There is a prejudice about the Chinese, that they will fake nearly anything.


I will start with a non-tech story a friend of mine from Shanghai told me: a colleague of his bought a Audi A6 in China for a really good price – a “lucky punch”, a bargain.  This made him happy.  A view months later there was a problem with the motor, and as the guy isn’t a great mechanic he took the car to the nearest Audi garage.  A day later the garage rang him up and asked him where he bought the car.  He told them he bought it in Shanghai, but not from an official Audi dealer.  The garage employee responded: “Hm… , well, OK, that maybe explains something, because actually your car is not a real Audi….”   Hard to believe?
I thought this was really priceless, that even German cars are now being faked (‘knocked off‘) in China.

Coming to another kind of fake:  five years ago I have been to one of the official tourist knock off markets in China that specialized in garments, handbags and watches.  I’ve since been told that this market was closed down due to the pressure from all the luxury brands on the Chinese (by the way, I have never seen a bigger Louis Vuitton store than in Shanghai) – so I really thought that the times of these markets were over.  Well, as it always happens in China: if something closes, it remains for this for some weeks and then it pops up in another side of the city…  and now, voilà, it’s not only cloths, shoes, and handbags – the new thing is, they even fake electronics nowadays.  Clearly, the iPhone is the #1 knock off you see everywhere.  And they even have a faked the software on it, the icons look pretty similar and it works more or less.   But if that’s  not enough, all forms of iPods of course, iPads (yes, 1 and 2) and Blackberry knock-offs are available too.   Sure, you’ll see all of our iconic Asian status symbols there!

But see yourself on the pictures (sorry I forgot to take one of the iPhone display showing the operating system).

Facebook yesterday announced it is adding Skype video chat to its growing list of features.

This is not a trivial matter.

With its Skype video chat announcement, Facebook merges social with communication. If done right, that’s a tremendously powerful combination.

For one, think of Facebook as your white pages on steroids; a single globally connected super-large phonebook stuffed with detailed profiles, likes and dislikes, photos, links, messaging – the works!

Now add video chat to the mix. Is this the genesis of Facebook Telecom?

Not quite. But at closer look, the social network giant might just have the wherewithal to grow into the first global social IP carrier.

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There’s a new social networking service in town. It’s called Google+/Google Plus. The beta isn’t fully open to the public yet.

There’s a lot of nerdy/media-y navel-gazing going on there right now.

There will be advantages to businesses, political organizations and non-profits down the road.

There are some features “stolen” from other social networks; others are brand new. Users will like some things and hate others.

The end.

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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We found Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform interesting enough to write about two years ago when it first went live – now, as the platform matures and it becomes clear just how central Azure is to the company’s future, it’s getting even more interesting.

And when one considers recent cloud-related new items such as the Amazon EC2 outage of a few months ago and the (still unsubstantiated) rumors that Apple might be using Azure to support at least part of its new iCloud service – well, the Microsoft cloud computing story gets more interesting still.

With that in in mind, we thought we’d pose a few questions about Azure to Jim O’Neil of Microsoft.

Fair warning: this is going to be a bit more technical than the typical digitalmissive post.  Hang in there, though, because we believe Azure is A Big Deal, and the opportunity to hear about it from someone at Microsoft – especially at this early stage of its evolution – makes for a worthwhile read.

Thanks to Jim for taking the time…

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Take Al Gore, Gore Vidal, or Vidal Sassoon. Would any of these gentlemen have turned as successful had their parents picked less recognizable names for them?

Likely. After all, how do you explain the success and phenomenon around someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gisele Bundchen?

Clearly, it’s not about one’s given name, but how you manage to *live*it: fill it with life, meaning and gestalt. To put it into today’s social media speak, it’s about how you create the brand of you!

But what happens if social media turns into the new go-to engine for parents eager to hone in on the ultimate name for their kid? What happens if the über-popular engagement platform begins to not just promote but indeed shape parents’ decisions on what to name their kids?

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I have been traveling for nearly seven weeks now, on a tight and tough schedule.

