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 was reported recently that Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to bring Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-published (and much anticipated) Steve Jobs biography to the big screen.  To anyone who’s followed the consumer electronics market even casually, the irony is hard to miss: it’s hard to think of anywhere Steve Jobs (and his relentless focus on user experience) appears to have been less understood than at Sony.

Armed with concepts such as “Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry“, CEO Howard Stringer as led the company through recent years in which too many new Sony products were incompatible, user-unfriendly, and/or simply misguided.  The results?  Tremendous losses (3.1 billion US for the fiscal year ending March 2010), a decidedly unsafe-for-the-workplace Onion news clip that’s been viewed almost 5 million times on youtube alone (in fairness, Apple’s received the Onion treatment as well), and lastly, a near complete loss of brand value in regards to consumer electronics and innovation – this for the company that gave us the Walkman.

Despite having had its lunch so thoroughly eaten by Apple, though, Sony still doesn’t appear to quite get it: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, Stringer claimed in a 2009 interview.  The logic behind this spin almost works, if one ignores the fact that Apple itself is perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (iTunes, anyone?).  No, a stubborn attachment to proprietary technologies such as ATRAC and the Memory Stick was not the primary cause behind the current sad state of affairs at Sony (although it almost surely contributed).  Instead, a more constructive place to look would be towards the products themselves – towards the utility, value, and user experience they offer.

As it turns out,  maybe engineers aren’t “the movie stars of the electronics industry”, maybe they’re just the engineers of the electronics industry – and if there is anyone deserving of being put on a pedestal, maybe it’s the consumer.

That’s perhaps at the core of Steve Jobs’ professional legacy.  As to regard for the consumer over at Sony, just the fact that Stringer is quoted above using the term ‘electronics industry’ rather than the more common (and accurate) term ‘consumer electronics industry’ is perhaps telling.

Here’s hoping that if he’s still at Sony in a few years when his Steve Jobs movie finally comes out, Sir Stringer watches it closely.

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….

The announcements today (October 4th) coming from Cupertino’s giant didn’t make everyone smile -most did not get what they expected.  It was a tough first presentation for the new Apple CEO – the first in the era after Steve Jobs – and he really might have wondered if he had raised the bar high enough.

But why should he?  Apple continues to sell the current iPhone 4 briskly and is moving strongly into new markets like China.  So the company is focusing on more efficient and stable production conditions and the optimization of international sales.  And what could be more needed than a “World Phone”, a phone running all international mobile network standards and providing ultimate flexibility?  Not only for customers, but also for their retail chain.  Simply put, one model to be sold worldwide.  A producer’s dream coming true…

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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.

Writing from New York  a few hours before Irene is set to hit town, this seems genuinely the first broadband-generation social media-heavy hurricane coverage to strike our Northeastern states.

The New York City Mayor wrote me an email, and my Brooklyn neighborhood association sent one, too. So did my beach house community. Even my insurance company seems to worry about me these days.

What strikes me most amidst this blast of e-messages is how different public service announcement now disseminate and how they seem to have changed an entire city’s public perception about what constitutes appropriate disaster recommendations.

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On Monday, August 8, SXSW.com will announce the launch of the SXSW Interactive Scholarship 2012 program. While last year’s scholarship program was limited to nonprofits, this year’s iteration expands its focus to recognize individuals from all sectors and from anywhere in the world who are using new media to push the boundaries of tackling community problems. Nonprofit leaders, grassroots organizers, individual citizens, and civic-minded entrepreneurs are all eligible.

Individuals can begin to submit their essay anytime between Monday, August 8, and Friday, August 26. SXSW and CauseShift will lead the review and selection process with the five scholarship recipients to be announced on Monday, September 19. Each of the five recipients will receive a complimentary SXSW Interactive badge for the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival.

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