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TEDx Pannonia Videos: get inspired!

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This year, Austria's first TEDx (an independently organized TED conference) took place in Burgenland, the part of Austria closes to Hungary. The landscape here gives a foretaste of the Puszta lowlands, and all us attendants enjoyed a great day filled with many inspiring talks. The Dream Academia boys have organized the conference and now they've done a great job with the videos: all the talks are online, video and audio quality are excellent: TEDx Pannonia: The Talks

TEDx Pannonia - New Energy

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Invitation to the World Blogging Forum in Bucharest

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GermanThis posting is also available in German.

Just before I took off to Andalusia I got mail from Mihaela, asking if I wanted to attend the World Blogging Forum 2009 in Romania as a VIP guest. Yes of course! Flight and hotel room are already booked and I'm looking forward to a conference a lot! The guest- and speaker-list contains a lot of popular bloggers who I'm glad to meet face to face, plus it's the first time I'm going to visit Bucharest. The organizers have invited the most successful bloggers from 30 countries to Romania to discuss the “ideas for a better digital world”:

The most influential bloggers in the world: The event brings together some of the most influential persons in the online media all around the world, in conferences and workshops aiming to establish clear parameters of the development of the online media.

World Blogging Forum 2009

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Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 23/2009

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This weekly round-up comes with a built-in 24 hours of delay, as the author was extremely busy during the last weekend launching the Austrian Internet Council [site in German]. This was an amazing proof of the power of social media: within the short time span of 5 days we our project was the cover story on ORF FutureZone, Austria's biggest Tech News site. Crowdsourcing is great, but it can be quite time-consuming, especially when there's a lot of interest and involvement. So, without any further ado, let's jump right into this week's hot social media topics!

Ignore everybody!

breas! Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid published his first book titled Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity. Just ordered my copy – I'm looking forward to some inspiring quotes and cartoons:

The first rule of business, is never sell something you love. Otherwise you may as well be selling your children.

The Real Pip-Boy Deal

The Pip Boy saved me various time – while I was strolling through the post-nuclear wastelands of Fallout 3. But the nifty little arm-computer might soon enter real life: Engadget shows pictures of an impressive flexible OLED-Display:

The 4-inch organic electroluminescent display sports up to 1.67 million colors, QVGA (320 x 240) 100ppi resolution, and can be bent to a curvature radius of about 2 inches. Hopefully, this doesn't become a must-have fashion accessory any time soon: while it's perfectly appropriate attire for post-apocalyptic wastelands, we don't know how well it'll fly at the sorts of high society social events we normally frequent.

Seesmic Desktop: no Air required

TechCrunch interviewed Seismic founder Loic LeMeur – and the most charming Leena Rao managed to make the man talk:

According to Le Meur, Seesmic will soon be offering a browser based client. This offering is actually appealing, considering that Adobe?s AIR platform has some strange UI bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers. And Seesmic will also launch an iPhone app, which is currently under wraps along with the web-based product.

Jeremy's own Affiliate-Network

Jeremy Shoemaker has been writing about affiliate marketing for quite some time; but recently he launched his own affiliate-network and published a post about his experiences. I'm really curious about his plans:

Sure I hear you? your thinking “Why the hell would you pay people to sign up for a free course?” It's a great question and I think when the dust settles around the shoemoneyx.com program I will write all about it, why I did what, and what exact effect it had. I do have a method to my madness but it's not as many have guessed. We will see if it works but that is for another post

Twitter is becoming infrastructure

Regular Geek posted an interview view on twitter – his main point: Twitter is shifting from an online service to a basic infrastructure upon which early adopters are constructing an eco-system:

So, why is marketing and economy so important to Twitter becoming infrastructure? Without an economy building on top of Twitter data and functionality, Twitter would just be a toy. With people researching the data that is generated from Twitter, it becomes much more important. In order to monetize the system, they can sell the data, but monetization becomes much easier when you become ubiquitous.

Can't argue with that – with all the various mash-ups and the growing interest in real-time search, it seems that Twitter is here to stay. At least for now.

Bing beats Yahoo

Microsoft's new search engine hat a great start: TechCrunch reports that Bing overtook Yahoo – now the question is: will this trend last or will the wearer of the ancient headband #2 leap for a comeback?

