I just came across this blog site where they also show lots of short videos. Contributors are such people like Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Jimmy Wales and many others. I liked the category "Inside the Entrepreneurial Mind" where you have e.g. Richard Branson talking about that people matter the most or the Business of Technology where Seth Godin interviews online business experts to get confirmed what he already knew anyway. Check it out and see if you like it too...

Year end you can find on each popular tech blog a list of the most read stories. Seeing the results I am getting suspicious and ask myself: Why is it that practically all most read tech blog posts are about one of these US tech companies: Apple, Google, Microsoft ("AGM")? Is there nothing else to report about, do people only read about these companies or are there other reasons for this?

Techmeme: (of the top 50 stories in all of 2008, 41 were about AGM)

Engadget: (in the top 20 list 14 were about AGM)

GigaOm: (no list yet, would be interesting to see, I suspect it is in the at least 30% neighborhood)

Techcrunch: (has no list yet, but I bet it is also around 50%, they only comment on the Techmeme list maybe to distract from it? )

Ars Technica: (only 2 of the 10 most viral stories, but they seem to go after other even stronger buzzwords: "sex", "scam", "crime" which is found in 7 of the top 10 stories.)

Below a list of my currently favorite iPhone apps. There are so many iPhone apps out now that I have a hard time keeping up with all of them. In fact I am not keeping up with it. If you want a review of these apps check out AppVee. It seems the currently best review place that I have found at least. Some of their reviews I do not share though at all, so it is still worth checking out the apps by yourself and look for other reviews and opinions elsewhere. The lists below are in random order btw.
Worth noting is that practically all my cloud applications also have a mobile version now which I can add as bookmarks to the iPhone and they look like any other iPhone app; they have just to be launched through the bowser which happens automatically.

For Work:		For Fun:
Instapaper Evernote fring Stitcher Tube (London, Paris, ...) Newsstand Taxi Guide (Shanghai, Beijing...) DianHua WiFinder Holidays Flight Status AirportStatus Record SBB Timetable Google Google Earth LinkedIn iCurrency		Easy Pasta Recipes Shazam Wine Card TV Guide Word Bank (MyWords-Chinese) Flashcards (Chinese characters) Hanoi Cocktails Clubs 20Minuten Aero Weather WeatherEye Stanza iChillout FourFree Blanks

While Europe excelled in old style industries such as automobiles (which are now facing lots of problems), it seems to be a much smaller player in IT, Internet and - data-communications. So is that perception based on reality or just what we read and see every day? Let's first look at what I experience daily - and I might not be so untypical, I would think.

Lenovo laptop used. OK, this is a shared China-US domain. Now Lenovo is a China-based company, manufacturing is done in China but I think still designed in the US. Lots of components are from US companies like Intel CPU, NVIDIA video processor and the Windows operating system. The software I am using is mainly a US domain too: Mozilla Firefox, Seamonkey e-mail client, Microsoft Office, online calendar, web collaboration, VoIP (Skype is US owned now), web presentation, photo sharing, online CRM; Ok I think you've got the picture (for the record: my security software is from Europe).

Now let's look at my mobile connectivity: Apple iPhone, Samsung D600. Sorry, Opera guys, but you do not show up, although you need to be mentioned here as the number one mobile browser vendor.

Things look a little bit different, though, behind the scenes. While my Swisscom last-mile provider is definitely a Cisco shop, they work with Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent I think for the mobile infrastructure. OK, here we are still present but Chinese guys are on our heels (Huawei and ZTE).

So overall, a mostly lost game, although things look a bit more friendly in business software with many local "no-name" players and SAP as a powerhouse even now. Of course Oracle, HP and IBM are rolling up the little players here, too, and will do so more in 2009.

Looking at the above, while we do not have the same problems with basic infrastructure such as
airports, railway systems or mobile and fixed line telecom systems, I think we also will need a reboot for the IT, Internet and datacom industries.

I therefore call for a bail out plan for the IT industries in Europe. Use the money to catch up again and set ambitious goals. Along the same lines are recent calls for supporting the space programs in Germany with a plan to fly to the moon. At first I had a good laugh, asking myself "when was it again that they first landed on the moon? Why would hundred of millions spent to do something that is the same as others did nearly 40 years ago be any good for general competitiveness? But the good thing is that for once they are trying to come up with a general plan for high-tech too (and not only for the bank and automobile vendors)- Even if the first ideas seem a joke maybe it could lead in the right direction once they start thinking some more?

One thing I can say for sure: If the US. thinks they can reboot from their total current mess, then it should be possible to have a reboot of the IT industry in Europe and come back as well.

Come year end, you start reflecting on what happened in the past year, and of course what to expect for the new year. Here's my very personal list of some of the things I enjoyed most in 2008. This list is only a way to show what I liked and therefore not a "list of 2008" as many of the things I only discovered this past year but had been around for much, much longer, without me knowing about them before...

Best gadget I spent money on

Also for me as for many others, the iPhone was the highlight. I still have the 2G version as I do not like the ultra-short battery run time of the 3G model. The iPhone apps are simply revolutionizing mobile communications and for me lots of great applications have already totally changed the way I do things. Mostly, travelling has become easier as you can find many great apps for the major locations. Also, I started to listen more to podcasts with Stitcher and, lastly, could find some nice language tools as well (Chinese e.g.). And of course it stores hundreds of pictures and songs and a few videos as well, helping to make travel times on long distance flights seem much shorter.

