tools that seem to have lost its magic:

• e-newsletters, I get much less than a few years ago when everyone sent out a newsletter and really expected that people would read them. I think they don’t unless you have something super interesting to say. Also if you do it it needs to be done very well incl. the design. The standard e-newsletters are not good enough. There are better ways now too such as RSS or community sites to do the same or even better.
• e-mailings, I think with RSS e-mailing campaigns have lost their raison d’aitre. Still there are many out who still spam the inboxes of their target groups. More annoying than effective I would think unless, again, it is a personal email but that is hard to do.

Update: and a more generic slide on Marketing 3.0 from Phil Kotler.

• Forward email to your unique Evernote email address.
• Upload text, photo, or voice recordings via an iPhone, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile phone.
• Drag-and-drop audio, images, PDFs, and files into Evernote on the desktop.
• Attach Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents to an email and send them to your Evernote email address.
• “Save PDF to Evernote” from the printing dialog box.
• Clip websites and blogs.
• Send documents directly from a scanner.
• Tweet text with the string “@myEN”.
• Upload from cameras directly to Evernote using the wireless EyeFi card.

Watch this:

great    easy    awesome   incredible    amazing

Or, and that is certainly a good part of it too, they are highly passionate and excited about their own work, which is one of the best sales and marketing attributes you can have.

Personally, I really do not care much about the full story behind all this, or whether this claim has any merit or not. What puzzles me much more is that these guys, after they made a killing selling Skype for 3 bn USD are now suing the exact same company that made them stinking rich. Maybe I am not enough of a hard core  take-it-all-when-you-can business guy, but actually I rather feel sorry for them as they seem to have lost touch with reality. In fact I once had very high respect for them as one of the only really BIG European tech startup success stories, but I have lost that respect entirely now. I guess the bottom line lesson learned here must be that money does not necessarily make people happy .

No other info is available yet. If you want to be informed of news you can submit your e-mail on this site.

Lastly you can see which party comes closest to your answers. At first sight a neat idea but after trying it a few times and ending up with totally different results I think they should have tried a bit harder. Overall, though, it shows the potential of simple online marketing tools. But it is crucial to put more effort into the modeling if you want to have a tool that people come back to. For the Wahl-O-Mat they did too simple a job I think and ended up with only simple results. Too bad. But it can be done better, much better!

I attended this week a presentation hosted at Deloitte in Zurich. While Deloitte presented some high-level social communications and collaboration PPT slides from a former internal workshop only, the communication expert and project manager at SwissRe (a large global reinsurer company) had much more concrete to say about his project. SwissRe will launch end of September now to all their 10k employees after a successful trial with 1300 employees since April this year an internal collaboration software based on an off-the-shelf Web 2.0 community tool. What makes this news interesting is not the rollout of this tool which is IT-wise a piece of cake, but the fact that such a conservative company now suddenly opens up to full collaboration between all its employees allowing them to use any kind of web based tools such as forums, wikis, IM, blogs etc. being able to form groups and share knowledge across any departments globally.

They justified the investment with a range of organizational and cultural benefits that they expect but one thing worked out by chance very nicely, they could show that they can replace two very expensive (only used by small groups) existing collaboration tools that they inherited from some former acquisitions. The project was run by the communications department and was not an IT project which makes total sense since it is not about the tool or technology but about the business benefits in communications that are at the center here.

During the following apero I raised the idea that any progressive bank that would allow its analysts to work with such tools would have a significant advantage over the currently closed-minded and self-centric approach that all the banks have right now. People agreed with me. Will it happen? We will see, there is certainly a chance for a paradigm shift which is not only the case in the banking and insurance markets. And if there are some expensive not much used software tools in your organization as well, how about taking a look at replacing them with something that could actually work and provide big benefits to your organization? Now is the right time to do this.

Image: Flickr/Paul Shaffner

As the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger writes, the new launch of Google StreetView in Switzerland creates lots of protests among private people, companies, communities as well as annoys the country’s top data security officer, Hanspeter Thür. Already on Friday this Swiss data security officer announced that he would order to shut down the service if Google should not - as they actually already agreed prior to the launch of its service - take off faces, car license plates and other private information. In Europe and even more so I feel in Switzerland people do not take privacy issues that lightly as maybe it is done in the US.

The deal with other countries where Google will take such information off when people ask them to do so is not what they agreed to in Switzerland. They want Google to take it off immediately prior to going live. I think this is not that easy to do and for sure quite time consuming and costly. It might well be that Google decides to not offer this service in Switzerland at all. I would find that a shame, but try to argue with people who are paranoid when they see their house on the Internet. They should be maybe more concerned about what possibilities the military or the police has to check them out, but that is not known in public. To me they make an elephant out if a fly and as usual Google is quite amateurish in handling it.

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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In any case, it is good news for the mobile industry who will enjoy impressive growth also in mobile data services as the smartphone users will of course drive that market too.

Twitter client

Twittelator is what I use the most. Sometimes also TweetDeck. Other clients that work well but are not that popular with me — but still worth taking a look as it is quite subjective — are Tweetie, Twitterrific, TwitterFon.

