When my better half has ideas for a particular day to go out (movies, opera, dinner, etc.), she is typically not aware of any travel plans of her road warrior husband. That’s why I looked into synching my Outlook calendar with something online. The Calendars.net is ok for sharing a calendar across a group, but [...]

As an industry analyst, I am on the receiving end of many requests for briefings, as noted before. While I can understand that PR folks often don’t really understand what their vendor clients’ business is all about, it’s sometimes surprising what kind of language vendors themselves are using when describing their product or service or [...]

Now that I call a nice cabin. At the recent Airline Interior Expo in my home town, Airbus, Boeing and their friends were showing the new designs of aircraft cabins, seats, entertainment devices, and so on. I can’t wait until the first planes will be equipped like that. With close to 400k miles in the [...]

This is just a simple pointer to my creative side. I mean, being an analyst and talking nerdy, techie, and geeky stuff all day is fun, but I guess the other half of the brain shouldn’t get neglected. I’ve been shooting photos for as long as I can remember, even did the darkroom thing for [...]

It looks like I’m not the only one getting regularly annoyed by clueless PR people. In a really entertaining article for the Chief Executive e-zine, a certain Bill Holstein writes about The six things CEOs don’t understand about PR people. Many of the points certainly resonate with me, particularly if I simply replace the word [...]

Huh? I admit that there is lots of work sitting here on my desk, but I don’t remember advertising that I’m looking for additional help. Hopefully, the reason for the German Arbeitsamt (the federal employment office) to visit my blog was pure coincidence and they are not planning to send me job applicants. Back to [...]

Speech recognition has come a long way. I mean, I have tried to talk to my computer for decades, with various degrees of success. Somehow, those chips are just not listening! I started in the early days of ViaVoice, VoiceType, and similar tools, but only recently I’ve come to a mutual understanding (no pun intended) [...]

In a recent Intelligent Enterprise article, author David Stodder, no less than editorial director and editor-in-chief, takes on the Magic Quadrant, and the Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant in particular. As one of the co-authors of the same, I thought, why not do a little analysis. Hey, that’s what I do for a living.
Perhaps [...]

Analysts are information junkies, among other things (I’ve recently been branded an air-miles junkie, because I live in airplanes). That’s why I typically tell a vendor’s AR, PR, or marketing department to put me on a distribution list for the company or analyst newsletter, so I stay informed about what’s happening with new sales, new [...]

Lots of talk suddenly going on about non-disclosure agreements, being signed or not, broken, ignored, rejected, whatever. And although there is mostly a mutual understanding that an NDA must be binding until it expires, for whom it applies, what the NDA covers, and so on, there is still a large gray zone about how [...]