I’m in Athens today to deliver presentations at our BI event, but I’m curious about this other meeting that runs in another room here at the Ledra. Is Microsoft going into the clothing business?

While we’re at it… I wonder how people book rooms using the URL on the shuttle bus. Unless I completely misunderstand top-level domains, or the Greeks are already using Web 3.0, with new naming conventions and all.

A few months ago, I wrote about my experiences with online calendars, such as those from Google or Yahoo. Back then, I was hoping to eventually get some easy synchronization between Outlook and the online counterpart, other than by export/import. Well, it looks as if shortly after Google announced its calendar, companies started to build just that: Tools for synchronizing Google Calendar with whatever other calendar was used, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm, Groupwise or others.

The first one I’ll try is CompanionLink for Google Calendar from a company named, well, CompanionLink Software, another “leading developer of data synchronization and contact management solutions for mobile phones, PDAs and other handheld devices.” Yawn. They allow downloading a free evaluation software, and so I did. Kinda interesting that you need to download, install and run the application, before they actually tell you that the evaluation is good for 15 days. Would have been nice to mention that somewhere upfront. Installing is easy, customizing too. Simply enter the Google login credentials and select the appropriate calendar application and time period, click Synchronize and wait…. Wait for a looooong time, that is.

While I’m writing this, the little synchie app has been running for over an hour. The status window seems to count calendar entries that it pushes towards Google, but I’m wondering why this is soooooo slooooooow. It’s not that a calendar entry is a lot of data. And I’m behind a 6M DSL line. At a count of about 1200, the synch application appeared to have frozen, so I clicked Cancel, however, the little “companion” seemed largely unimpressed by that. A few minutes later, it woke up miraculously and kept counting, all the way to something like 3000 or so, and then the window disappeared. No “Finished” message or anything. Weird. On the Google side, everything seemed to have been captured alright, so I’m happy, sort of. I’ll try a few more days and will check on alternatives before I’ll consider shelling out $29.95 for the companion, particularly because it’s still not ideal. Instead of launching an application everytime I happen to remember synching, I’d much rather have some little agent sitting nicely in the taskbar doing this without any user intervention. Doesn’t sound like rocket science to me, that’s why I’d expect to find something similar shortly…

Update: Well, there seems to be an issue with using Outlook and the companion at the same time. Apparently, the little helper locks some Outlook files during synchronization, so Outlook itself can’t use them. If that is the case, it’s very bad application design. However, the error message itself is strange. It says “Another application closed unexpectedly.” Maybe that was the effect of the failed Cancel and the window disappearing without any comment. In any case, the application is closed now, right? So why is the message then saying “… until you close all applications currently using it”? I thought everything is closed already. Or did the little companion turn into some locking zombie? In any case, I won’t pay anything for this….

If I were Google’s searchmaster, I’d be reading all day what people enter into the search field. In fact, I’d be surprised if the Googlarians didn’t store every single search item and use it for the better of humanity. Or their company’s own stock price. Either way, I sometimes get a tiny glimpse of what must be billions of search terms every day, by looking at the referring URL of the anonymous surfer eventually hitting any of my web pages. And while it can be ego-boosting if I find people actually entering my own name, the more interesting searches are when some random combination of words on any given page of this blog turns into a hit for someone looking for the answer. More recently, I noticed the following interesting search words:

• how do I become a spammer
• how big should a big screen tv be?
• IT vendor taglines
• corporate slogans
• 14 ways to pronounce “ough”
• anita blond calendar 2005
• photographic memory
• photo business card
• the need for manufacturers silly disclaimers
• blood at fertile time
• climbing eiger

This calls for an experiment. Hey, it could even be called research. I will create a content-free posting that includes nothing but vendor names, buzzwords, potential keywords and tags. And then I’ll just wait, because Google and Sitemeter do the rest. I will report results.

This past Saturday, I participated in a WDR 5 broadcast about Web 2.0. The format is called Profit and touches on all kinds of business aspects. This time, anchor Frank Wörner and I talked about the new Web 2.0 bubble (if it is one), new business models, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and the Google-Microsoft battle. If you’re able to understand German (or otherwise want to expose yourself to a foreign language), you can find a downloadable podcast.

