It’s been a few weeks now since the local elections here in Berlin – elections in which the Pirate Party won almost 9% of the vote, enough to help unseat Angela Merkel’s state coalition – and you can still find a few leftover Pirate Party election signs here on the streets and sidewalks.

Take, for example, this specimen I came across on Frankfurter Allee the other day.  As an American for whom the the term ‘grassroots‘ has gradually become almost completely devalued (the result of  having been appropriated a few too many times by a few too many well-established mainstream political interests), I found this sign remarkable.

Spray-painted and stenciled, obviously homemade, yet in support of a political party capable of impacting elections in the capitol city of the most powerful country in Europe…  It occurred to me that this sign (literally sitting  among some tufts of grass, no less) is what ‘grassroots‘ really looks like.

But what of this term ‘pirate‘?   While the official Pirate Party platform includes support for net neutrality, free public transportation and the legalization of marijuana, the traditional meaning of the term ‘pirate‘ in the context of the internet has had to do with something else completely: the free sharing of intellectual property such as music, films, and software in violation of existing copyright law (in fact, the Pirate Party has hosted servers for one of the most popular bit torrent tracking websites: the Pirate Bay).

So being a pirate is a Bad Thing.  Right?

When it comes to technology start-ups, the answer would seem to be not necessarily:

• Going all the way back to 1996, the TV adaption of the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer was titled “Pirates of the Valley“
• A year ago, Michael Arrington of  the popular technology website techcrunch.com wrote a piece equating the term ‘pirate‘ with the term ‘entrepreneurial‘.
• More recently, when it came time for Google to chose a venue to announce the imminent appearance of their Google Voice service here on European shores last month, they chose a new start-up/entrepreneurial conference being held in Köln.  The name of this conference?  The European Pirate Summit.
• There’s now even a paperback out there entitled “The Pirate Entrepreneur: A Pirate’s Guide: ‘How to be Wildly Successful in Business‘” (ordering yourself a book from Amazon on how to be a pirate strikes me as possibly the least pirate-like thing a person could do – but hey, that’s just me).

Yep – in fact, the internet is awash with a growing  number of pirate-entrepreneur analogies these days.  It would appear that  just as the term  ‘grassroots’ has been co-opted to mean something more mainstream than originally intended in the US, the term ‘pirate’ is in the process of being co-opted to mean something more mainstream than originally intended here in Europe….

Shortly before moving to Europe, it occurred to me that although I was about to (very happily, by the way) cancel my AT&T cellular account, it would be a good idea to still maintain a US phone number.  What I needed was a number that would a) cost nothing, b) go straight to voice mail, and c) allow me easy access to any messages via email and/or a web interface.

Enter Google Voice – good on all three counts.  One potential problem, though: since (at least so far) Google Voice is designed to be merely a phone management/aggregation service rather than a standalone (Skype-like) internet telephony solution, it’s not possible to create a Google Voice account without tying it to an already existing traditional (i.e. land line or cellular) phone number.

Would my Google-based voice mail solution continue to work after the AT&T number I created it with ceased to exist  a few days later?  Luckily, yes.  Granted, if I want to, say, record a new outgoing message, I have to temporarily tie my account to additional (working) US phone number to do it – but even if that’s a bit of a hack, it’s not too inconvenient, given how useful it’s been to have a US number (albeit voice mail only).

So far, the Google Voice service has been limited to the US, though – so for making calls back to the states, I’ve had to rely on Skype.  While Skype works great (from both my computer and my iPhone), in the interest of simplicity I wouldn’t mind getting my transatlantic phone solutions (incoming and outgoing) all under one roof, though – which is why the recent news of the imminent rollout of Google Voice in Europe (announced during a surprise appearance by Google’s Jens Redmer at the European Pirate Summit conference in Köln) was of interest.

Redmer gave no indication of when the service might launch over here, but he did mention that Google is already testing Google Voice internally – so one would have to assume the technology is pretty much there.  What he did cite as a potential holdup were the various European legislative hurdles Google would have to overcome.  This is not surprising – what’s interesting about the timing of all this, though, is that the EU is expected to decide on whether to allow Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in the next week or two.  Whether or not the Skype ruling and the Google Voice announcement are merely coincidental, it’ll be interesting to see if and/or how the two affect each other – especially given that (until Microsoft’s acquisition goes through, at least) Skype is a European company.

First it was the era of the call center:  “You call is very important to us – Estimated hold time: 47 minutes”.

