Tag: switzerland

Music Star

sarah: By the way… Claudio got the axe on Music Star.
gregorrothfuss: LOL!!!
sarah: And please don’t tell anybody I looked that up. 🙂
gregorrothfuss: too late
gregorrothfuss: i burst out laughing
gregorrothfuss: sooryy
sarah: yeah, yeah, yeah 😉
gregorrothfuss: this is great
gregorrothfuss: anything else i need to know about under my nose?
sarah: Not that I know of, but Ill be sure to keep you informed. 🙂

2007-01-05: Music Star uses KAYWA.

Tomorrow, the third edition of Musicstar (aka American Idol, Superstar) will start on Swiss National Television. Kaywa provides the blogs for the candidates.

What’s special is that the candidates can moblog their videos right from their mobile phone and everyone can then see their flash-movies some seconds later

heh. My old startup continues to have fun projects

Telco Mass extinction

i went shopping for a mobile contract on saturday. with the new alliance between swisscom and vodafone, i was vainly hoping that they would offer an intelligent plan for people who travel a lot and do not want to pay ridiculous roaming charges. i was especially interested in a plan that would let me have 2 numbers, 1 for switzerland and 1 for the us, while also offering me GPRS. of course, no such thing exists. which means i will be looking into VOIP solutions next. meanwhile, the telcos will have a problem on their hands too:

I was just doing some computations today on my fingers and toes on the scale of the problem of replacing voice revenue at a hypothetical telco totally unrelated to my employer:

  • Voice Revenue of hypothetical telco: $25B
  • Proportion of voice revenue that is service rather than access: 50%
  • Gartner prediction for last circuit-switched PSTN call: 2020

Assume you retain 100% of access fees, lose 100% of service fees. Assume wireless and wireline go 100% IP-based.

Some numeric prestidigitation means that on average you need to find $600m of new business EVERY YEAR for the next 17 years. This needs to be conjured up from completely new intermediary roles and new services: access revenue is already factored in. And this is just to stand still. Oh, and it’s front-loaded since most of the people who are motivated to leave because they’re paying a lot will leave in the early years. The last person with a pure circuit PSTN line will be a sad case indeed. So you’re probably looking at having to invent a new $1B business every year. Without fail.

also, dear telcos, what is your strategy for ambient virtual co-presence?

Magnolia


a swiss company released a new CMS yesterday: Magnolia is the first open-source content-management-system (CMS) which adheres to the upcoming standard of Java content repositories. a first look did not impress me that much, the exposed functionality is quite spartan at this point. on the other hand, the repository abstraction is something to look into. also, the ability to move content around with the mouse (see screen shot 2) is neat.

Interactive politics

funnily, i’m knee-deep in politics on this trip. between helping my friend henri who is in charge of IT for kucinich and advising chris who is running for office in palo alto, i’m getting a good idea of how the campaigning works around here. tobias mentions swiss politicians and weblogs. i’m not very hopeful that they will get a clue any time soon, but there are some political weblogs in switzerland. of course they only pay lip service. i mean, what’s up with not updating since december 2002?

Tale of 2 cities

There’s a new partnership between the greater area Zurich (Switzerland) and the San Francisco Bay Area. Founding members of the “San Francisco – Zurich Initiative” are so far Richards Fredericks (former US ambassador in Switzerland), Universities of Berkeley and Stanford, University and ETH of Zurich, Swiss Re and ZKB, Opera of Zurich and the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce. The governments of the 2 cities already indicated interest in supporting the initiative.

very cool, to see 2 of my favorite cities working together like this. whether this will have any discernible impact remains to be seen, but still. also, tobias seems to have moved from postnuke to typepad. i guess he would have made a good beta tester for KAYWA.

KAYWA in the news

Des Suisses se lancent aussi dans l’aventure. Ainsi, le Zurichois Roger Fischer présentera le 5 juillet a Tokyo, lors de la premiere Conference internationale de moblogging, sa plateforme KAYWA, permettant de mieux organiser son site.

as usual, there were some omissions and some wrong facts. typical journalism: “mieux organizer son site” come again? how about fact-checking 101 considering that roger sent a very informative email.