The interesting thing for me was the fact that I didn’t have to go to WDR headquarters in Cologne, or even our local broadcasting company, NDR, but only to some tiny (half a closet, really) private studio here in the city, only 10 minutes from my house. First I thought I was in the wrong place, going up stairs in a very old appartment building. But there it was, on the third floor, the “studio”, including control room and soundproof box, both separated by a car’s windshield (I’m not kidding). The owner explained that the curved surface of the glass would do much better to diffuse sound reflections. Well, it must have worked, because the sound technicians in Cologne didn’t complain. The sound connection to WDR was the surprising bit. I expected some sophisticated mechanism to establish the voice connection between Frank and myself, which sounded as clear as we were sitting next to each other. Apparently, a single ISDN line is all you need. By having a Codec on each end (in this case an old CDQ 1000) talk to one another, the analog signal easily gets transferred via a standard 64k line. Amazing. I need to upgrade my home studio….

The paranoia continues. I mean, I am all for protecting a country, its people and all the rest, but apparently the US Department of Homeland Security and its ability to screen travellers just went up a notch. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives just issued a statement that highlights the details about those regulations at the US border. As if fingerprinting and photographing every US visitor wasn’t enough, it’s now apparently possible to seize computers, memory sticks, phones, and basically all data on any device brought into the country.

I don’t believe the US Customs officials mean that my memory stick is a weapon (although I could poke someone with it) or I could knock someone down with my corporate laptop. But if that’s not the problem, it’s clearly only about the data getting into the country. Bad data, that is. Then again, has someone in the US administration ever heard of the …. uh… Internet? Didn’t Al Gore invent the whole thing? Reminds me of the old joke where border officials worldwide were searching for CDROMs in travellers’ bags to prevent the use and spreading of pirated software. They quickly learned that if someone wanted any data to travel across borders, without any border patrol, they would simply use an email or ftp the data to any place in the world.

So, if the memory stick is not the threat, the data is, but only on devices brought physically into the country, what could it be that the customs officials are after? Not the pictures of Uncle Henry’s birthday party, that’s pretty obvious. Well, maybe it’s all about exactly that corporate data that everyone carries around. In other words, a way to enable legalized industrial espoinage. So much for the common conspiracy theory, but in any case: Nice move, boys, sounds like a golden opportunity for vendors of encryption software.

It’s quite interesting how Microsoft made more and more inroads into my personal life. The last barrier (or is it?) just fell last week, when I switched my mobile from a Sony Ericsson P910i to an HTC TyTN. And with that, my year-long Symbian OS liason, which started in the days of the early Palms, has come to an end, and now I suddenly am a Windows Mobile user. Well, an unbeatable Tytanic Vodafone deal (read: high phone bill) made that move relatively easy.

The daily use of the new device needs a little getting used to, even though it’s plain ol´ Windows (well, sort of), with Start button, Office apps, media player and all the rest. Now, of course, I need to check out all those funky apps that would make the new toy even more attractive. My friend Gary pointed me to the Gmail midlet, which I would have started using immediately, if it wouldn’t have required a new JVM. So now I’m back in the plumbing looking at IBM’s J9 to make it work.

Another really useful type of application I found is PenPower’s Business Card Recognition tool. This is particularly useful for people that collect (that is, exchange) large numbers of business cards. Just last week alone at our Symposium event in Cannes, I must have gotten about 60 from clients, vendors, and prospects. Entering all those details into the address book is typically a time killer work during long flights. I checked out Penpower’s trial version, by which you simply take a photo shot of the card, and the OCR engine generates text, which then gets copied into Outlook. Worked a few times pretty well, but then stopped, although unregistered versions are supposed to work for 30 days. Looks like Taiwanese days are much shorter then European days. Oh well.

Alternatively, I dabbled with scanR, which is an online service of the same kind. You take the photo, send it to an email address, and voila, they return a vCard file, that you simply import into Outlook. Worked alright, but I don’t feel that comfortable sending complete details of people I know to a third party, although they claim to follow privacy rules.

