I have just returned from an amazing business trip to Chicago and New York where I attended the Intel Capital Technology Days (ITD), a workshop event consisting of structured matchmaking with emerging Intel portfolio companies and leading industry executives.
The event takes place annually, yet always at different locations in cooperation with leading enterprises who invite some of Intel’s top portfolio companies to gain an insight on innovative services and technologies in various fields throughout the world. This time it was held at the Omnicom Group premises in Chicago. Omnicom is one of the world’s largest advertising agency holding companies holding stakes in multinational companies such as BBDO, TBWA Worldwide or DDB Worldwide.
While being the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for an Intel Capital portfolio company in Tokyo, I was invited to the event not only to represent my company but also to make a presentation on Internet TV distribution and monetization technologies, services as well as related marketing opportunities here in Japan.
Here’s a brief list of my current top five iPhone 3G apps that can be purchased or freely downloaded from the iTunes store.
- Twinkle - A microblogging client based on Twitter that lets you add location-based information and photographs to your postings. It either shows postings from only your friends or from random people near you.
- OmniFocus - Personal task management on speed. Very convenient productivity tool that lets you keep track of all your tasks and to-dos. Also synchs with the MacOSX desktop version.
- Evernote - Note keeping application allowing you to store, combine and archive little notes in the form of text, audio or photographs. Synchronizes with their web application, too.
- NetNewsWire - Very solid and easy-to-use RSS reader. Need I say more?
- ekitan - Japanese train transit planning service, which lets you retrieve train, subway and bus time tables in realtime. Never miss your train again.
Yesterday I attended OMD 2007, Europe’s leading convention and congress for digital marketing which was held in Düsseldorf (Germany). With the main focus put on online marketing, most of the workshop topics ranged in the field of search engine marketing, mobile and e-mail marketing. Apart from that, numerous international vendors featured buzzwordy products, services and more or less new forms of digital advertising such as affiliate marketing or performance marketing (geez!).
As a part of my journey I also paid a visit to the booth of artegic AG where I saw the hot and flashy software prototype of Felicia, a new framework for analysing the behaviour of website visitors. By no means does this technology compete with traditional tracking tools like Urchin, WebTrends, HBX Analytics or Google Analytics as it operates in a completely different market niche. Felicia is designed solely for rich media components based on Flash, Flex or Adobe AIR and is therefore suitable for analysing online videos or fully Flash-driven websites. The fine grained statistics appear in real-time and on a nice user interface which is even accessible from a mobile phone - so far it looks pretty solid.More impressions of the exhibition are available here.
While surfing through hyperspace to find more detailed information about Calvera, presumably the Earth’s closest neutron star located in the constellation Ursa Minor which has been discovered by astronomers just a couple of days ago, I found a very fascinating article dealing with audible tones emitted by the Sun.
Apparently circulation within the Sun’s convection zone causes emerging bubbles to squeeze the plasma as soon as they reach the solar surface. As a result, some areas on the surface are visibly brighter than others caused by upward and downward movement of plasma. These very low-frequency vibrations have recently been recorded and made audible by SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft of ESA and NASA designed to observe the Sun.
Follow this link to read and hear more:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news/sounds_from_the_sun_make_the_earth_dance
Elaine speaks Japanese and it suits her pretty well.
Okay, now who is Elaine? Elaine is a web-based email and RSS marketing tool developed by artegic AG in Germany. Elaine offers the freedom to develop new possibilities in the creation of mailings, segmentation of target groups and client profiling. It offers transparent reports and analysis as well as a series of other well thought-out functions that make life easier such as a powerful developer API which allows quick and easy content management system integration.
Since I have been already using this tool in non-Japanese projects to my satisfaction, I decided to evaluate Elaine’s capability for delivering Japanese multibyte content in a production environment at Ashley Associates.
After numerous difficulties starting up and installing a few bug fixes, finally everything runs smoothly without any further garbage characters (so called mojibake). Yes! If you’re familiar with the problems that arise when looking for a web-based tool that fits your needs AND supports Japanese character sets, you know what I’m talking about.
Now that content delivery works, I tried translating the user interface into Japanese (see screenshot). Very nice.
As JanRain announced yesterday, Pibb, the OpenID enabled communication platform received a slight face lift and feature upgrade. I took this as an opportunity to give it a try and must say that it so far seems to be a nice alternative for classic forums, although it still appears to be a little bit buggy (my profile did not update as expected).
Pibb brings together the familiarity of forums, power of blogs, flexibility of email and convenience of instant messaging in one browser window. All messages are delivered in real time and then archived automatically for later search/viewing […].
The first candidate of Zend Framework has finally been released this weekend. Great stuff!
Zend Framework has come a long way, and evolved into a professional PHP class library that is already used to run many web sites around the world.