PavingWays

Last Wednesday evening we attended the MissionFuture Emergency Session. Founded by CScout Trend Consultancy and innovation agency TheFutureKitchen the event took place in the famous Löwenbräukeller in Munich. The idea behind this initiative is bringing together people from different industries and with different backgrounds to inform, assist and help each other during this economic crisis.

The event started with short presentations from Dr. Aleksandra Weber (EUCON - European Institute for Conflict Management), Prof. Hugo Kehr (Professor of psychology at TU München), Jörg Schallehn (Vermögensakademie GmbH), George Zoche (Transnational Republics), Jan Wildeboer (Red Hat / Linux Evangelist), and Stephan Doesinger (Doesinger & Partner).

All the presentations treated the financial crisis topic really differently and from different point of views. Prof. Hugo Kehr talked about his latest study “From the monetary quarterly target to a motivating vision“. He explained why a vision is more motivating and helping you more through a crisis than setting a monetary quarterly target (e.g. vision: being an innovator in a specific branch versus target: reducing production costs by 10% in the next 3 months). His conclusion is that a vision keeps you flexible and motivated, because you can adjust your strategy when needed, while a monetary quarterly target makes you inflexible. Motivation is very important, especially during times of crisis.

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During its first BlackBerry Developer Conference co-Founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion Mike Lazaridis unveiled plans for an online application store for its smart phones. The store will launch in March 2009 and will include both an online and on-device component giving 20 million BlackBerry users on all platforms the opportunity to find and download add-on applications for their specific phone models. RIM is working with PayPal to build the payment system for the store.

“A new online application storefront and a new on-device application center will help application developers and carriers reach millions of BlackBerry smartphone users worldwide and will provide consumers with greater choice, enhanced application discovery and an easy method for managing installation, upgrades, and purchases.” (source: press release of RIM)

In December this year developers can begin submitting their applications. The storefront will allow them to set their own prices for applications. Developers will get 80 percent of the revenue generated from their application.

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In its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Sept. 27, Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones and has now sold more than 13 million iPhones this year (Apple’s sales goal was 10 million in 2008). Compared to Apple, RIM has sold 6.1 million Blackberry devices in the quarter ended August 30.

“RIM is a good company that makes good products and so it is surprising that after only 15 months in the market we could outsell them in any quarter,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during an analyst conference call following the release of the financial report.

Jobs also said that Apple was the third-ranked mobile phone supplier worldwide by revenue during the quarter.

Sources:
eetimes.com
theglobeandmail.com
golem.de

O2 and Vodafone have launched their new payment service “mpass” in Germany. Through mpass mobile phone customers with any German provider now have access to secure online shopping on their mobile phone or PC.

mpass combines the direct debiting system (German: Lastschriftverfahren) with SMS payment confirmation through mobile phones (we blogged about this before). Some companies like Cinemaxx, Blume2000.de or Beate Uhse are already supporting the service.

More about mpass here: http://www.mpass.de/

Source:
zdnet.de

As soon as Nintendo announced the next version of the hugely popular Nintendo DS gaming console, called the Nintendo DSi, I was curious if along with some hardware upgrades, such as 2 cameras, better screens and a SD card slot, there would be major changes to the OS and software included, especially if a decent web browser would be available or even included…and I was hoping for Opera. There is a video of the DSi presentation on YouTube.

Turns out there will be a web browser available (see above video from 01:45)…and it will be an Opera browser! In contrast to the current DS version, the DSi web browser will reside on the console’s flash memory meaning it will not come as a game-cartridge as the currently available Opera browser does.

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This week I attended another Mobile Monday, the venue was provided by IIR who did their Converged Messaging Summit there as well.

It probably was the Mobile Monday with the lowest number of attendees I’ve ever been to. That’s mostly because the Oktoberfest takes place and everybody has to decide between having a few (liters of) beer and listening to powerpoint presentations during the evening…I decided for the latter ;)

The presentations were interesting. Taptu went first talking about their mobile search engine, enhanced by human edited results, social interaction and sharing of results with your friends. Apparently groupile.mobi is crawled as a desktop web page, which it is not, probably a header recognition issue.

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