>> scanR uses the information we collect to set up and provide the scanR service to you. scanR also stores some or all of the information we gather from processing images through the scanR service in a database for the purposes of improving the accuracy and performance of the service. Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. We may review personal information for the purposes of resolving a problem or support issue. <<

They store all cards to “improve the accuracy”? That’s nonsense, they could just as well use hand-scribbles to do the same. Also, there is no information as to how long that data will be stored. What really was interesting is this verbage: Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. I would really appreciate that, however, there is no place on the whole website to opt-in or opt-out, so this “approval” doesn’t really exist. Looks like I can only send business cards of general managers of some hotel or the card of my gas station attendant to this service. Then again, why would I want to store those addresses in the first place?

I love it when people from one vendor, for example, the competitive intelligence folks or product management, leave trails how they are trying to knock, bash, and discredit their competition. Of course, many times, there is hearsay like “I was told that vendor XYZ’s product doesn’t scale, doesn’t perform, has quality issues, is untested, …” The creativity has no limits. Then there are people that use Google to skim the Internet’s bulletin boards, forums, or blogs in their quest for dirt.

My Sitemeter log just monitored a nice example of the described category. A Firefox user on a Mac, working at Oracle is apparently on the lookout for stories about support challenges at MicroStrategy.

What’s interesting is not the fact that a vendor would do such a thing. Business is war, right? The funny part is the wording of the search term that the Oracle person used to find something of value about MicroStrategy. Horror stories? As if someone would just write them up nicely for easy consumption.

What gets me is this: With those search words, why does my blog show up in Google’s results? The mentioned entry page mentions MicroStragegy alright, but no horror story.

Maybe I should stop evangelizing. For years I’ve been telling clients to take data quality seriously and manage information like a corporate asset. Since Monday I’m thinking “maybe it’s a good thing that companies have such a mess in their databases.” Think about it, wouldn’t it be nice if you couldn’t get a speeding ticket, because the address data in the police database is corrupt?

Well, most of the time, it sure is beneficial to have correct, complete, and consistent data that is not duplicate, and so on. Not so today. When I checked into the Marriott Anaheim this week (I’m attending the IBM IOD event here), I was surprised to be treated with more respect, friendliness, benefits, and perks than in any other case when I checked into a hotel. Nothing to complain about, but why the sudden change? I live a large part of my life in hotels, and I have never seen that special treatment. The puzzle was solved quickly when the check-in clerk handed me a piece of fancy cardboard with a personalized welcome note from the Marriott Rewards program (some kinda frequent sleeper program). It had my name on it. It also said I was a Platinum Elite Member, which I’m not. And I was supposed to have (get this!) a balance of 1,912,602 points in my account. Almost two million points? No way. Now, was I going to tell the guy that I rather not have an upgrade to the best available room, a bottle of wine, fruits and nuts in my room, high floor with a nice view from my balcony, access to the concierge lounge with free breakfast, hors d’euvres, drinks, etc? Think again.
No idea where the hotel pulled that data about my account from. Honestly, I don’t care either. Cheers!

Here is a song I’ll be working on. It will be my first attempt of generating some music based on fully computer-generated lyrics. I know what you think. Many of the Top 40 hits are probably just that. Want to create your own lyrics that sound like Alanis Morrissette? The Brunching Shuttlecocks gladly generate them for you.

“I Think”

I Think phone calls are really a huge problem
I Think papers are too much on my mind
I Think meetings have got a lot to do with why the world sucks
But what can you do?

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like a Monty Python line, which won’t let go of my brain
Like Bettie’s ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

I Think airplanes are gonna drive us all crazy
And hotel nights make me feel like a child
I Think computers will eventually be the downfall of civilization
But what can you do? I said what can you do?

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like a Monty Python line, which won’t let go of my brain
Like Bettie’s ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

Like a violet rain, beating down on me
Like Bettie’s smile, cruel and cold
Like Monty Python’s ass, it is in my head
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss
Blame it on the Boss

Just found a fabulous self-check of blogs by Lore Sjöberg, who wrote the ultimate blog post over at Wired.

“Blog” itself is short for “weblog,” which is short for “we blog because we weren’t very popular in high school and we’re trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people.”

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it.

So there… brilliant. Those of you who read this blog, thanks for stopping by.