Here’s a list of the iPod Touch apps I like the most and also some that I am still checking out some more as I have not yet seen their usefulness in full.

Twitter client

Twittelator is what I use the most. Sometimes also TweetDeck. Other clients that work well but are not that popular with me — but still worth taking a look as it is quite subjective — are Tweetie, Twitterrific, TwitterFon.

Traveling apps

The iPhone apps in the traveling category are growing rapidly and I am not up to date on all that’s out there now. I think LonelyPlanet is good, although I have not bought any iphone app. What I can recommend are Tube (London, Paris), BERLIN (TripPlanner), CityGuide (Barcelona, Roma), BucksMe (to find the next Starbucks nearby), worldtop7 (best restaurants to check out), and Beijing and Shanghai Taxi Guide — a MUST have when you are there.

Swiss apps

Yes, living in Switzerland you have a good choice of some really excellent apps like: PhoneBook (works super fast), ParkMe (shows in real-time the parking lots available in all the major Swiss cities), SBB Mobile (all the railway connections), Wemlin (all the buses and trams in Zurich), 20minuten and Tagesanzeiger apps, which are very good online newspapers, Swiss events, Swim Weather (shows details of all the public swimming pools), usgang.ch.

Games

My kids are the authorities on this. They like: Topple, Monkey, NFSU, Tiki Towers (is THE hit), Paper Toss, Hanoi. Shazam for recognizing songs works well and I use it quite often.

Weather

WeatherPro is the best I think, AeroWeather as a backup is OK next to Apple’s own Weather app. iWeather.ch I don’t yet find useful.

News

20minuten and TA in Switzerland, stern.de is well done, NYT, Instapaper, Newsstand (I like the most as blog reader), Stitcher for podcasts, TVGuide, TV Movie and netTV are all far from perfect TV guides and lots of usability improvements are needed for all of them.

Work tools

DocsToGo is similar to FileShare, OffMaps I consider as a work tool to help me find my way as a backup, Flight Status is nice to have and AirportStatus is good for only shows US airport delays, 30Boxes online calendar works very well, Convertbot makes converting Fahrenheit or inches into what I understand better - metrics - fun to use, mSecure keeps all my login names and passwords at one place — and man, how many there are! My ultimate week planning tool is Evernote, a must-try-out app! To find Wifi networks I use WifiTrak and WiFinder (this does not work under OS 3.0 anymore, though), to find FREE Wifi connections I try out iFiFi and FREE Wi.Fi but both with so-so success, you need to be patient so often not the best tool for work. I have now found WifiCafe and this app seems to also work in offline mode.

Social Communications

LinkedIn and Facebook work well on the iPhone, so does Skype (no more need for FRING, sorry guys), Brightkite and Mobeedo or aka-aki I am trying out still, so far it did not convince me as there are not enough people in it and anyway only works in BIG cities, maybe.

Fun for me

Cocktails, easyPasta, Holidays (to see when other people are taking off again), iChillout, CellarRat (quick overview of what wine area and year could be promising, so far did not use much at all). Schmap and Unlike I’ll probably delete soon, Trailers Int. shows the latest movie trailers, very nice app, CultureGPS is a mix of fun and business app, sometimes one and sometimes the other — try it out and see yourself!

The iPhone apps are overall now more sophisticated than the first versions. Still I have the feeling they are now reaching their limitations as there is only so much you can do with an app on a relatively small screen. Not surprisingly Apple seems to be working on a bigger screen version which will open up entirely new and better opportunities. E.g. web surfing on a small screen is still not that much fun and remains an exception for me even with Wifi connectivity.

This year’s elections in Germany will also make use of social media tools. Unlike the US presidential elections, I do not expect they will be much affected — with one exception:

The newly founded HSP (Horst Schlämmer Partei) is betting big time through using social media. On its campaign website you can see that they are present on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, StudiVZ, have newsletters, a blog, its podcast is number one in the iTunes store already, and much more. It looks almost as if they are making fun of social media tools, too, having just about any social network embedded code for copy available.

Watch the campaign video, I like most where he shows his plan in a live TV show.

Hot off the press: Ericsson buys the CDMA and LTE business in NA from Nortel for 1.1 bln USD. While NSN lost out in this deal it is Motorola and (Alcatel)-Lucent who will not like this at all. Ericsson will double its revenue in NA with this deal and also buy a profitable business.

As we have seen at the Mobile Wireless event in Barcelona, Nortel’s LTE development was quite advanced, having been able to leverage its WiMAX technology (shares OFDM with LTE) to gain a lead I think.  Their LTE system was showcased jointly with LG and T-Mobile. See our videos on this as well.

Funny side note: we did this video by simply walking around and cost us zero. Goal was to be as authentic as possible. T-Mobile had their Marcom department run a very expensive video with professional graphic animations on this as well but got only double the viewers (3000) that we did (1500).  This is how the social web works, it us all about being authentic. Next year we plan to invest a little more than zero, but then strive for 10-100x the viewers: stay tuned.

Looks like Twitter is now becoming quite popular in Europe too. At first sight it seems like a waste of time for most people, but only if you take some time to check it out will you really know if that is true or not.

Here a list of the things you can do to get your feet wet:

Introductions: read the Twitterhandbook first, then you can also go through the new Twitter 101 for business. Also great tutorials can be found on Slideshare, which I recommend reading after these two introductions and after you have actually signed on and started using it already. There are more than 4,000 presentations on Twitter already uploaded. (a nice one is this here.)

Using your first apps: some apps you might want to install are Twitpic, which lets you upload pictures and also send them simply via e-mail. To start getting some discussion going you can try out TwttrStrm, which lets you post questions. You can also link to your Facebook account with twitter/badges. There are endless apps available. One recent one is Geo Chirp, which allows you to search for Twitter users locally.