Traveling apps

The iPhone apps in the traveling category are growing rapidly and I am not up to date on all that’s out there now. I think LonelyPlanet is good, although I have not bought any iphone app. What I can recommend are Tube (London, Paris), BERLIN (TripPlanner), CityGuide (Barcelona, Roma), BucksMe (to find the next Starbucks nearby), worldtop7 (best restaurants to check out), and Beijing and Shanghai Taxi Guide — a MUST have when you are there.

Swiss apps

Yes, living in Switzerland you have a good choice of some really excellent apps like: PhoneBook (works super fast), ParkMe (shows in real-time the parking lots available in all the major Swiss cities), SBB Mobile (all the railway connections), Wemlin (all the buses and trams in Zurich), 20minuten and Tagesanzeiger apps, which are very good online newspapers, Swiss events, Swim Weather (shows details of all the public swimming pools), usgang.ch.

Games

My kids are the authorities on this. They like: Topple, Monkey, NFSU, Tiki Towers (is THE hit), Paper Toss, Hanoi. Shazam for recognizing songs works well and I use it quite often.

Weather

WeatherPro is the best I think, AeroWeather as a backup is OK next to Apple’s own Weather app. iWeather.ch I don’t yet find useful.

News

20minuten and TA in Switzerland, stern.de is well done, NYT, Instapaper, Newsstand (I like the most as blog reader), Stitcher for podcasts, TVGuide, TV Movie and netTV are all far from perfect TV guides and lots of usability improvements are needed for all of them.

Work tools

DocsToGo is similar to FileShare, OffMaps I consider as a work tool to help me find my way as a backup, Flight Status is nice to have and AirportStatus is good for only shows US airport delays, 30Boxes online calendar works very well, Convertbot makes converting Fahrenheit or inches into what I understand better - metrics - fun to use, mSecure keeps all my login names and passwords at one place — and man, how many there are! My ultimate week planning tool is Evernote, a must-try-out app! To find Wifi networks I use WifiTrak and WiFinder (this does not work under OS 3.0 anymore, though), to find FREE Wifi connections I try out iFiFi and FREE Wi.Fi but both with so-so success, you need to be patient so often not the best tool for work. I have now found WifiCafe and this app seems to also work in offline mode.

Social Communications

LinkedIn and Facebook work well on the iPhone, so does Skype (no more need for FRING, sorry guys), Brightkite and Mobeedo or aka-aki I am trying out still, so far it did not convince me as there are not enough people in it and anyway only works in BIG cities, maybe.

Fun for me

Cocktails, easyPasta, Holidays (to see when other people are taking off again), iChillout, CellarRat (quick overview of what wine area and year could be promising, so far did not use much at all). Schmap and Unlike I’ll probably delete soon, Trailers Int. shows the latest movie trailers, very nice app, CultureGPS is a mix of fun and business app, sometimes one and sometimes the other — try it out and see yourself!

The iPhone apps are overall now more sophisticated than the first versions. Still I have the feeling they are now reaching their limitations as there is only so much you can do with an app on a relatively small screen. Not surprisingly Apple seems to be working on a bigger screen version which will open up entirely new and better opportunities. E.g. web surfing on a small screen is still not that much fun and remains an exception for me even with Wifi connectivity.

The newly founded HSP (Horst Schlämmer Partei) is betting big time through using social media. On its campaign website you can see that they are present on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, StudiVZ, have newsletters, a blog, its podcast is number one in the iTunes store already, and much more. It looks almost as if they are making fun of social media tools, too, having just about any social network embedded code for copy available.

Watch the campaign video, I like most where he shows his plan in a live TV show.

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.

Here a list of the things you can do to get your feet wet:

Introductions: read the Twitterhandbook first, then you can also go through the new Twitter 101 for business. Also great tutorials can be found on Slideshare, which I recommend reading after these two introductions and after you have actually signed on and started using it already. There are more than 4,000 presentations on Twitter already uploaded. (a nice one is this here.)

Using your first apps: some apps you might want to install are Twitpic, which lets you upload pictures and also send them simply via e-mail. To start getting some discussion going you can try out TwttrStrm, which lets you post questions. You can also link to your Facebook account with twitter/badges. There are endless apps available. One recent one is Geo Chirp, which allows you to search for Twitter users locally.

Install on your mobile: to make things really neat you have to install a Twitter client on your mobile. I have tried a few apps on my iPod touch and all of them do the job quite well. It is more a matter of personal taste I think what app you pick: I use mostly TweetDeck now but Tweetie and Twitterrific are good choices too.

Only time will tell if Twitter is indeed the most initially undervalued business app or the most hyped up tool.

My feeling is that either Google or Microsoft might acquire them if not even Facebook, who seem to have some close links to them already.

