I have been pretty happy with my mobile operator TeliaSonera. It has Sweden's best coverage and did recently introduce relatively cheap roaming packages for other EU countries.

Nevertheless, the company has a track record of limiting P2P traffic which means that Skype calls via 3G (or 4G if you have a compatible handset) are a rather frustrating experience. 

Today ArcticStartup reports that the operator plans to charge for mobile VoIP calls as of Summer in both Spain and Sweden.

I get it: Losing regular voice minutes to VoIP is a challenge for operators since it means lower revenue. Still, charging customers extra for something they already pay for sucks big time and is nothing but an evil move. 

It's not complicated: I pay 149 SEK (about 16 Euro) for 1 Gig of data/month. That's not even a very competitive price, but ok, Telia has always been a bit more expensive than the competition, and the special roaming deals make up for it. 

BUT: I want to be able to use those 1 Gig the way I want. It's one Gig of data/month I am paying for and I don't want Telia to come and tell me "You can use it for surfing, but not for VoIP, which costs more". All data has to be treated equally, at least if I pay rather a lot for that data.

For the price of 149 SEK I expect full freedom in using my monthly data. 

Fortunately, there is competition on the Swedish mobile market. If Telia pulls through with their plan an starts to block mobile Skype calls entirely, I will switch to Telenor, "3" or Tele2. 

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Hehe, this is sooo true (in my experience at least):

But you know when you go into an Apple Store, and it’s filled with sometimes scary Apple fanatics who seem to have arrived at a holy place? That’s Google+ for Google.

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Imagine you need quick help with a decision or an answer to a question. You pull out a mobile app on your smartphone, type in what you want to get feedback on, and within a few minutes you have 30 to 50 replies from the community - in form of votes (thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral) or free text comments.

This is what New York based iOS and Android app Thumb has managed to accomplish. I read about it in a recent VentureBeat article which stated that the app is twice as addictive as Pinterest. First I was sceptical, but after having played with Thumb this weekend I can state that it is in fact incredibly addictive. Proof: Within 48 hours I have voted on 722 items (and I have received 16 good advice stars from other users on my comments). 

Yesterday I was at a party, and I think I made at least 6 or 7 people download the app, after I took a photo of the crowd and asked the Thumb community whether they thought the party was good or not. Seeing new replies coming in every few seconds is pretty amazing compared to the rather low engagement levels and user activities of most other social apps.

Voting on other peoples’ questions is quite entertaining. And even though some of the requests for opinions are rather silly, it’s hard to quit because one always wonders what the next question might be. That’s the most addictive part. 

Also I haven’t stumbled upon a single vulgar or NSFW question, despite the fact that they are published immediately. The company must be running some automatic filter software that recognizes and removes questionable content.

I have no idea whether Thumb will be able to keep this high user engagement up. But if they do, this app will become huge!

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Last week, Oink (a recommendation app I really liked) announced that it will be closing down - less than 5 month after launch. A few days later, All Things D reported that members of Milk Inc, the company behind Oink, including founder Kevin Rose were hired by Google.

So Oink is gone and Rose and some of his colleagues will work with Google+ in the future.

I imagine that the talk between Google and Kevin Rose went something like this:

Google: “Hi Kevin. We’d like some of you guys to work for us. You get 1 to 2 million Dollar signing bonus each, and of course your investors get they money back, including a little extra”

Kevin Rose (after checking with his investors): “Nice. Let’s do. But what about Oink?”

Google: “We don’t want it. But people are becoming increasingly hostile towards our company, because of the way we prioritize Google+ and close a lot of our less popular services. So that’s why we can’t communicate the deal as us acquiring Milk and then closing down Oink. You need to shutdown Oink by yourself, before joining us. So you take the blame, not Google”

Kevin Rose “Well, ok. I don’t want to put more effort into Oink anyway, so I can live with that"

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Just for the record. Yesterday over at netzwertig.com I coined the term “Kony Effect” (in the style of “Streisand Effect”).

