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.

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:

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.