Install on your mobile: to make things really neat you have to install a Twitter client on your mobile. I have tried a few apps on my iPod touch and all of them do the job quite well. It is more a matter of personal taste I think what app you pick: I use mostly TweetDeck now but Tweetie and Twitterrific are good choices too.

Only time will tell if Twitter is indeed the most initially undervalued business app or the most hyped up tool.

My feeling is that either Google or Microsoft might acquire them if not even Facebook, who seem to have some close links to them already.

I just came back from a 10-day business trip to the U.S. having been on the west coast mainly.
It is obvious that the economy has been hurting for quite a while now. This can be seen literally on the street with less traffic (relatively speaking only as it is still bad in peak times), areas such as south of Seattle where whole neighborhoods seem to be up for sale (hundreds of meters of For Sale signs) and stories of startups who can’t get any funding anymore at all, plus people struggling to find new jobs.
Still I got the clear feeling that the bad times have hit the bottom and that things are improving.
Also the latest financial results from companies like Intel or IBM show this clearly. Not to mention
the stock market where the NASDAQ had a big rise this week, so folks are speculating that it will get better too.
One ex-colleague of mine who used to live in Silicon Valley and went back to Switzerland 6 years ago, has decided to move back to the U.S. and bought a house in Mountain View for his family (3 kids) just this Monday. He told me that he got already quite a few job offers, which makes him believe that there are options for him. In Europe he could never find a challenging HW engineering job in the datacom industry and had the feeling that most Swiss companies he talked to were very stagnant, doing the same as they did more than 10 years ago and happy with that - but of course being hit hard now due to their inflexible business attitude. House prices are low so he might do quite well I think. Still, banks are asking for 60% down payments as in his case, which is ridiculous of course.

(Photo credit: www.pbase.com/camera0bug/image/13107594)

I installed now the newly released Firefox 3.5 and I am impressed. I think it is about twice as fast as the 3.0 version. I had also recently tried Chrome but had noticed significant stability issues when I had many tabs open and the speed also seemed to suffer. For some reason I never used Opera other than checking it out briefly. No idea why, but I guess the web surfing experience on the mobile - prior to the iPhone coming on the market - was so bad that I simply did not want to try it out on my laptop, too. And then of course there was always Firefox.

This survey was done by a sales and CRM expert and not by a Social Business Software vendor or an analyst company also selling their services and reports to SBS vendors. So, in short, it should have higher credibility. It was done among the members of a social media information community who should be very familiar with the subject.  I also think the respondents’ companies are most likely all US-based.

Some of the more interesting outcomes are:

• while most companies are using social media currently for branding and marketing communication purposes, the survey shows that in the future lead generation will be the number one purpose
• currently the most used tool is LinkedIn while in the future blogging will be the highest ranked
• there is a clear difference in how small and larger (>1000 employees) companies use social media: smaller companies focus on external use such as marketing and customer research, while bigger companies use it for internal purposes such as information sharing and collaboration
• for the use of Twitter (still rare in B2B btw) the same holds true. Currently it is used for sharing breaking news but the majority of the people interviewed mention that this will be “keeping in immediate touch with customers” for the future

I noticed it a few weeks ago when I saw that the German GPS navigation company Navigon provided their navigation software for the iPhone that they quickly showed up in the Top 10 list in the AppStore.

Now Navigon is number one paid app in the Navigation category and based on the huge number of reviews (250) in a league with e.g. the very popular game Brain Challenge.

Navigon offers two versions currently: a European and a D-A-CH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). It supports also many languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch and will have even more in the near future.

While the price is very high for an iPhone app (105 CHF and 69 CHF) for the two versions it is relatively cheap compared to buying a complete navigation device. Also this app seems to close a gap that neither Apple nor Google’s Android phone could close so far (not to mention the mobile operators who are loosing out it seems once more here too) and that is for a professional navigation system. There are GoogleMaps based GPS projects under way, but they are still in a stage where I would not use it and rely on it to find my way on time to a meeting in a new place. Of course they will improve over time as well but I think this will take a while and possibly never reach the quality of Navigon.

Now that Navigon has started this they should not stop but expand the functionality to much more location based services and join forces with many other apps that you can find already in the AppStore. They could become a platform for many of them. If they take that opportunity will have to be seen though. Navigon being a German company I doubt that they will succeed in this or even try as this is not something that comes natural to German companies.  They very typically stick to their own ideas and don’t use extensive partnering as a way to distribute their brands. That’s one of the reasons also why hardly any German software company was able to build an international success unlike so many US software providers. But maybe I am wrong and if so Navigon could have a stellar rise from here. Let’s see…

Today Google Germany made an agreement with the German authorities to allow people to opt out of Google Street View when they don’t like their property or personal things being displayed in Google maps. This was a pre-emptive move to avoid any legal actions from privacy protection groups or others. Currently there are no laws in Germany though that would prohibit Google from driving around with their 360 degree view cameras, recording it and then displaying it in Google maps.

Now I have read about a new service from a Dutch company - Layar - that allows you to view your environment and then get maps and any other location-specific information displayed, overlaid in real-time.

The video above explains it well, so watch it if you are interested. It looks quite promising and, if it catches on, could mean another SMS-style success or maybe not. :-)  Seeing my kids playing with their Nintendo DS camera enthusiastically, I think though this could well show the future of where location-based services are going.

Layar was developed by this company SPRX Mobile. Layar works wih Android on the HTC Magic but a prime target is the new iPhone 3G S as they mention. The whole approach is btw called augmented reality (AR) browser, just in case you did not know.