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:

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It was my birthday this weekend. Thanks everyone for your kind and warm wishes.

Turns out, it was actually my first truly Facebook-centric celebration – a social media-powered birthday if you will.

This might not necessarily be anything new to you, but I had never had a birthday were Facebook wall posts took center stage.

Be that personal calls, emails, or postcards arriving in the mail (remember those?), wall posts from Facebook friends way outnumbered any other forms of traditional greetings I received this time around.

From New York to Berlin back to LA, friends apparently pay notice to Facebook’s able birthday alert system. True to social media’s promise, incoming wall posts even made for a bit of a reunion with some of the folks I hadn’t been in touch with in years.

Old fashioned me, I did respond to each and every post. Not even sure if that’s the proper etiquette and instead a single *bulk* mille grazie reply post would have done?

Who knows? Despite its success – social media is still relatively new. So is Facebook’s personal wall concept. (Hey, my car is older than that). And as the social powerhouse continues to introduce new features and capabilities, rules around Facebook usage will likely stay equally in flux.

So, let’s see what shape and form Facebook will take in years to come, as it continues to grow into what seems to have already turned into our central e-greetings hub.

Just back from a trip to Germany, while over there I ended up in several serendipitous conversations about our increasing embrace of technology to help organize and memorize our everyday lives.

From the many appointments and conversations to ad-hoc thought streams, new log-ins, phone numbers or email addresses, we increasingly love to tether ourselves to nearby hardware and software managing our lifes’ personal and professional data streams – preferably instantly and on the go.

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I have a few  friends who’ve had ID chips implanted in their expensive purebred pets over the years.  I’d always thought of it as a vaguely creepy, almost comically yuppie thing to do – until we found ourselves having to do just that in order to legally bring our cat (of somewhat more humble animal shelter rescue origins) with us when we moved here to Berlin.

Since the chip in question is only about the size of a grain of rice and is completely undetectable lying somewhere under the loose skin behind his neck, I had completely forgotten about it.

Until I noticed the uniforms worn by the wait staff at a trendy Berlin café I was at the other day, that is…

QR code  Originally developed on Japanese automobile assembly lines to keep track of individual parts, QR code represents the state of the art in bar code technology, and is capable of storing textual information much more densely than the old-school vertical bar codes found on your groceries.  With the advent of high-quality smartphone cameras and QR code-scanning mobile apps, the square pixelated images have started showing up in print ads, billboards, catalogs, and signs everywhere, as consumer-facing businesses have co-opted the technology for marketing purposes.

Technical takeaway?  QR code makes the transfer of a small but meaningful amount of data from a physical object to a machine over the air possible.

User experience takeaway? Your cellphone is learning to read.

All well and good – but seeing these codes plastered across uniforms worn by humans rather than on inanimate physical objects – well, it reminded me a little bit of that chip inside our cat.

After thinking it over a bit, though, I think it’s just an example of technology as fashion statement – like simulated “shark fin” car antennas, merely an affectation more about conveying a certain level of affluence and technological hipness than anything having to do with actual functionality.

That would make the whole thing a bit silly, wouldn’t it?  Still, less silly than the alternative: imagine patrons actually trying to use these codes, frantically pointing their smartphone cameras at the backs of waiters and waitresses as they quickly pass by, hard at work in a busy café – all in an effort to get the menu or website URL onto their mobile devices.

That, to me, would be not only silly, but a little sad, too – and might just be what too much technology would look a little something like.

Some people are really bothered by imperfect grammar.  Other people can’t stand the sight of people chewing gum.  I don’t share either of those particular pet peeves, but there is something that really gets under my skin: usability-challenged software.

Which brings me to Microsoft Outlook, an application a lot of us spend the better part of our adult waking hours using (I know – kinda sad).  While setting an Out of Office message on the 2010 Mac version the other day, I was struck once again by how even a simple operation can be made needlessly limited and confusing.

In Outlook, the sending of auto-reply messages to internal and external senders is independently configurable – well, sort of.  See the “Send replies outside my company to:” checkbox to the left?  It’s greyed out unless the user has first selected “Send out of office messages“.  In other words, the assumption has been made that nobody could ever possibly need to auto-reply to an external sender if they weren’t already auto-replying to internal senders.

Two things…

• First of all, what a curious and arbitrary assumption to make.  Imagine you’re a worker who typically gets a lot of external email traffic, but those emails need to go unanswered while you work against deadline on an important internal project that demands routine and timely internal email.  Now imagine that as a courtesy to your clients, you’d like to send them an auto-reply for a day or two until the deadline is past.  Not an unreasonable scenario – and just the thing for an enterprise email client that allows independent external and internal auto-replies, right?  Well, with Outlook you’re still out of luck.  Memo to designers: before you impose an operational hierarchy on the user, make sure there’s a reason for it.
• And how about at least clearly naming the options as implemented?  Would it have been too much trouble to correctly label the  “Send Out of Office messages” option “Send Out of Office messages inside my company“?  That would provide a helpful hint to all the harried office workers out there that the options towards the bottom still need to be checked and filled out before heading out on that vacation.  And another thing: if you take the trouble to inform the user that external senders will only receive one auto-reply, why not display whether or not the same is true regarding email coming from internal senders?

How big a deal is this in the grand scheme of things?  OK, not too big – but maybe this kind bothers me only because it’s so unnecessary.  I mean, here’s the thing:  software development, like math, is hard.  The folks creating these applications are highly intelligent.  Why is it that all too often (this is by no means limited to Microsoft, by the way) the easy things – the ‘low hanging fruit’ of simple usability considerations – are overlooked by engineers?

It’s even more difficult to explain in the face of abundant evidence that when a product does get usability right (dropbox and iOS come to mind), it turns out to be not only good for users, but good for business as well (for more on that, see our recent post on Sony and Apple).

Google+ has been around for a few months now, and while the company is keeping typically quiet regarding the hard numbers, most web traffic analysts estimate that as of November of this year, something north of 50 million users will have created Google+ profiles.

How many of those users are actually active on the service, though, is another story: in our (admittedly anecdotal) experience, a lot of these initially enthusiastic early adapters have tapered off on their Google+ usage pretty dramatically (and even if every single one of these 50 million users were still highly active, that’s still only a 10th of Facebook’s user base).

Inertia?  …strongly in Facebook’s favor.

What’s a scrappy little upstart like Google to do?

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Here we are. You and I, plus another 6,999,999,998 more people. Today statistically we’ve reached the 7 billion population mark. What matters now is what is next.

As part of my Deutsche Telekom responsibilities, I recently took part in helping to shape what has become the 7 Billion Actions campaign under the auspices of the United Nations Population Fund - an innovative campaign that is building awareness around the opportunities and challenges of a world of seven billion.

As an individual as much as a representative of a large, multi-national communications provider, population-relevant issues and causes matter to me probably as much as they do to you.

To that end, the social media team at the UNFPA sent along the following tips how everyone across the social graph and blogosphere can help contribute to the cause:

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#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:

Social entrepreneurship is mindset that can be applied to any sector.

A More Detailed Exploration:
Are you as fascinated with the rise of the concept called “social entrepreneurs” as I am? It seems like in the past few years, more people have begun to identify themselves and others with this label – almost like a new fashion brand.  Just as you may have noticed being a startup or entrepreneur is quite the thing these days, you’ll notice being a “social entrepreneur” will turn even more heads.

[If you happen to be someone who views her/himself as a social entrepreneur, I would highly recommend you read Brian Reich's advice to you. It's timely and very appropriate.]

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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.