My definition would be something like that:

The Kony Effect is an online phenomenon where a highly emotional, slightly manipulative, factual possibly not fully correct information including a call for action is spread by millions of people online within a very short amount of time - before others had the chance to validate and question the facts presented.

Let’s see if it catches on.

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I had some discussions with hardcore Google+ users lately (yes they actually exist). More than once their reaction towards my criticism of the project (which is technically sophisticated but struggles to find its real purpose) was something like “You are doing it wrong, so it’s no surprise you don’t see the potential”. 

Even directors at Google use this kind of defence, as Google’s guy in charge of social, Vic Gundotra, showed at SXSW yesterday:

“The other answer popular with Gundotra was, “We’re misunderstood.” People aren’t using Google+ correctly. They don’t realize most sharing is done privately, for example, which is why many profiles look dead.”

Personally I think this is the weakest argumentation ever, because it suggests that people have an unlimited amount of time to figure out each of the thousands of social web tools and apps out there, in order to learn to understand them.

The opposite is true: The user’s time budget is extremely limited. If a new site wants to convince them that it’s worth to redistribute some minutes spent on other sites to the new contender, it needs to be able to make the value clear.

If users misunderstand Google+, then that’s Google’s fault, not the user’s.

The best thing Google can do for Google+ is to make sure people don’t misunderstand it. 

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I usually don’t write about smartphone games but yesterday my friend Viktor introduced me to Draw Something, and in the second I saw it I knew this will get me hooked immediately.

Draw Something, available for iPhone and Android, lets you play with your Facebook friends (or other people). The task is to draw a picture describing a word and to make your friends guess what it could be. If they guess right, you get points. 

Here in Sweden Draw Something seems to go viral right now (almost 10.000 reviews) and judging from the 320.537 reviews in the US app store, it’s already pretty big over there. As usual (and probably due to the language barrier since Draw Something is only offered in English, although no advanced English skills are needed), my home country Germany lags behind, with only 172 reviews in total.

Try it. My username is “imartin”.

P.S. it's a bit too easy to cheat since you could simply draw the letters of the word you are supposed to describe in a picture. I think the app should get some intelligence to recognize and prevent drawings with letters in it.

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...of this incredibly good track called "Moderation" by Australian producer Light Year.

It's a real masterpiece because the sound and video fit so perfectly together. I have been watching this clip now at least 10 times. It somehow touches me a lot, despite or maybe even because of the strange atmosphere it creates. 

via

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What's the deal?

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In a poll of 1900 people conducted by sodahead.com (via) about the new Facebook Timeline profile, only 10 percent of the participants over the age of 65 liked the new profile style, but 34 percent of those between 18 and 24. 

Despite the fact that there might be a 1000 possible factors making such a poll not very meaningful (like the assumption that there probably weren’t to many participants over the age of 65 at all), it still confirms the general theory that, the older people get, the less they are able or willing to adapt to change.

Thinking about the increasing intensity and speed with what the world is changing in the digital age, my guess is that the capability to adjust to change and to see an ever transforming environment as neutral or even positive instead of negative might become one of the most important (new) skills of human beings.

In the past, it seems as if one could have a fulfilled life without the permanent need to adapt to change. I’m not sure but I’m afraid that won’t be the case anymore in the upcoming years and decades.

Thus, becoming older myself and reaching the age of 30 in about a year, I will do everything possible to keep a positive attitude towards change. Of course, not every change is good, and the Timeline profile might actually be less useful than the old profile page. So the deal is not to appreciate any change, even it is for the worse, but to give yourself some time to evaluate and to get used to it before you make your final judgement as well as to always see the theoretical potential for improvement that comes with changes. 

One of my goals is to have a similar attitude towards change when I’m 60 as I do now. Not sure if I’ll manage, but it’s worth a try.

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The whole Megaupload case is starting to look odd.

Here is what happened in chronological order:

First, in December, a viral music video appears, a commercial by Megaupload featuring a couple of high profile US artists supporting. The video was later removed from YouTube due to complaints by Universal Music - which didn’t own the rights to the clip. That led Megaupload to sue Universal. 

