IB

Worked a year without holidays: now I´m finished, and my girl and I just want to escape. But all the well known travelling sites just offer the same: „all inclusive in turkey, Robinson Club in the mediterranean, ….“ That´s not what we are looking for: we are searching for the nice, small family driven hotel somewhere in the Toskana. I found a very good site for this issue: escapio.com (english version here). It is very nice designed, and has all the features you really need: direct-contact fields, a lot of pictures, remember-lists, send-a-freind,.. So, if your looking for a special hotel/pension/appartement throghout europe have a look at escapio.com.

Update: Had a special question and got answer within half an hour.

Since i´ve experienced that having your software „synced“ everywhere is *so* important, I´m watching out for platform independent productive software for our agency. For developing issues I now found Eclipse, which is, from their own website a „kind of universal tool platform – an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.“ And boy that is oh so true, and yet so powerful. Eclipse is fully based Java, so that it´s completely platform independent. It´s plugin-system assures, that it´s nearly endless extensible: PHP, Java, Python, Time Tracking, CVS, …. and A LOT more is able to be installed, after you downloaded it via a setup manager. You can arrange your views as you like – save them and export them anywhere. If you are on any other eclipse installation get it, and your workbench looks like before. There are some *out-of-the-box-packages* you can download, eg. Trustudio which comes with full ftp/webdav/php and python support. Code highlighting as well as -completing are fully integrated. If you´ve got a remote site to work on, you first import it via the import manager to your local machine (whoooo: apache and mysql are running inside the java environment on a buttorn press!!!) and work locally – test it, ant it, as you like. Through the integrated CVS you then export it again, and if you like, your work is tracked and exported into opentime whichs allows your project manager to stear the project. It´s a fast and powerful tool I´m planning to integrate now into our agencys´ workflow.. Did I say it´s opensource and therefore *free*? 🙂

Recently I´ve noticed that „Homepage Exclusive“ ads are becoming more and more popular on the web. As in case of Spiegel Online the ad defines a new background color and the top and right side beneath the content get´s special elements (mostly response elements). The bad thing is, that if there are big Flash Layers, or whatever code, which was not programmed in a clean way, the whole site gets slow – very slow. Today there is a homepage exclusive on Spiegel which is so bad coded (Flash with response element) that the site is nearly not viewable anymore – i´d appreciate that spiegel technicans should watch the quality of the ads they are running on the site – first comes content, then comes ads. (in case of Flash we may help you 🙂 )

Now it´s nearly a year ago, when Google went public – it was THE event of 2004. Last week baidu.com had its IPO – Baidu is the chinese counterpart of Google – and the blogosphere didn´t care (Technorati: „baidu ipo„=366, „google ipo„=3745). Last year everyone was talking about google – maybe because it was the first big IPO of a technology company since the millenium, but still: baidu went up appr. 350% on the first day. That´s astonishing. Why don´t we care? Is it because of the language? It can´t be because it´s not interesting – the potential market is 1 bill. people and raising. We somehow don´t really know what is happening there- it´s off our focus. BTW. does anyone know what is the biggest search engine in india?

Have you recently noticed performance problems with your OS X System? Booting takes longer, the animation of Icons is a little slow? Try YASU! It´s just a GUI for OS X ystem tools and cleans all system-chaches, repairs permissions….It´s quite powerful and my OS X feels freshly installed 🙂

The german manufacturer of high-pressure tools, Karcher, seems to have a brilliant marketing. They got the job to clean up the heads on Mount Rushmore – what a prestige-job, especially when blogs are speaking about you…

Beg on me: my next investition investment (thx Boss for the correction 🙂 )will be a climate-thing for our office. Because of the heat of the last weeks first my beloved ibook´s HD died – thankfully just one day after I upgraded to iSync 2 and now have all my private-contacts on my 6630. No problem with the ibook, because I´ve got a „rescue – PC“ – and since I´ve organised our office structure in a strict „outsource-as-much-as-can-way“ there´s any problem of switching. Got an webmail account for mails, an online crm-system for the contacs and basecamp as projectserver. But now my rescue PC has died, too – the HD sounds terrible: so I got on to amazon and bought a new one. It came today and is now being installed. `Cause it will take the whole day to build it up from scratch and I´ve a lot of work to do, and all the workstations are used, I took out my good ol´ G4 from 1999. 450 MHz, 1,2 GB of RAM and OSX is just running fine. Installed Skype and received all my mail, now there just some system-updates left and I´m up online again (oh, this post is from the G4). Web-based Apps are rockin´!

Just put up your art in the big New Yorker Museums as Bansky did!

I´ve thought a lot about it in the last year but never executed: creating an open company. Now I´ve found the businessexperiment.com and I wonder if they will be able to do it. From the „about“:

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts: wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work. The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business. Business plans will be written. Financing will be sought (if needed). Employees will be hired. Systems of accountability will be put into place.

All major strategic decisions will be voted on by the registered users, and must be implemented by the employees. This will test to see if „the crowd“ is really wise or not. Who do we hire? The crowd will vote on the candidates. What is our marketing strategy? Vote on it. How do we price our product or service? Vote again. It could be cool, or it could be foolish. But either way, it’s definitely different.

As I´ve stated out in the past I really see some problems in it, mostly about getting organized „a-lot-of-people“ and keeping business informations secure. In case jobs go wrong: who is accountable?

Nico has discovered a Star Trek Keyboard

See it in action 🙂

When will you launch your spaceship ?