On my trip to the US I could not resist the saving potential buying a MacBook. I got the lowest cost model as I did not see any real difference to a MacBook Pro and I looked into all the details. All in all with some software I saved about 500 USD compared with what I would pay in Switzerland. Not bad when the total amount was only 1500 USD.

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.

Just came back from a week long trip to the heart of the tech world, Silicon Valley. It was unusually cold for December, at night even freezing. Now back in Zurich, it is snowing right now, which is more normal weather here for this time of the year. So what is going on in Silicon Valley? Following are a few personal impressions and views:

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 :-))

:/urlfan is a website that is “currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,936,519 blog posts from 5,970,548 blog feeds”.

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.

I am sure you noticed it too. In times of economic challenges surprisingly many new things pop up around us. One might call it innovations but often it is simply using existing technology for the first time  and making it accessible to employees or customers. This is only at first sight surprising as one might think that companies put new things on hold right now having more pressing issues.
Probably most do I guess but the leaders actually don’t and use these times to gain some differentiation. Often in markets it seems where it is otherwise difficult to differentiate such as in the telecom industry.

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.

Ooops - you might wonder how this headline goes together with our very own services for social communities? In fact it goes very well, as the point I want to make here more or less concurs with this article in Business Week back in May 2009. Gene Marks, who is a bestselling author for small business topics, makes this point there:

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?”.

This week we have seen two major announcements that are clearly relevant for social media communications: first Microsoft said they would integrate both Facebook and Twitter into Bing and then Google announced an integration into search with Twitter and others. “Financial terms” were exchanged between Google and Twitter is what Marissa Mayer disclosed at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco so it is at least clear that there are business interests behind it.

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.

Today I attended for the first time the Swiss Comdays 2009. This event is organized by the Swiss telecom industry regulator BAKOM and brings together the Swiss telecom management to listen to 30min presentations on telecom topics the first day and the second day the talks are about the media industry.

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.

To give you my opinion right away: I can’t imagine that Motorola and Verizon will by addressing some of the possible shortcomings of the iPhone ecosystem make their own Droid launch a success. Product management is more complicated than looking at  the market leader, writing down all its product specs and then simply bringing out a product that shows better features. This strategy succeeds only in a commodity market. But Apple and the iPhone, app store, iTunes ecosystem is NOT a simple product only but a thought-through end-to-end user experience product & service offering. The Motorola and Verizon folks have obviously still not understood this otherwise they would not have launched such a desperate campaign merely addressing - mostly - features. The strongest point was the openness of Google’s Android platform but also here they did a quick-and-dirty job. Not surprising knowing how desperate Motorola is these days to finally get back on track with a successful mobile phone after its long-time-ago success of the Razr.

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…

Ever so often I take out some older DVDs to watch them. Last night I picked one of my favorites, Out of Africa (from 1985, 7 oscars), with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. I asked myself then why is this such a great movie. Obviously great actors and one of my favorite actresses: Meryl Streep,  who plays a baroness from the “small country next to Germany”, Denmark. Bored, feeling trapped in a men-ruled world, she decides - strangely - to break out of it all by marrying “her lover’s brother” and following him to Kenya where the British were operating a colony at the time.

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.