Right before Christmas, Megaupload launched MegaBox, a music streaming service. According to the reports, the plan was to allow artists to sell their songs and to keep 90 percent of the earnings. I tried MegaBox without getting too impressed - I expected free full length songs but only found 30 second previews. And in order to upload your own music collection to the service, one had to download a special client, which I didn’t trust (it’s still Megaupload we are speaking about). Nevertheless, the thought of Megaupload and artists working together, removing the labels from the equation, sounds revolutionary. 

A couple of weeks later, it was reported that multi-million selling hip-hop producers Swizz Beats was the CEO of Megaupload. Later, after the raid, it was said that he actually hadn’t signed a contract yet.

A day later, Megaupload was shutdown by federal prosecutors, the people behind the site (including Kim Schmitz) were arrested in New Zealand.

Then, yesterday, tweets by hiphop celebrity Busta Rhymes emphasized how Megaupload proved to be a working business model for artists who got paid by the site if their free songs got downloaded a lot - cutting out the middle man aka the labels.

Putting all those pieces together makes it look as if the Megaupload people were about to seriously attack the music industry - with the help and support of some very popular artists. 

Before this could happen, the FBI stopped it.

Despite the fact that Kim Schmitz and the other Megaupload crew members definitely aren’t the most trustworthy people, and despite the fact that there hardly was any copyright protected media content that wasn't available through Megaupload, this case seems to be more complex than what it initially looked like.

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Important!

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A few days ago I was at the cinema, watching “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. At several occassions during the movie (which is worth watching if you haven’t already seen the Swedish original), the characters work with MacBooks, with the bright Apple logo at the backside being very visible to the audience.

In 2010, Apple products appeared in 30 percent of the 33 movies that hit No. 1 at the box office. Although I’m not sure if Apple actually pays for these placements (according to this it doesn’t), many other companies do pay for having their products shown. The Wikipedia article about product placements cites an older forecast about spending on film placement which was supposed to reach 1,8 billion Dollar in 2010. Not sure how the actual figures look like, and it seems unlikely that product placement can fully finance a movie, but it’s still a revenue source for movie companies that shouldn’t negatively be affected by piracy. On the contrary - the more copies of a movie are being downloaded, the bigger the reach of the companies that have paid for showing their products. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of unauthorized downloads is increasingly affecting the prices of the placement. Like this: “We expect 20 million illegal downloads and eventually 80 million people watching the movie without paying. For that audience we gonna charge you XX percent extra for your product placement”.

This is no fact, just speculation based on obvious facts: 

1. Hollywood movies are increasingly crammed with products that companies pay for to be shown. 
2. Subtile marketing messages work whether the copy of a movie is pirated or not.
3. The movie studios would be stupid not to count those “inofficial” viewers. Hence, they will consider those when defining the prices of the placement.

I guess, nobody would go on the record with that. And again, there probably can’t be enough product placement to fully finance an expensive Hollywood movie without the movie having the feeling of a 2 hour commercial. But it’s something one should at least have in mind: Each pirated copy actually helps the movie studios to charge more for product placement. Because movies are increasingly becoming ads. And they probably will become even more.

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Fanboyism is an interesting topic. Instapaper founder Marco Arment, an outspoken Apple fan, argues that the term usually is used by people who own another device or product and who feel insulted by that someone is casting doubt upon their choice of product. Hence, they start to discredit that someone by calling him/her fanboy (or fangirl).

From the accuser’s point of view, fanboy means - according to Arment - someone who is blindly and irrationally devoted to a product that I believe is inferior to what I bought when faced with a similar choice, and whose opinions and arguments can therefore be completely disregarded.

Not surprisingly, Arment is mainly referring to the never ending conflict iOS/Apple vs Android. 

I think, Arment is missing something: Not everybody calling another person a fanboy is necessarily defending the "opposite party” or even owning their product. I use and enjoy the iPhone and iPad, still there are persons that I would undoubtedly call Apple fanboys.

In my eyes, a fanboy is simply someone who has an unbalanced positive view on a product and an unbalanced negative view on the competitor’s products. A real fanboy (or fangirl) is practically incapable of serious criticism to the company or product he/she’s devoted to - at least not without criticising the biggest competitor even more. Fanboys often turn into passionate bashers of the competitor.