Next, it was decided that the call center was a little more than we all deserved, and soon CRM phone systems were inviting us instead to visit the corporate support website (shortly before politely hanging up on us).  No problem, the website often had a live chat feature.  From a cost-cutting  perspective, the live chat feature was a brilliant inovation: in the added time needed for a customer to type their question rather than speak it in real time, still more productivity could be squeezed out of the support staff, who could now be asked to handle several customers simultaneously (all while the customer on the other end has the illusion of receiving individual personal service).

What could  be the next step in the evolution of online customer service management technology?  Here’s Continental Airlines with their take on a more recent innovation: let’s just fake the live web chat.  Let’s camouflage  a simple HTML search form as a live chat feature – we can include a wholesome, smiling, helpful-looking avatar, her hands (just out of sight) surely poised above a computer keyboard to answer our questions.  We can even give her a name – let’s call her “Alex”.

That’s what I ran into while tracking down my Hurricane Irene-related refund from Continental recently (it turns out there’s nothing like a hurricane to close almost everything down in Manhattan by noon and make a Saturday afternoon in my old hometown as quiet as a Saturday afternoon  in Berlin,  my new hometown – but that’s another story).

The thing is, I would much rather be put on hold or given an email form to fill out than have my intelligence insulted by ‘Alex’ – I guess disingenuous software and user interface design is just a pet peeve of mine.

P.S. On the other hand, I really get a kick out of clever website design – even small gems like the status line I once saw atop the comedy central website: “You are so not logged in”

Social networks are funny things: value to the user is determined less by the quality of the network itself than by the number of that user’s friends also using the network.

To put it another way: if show business is like “high school with money”, so it is (even more so) with social networks – popularity is everything.

In fact, it’s almost a zero-sum game: myspace kills off friendster, facebook kills off myspace…  It seems there can only be one dominant social network at a time (twitter coexists peacefully only because it’s more of an ‘opt-in broadcast network’ than a social network).

In this context, at a few months in, it’s time to ask: will google+ end up replacing facebook?  I’ve been a member of the beta  since day one (more on that here).  While I’ve yet to actually post anything (full disclosure: social networks are more interesting to me as a medium and cultural phenomenon than as something I’d choose to use personally) – I have had a ringside seat from which to witness user uptake of the service.

Below is my firsthand account of how’s it’s been going so far – at least from amongst my ‘circle’ (sorry, couldn’t resist) of friends and colleagues…

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On German exposure to credit crises of all flavors: North American and European  Michael Lewis is the author of several non-fiction bestsellers chronicling the current plight of the US and global financial markets.  Last month he wrote a thought-provoking piece in Vanity Fair that not only covers not Germany’s central role in the US (sub-prime mortgage-driven) and European (sub-prime EU partner-driven) debt crises, but also speculates on some cultural issues that may have might have contributed to the extent of the country’s involvement.  As a US expat living in Germany, I felt that while a few of his points in that regard were a bit of a stretch, he gets a lot right.  Agree or disagree, an interesting and well-written piece.

If you read one article on Steve Jobs’ legacy…  read David Carr’s piece in the New York Times.  Enough said.

A picture’s worth a thousand words… especially when it’s a gigapixel picture.  No reading required to get the point here on what the combination of hi-resolution photography and social media (or even worse, facial recognition technology) could mean to privacy.  Not just ‘online’ privacy, but physical privacy – in public. 

Just click here (it takes a bit for the image to load), and zoom into the crowd.  Keep zooming – until the little blue icons (and the implications of this technology on personal privacy) become clearly visible.

In the context of the city becoming a European center for internet startups, here’s a short video piece from Reuters on two companies based here in my adopted hometown of Berlin: soundcloud and wooga.

The day is coming when the ‘file’ as we know it will be a thing of the past for most computer users.   The process is already well under way:  use Google docs?  Under the File menu is a “See revision history” option.  Dropbox?  There’s a “Previous versions” option for every file up there.  Even the WordPress blogging platform (into which I’m typing right now) retains each intermediate version of every post I write (including manually saved versions and versions automatically saved by WordPress).

Versioning – For software developers, the ability to code without fear of overwriting a teammate’s work from last week (or last month) is critical – as is the ability to step back through each previous version of the code when tracking down bugs.  For these reasons, simply working on flat files – even if there’s a backup – is not an option.  Instead, versioning tools such as GIT and SVN have been developed, and are second nature to anyone writing code in a professional or team situation.