I just came back from a 10-day business trip to the U.S. having been on the west coast mainly.
It is obvious that the economy has been hurting for quite a while now. This can be seen literally on the street with less traffic (relatively speaking only as it is still bad in peak times), areas such as south of Seattle where whole neighborhoods seem to be up for sale (hundreds of meters of For Sale signs) and stories of startups who can’t get any funding anymore at all, plus people struggling to find new jobs.
Still I got the clear feeling that the bad times have hit the bottom and that things are improving.
Also the latest financial results from companies like Intel or IBM show this clearly. Not to mention
the stock market where the NASDAQ had a big rise this week, so folks are speculating that it will get better too.
One ex-colleague of mine who used to live in Silicon Valley and went back to Switzerland 6 years ago, has decided to move back to the U.S. and bought a house in Mountain View for his family (3 kids) just this Monday. He told me that he got already quite a few job offers, which makes him believe that there are options for him. In Europe he could never find a challenging HW engineering job in the datacom industry and had the feeling that most Swiss companies he talked to were very stagnant, doing the same as they did more than 10 years ago and happy with that - but of course being hit hard now due to their inflexible business attitude. House prices are low so he might do quite well I think. Still, banks are asking for 60% down payments as in his case, which is ridiculous of course.

(Photo credit: www.pbase.com/camera0bug/image/13107594)

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.

Some of the more interesting outcomes are:

• while most companies are using social media currently for branding and marketing communication purposes, the survey shows that in the future lead generation will be the number one purpose
• currently the most used tool is LinkedIn while in the future blogging will be the highest ranked
• there is a clear difference in how small and larger (>1000 employees) companies use social media: smaller companies focus on external use such as marketing and customer research, while bigger companies use it for internal purposes such as information sharing and collaboration
• for the use of Twitter (still rare in B2B btw) the same holds true. Currently it is used for sharing breaking news but the majority of the people interviewed mention that this will be “keeping in immediate touch with customers” for the future

I noticed it a few weeks ago when I saw that the German GPS navigation company Navigon provided their navigation software for the iPhone that they quickly showed up in the Top 10 list in the AppStore.

Now Navigon is number one paid app in the Navigation category and based on the huge number of reviews (250) in a league with e.g. the very popular game Brain Challenge.

Navigon offers two versions currently: a European and a D-A-CH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). It supports also many languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch and will have even more in the near future.

While the price is very high for an iPhone app (105 CHF and 69 CHF) for the two versions it is relatively cheap compared to buying a complete navigation device. Also this app seems to close a gap that neither Apple nor Google’s Android phone could close so far (not to mention the mobile operators who are loosing out it seems once more here too) and that is for a professional navigation system. There are GoogleMaps based GPS projects under way, but they are still in a stage where I would not use it and rely on it to find my way on time to a meeting in a new place. Of course they will improve over time as well but I think this will take a while and possibly never reach the quality of Navigon.

Now that Navigon has started this they should not stop but expand the functionality to much more location based services and join forces with many other apps that you can find already in the AppStore. They could become a platform for many of them. If they take that opportunity will have to be seen though. Navigon being a German company I doubt that they will succeed in this or even try as this is not something that comes natural to German companies.  They very typically stick to their own ideas and don’t use extensive partnering as a way to distribute their brands. That’s one of the reasons also why hardly any German software company was able to build an international success unlike so many US software providers. But maybe I am wrong and if so Navigon could have a stellar rise from here. Let’s see…

Today Google Germany made an agreement with the German authorities to allow people to opt out of Google Street View when they don’t like their property or personal things being displayed in Google maps. This was a pre-emptive move to avoid any legal actions from privacy protection groups or others. Currently there are no laws in Germany though that would prohibit Google from driving around with their 360 degree view cameras, recording it and then displaying it in Google maps.

Now I have read about a new service from a Dutch company - Layar - that allows you to view your environment and then get maps and any other location-specific information displayed, overlaid in real-time.

The video above explains it well, so watch it if you are interested. It looks quite promising and, if it catches on, could mean another SMS-style success or maybe not. :-)  Seeing my kids playing with their Nintendo DS camera enthusiastically, I think though this could well show the future of where location-based services are going.

Layar was developed by this company SPRX Mobile. Layar works wih Android on the HTC Magic but a prime target is the new iPhone 3G S as they mention. The whole approach is btw called augmented reality (AR) browser, just in case you did not know.

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.

This long time discussion is still open, as viewed on Bazaarvoice’s blog and classic post by Pete Blackshaw from whom also comes the table below. He thinks marketers are still in control - I guess he simply has to.

Some visible patterns to highlight:

- Facebook has almost captured Europe and is extending its dominance, more than 200 million users
- QQ is the leader in China and the largest social network in the world (300 million active accounts)
- MySpace lost its leadership everywhere (except in Guam)
- V Kontakte is the most popular in the Russian territories
- Orkut is strong in India and Brazil
- Hi5 is leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania
- Odnoklassniki is strong in some former Soviet Union territories
- Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal

Other country specific social networks:

- Iwiw in Hungary
- Nasza-klasa in Poland
- Cyworld in South Korea
- Friendster in the Philippines
- Hives in the Netherlands
- Lidé in the Czech Republic
- Mixi in Japan
- One in Latvia and Lithuania
- Wretch in Taiwan
- Zing in Vietnam