The iPad arrived now also in Europe. One of our freelancers got one yesterday and he got a lot of milage out of it (after 18h of use the battery was still 50% full) and he answered my question on how you best hold the iPad (on the lap or in your hands):

ich habe ihn vor allem damit ich auf dem klo nicht tausend zeitschrifen und bücher herumliegen habe. (ganz im sinne meiner frau)
(I use it mainly in the bathroom to get rid of all the magazines and books there so also my wife likes that now)

>> CollegeHumor gets excited about the great, endless possibilities to make fun about the iPad and Apple now:

>> List of 10 funny iPad cartoons.

>> John Klossner’s Apple cartoons.

For the 30th anniversary of the legendary Pac-Man video game Google’s logo turns into a Pac-Man game itself. It will be shown for 48hours and seems to be a big hit. Update: Here a modified version you can still use now.

This week’s EURO mess showed a few things that one might have suspected beforehand but only became evident when the crisis hit, and there are good chances now to fix issues finally.

• German - French friendship seems more for political show than something Europe could rely on in a crisis.
• In contrast, the Swiss showed where their real interests lie and supported the Euro heavily with their national bank which already holds two thirds of its reserves in Euros.
• Deutsche Bank and others are actually more interested in making tons of money in such a situation than stabilizing the markets. Total trading transparency and control are inevitable in the near future meaning NOW to show who follows what interests.
• Even though the UK has just had a change of government it also became clear that Europe is somewhat a club without them. If one looks at the fall in the British pound in the last few years the Euro is a safe currency in comparison. I think the UK needs to decide if they want to really become part of a European system or stay isolated on their island somewhere in no man’s land between Europe and the US. It is their call.
• Without strict fiscal control of Euro countries and punishments when needed this will not work; it looks like Germany is taking on the role of watchdog, which might be a good thing for all in the end.
• Countries can become bankrupt and the financial institutions who lend them money can’t hope anymore so that the taxpayers pay for eventual losses; the same will be true for big banks.
• update: This here is a good contribution in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. The author suggests that the EURO countries include into their constitutions a maximum debt threshold. That way - assuming the countries respect their constitutions -  each country can separate the discussion from politics since it becomes a law. Germany followed last year Switzerland doing exactly that.

This week a client of us attends the LTE World Summit event in Amsterdam. It is the major LTE conference and also has a vendor exhibition attached to it. The volcano ashes from Iceland came back though and the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam is closed. I just exchanged an e-mail with one of the speakers who can not come anymore and I suppose many others will also not make it.

What a mess for the exhibition organizers, the companies who brought their booths and also the speakers who prepared themselves and all booked flights and hotels and set up business meetings.

I think there is one clear solution now that also will not cost too much:

1. Provide a web presentation event

2. Offer a virtual exhibition event using a social community platform, where the vendors can showcase their products still

This would be totally independent of any airport and flight closures and also would be relatively inexpensive still. The other alternatives would be to cancel the event entirely and reimburse the people. Or reschedule with the risk that it will again not happen and of course I assume that the costs would be way too high as well to make this a viable option.

Update: the event could - fortunately - happen afterall when Schiphol airport reopened on Monday afternoon. Still, virtual events are an alternative, a backup and most importantly extend an event to an all year around meeting place increasing the number of people attending. Real example: VMWorld Virtual Pavilion

I had asked not long ago in a blog post here “SAP - Quo Vadis?”, raising the question why they don’t get a database and also invest more into mobile enterprise software suggesting they should do acquisitions. And voila, SAP will buy database and mobile application specialist Sybase for about $6 billion.

Competition is heating up in the tech sector where the big ones need to offer most solutions that enterprise customers might need. This is also triggered and accelerated by e.g. Google who is increasingly becoming a software application player making its web-based Google Docs more robust and adding missing features to catch up with Microsoft. Microsoft itself needs to look for other software opportunities such as enterprise resource planning interfering with e.g. SAP. The list goes on and on and one can expect that Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Google and IBM will continue their acquisition strategy and become increasingly more competitors.

Yesterday Microsoft launched at a press conference event in New York SharePoint 2010 which offers better social collaboration features than the former SharePoint.

Compared with other pure social collaboration offers Microsoft is quite late, lacks key features, will be expensive to implement, make you vendor dependent and will still be bought by most corporations IT departments who don’t care much and just want to add a check mark at their users’ requests for better collaboration tools.

Forrester commented in a similar way:

At the end of the day, Forrester clients seem to be falling into one of three buckets:

• Those that are committed to SharePoint and are planning to take the native social capabilities, even if it means being a bit behind the cutting edge.
• Those that want the latest and greatest in social technology in their enterprise and will pursue a pure social technology offering.
• Those that want both and will look for a pure social offering with deep integration with SharePoint.

What American football, basketball or baseball is for the Americans soccer is for pretty much the rest of the world: the number one - most watched - sport. A professor in Germany now predicts that Germany will become the next World Soccer champion in the world cup starting in a few weeks in South Africa. The formula is actually quite simple to understand if you still remember just a little maths from university. Of course, the professor also predicted that Germany would win 4 years ago and as we know they finished an honorable third “only”. So practically this means that they all still have to play.

Today the Swiss government officially launched the so called SuisseID which allows for secure Internet transactions. Application areas will be:

• e-government, allows you to do more and more simply online
• e-signature, allowing you to sign a contract online (need an additional software for that such as SwissSigner10 and is also supported by Adobe 9)
• as a login/authentication mechanism to use web applications that support SuisseID

The Swiss Post is the official distribution partner for the SuisseID. You need to fill out a form online and then go to a post office to verify with your current ID such as a passport to obtain the chip card with your ID. There are then three ways to use it: simple USB reader that holds the chip, USB stick that holds the chip and also contains more software such as a secure browser and the SwissSigner10 software to do online signatures, or a plastic card (the size of a credit card) that works with a card reader.

I looked into it as a way to do online signatures for us but then decided that we actually don’t need it right now or the 238 CHF for this option is not worth it. Probably for a company who does many contracts this is a small worthwhile investment though. The option with USB reader only is quite cheap with 39 CHF. For doing e-government this is worth paying I think and once I am officially Swiss will probably get one to be able to vote online and use other e-government services conveniently.

Just saw this list today which claims to show the top 50 most innovative companies in the world. Of course Asia, and China in particular, is gaining traction and also it’s normal that the US has by far the most companies represented. I consider such lists to be not very helpful at all. They serve primarily as a clever way to do PR for the consulting firms doing them and other than that show the totally obvious. By slightly changing the criteria used in such lists, a totally different list would show up. E.g. why not take worldwide market leaders. There is an excellent book called The Hidden Champions that talks about unknown small to medium sized companies (some also pretty large in fact) being world market leaders in their field and highly innovative. Most of this list’s companies are from Germany since the consulting firm is based there.

What this Top 50 list though is simply doing is taking the biggest companies by revenues and/or market cap and then seem to look who is mentioned the most in the public (Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.) and  - voila - here’s the list.

As I said above mostly PR and not worth to pay too much attention to. The media should IMHO not even look at such lists unless they do a bit more research on how these lists were created as they otherwise are misused as PR vehicles by consulting firms.

To sum it up: if you are not mentioned on this list but really would like to be, then you have to increase your PR and marketing budget and most likely don’t have to do anything more in product/service innovation at all. Or you hire that consulting firm. But that was not my idea.