What VoIP can do to roaming charges is shown in the US where international calls for both mobile and fixed line are quite cheaper than in Europe. This morning I came across this news here and was quite amazed about it.

I have a special mobile roaming deal that allows me to make "cheap" international mobile calls for 39c per minute. This is about 2-5 times lower than calls with the average mobile operator in Europe.

Now, with Gorilla Mobile you can make calls for only 5cents per minute though. It uses VoIP technology but is only available with a US number and for calls originating from the US. They say it will be available as an app for the iPhone as well soon.

Perception is everything in marketing and branding. It seems the exact same is true with economic forecasts. Just last week the overall perception was that the US is up for a recession (awaiting still the full impact of the financial services and housing crash) and while Europe is growing slower compared with a few months ago things look much brighter.

Now suddenly the US dollar goes up against the Euro and also the oil price rises again. Something not seen in quite a while and quite unusual. Market analysts talk the Euro economy down, supported by consumer and company indexes in Germany that show its lowest level in 3 years.

Of course this all makes no sense at all. It is looking at it with the perspective of half a glass empty rather than full. Surveys in the US show that more people are seeing the economy getting better now but at the same time there are 40% of people who say they had cash flow problems in the last 90 days and still 30% think the economy is getting even worse. So it is clear that opinion makers are at it here. If in Europe a survey would reveal such numbers, I think we would consider this as the worst economic downturn since World War II or so...

Warren Buffet is buying US dollars. Ok I would too since the Euro got way too high. But to think now that the one economy is up and the other is down overnight makes no common sense.

iPhone apps have catapulted the wireless mobile industry into a new millennium. Everyone will benefit: Apple of course, the app developers now having a platform to make good revenue quickly; the other wireless device vendors and developers as they now also have a path to tap into the market of the billions of mobile phone users, allowing them to profit, too, if they move fast.

• the neutral app recommendation site www.appvee.com contains lots of copied and neutral info on iPhone apps, plus reviews. This site helps with finding your applications.
• there are apps restricted to use in North America only: WeatherBug (temperature in Fahrenheit only), Pandora radio (does not run in Europe), AirportStatus (also keeps crashing on startup, latest: now it works!), NWA travel...
  
• my favorite apps right now are (a snapshot as things change daily):
• Evernote, great notebook that also has a website that lets you better organize and share your notes
• MProfs, nice short marketing tips and how to stories, with some good contributions in it
• SBB Timeplan, giving you fast access to the Swiss public transport timetables
• 20min, free Swiss news source, best are the available news videos, I think
• Bloomberg, this has proven to be the so far best stock market news and tracker application for me, its counterpart Swissquote lacks basic usability features, which is a shame, as otherwise they could be even better I think, so right now I'm still using Bloomberg
• WinWeinReb, a big database in German for wine grapes, after you key in the wine grape name you get infos about its major locations and also a description of its to be expected taste, a database that gives access to the wines itself would be a great extension, hope they do that for free then too
• AeroWeather. There are many other -- it seems great -- to-be-paid for tools for pilots available, but AeroWeather is for free and provides the latest reported weather at all major aiprorts worldwide, including METARs and TAFs in both raw and decoded versions: very nice tool!
• nice stuff for just playing around: Mandarin phrase book, Cocktails, Brain Tuner, Newtons Cradle, Blanks (new English words), PangeaVR (3D panoramas), Midomi and Shazam (recognize songs)
• more useful tools: Currency, ZIPcodes, Units, Translator, Cards, WeekNumber

Two days ago American Airlines launched as the first airline in the US Wifi access aboard three flight routes from New York to San Francisco, to LA and to Miami. Next airlines to follow will be Virgin America and Delta Airlines. Delta will offer it even on all their domestic flights. The technology company behind this is Aircell who is in business since 17 years and is the provider of the inflight telephone communications.

The Wifi service is called Gogo and it seems to work very well as this test report here shows. Unlike its European counterparts (I have yet to find any flight with this service although they all talk about it for quite a while) who use satellite links, Aircell's Gogo service uses ground base stations scattered across the US. This seems a much better, for sure higher-speed service than going over the slow satellite links. Maybe an idea for the European community to think about building such an infrastructure as well. I will for sure try to check out Gogo on my next trip in the US and then report back my experience with it. One time flat fee is 13 USD BTW which is not that cheap but also still affordable.

One year ago I already trialed Genius.com organizing initial e-mailings to prospective clients. At first I was excited - as far as I remember - but then I decided to drop it anyway due to a lot of missing features and also lack of stability.
Now I am impressed with it and Genius.com got much closer to deserving its name.
As with many good software tools usability makes the difference. Exactly this is what the Silicon Valley based VC funded startup does extremely well now and most importantly very reliably and stable. Investment into the platform and into the Ajax client user interface have paid off.

They also addressed the spam filter issue now very well. No cookies are used. Genius.com solves this problem, at least for now, by giving your websites a unique new URL which is all that is needed to identify who, for how long and in what order clicked onto your websites. You can even replay what someone did on your website showing its path and time spent on each page, so you can draw real conclusions that help decide what to do next with each prospect.
Equally well done is the management of emails and contacts organized in SmartGroups. Here a lot of goodies have been added compared with a year ago.

One nice feature is the possibility to add a remove footer when you send out the e-mail to more than 20 recipients. This complies with US anti-spam regulations and is also in Europe good to have.

Overall Genius.com is a very good tool that solves a current problem very nicely. I will have to test the integration with salesforce.com still but also here it appears the company's product management is eager to provide a complete user experience. With regards to it's business model one can expect that they position themself for a trade sale to one of the BIG players such as Microsoft, salesforce.com or maybe Google. I can so far fully recommend Genius.com to create, execute, analyze and coordinate your business e-mailings and have it all integrated with other website analytics or CRM tools.

Having tested XING over many months, Germany's biggest newspaper FAZ came to this conclusion (in short): XING is a place to discuss all kinds of subjects, an entertaining, comprehensive place for dating and hobby forums where you can find friends and your partner for life maybe. But as a business contact tool it is not suitable at all.

"Das Web-2.0-Konstrukt Xing, glauben wir, hat die besten Zeiten schon hinter sich. Aus unserer Sicht ist es ein unterhaltsames Panoptikum für alle Themen der Welt, ein vielseitiges Flirt- und Hobby-Forum, in dem man Freund und Lebenspartner finden kann. Für berufliche Zwecke erscheint uns Xing kaum geeignet, denn Kontrakte und Kontakte machen wir immer noch persönlich und am Telefon. Daran hat auch Web 2.0 nichts geändert. Die virtuelle Gemeinschaft vermittelt nur das Gefühl, ein wenig näher am Geschäft zu sein. Das Gegenteil ist der Fall."

I agree with this statement, having just unsubscribed from it as well. While it was possible to find certain contacts in the IT community, having used it for one of our clients in business development, I saw little prospect of bottom line results with it. I think that the members are mostly freelancers and job-seekers who use it as an inexpensive tool to maybe some day land a freelance or full-time job, and then it pays for itself. If nothing comes of it, and that is probably the case for most people, it does not do any harm either, as expectations are anyway very low. An analogy would be installing a low-cost software package and testing it on your PC -- if it is not exactly what you were looking for you simply de-install it. The very same business model is what the XING people seem to be after...