The company?s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google?s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

Content ain't king

“The idea that ‘content is king' in blogging is total bullshit” says Viral Garden:

Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. And every day, I see dozens of truly GREAT posts that get no comments. Every day I see dozens of pretty good posts that get dozens of comments and have vibrant conversations.
The difference? Most of the bloggers that write those pretty good posts are also pretty good about leaving their blog and interacting with people on OTHER sites. They comment on their reader's blogs. They tweet their links on Twitter. They are ACTIVELY social with social media.

Interesting thesis… I'd say that both factors come into play. Social media spamming will just piss people off unless you got some stories that are actually worth watching your moves.

Pic of the week

I admit: I just couldn't decide between these two beautiful shots. A direct path was taken by eyesplash Mikul, it's a free-handed shot. The seconded picture portrays a female lying wolf in the zoo of Z?rich and was taken by Tambako the Jaguar:

picweekbird

picweekwolf

Video of the week

Boats are only people – pretty unreliable ones, to be exact. These love boat passenger are in for a wet treat – feel the pain of these great sailors:

This is the end – of this week's round-up. Thanks for stopping by and offering me some of your Whuffies. Let's do it like this: I'll keep posting and you'll keep coming back and drop a dime from time to time :mrgreen:

Input for weekly round-upGot any news you'd like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?
Don't hesitate to contact me! Of course I'll include a backlink to your original story.

So don't hesitate – just click here for the contact form and give me an update on your issues: Give me input!.

Austria must not leave CERN!

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Some of you may yet not have paid any attention to the fact that I'm living, working and teaching in beautiful Vienna, capital of Austria. No surprise, as I usually don't blog about .at-specific topics on this blog. But today I have to make an exception as Austrian minister of scientific affairs Johannes Hahn recently announced – as a complete surprise to all involved parties by the way – that Austria will quit the CERN project. Naturally, a massive wave of protest has risen among Austrian scientists and a petition has been put online.

CERN explained in 3 minutes

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJFllPVIcpg[/youtube]

Even though the page is in German, signing should be quite doable. It's a simple online form, after clicking on the approval list your name is going to appear on the list of supporters which will be presented to the Austrian parliament soon – these guys are the only ones able to stop Hahn's completely erratic plan. There are plenty good reasons for this:

  • The ministry of scientific affair's budget has been raised by 15% percent this year. CERN project accounts for a mere 0,47% of that sum or, in absolute numbers: 16 mio Euros. But from 1994 to 2007 Austrian industry grossed an average total of 6 mio Euros per year via direct CERN projects.
  • The kind of experiments conducted at CERN are so expensive that one single country could hardly handle such a project. Austria has been a partner for 50 years now. The CERN is seen as the top European science cooperation showcase – being a part of that has huge benefits for a countries scientific community.
  • In the past, many great inventions were direct or indirect results of CERN: among them the world wide web, computer tomography, new cancer therapies – to name just a few. And thanks to Prof. Oberhummer I got some more I got some more numbers to put this situation into perspective: 16 Mio Euros is the sum the Austrian public railway company is currently losing – every 3 days.
cern

By the way: Albany, a much poorer country than Austria, recently applied for a CERN membership. Pls Mister Hahn, don't be short sighted. The Austrian scientific community will suffer for years from the aftermaths of this historic misjudgment! As Prof. Herman Feshbach, physics Nobel Prize winner in 2004, puts it:

Scientific prospects at CERN have never been brighter and more exciting, as the great Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project approaches its operational phase. Many years' investment in research, development, and construction are about to bear fruit. There are good reasons to anticipate discoveries that will dramatically advance our most basic understanding of what the physical world is made of, how it works, and even how it came to be. While the primary goal of CERN is to address such fundamental issues, the laboratory is also a treasury of engineering marvels. It has been a seedbed of innovation in computer and communications technology, cryogenics, and large-scale, high-tech project management. Young people learn cutting-edge skills at CERN that they take back to businesses and schools of their home countries. For these reasons I believe that CERN has yielded, and will continue to yield, excellent long-term returns on investment, just as a matter of economics, even apart from its unique scientific value. In addition, since its origins in the aftermath of World War II, CERN has been an inspiring, visible symbol of European unity and cultural vitality. It would be a great loss for Austria, and a blow to Europe and the scientific world, if short-term thinking and lack of vision caused Austria – birthplace of Ludwig Boltzmann, Erwin Schr?dinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Victor Franz Hess, and Lise Meitner – to pull out of CERN now.