What’s interesting is that now similar technology is moving into the consumer space.

And it’s not just a ‘cloud thing’, either – Apple’s local backup solution ‘Time Machine’ has been around for a few years now, and in fact is more of a versioning tool than a traditional backup solution.  The new Lion OSX release takes things a step further – the operating systems is continually taking snapshots in the background of every open document as you work, and each of these snapshot is available as a separate revision. In other words, Lion (like Google Docs and WordPress) will even do the saving for you!

It won’t be long before the idea of the file (and of having to explicitly hit ‘save’) are – like the CD,  the 200GB external hard drive, and (maybe) the United States’ AAA bond rating – relics of the past.

Since I’ve already been on a Google+ few weeks now (I had an invitation to try out the service the day before it launched – one of the small perks of writing a tech blog), and since I’ve already received an email invitation to try out the next brand new web service (the US rollout of Spotify),  I guess it’s about time I shared my impressions of Google’s planned Facebook-killer.

During the first day or two of Google+, you really had to “know a guy who knows a guy” to get an account, but if the recent escalation in the number of friends and family showing up there is any indication, they’re scaling up the service more aggressively than they did with Gmail a few years ago.

Although they’re keeping quiet about the numbers, some recent independent research estimates that about 20 million people have signed up as of this past weekend.  Just to put that in context, Facebook claims over 750 million active users.  On the surface, that would seem to represent some pretty substantial  inertia in Facebook’s favor – but the tipping point syndrome can be pretty brutal in the social networking world (imagine a cocktail party in which each guest can anonymously and painlessly bail out of if it turns out the cool kids are heading on over to the party down the street).

This point  is not lost on Facebook – in fact, Mark Zuckerberg is “keeping his enemies close” via a Google+ account of his own that’s ended up in over a quarter of a million Google+ user’s Circles – but has yet to contain a single post.

After playing around with it a bit, I think Google+ can objectively be said to have the edge over Facebook in terms of simplicity and transparency – and on a more subjective level, I believe there are a few other things to like about Google+, as well…

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I never really ‘got’ Facebook – so when someone at Google asked me yesterday to take part in the initial trial of their new Google + social media platform, I decided to read up on it a bit first to see whether it might be worth my time.

I have to say, after looking into it a bit, I was intrigued – intrigued enough to try it out over the next few weeks.

Why?  Because Google+ seems to address the one reason I’ve avoided Facebook: the list of things I would want to say socially in exactly the same way to every person I know is a pretty short list.

The folks behind the Google+ project seem to get it – Google’s new social media platform appears to be built upon the notion of groups, and it appears to be designed that way from the ground up.  This is in stark contrast to the opt-in, after-the-fact group-filtering mechanisms other social media platforms seem to have implemented reluctantly and seem to prefer you wouldn’t use.

And according to Bradley Horowitz (who along with Vic Gundotra is in charge of  the Google+ project), that’s just what’s wrong with today’s social media sites:  “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world.”

Amen, brother.   So I’ve just logged into my trial account and had a quick look around – I think I’ll give this Google+ project a try.  As a confirmed social media skeptic, it’ll be interesting to see if it feels like there’s something worthwhile there… stay tuned.

In my role as in-house/at-home IT support staff, I’m regularly called upon to respond to user trouble tickets, usually delivered verbally from my wife’s desk.   This latest one was particularly interesting – our bank’s website form for making online payments (nobody sends checks in Europe) was hanging in mid-transaction.  My wife, being pretty technically astute herself, had already tried deleting the cache and all her cookies – but still not go.

She had just updated to FireFox 5.0 a day or two earlier (we’re a Firefox household, tried and true) – so I suspected the new browser might have something to do with it.  Who knows, maybe our bank’s website is doing something in a slightly nonstandard way that this latest Firefox release is just being picky about.  It could be a JavaScript or an HTTPS issue, or maybe it’s something to do with FF5′s increased support for IPv6 – it didn’t matter, really: our bank’s website wasn’t working anymore, and it was up to me, as senior home help desk technician, to get ‘er done.

Hitting the same website from another browser on the same machine was the obvious thing to try… and lo and behold, everything worked just fine using the Apple Safari browser that shipped with my wife’s Mac.

After I blew the imaginary smoke off the tip of my extended index finger (why does my wife roll her eyes when I do things like that?), I started thinking about browsers, updates, and compatibility…

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