Started my journey in Thailand in Bangkok . Made my way to Cambodia (Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap), Hong Kong, Shanghai, Borneo Island , Malaysia, and now I am writing from Boracay Island in the Philippines.  A lovely, maybe a little too commercialized spot (they even have a Starbucks on the waterfront), but with a stunning beach. (Just awarded the #2 best beach worldwide on Tripadvisor).

All in, I intentionally wanted to get away from the Interweb and being online all the time.  But it wasn’t meant to be – at least not while in Asia .

Welcome to the world of Wifi, smartphones and Facebook supreme!

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We’ve recently written about National Teacher Appreciation Day in the US – in many other parts of the world, though, the big holiday of the month is May 1st, or ‘May Day‘ (aka Labor Day).

In the US, Labor Day happens in early September and is primarily about getting that one last long weekend in before the unofficial end of summer.  Elsewhere in the world, though, the concept of ‘Labor Day’ is a bit more politicized: also known as International Worker’s Day, the holiday has had a particularly rich history here in Berlin dating all the way back to the bad old GDR days (the still grandiose Karl Marx Allee boulevard was in fact built for the sole purpose of providing as impressive a backdrop as possible for the yearly parade).

As Berlin has gradually became more westernized in the years after the fall of the wall, the holiday has evolved into more of a day of protest – in fact, just last year, 10,000 protestors clashed with police on the streets.

With May Day all over the local news here for a couple of days last week, I thought it might be interesting to see whether the same was true out there on the internet as well: was May Day (or, rather, Tag der Arbeit) a ‘trending topic’ online over the weekend?

The fastest/easiest/best/cheapest (i.e. free) way to graph the frequency with which a given keyword or phrase is searched for on Google within a specified time window is Google Insights. (Google Trends, another Google site, offers much the same service – but the date and geographic region filtering is less powerful) .

Here’s what Google Trends shows for ‘Tag der Arbeit’ over the past few years:

A few things to note:  if Google’s data is correct, there was roughly 5 times the amount of interest in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ this year than in either of the previous two years (vertical values are scaled such that the number “100″ represents the maximum value returned, much as Google’s financial charts are scaled).   That’s a little hard to accept, and begs the question of whether what we’re looking at is being affected by some differences in Google’s methodology over the past few years.  Secondly, thanks to the site’s geographic functionality, it would appear that the German states of Nordrhein-Westfalen and Hessen are for more interested in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ than we are in Berlin – although, again, this assumes a normalized data  methodology across the whole of Germany.

Google Insights is a very useful service.  It understands the Google search operators (‘OR’, ‘+’, etc.), and it’s possible to compare (overlay) multiple results by keyword/phrase, location, or time span – which can lead to some pretty interesting graphs.  However, as noted above (and as is always the case), any results are only as good as the underlying data – in computer science/IT vernacular, it’s the ‘garbage in, garbage out‘ effect.

In any event, I’m happy to report ‘Tag der Arbiet’ 2011 was largely violence- and vandalism-free here in Berlin.

PS The Saturday before May 1, I read about a protest parade coming through my Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, so I decided to check it out (and as one of the area’s invading gentrifiers, to film it with my iPhone).  As protest marches go, it was relatively cozy neighborhood event:

…evidently der Polizei had heard about it too, and after last year’s troubles, they were not taking any chances – so immediately on the heels of the protest parade came the ‘Polizei parade’…

Another month, another European trade show.  This time it’s musikmesse, the world’s largest musical instrument and accessory trade event.  Held in Frankfurt every April, musikmesse covers everything from musical instruments to DJ equipment to audio software (which is why I was there).
Think of the largest music store on the planet, spread across 6 or 7 huge convention halls – in other words, heaven, hell, or a bit of both, depending on your point of view.

Last month I wrote about my trip to CeBIT – musikmesse is, as you might imagine, quite a different kind of trade show experience.  One thing both shows have in common, though, is their own iPhone app.  Driven by an app store model that’s made applications safe, easy to install/uninstall, and often free, the use of such disposable event-specific apps is on the rise.  In fact, a dedicated mobile app – complete with exhibitor lists, floor plans, GPS, and some degree of social networking functionality (usually twitter) – has become ‘de rigeuer’ for any self-respecting trade show these days.

So I decided to try musikmesse’s iPhone app out.

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