The EU is right now collecting lots of money for Greece to reestablish some confidence in the markets and with that avoid having to pay even more. There are also fears that the other PIGS countries Spain, Portugal and Ireland may call for help.

Now Ireland being a nation that has been through lots of economic hardship in its history but also enjoyed an EU-wide unmatched boom not too long ago, is currently hit hard as well. Being a proud nation that likes to take its fate into its own hands, its President Mary Mac Aleese is calling its citizen to submit ideas in eight categories on how the country can direct its policies. The event is called quite appropriately “Your country your call”.

I think what we see here is only the beginning of something that many other countries should and will do as well at some point. Calling for the combined knowledge of a whole country will certainly lead to new and better ideas. I consider it as a true democratic way and this even seems an improvement over what we have enjoyed in Switzerland for quite a long time already: letting people decide about their matters and not some professional politicians only with lots of self-interest, who are also quite limited in their judgements and overall understanding of most of the subjects that they have to decide about. Online Social Communities seem ideal for governments enabling them to run such calls effectively. Something Switzerland, which is otherwise probably the most advanced country in applying democracy, should also make use of. Not to mention practically all other so-called democratic countries. The eight categories plus “Other” where Ireland is asking its people for ideas are:

• COMMUNICATIONS & TECHNOLOGY
• DESIGN, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING
• EDUCATION & THE ARTS
• ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
• FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
• HEALTH, SPORT, & NUTRITION
• PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
• TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY
• OTHER

As mentioned in a GigaOm post Skype is growing by leaps and bounds with no slowing in sight. 12% of all international long distance call minutes are made with Skype now. They also rolled out recently a few new features nearly quietly such as public Wifi access (I was surprised to suddenly get the option in a public Wifi hotspot to pay through Skype, but that made lots of sense as it speeds up the sign on process), screen sharing (this feature is not made very public either and I only heard about it today, you need to enable it in the menu bar under Call/Share Screen) and then they seem to have further improved the call quality (the call quality is simply excellent and I practically hear no difference if I talk to someone in the country, in China or the US, maybe initial delays but that goes away too quickly).

And then they have currently big efforts under way to bring Skype onto mobile phones working over wireless networks.

Today I could test drive for the first time ever an electrical car from Mitsubishi, the MiEV. (see also the UK page) The car had a great acceleration - as expected - also uphill and was also much faster than my gasoline-driven Mazda 3 1.6.

Assuming you can recharge the car at work the daily radius will be doubled and the majority of the commuters here in Zurich could use one easily I think.

For a video look here and for pictures that I took look here.

It is a good sign if the market leader is rushing out new features as it shows that they fear competition. Today’s announcement of Apple’s new OS 4.0 brings many things that were missing for a long time, also partly due to the hardware limitations of the first iPhone and iPod generations. Still, Steve remains hard on Adobe’s flash and seems determined to fight this out. The new iAd platform essentially tries to make it very easy for developers to make money with ads (40% will go to Apple). Multitasking is the other big feature that will allow you to run Pandora, GPS location, Skype or whatever in the background. Then there is iBooks which was to be expected and will put the pressure on Amazon even more.  For better organizing all of our apps they will bring out folders. And then as one would expect Steve hates Google’s Android which is probably the number one reason why they made all these announcements today.

- Q: Any change in Apple position on Flash and Java?

Steve: No.

- I asked whether Apple will enable unsigned applications like Android and Palm OS.

Steve: There’s a porn store for Android… you can download it, your kids can download it. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to.

Update: Apple boots Google off iPhone 4.0, as reported in this article in Business Insider, it could well be that Apple takes off Google Search with iPhone 4.0. This could mean a range of things. One of them that Apple enters the search market itself (would go well with its iAd launch) or that it uses Bing from Microsoft.

Apple’s impact on Amazon’s Kindle can be seen clearly with Amazon sending out email ads talking about Kindle apps but not Kindle anymore:

Only a week after CERN in Geneva could successfully create electron collisions that could lead to new understanding of how the cosmos started, another French Swiss (in the French speaking area of Switzerland) world first was achieved. The first solar-powered plane took off with a test pilot setting an important milestone for this ambitious project called SolarImpulse trying to fly around the world with a purely solar-powered plane.

I asked myself why it is that the Romands (as the French speaking Swiss are called) seem to be so much into world’s first recently.  Is it coincidence or has it to do with a certain attitude and entrepreneurial spirit that they have in their genes? I was also quite amazed to see how openly both events were celebrated which was so much different than the cool banker style that one otherwise gets to see on TV (and in movies like James Bond) when it comes to the Swiss nature.

From a more general view you could also say that the good guys are in the West of Switzerland (creating great positive public news) and the bad guys (if you want to use that word) are in the East where the bankers are at home. Uuups that comparison might not go well though with the folks in Zurich I suppose.

But let’s get back to the SolarImpulse project. Congratulations to a great achievement and a great PR event. The website contains also great social community ideas and crowd financing approaches such as the possibility to buy a solar cell and name it your own for just 200 CHF. With 12,000 solar cells integrated into the wings that also adds up to a nice 2.4 million CHF. Well done too guys and good luck for the next milestones!

Now that everyone expects a huge rise in mobile data traffic (e.g. 40x in 5 years according to Coda Research Consultancy) it is even more important to know that user experience and speed are valued higher by the mobile users than relevant content. This is different than in desktop use and must be taken into consideration when you develop products for the mobile space.

Maria Azura’s new book The Social Factor writes about IBM’s very own experiences using social networking and describes the tremendous success that Wikis, Blogs, and other social tools have. The numbers are mind-boggling and were also for IBM beyond their highest expectations. This lead Maria to ask in her book:

Is there a correlation between the success of IBM and the social tools now used extensively by IBMers?

• within a year more than 150,000 IBMers were creating, accessing, or updating wikis, this represents about 40% of the total workforce
• after six months the active blogs topped out at approximately 5,000; the traffic continued to grow, however

The new Samsung Galaxy with its incredible AMOLED touchscreen seems to be the best Android phone ever. MobileBurn says, “It was so sharp, crisp, and colorful that the photos and videos just jumped off the screen.”Great set of other features too. (real n standard Wifi, 118g light, 9.9mm thin, 5 megapixel camera with ability to record 720p HD video). Apple should have maybe better sued Samsung and not HTC it seems as this Samsung Android mobile phone might become the best iPhone competitor soon.