Gestern war viel Aufregung. Google Drive ist da. Kleine Bestandsaufnahme in der Klugen Welt:

Google Drive ist derzeit noch nicht für meine Google Apps Domains verfügbar. Kommt dann halt etwas später. Es sieht so aus, als würde ich einige Themen von Dropbox nach Google Drive schieben. Denn Drive kann Collaboration – das wird in meiner Arbeits- und Projektwelt entscheidend sein.

Und die gestrige Aufregung um das Kleingedruckte? Die Aufregung wird derzeit belächelt. Aber insbesondere in diesem Land ist man da extrem vorsichtig. Der Punkt ist nicht, dass mir gehört, was ich in Google Drive ablege. Im Gegensatz zu anderen Diensten räumt sich Google Rechte über das Ende des Vertrags hinaus ein. Das ist ein Schönheitsfehler. Vermutlich wird es da noch zu Klarstellungen oder Korrekturen kommen.

Eine gute Übersicht über die Cloud-Storage & Sync Lösungen findet man -> hier.

“life is short. you should work with people you like”

“You are much better off if you organize your system around a continuous iteration model”

“If you organize around the consumer, the rest will follow.”

Ich hatte schon einmal das Vergnügen, Eric Schmidt live erleben zu können und war damals sehr beeindruckt. Dieses Video zeigt, das man dem Mann öfter zuhören sollte. Eric Schmidt gibt sehr souverän den “elder statesman”, schwadroniert über alte Zeiten und äußert nebenbei jede Menge simple, aber merkenswerte Weisheiten aus seinem langen Geschäftsleben. Und einige sehr wertvolle Gedanken zu Enterprise Collaboration und der Frage, wie heute Software entwickelt und eingesetzt werden kann.

Eine Stunde lang, keine Sekunde langweilig. Wenn man mal von den ersten 5 Minuten absieht.

Es kommt ja nicht oft vor, dass ein Internet Startup pünktlich am Start ist. contractix ist jetzt gestartet, und zwar pünktlich.

Ab sofort kann jeder die Funktionalität der Vertragsoptimierungs-Plattform nutzen: Verträge erfassen, Übersicht gewinnen, keinen Kündigungstermin mehr verpassen, Einsparpotentiale identifizieren – contractix ersetzt den Vertrags-Ordner im Regal und verschafft Übersicht über alle Dauerschuldverhältnisse im Haushalt.

contractix ist kostenlos und anonym nutzbar. kluge consulting steuert know how und Kapital bei, namhafte Partner wie Check24 liefern Mehrwerte für Anwender. Daher unsere Empfehlung: Testen – und Geld sparen.

… jeder Versuch, Mails durch ausgefuchste Systeme zu sortieren, macht nur Scherereien. Zu diesem Ergebnis kommen Forscher von IBM. Moment mal: Ist das nicht jene Firma, die der Welt Lotus Notes bescherte?

-> SPON über den täglichen Umgang mit der Mailflut und die Erkenntnisse der IBM.

Ecosystem-wise, Berlin has some things going for it that most Western European capitals lack. For starters, it’s cheap to work and live there. Culturally and historically, Berlin is a more natural gateway between Europe’s mature Western economies and the surging talent in Eastern Europe. And Berlin has a surging creative class, largely made up of transplants. It’s become the place where misfits in Europe– people who want to be artists and creators, people who don’t fit in rigid social structures of cities like London– flock to do what they want.

That risk-taking, misfit creative class doesn’t always give rise to out-of-the-box startups, but it was a crucial ingredient in the development of startup ecosystems in San Francisco and Tel Aviv. It’s also something that London has long been criticized as lacking.

If London feels like a European New York; Berlin feels like a European Portland or an Austin or a Boulder. And perhaps one day a European San Francisco.

So we feel we are at the right place to start our new venture. Stay tuned.

Some excerpts from Ray Ozzies post “Dawn of a new day:

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use. Complexity introduces security challenges. Complexity causes administrator frustration.

And as time goes on and as software products mature – even with the best of intent – complexity is inescapable.

Indeed, many have pointed out that there’s a flip side to complexity: in our industry, complexity of a successful product also tends to provide some assurance of its longevity. Complex interdependencies and any product’s inherent ‘quirks’ will virtually guarantee that broadly adopted systems won’t simply vanish overnight. And so long as a system is well-supported and continues to provide unique and material value to a customer, even many of the most complex and broadly maligned assets will hold their ground. And why not? They’re valuable. They work.

But so long as customer or competitive requirements drive teams to build layers of new function on top of a complex core, ultimately a limit will be reached. Fragility can grow to constrain agility. Some deep architectural strengths can become irrelevant – or worse, can become hindrances.

Remembers me not only of Microsoft products but of an collaborative solution he invented.

Furtheron about the shift toward the continuous services and connected devices model:

As we’ve begun to embrace today’s incredibly powerful app-capable phones and pads into our daily lives, and as we’ve embraced myriad innovative services & websites, the early adopters among us have decidedly begun to move away from mentally associating our computing activities with the hardware/software artifacts of our past such as PC’s, CD-installed programs, desktops, folders & files.