Best places I visited

Living in one of the best places to live in the world - in Zurich - makes traveling a bit harder in the sense of measuring everything against what you take for granted in your home town. I still enjoyed going to places such as Stockholm, Shanghai, Barcelona, and this time around I even had a pleasant stay in hectic and traffic-jammed Paris. One of the most surprising places I went was in the US during a family reunion: Northern Michigan. It was picked by our US relatives and turned out to be a great place to go to, and not only because of the so-suitable summer hit song from Kid Rock.

Best countries I did business with

This is a tough one to call as it typically depends much more on who you can do business with than on the place. One would e.g. imagine that it should be easy to do business in Switzerland compared with places in Southern Europe like Italy, Spain or Greece, but my personal experience showed that this is actually not always true. A very mixed experience we had with Israel where the range is from very bad to excellent so it definitely depends on the who rather than the where. China is of course the same: if you do not know the people well and are not able build up a trusting relationship, you should not enter into any business relationship at all. But my personal best this year was Sweden. Interestingly, in Finland, where you would expect things to be much as they are in Sweden due to the proximity, my experience was rather negative and I got confronted with lots of local protectionism and not very trustworthy managers. But maybe in 2009 this will change when I can finally meet the right people there as well?

Best business books I read

I stopped reading business books that are not based on very concrete first-hand studies or personal experiences or interviews. They turn out to be too theoretical/academic and do not add much value for me. This year I read two very practical books that I can highly recommend: Entrepreneurial Success in Shanghai and YES! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion.

Best food I ate

When it comes to food the best places for me are in Italy. If you like seafood you might be surprised to hear that Milano is a great place to have excellent seafood. Milano is a trading hub for seafood even if it is not at the coast at all (1-2 hours drive way) which is the reason why you find some of the best seafood restaurants here.

Best blogs I enjoyed reading

I have subscribed to many blog feeds and try to check them daily. Unlike some US VCs who seem to have nothing else to do all day long than read and write blogs, I have to restrict my time to maybe 30 min per day which is not as much as I would like to but as much as I can spare. I have checked out some of the blog posts with the announcement of Google's Chrome browser and tried to take a snapshot on the quality of the articles. Of course this was only a snapshot and not representative of what they write about all year around. Still it gave some flavour of what you can expect and could run into. Blog post quality can range - not surprisingly - from excellent to total rubbish and all coming from the exact same blog (not on our blog site of course ). Ars Technica won that snapshot contest while quite a few other highly visible ones turned out to be pretty bad. My favorites typically are: Techmeme, I, Cringley (now he has a new blog), and Seth Godin. Lots of press recently has gone to Valleywag with is celebrity (both bad and good) co-founder. For me Valleywag reads quite boring, lacks deep practical experience with anything I would call marketing and sales and also has no technology understanding. It is from an analyst who turned into a writer, and that is what you get. Interesting of course is how he looks at it from a pure financial point of view, as this is what you can expect VCs and financial analysts would do as well, so still worth looking at it once in a while. It's the money speaking...

Best airline I flew with

Swiss is still in a class of its own and seems to be blossoming nicely ever since Lufthansa put their protective arm around them. The leather seats are simply the most comfortable I have found in any airline and the service is always excellent. Most pleasant surprise in 2008 was the fact that pricing is now also highly competitive, to the point where flying with a no-frills, zero-customer service airlines like Easyjet is not worth it any longer on certain routes.

Best movies I saw

It should have said "best DVDs" here as I hardly ever go to the cinema, and if then only with my kids. Madagascar 2 was great and actually also entertaining for adults as the dialogues are written for us grown ups as well. The kids loved it and the "movin, movin..." song gets you shaking for sure. Some of the others are actually not from 2008 but I saw them this year for the first time so that's why they show up here still. A Good Year with Russell Crowe, directed by Ridley Scott, is a great movie making fun of both the French and the Brits but at the end they come together nicely. Letterheads with George Clooney and Renee Zellweger I enjoyed on a long-distance flight and liked how the main actors enjoyed making this movie themselves. The German comedy "Männerpension" made by Detlev Buck with Til Schweiger was macabre but very refreshingly unconventional and not US style at all. For action Mr. & Ms. Smith was surprisingly top when I saw it on the plane. The story is dull but the action scenes are outstanding and also I think it becomes obvious that this was the beginning of the Brangelina story...

Now in case you like Abba (come on admit that they are not so bad at all, ) then you HAVE to see the movie Mamma Mia. One Abba hit after the other and quite well matching each scene in the movie. They had real fun making this movie too, that is for sure and it shows. Great! So I say "Thank your for the music, the songs I am singing, thanks for all the joy it's bringing - and thanks for giving this movie to me."

Best music I came across

Sophie Zelmani was my very personal discovery this year. The other favorite turned out to be The Killers. Don't take the band name literally, in fact I have no idea why they picked this nonsense name, but still their music and latest album is simply fantastic IMHO.