Particle Hunters: the CMS-experiment at CERN

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nifTTSfqubM[/youtube]

T-Mobile G1: Android Insights

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T-Mobile G1 Android Google PhoneLuckily, I'm a member of the selected few bloggers who got one of the first T-Mobile G1 phones here Austria. While the device is already available in Great Britain and the UK, the market launch in Austria will take place in 2009, but there's no specific date yet. During the next weeks I'll blog about my experiences with this new geek toy – for starters, here's an unboxing-video:

The first thing that comes to mind is a comparison with the iPhone – but I must say quite frankly that I could never use this phone, as it the lacks the keyboard I need though badly. That's why I'm currently using a T-Mobile HTC MDA, which suits my mobile e-mailing needs much better. Luckily, the G1 has a built-in keyboard as well (the hardware is actually manufactured by HTC) which works quite well. Google doesn't focus on entertainment, there's only 256MB of built-in memory – it's all about the operating system: Android is open source software. Instead of implementing a “single-point-of-software-sale” model (hello iStore), big G is relying on the creativity of the developer community. The number of available apps is quite low, since the device is so new – but this will probably change rapidly. I'm positively surprised on first impression, but I have yet do sync the device with my pc and try some apps.

One phone to bind them all

mobileblogger.at will go online soon – all postings will be aggregated on this site, and while most bloggers run German sites, there will also be some English reviews. Max, Michi, Luca, Peter, Helge, Robert, Martin, Georg and me got our phones yesterday. The official Feature-PDF is available on at T-Mobile US, I'm looking forwarding to testing the G1 under real live conditions – of course I'll keep you updated.

Barcamp in Klagenfurt: My bags are packed

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Barcamp Klagenfurt 2009Lookin' forward to Barcamp Klagenfurt – it's been a while since the last un-conference, and I'm expecting an international crowd: after all, Slovenia is very near, and I'm quite sure that some Swiss, Italian and German web entrepreneurs and bloggers will drop by. If you've never visited the city of the “Lindwurm” (a mythological dragon, the town's landmark), there's a good reason now to travel to Carinthia.

The actual Barcamp takes place during the weekend, but we will all hang out together on Friday – so it's very likely quite a few folks will be hang-overed on Saturday, which is why I might consider doing my presentation on Sunday: I'm planning to speak about future micro-blogging scenarios and I will introduce my “3 twitter strategies”. The perfect chance to test Prezi under live conditions :mrgreen:

The participant list is 51 names long by now, I'm sure there will be at least 100 attendants. Of course the entry is free – it's an unconference. If you want to join, just add your name to the list of participants in the Austrian Barcamp wiki. Big Shout-outs to Georg, Ed and all others involved in the organisation of this event!

Need a place to stay? Klagenfurt's Youth Hostel not only offers very cheap accommodation (EUR 34,- for a single room), it's also located very close by the university, where the BC takes place – reservations can be made via e-mail: Youth Hostel Klagenfurt.

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 48/2008

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weekly round-up KW48Another week bites the dust: and much ado is going on about something that hardly anybody understands: the global financial crisis is spilling over from bankruptcy-filing banks to the car industry and plenty other businesses. Neither Obama nor the new Austrian government (if this comparison sounds strange to you: I live in Austria) will have an easy job: and while the EU is planning coordinated measures, I keep asking myself one question that nobody could answer so far: The governments deem giving cheap credits to banks appropriate. Why don't they hand out those credits – on the same terms – directly to needy companies?

After all, this money is supposed to fuel the economic fire, but so far the amount of money parked at the European central bank by national institutes has increased! Doesn't sound like a good plan to me… but luckily, online-entrepreneurs who specialize in marketing need little to no start-up capital: and that's one of the reasons, why our businesses will bloom in the near future.

Who to follow on twitter

Dan has dug the archives and came up with a list of twitter opinion-leaders:

One of the best ways to get started is by following the

Pictures from Barcamp Vienna

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Last weekend #bcv08 took place at HP headquarters in Vienna. The weekend was incredibly intense, special kudos go out to all the guys from Bratislava who came to join us. We're thinking about a bi-city barcamp, a (really slow) ship might make a great location. The two cities are so close, it's time to start connecting!

[slideshow=2]
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monochrom and the BLF take over Big G

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Austrian art group monochrom recently joined forces with the BLF (Billboard Liberation Front). Their Target: the Google Campus. Their mission: to set up a critical installation called “the great firewall of China”. It's art, so no one went to jail – the BLF knows the US law system like their vest pocket. What neither the monos nor the BLF knew though was that their action took place just on the day of a Google shareholder meeting – great coincidences still do occur in our wonder-less age! ‘njoy the vid:

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