So is Arment a fanboy? Not sure, but I think he’s close. As are lots of people who own Apple products. Though I actually don’t mean it as an insult.

There might even be two kinds of fanboyism - healthy (passion) and unhealthy (fanaticism) one. The latter is bad, because it makes people very predictable and hard to have a factual discussion with. 

And something else, while we are speaking about Apple fanboys: In the lights of the latest “Is there value in blog comments?” discussion, it’s remarkable that those usually siding with Apple (like Marco Arment, MG Siegler, John Gruber) all have deactived their comments feature. The need for total control seems to be something Apple and it’s biggest, most emotional fans have in common.

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For me, the most exciting new startup of 2011 was without a doubt ifttt, the San Francisco based service that lets you connect about 40 web services and functions with each other. It’s like digital duct tape and an awesome way to become more efficient by automating regular tasks.

I use ifttt for instance to add links in tweets I favour to Instapaper, to tweet articles from RSS feeds including specific keywords and to backup my Instagram photos to Dropbox. 

I asked ifttt founder Linden Tibbets about what to expect in 2012. He replied that he didn’t want to go into details for now but promised that they are building “some really neat stuff for the first few month”.

So under the assumption that his hesitation to tell me more doesn’t mean that he’s about to sell ifttt (which I really don’t hope), there might be some really cool new stuff coming. 

In fact I believe ifttt could become one of the rising stars of the next 12 month. Eventually I expect the service to widen its horizon by not only focusing on web services but to also include devices and things that are connected to the Internet. To begin with, ifttt could integrate with connected devices such as gaming consoles, Nest, Jawbone, Fitbit or Sonos hardware. Just as one example, by enabling Nest support via ifttt, one could change the settings of the intelligent Thermostat through email, tweets or even a phone call. 

The Internet of Things is coming. In the long run, ifttt could partner up with all kinds of electrical appliances manufacturers to allow them to interact with other cloud services and to be controlled through them. 

Establishing these kind of partnerships would require a lot of manpower and well connected people, so ifttt would need to grow and hire staff. Thanks to recent funding from Betaworks, resources to start with are available.

I’m not sure if this is the direction ifttt will aim at in 2012, but I see huge potential which also should help the service to get attention outside of the core user group of hardcore geeks. 

Can’t wait to see what ifttt has up its sleeve for the near future!

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During the weekend, I gave the TV show "A Good Wife" a try. I ended up watching 14 episodes almost in a row. 

It's brilliant, and so is the main actor Julianna Margulies. 

It's my discovery of the year. Together with "The Killing".

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Over at netzwertig.com we have been conducting our annual poll, asking fellow tech bloggers from Germany/Switzerland/Austria and readers about their favourite online service of the year.

Based on the individual top 5 of 62 bloggers and readers with knowledge in the startup and technology field, we compiled a list of the 11 most-mentioned services. After that, readers had 5 days to vote for their favourite. 1674 people chose to do so.

Here is the result (number of mentions among the 62 experts in brackets)

01. Dropbox (17)
02. Google+ (20)
03. WhatsApp (9)
04. Instagram (11)
05. ifttt (13)
06. Wunderlist (7)
07. SoundCloud (6)
08. Evernote (10)
09. Reeder (6)
10. Instapaper (13)
11. Hootsuite (6)

Facebook, Google search and Twitter (but not 3rd party apps) were excluded to make sure the list doesn't become too boring.

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There is a lot of discussion going on about Facebook's "frictionless sharing" feature after this CNET article stating that by automatically publishing any app activity (like songs listened to or articles read) to Facebook the social network is ruining sharing.

Personally, I'm not a fan of frictionless sharing (as described here in German), and I have difficulties to understand those who claim it is the future of sharing (like MG Siegler or Marshall Kirkpatrick - who criticises the feature for other reasons).

