There are a lot of great things about living in Europe.  Staying up until 3:30 AM on a Monday morning to watch the Super Bowl is not one of them, but as a NY Giants fan for life (evidently a hereditary condition) and considering the great game these two teams played four years ago the last time they met in the Super Bowl, I  had no choice.  No choice, I tell you!

So I stayed up way past my bedtime Sunday night.   Although the game was broadcast on German television, I opted instead for NBCsports.com and the first ever streaming of a Super Bowl for the US commentary.

I chose the US website for the play-by-play coverage in English – but as it turned out, there were other advantages to watching the game online too…

Unlike what’s called football in the rest of the world, to watch an American football game is to watch a heavily mediated experience – alternating bursts of action and strategy make it perfectly suited for multiple camera angles, continuous sportscaster commentary, quick-cut editing, and slow motion replays.  I know it’s a violent game (as is ‘rest-of-the-world’ football, when you consider the near total lack of player protection) – but I maintain that if they invented a sport from scratch for the medium of television, it would end up looking a lot like American football (witness this catch from the game).

It’s quite a feat, making a live event look and feel as neatly packaged and slickly produced as a movie – and they’ve gotten really good at it (and we’ve gotten really used to it).   That’s why watching the game online turned out to be so unexpectedly compelling:

As you can see from the screenshot above, viewers could choose between the main traditional TV feed (i.e. with a director switching between cameras) and any of the static source cameras.   Wanna stay on the camera suspended by cables above the field and watch the growing sense of urgency in Tom Brady’s face as he huddles with his offense  between plays from just a few meters above his head?  No problem!  But not only does this offer the opportunity to see things you’ve never seen before on a televised football game – you also have the option to slow down the frenetic cutting between cameras you didn’t realize you had become so used to.

And that’s how I ended up watching a lot of the game, staying on one camera for minutes at a time.  It’s a little  ironic that one new technology allowed me the choice to ‘turn off’ (or at least slow down) another technology, but without the relentless quick camera cuts, I was suddenly able to experience the game suddenly as a more live, real-time event (in fact, except for all the commercial breaks, it was almost like watching ein Fußball-Spiel here in Berlin).

Was it perfect?  No – as you can see, video resolution wasn’t exactly up to ’30 Rock on Hulu’ standards.  That was to be expected, given the scaling issues involved with the live streaming of was expected to be (and indeed did become) the most-watched US television broadcast in history (with the amount of traffic hitting those servers, I was happy with not a single rebuffering dropout).   Also, every time I switched to a new camera, it took 3-4 seconds for the stream to refresh – but still, all in all, it was pretty impressive.  Kudos to NBC for the vision (and courage) to do it, kudos to Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 video streaming platform, and kudos to whatever content delivery system they used.

That it streamed as well as it did, and that it offered a new viewing experience via allowing the user to switch between cameras?  A win for video streaming (oh yeah, and for the Giants!)

It’s interesting how online banking in Germany differs from online banking in the US…

Arguably, they’ve been at this electronic banking thing over here longer than we have in the states – in fact, the routine writing of personal checks ended in Germany sometime well before the end of the last century.  But while the move away from paper has progressed much further here, funnily enough you can’t do any personal online banking at all in Germany without one very important sheet of paper: a TAN list.

A TAN list is a numbered list of unique codes (usually 50 per sheet).  Each time you make a transaction online, your bank’s website prompts you for a random code from the list (i.e. “Please enter code number 43“).  The idea is not only to present the user with an additional authentication challenge – a simple “What is your first pet’s name?” type of question  accomplishes that – but to also make that additional challenge unique to the transaction.

Why is a transaction-specific authentication challenge important?  It’s a way way to fight keystroke logging software – malicious code capable of quietly recording each and every keystroke you type (including, of course, passwords).  Until recently, my US bank had been addressing the key logging issue a bit differently, requiring that I enter an additional “Security Key” by clicking on the keys of a virtual onscreen keyboard.  That avoided the physical keyboard (and thus key-logging), but the problem remained that my single Security Key was static rather than unique to each transaction.  As a consequence, if just one of my transactions was overseen (or screen-recorded), I could still be compromised.

…which is why they just changed over to the system shown below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just back from a trip to Rome, Italy, I was floored by the unparalleled wealth of artistic talent and expression the city harnessed across two and a half thousand years.

Touring the Vatican St. Peter’s Basilica and its Sistine Chapel was an especially mind-blowing experience.

I kept thinking what back then were the unique circumstances that enabled this tremendously beautiful body of work? Did they see it for what it is to us today? And would we be able to create similar genius if we tried?

Clearly, Michelangelo painting his Sistine Chapel frescos today would have a decidedly different outcome compared to the genius beauty he created back in 1508 to 1512.  (Oh, if Michelangelo is too dated for you, who among us doesn’t wonder how Paul McCartney’s 60′s Beatles era genius squares with his 9/11 Freedom song out in 2001. But let me not digress ; -). Conversely, today’s great industrial design – let’s say of Apple’s Jonathan Ive genius – would have been impossible to conceive in 16th century Rome.