Instead, to cope with the inherent complexity of a world of devices, a world of websites, and a world of apps & personal data that is spread across myriad devices & websites, a simple conceptual model is taking shape that brings it all together. We’re moving toward a world of 1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

H sees a future of amazing, pervasive cloud-centric experiences delivered through a world of innovative devices that surround us:

Today’s PC’s, phones & pads are just the very beginning; we’ll see decades to come of incredible innovation from which will emerge all sorts of ‘connected companions’ that we’ll wear, we’ll carry, we’ll use on our desks & walls and the environment all around us. Service-connected devices going far beyond just the ‘screen, keyboard and mouse’: humanly-natural ‘conscious’ devices that’ll see, recognize, hear & listen to you and what’s around you, that’ll feel your touch and gestures and movement, that’ll detect your proximity to others; that’ll sense your location, direction, altitude, temperature, heartbeat & health.

I agree to his predictions for the future. Maybe its not the future of Microsoft he has seen. And even not Googles future. But it will happen.

1. Don’t Reply
If you want to stop receiving so much e-mail, the number one rule is don’t reply to it. The more you reply, the more you will get back. If you break that chain, you are already on a good path to kill most of the e-mail you get.

2. Study Your Inbox
Next, study your inbox. Evaluate the kind of personal interactions that are taking place there. For example, you may find out that you subscribe to a hundred newsletters and you don’t read any of them.
After you’ve studied the way you use your inbox, try to group e-mails together into categories — newsletters, Q&As, e-mails from family members, etc.

3. Tackle One Area a Week
After you’ve evaluated you intake, slowly move one of those groups away from your inbox. Don’t try to cover them all in one go, because it will be too much.

One week, unsubscribe from newsletters and try and find alternative sources such as a feed reader or relevant Twitter accounts.

You may find that you are bombarded with e-mail questions from colleagues, and that you get one particular question 40 times from 40 different people in one month.

So the next week, sort out the Q&A. The way to deal with that is to set up a blog offering the answers. The blog will be indexed by Google, and your answers will be available to everyone out there. This means you are no longer part of the bottle neck, and you are helping people to feed themselves with the information that they need.

Simple steps indeed. I am currently sorting out all these newsletters again and trying to evangelise people by helping them sharing documents. It´s still work in progress since years. Because it is not a question of tools. We had Lotus Notes for years, we have Google Apps, Sharepoint, Wikis and all the helpfull collaboration solutions. But still people mail attachments back and forth.

It is hard to change old habits. But with a new generation of users in the corporate universe this might change. They grew up with Facebook & Co, and they use e-mail today just to write a message to their parents.

Danke für Ihre LotusLive Supportanfrage. Support ist zur Zeit nur in Englisch verfügbar. Wir prüfen, Technischen Support in weiteren Sprachen in Zukunft anzubieten. Wir haben Ihre Anfrage maschinell auf Englisch übersetzt, konnten jedoch keine passenden Antworten finden. Wir bitten Sie, Ihre Support Anfrage in Englisch an support@lotuslive.com zu senden und wir werden Sie weiter unterstützen.

Englische Übersetztung Ihrer Anfrage:

Hello Lotus Support

two concerns torment me:

1. I would like to edit my account information and my password does not work, alternatively, I’ve forgotten. If I reset the password, although I have noticed that an email was sent to me, but it depends on none. Also in the SPAM filter does not matter.

2. My client has established a space on Lotus Live, and I can not add, since I’m already registered. Why, exactly, he can not add an existing account?

My e-mail address is the address of registration:

Thanks for fast support

Greeting

Alexander Kluge

I love translation bots. And I do understand why there is no standard solution for that problem – nobody would ever understand this.

So does mine. Big company, very blue and yellow deciders. And yellow consultants. Conclusion: We will look at LotusLive first.

IBM opened a virtual space for my customer. We started configuring the service and added our team members. All team members? No. There is just one team member that will stay outside the cloud. It´s me.

The reason is simple. All members were new members to LotusLive. Except me. Unfortunatly I did not want to pay for the LotusLive service, so my test account expired and now we were not able to add my email adress:

Remember: We are in Germany and this messages tells the admin to call a US number. Of course he can not call US number from his business phone.

Meanwhile I tried to log in with my old data. Fail. I was told username and password are wrong. So I tried to recover my password, entered my email adress – and was told that my account will be reset immediatly and I will receive a new password. This was about 6 hours ago. Still no email from LotusLive.

So I decided to write to support@lotuslive.com, of course in german, because the User Interface is in german so I was sure there is german speaking support staff on the other site. Then I received an automated response from an account named “ASC”, email adress “ASC@virtela.com”. Who the hell is “Virtela” I thought:

Oha, it´s the LotusLive support, answering in english. This was 11:27 local time. Still there is no answer from what they call the “Sebior support”.

IBM, if you want to play with the others in the cloud, you should care about this. If you offer the service world wide in local language, then you need to support this language. Without toll numbers in the US but with toll free local numbers. If you want to sell that stuff, you should be fast answering problems from test companies. They might change to another provider in the clouds. Its just one mouse click away.