Who would have forecast only a few years ago that Dell would drive the innovation of laptop technology forward? Dell was well known for me-too, high-powered professional laptops for a relatively good price. Up until they ran into support problems and the “Dell is hell” story made its round, hurting the company quite a bit. Now that Michael Dell is back he seems to be doing a lot of great things. Firstly they started using social communities for innovation as well as for tech support, which also appears to have had a great effect on the culture of the company. And now they have announced the Latitude Z, which is full of great innovation. It is pricey still, but in a short amount of time I am sure this will all become more affordable as always.

Watch this:

Seth Godin caught my interest once more with an article, this time on how to do business development successfully. I think he is mostly right on. Take a look yourself…

This video here was also posted on Techcrunch yesterday. While it is intended to be funny, I think it contains a bit of truth. Question now is if this is done totally on purpose as sort of unconscious brainwashing of everyone listening to this or if the Apple folks simply don’t know any other adjectives than:

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.

Today the breaking news in the tech industry was that the Skype founders sued eBay for patent infringement in the U.S. for the astonishing amount of 75 million USD per day. Now that eBay decided to sell Skype to another consortium of investors instead of the Skype founders, it looks like they went wild and pulled the trigger on what they must have been already using as a pressure point against eBay for quite some time.

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 .

What else could people do on 9/9/2009, other than get married? That’s probably what Dell’s PR folks were thinking. In December 2008 they unveiled the original Adamo laptop but without much media buzz at the time. Now this week on September 9, a new Adamo was shown that measures 9.99mm in height, making it the thinnest laptop. Compare this with Apple’s MacBook Air which is 19.3mm high and you see that it must be unbelievably thin. Some folks who had their hands on a it were amazed about it. see here

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For the German elections a neat online tool has been launched. The Wahl-O-Mat asks 38 questions that can be answered with agree-neutral-disagree. Then you can also double weight each of the 38 questions if you think it is very important for your decision.

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!

Every so often fun things happen and shame if you only hear about it 4 weeks later. This time it is infamous Paul Carr’s very own story to accept Michael Arrington’s call to write the Saturday column at Web 2.0 blog/news portal Techcrunch. I think it is a smart move to try to lighten up the otherwise very dry reads about the dozen or more Web 2.0 startup news pieces every day mixed with a good dose of Apple, Google or Microsoft stories to increase readership - of course. Now I have to admit that I have not read Paul Carr’s Techcrunch columns yet but will start doing so from tomorrow on and with that read - yes - Techcrunch. His first intro post shows the kind of blog posts you have to expect and not take too seriously, or should you take it seriously? Bringing nothing to Techcrunch…; as the boss in the movie Good Morning Vietnam with Robin Williams said “…well, that is funny”.

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.

The GSM protocol family will soon reach 4 billion connections. And no end is in sight. The Chinese TD standards so far cannot technically compete it seems but that could well change in the next few years; half of these connections are in China. The winner was and currently is GSM-based technology though and as GigaOm noted:

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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