In other words, yes, universal artistic genius is subject to its unique time, place and circumstances.

Which brings me to our own now, here, our current environment.

For instances, do any of today’s *early 21st century* consumer digital devices and their designs count as art? If so, will any of them be considered of timeless artistic appeal in, let’s say, another two and a half thousand years from now?

To be sure, back in Michelangelo’s 16th century most art was commissioned by a few to elevate a few and typically tied to a single theme (i.e. religion). Today art is largely created by anyone for anyone, no longer limited to a canvas or church walls, instead feeding off of constant reinvention – one marketing-driven consumer *revolution* at a time.

Over the past weeks, much has been written about the late Steve Jobs and his impact on popular culture. If anything, we seem generally certain, the work that Steve accomplished jointly with Jonathan was pretty darn genius.

Whether in 4511 it will pass Michelangelo-level muster, let’s see.

For now to us anyway it is – well – insanely genius art!

I recently attended a management conference held at the Park Plaza Hotel.  You know, the Park Plaza on Wall Street – in Berlin.

The Park Plaza on Wallstrasse – a month ago when I was first sent the event details, I was struck by the presence of two such iconic big-money New York names in a Berlin address.  That didn’t prepare me, though, for the wall covering I found behind the desk at  reception:  a larger-than-life photograph of three businessmen reaching skyward in ecstasy, as money rained down upon them – their faces equal parts surprise and delight.

Although there’s nothing subtle about the image itself, I was at a complete loss as to exactly what message this curious choice in wall covering was intended to convey – and now, a week and a half later, as current events conspire to make it a more unfortunate choice with each passing day, it only baffles me more.  A playful and self-deprecating comment on unfettered capitalism that went a bit too far?  Not likely, given the German aversion to playfulness and self-deprecation.  An earnest and aspirational celebration of undeserved and amoral corporate profit?  Not likely, given the German aversion to undeserved and amoral corporate profit.

No, it remains a complete riddle to me, the image on this wall.  I mean, are we expected to read something into the fact that these are US dollars (and not Euros) raining down on these supposedly European businessmen, or is that merely the result of using a US stock photography service?  Or a more interesting possibility: are the three masters of the universe  depicted here intended to be American?

As you can see, I’ve thought about this a bit – and here’s another (at least partial) explanation I’ve come up with: the hotel happens to be in Mitte, a former Jewish ghetto in the former East Germany that’s since become maybe Berlin’s most expensive real estate, home to not only a thriving art gallery scene but also to a thriving  internet startup scene (the local Groupon clone down the street was recently acquired by Google, and the online audio hosting company around the corner has become a Berlin startup media darling – complete with an investment from noted technology visionary Ashton Kutcher.

So maybe that’s it – and maybe that’s also why this image feels like such a throwback to the late 90′s (in fact, it would be hard to think of a more loaded image to represent the high-water mark of a good old-fashioned US-style tech bubble than this).  In the end, though, I’d like to think that as remarkable as it is, the interior design of this one particular hotel reception desk is an anomaly – a blip.  I’d like to think that the admirable aspects of the German character written about so well by Michael Lewis in his recent Vanity Fair piece on the country’s exposure to the US and European sovereign debt crises will also come in handy here in Berlin – as the city navigates its way through an increasingly frothy startup market.

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, let’s just say it: roaming outside the US with a US-carrier smartphone and SIM card, no matter what you do, is highway robbery. There, now that that’s out of the way…

I have a global phone from Verizon (shoutout: Droid Incredible 2, w00t w00t), and I’d planned on purchasing a German SIM card to use on my trip, since it’s too expensive to use Verizon’s global services. To do so, I called ahead and got the unlock code for my phone (this is not “jailbreaking” or “rooting” as some have asked in forums online— this is just unlocking your phone to be able to use with another carrier).

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Buenos Aires has become a tourist hotspot in the recent years.  Some say it is the Paris of South America, something the locals do not like to hear – and actually, something which is also not true at all.
Buenos Aires is a City you cannot compare with anything you know, because it is a mix of a lot of influences.  Of course there are European and US influences, but there’s also a flavor of the real South America! Truly amazing and fascinating.  The Portenos (how the people of Buenos Aires call themselves) are a very modern, open crowd – they’re among South America’s “early adopters” (this is also due to their strong ties to Europe).  Every Porteno I met in has been to Europe several times, and I believe knows more places there then I do.

And as first adopters who care about their tourists and are proud of their city, they’ve introduced a nice little idea.  In Buenos Aires you can “like” and “friend” nearly every major place of interest on Facebook (and also find a lot of information about the places, of course).

And that’s not all – at every one of these places there are signs advertising the Facebook URL. If I were Facebook, I would say “thank you/muchas gracias” for this “official” advertising (which comes free of charge, I suppose).

Here you can see some examples – try them out.

• http://www.facebook.com/plazadorrego
• http://www.facebook.com/plazadelarepublica

PS: By the way, in Buenos Aires all of the street signs are “sponsored” by companies like Nokia or major Argentinian mobile network operators like Claro (they put just the logos on the street signs, which I suppose is NOT for free).

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).