It's not that I doubt that sharing everything as default with the chance to opt-out on a item-basis could be in fact the future of sharing - if Facebook sticks to its plans and allows more apps than the initial launch partners to enable frictionless sharing, it might become the default way of sharing (if user and privacy advocates' protests aren't becoming too intense)

But what I haven't seen so far from the frictionless supporters' side is a reasonable argumentation where the real value for the user is. I doubt it actually exists.

Songs people listen to, articles they read or videos they watch aren't necessarily what they would recommend you. Often it's even the other way round: The crap gets most of the attention, which with frictionless sharing means it is also most visible in your network. 

If a friend pushes the share or like button to recommend a piece of content I can be sure he/she really wants everybody to try it.

If a friend listens to the the latest release of Justin Bieber, it doesn't mean anything (of course I don't have friends who do). And even if five of my friends would listen to it, it still doesn't mean anything if they simply clicked on my first friend’s stream, out of curiosity or astonishment.

I would like to appreciate frictionless sharing, because I'm always open for seeing the digital world changing our behaviour in a meaningful way.

With frictionless sharing, I don't see it. It has no value for most users, (Scoble says "I’ve found new music over the past two months.I’ve found new news over the past two months" - I don't doubt that. Still there are billion better ways to find new music and "new news"), but it leads to oversharing and a lack of control about your privacy (I have already seen how hard apps try to get you to share your media consumption. In the future, it means one has to pay even more attention to the settings)

That's why I'm sceptical about it. That's why I switched off Spotify's auto sharing to Facebook (instead I switch it on when I listen to something I really want others to check out), and that's why I hardly look at the Facebook music dashboard to see what my friends have listened to. 

So to sum up: frictionless sharing might be the future of sharing if Facebook wants so, but that doesn't mean it's the best way of sharing. I don't think so. As long as nobody convinces me of the opposite (I'm always open for that).

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TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher has just published a post outlining the changes the European tech blogosphere has been going through in the past years in conjunction with the flourishing of European startups and the emergence of tech hubs such as London and Berlin.

One of his suggestions is that more tech blogs covering local or national startup scenes publish in English instead (or in addition) to their native language. 

Mike is not the first one two make this point, and he won't be the last.

Since I'm the editor of a tech blog publishing articles in German, I have been thinking a lot about this issue lately. 

From my point of view, the language issue can bee seen from two different angles.

1. The European tech ecosystem supporter's perspective

From this perspective it's clear that Europe needs more tech blogs publishing startup reviews and tech news in English. One of the main barriers for Europe to create a strong Internet ecosystem with an international impact and the strength to build startups which can become more successful than their Silicon Valley competitors even in the Valley is the intransparency and lack of network effects leveraged caused by the different languages. In Slovenia people don't know what's going on in Spain, in UK people have a hard time following the developments in the Baltics, and so on. And in the US, Asia and Africa, they only know about European startups what's been written on the international Tech blogs (which is not a lot). Each country has its own little hypes and minor-scale successes, but apart from TechCrunch Europe, The Next Web (which is a bit broad for my taste to be seen as a pure European tech blog) and a few conferences there is not a lot to connect all those.

And reading articles in foreign languages with Google translate is not really a solution (although I can recommend Swedish to English translation, which is almost perfect).

2. The reader's perspective

From the angle of the reader, switching from a local language to English to support the European tech ecosystem and please its supporters doesn't automatically seem to be a good idea. At least in the German speaking countries there are lots of people who love to read about tech, who follow the big US sites and who still say that they enjoy reading tech news in German. And I'm confident that this is rather the rule than the exception.

Since most tech blogs are primarily written for the readers (at least they should be), it's not surprising that the blog landscape looks the way it does.

+++

So personally I believe there is a need for both: A real Pan-European tech blog in English with local reporters in most countries would be the best thing that could happen to Europe's Internet and startup ecosystem (TechCrunch Europe is from the content focus still more a TechCrunch UK, although Mike is traveling like a maniac throughout Europe to attend conferences and connect entrepreneurs and investors - and The Europas is a great effort to put a spotlight on the continent).

That being said, for the foreseeable future there'll always be a demand for tech blogs written in local languages - especially in the bigger countries of Europe. 

Ideally, those sites would be the sources for the Pan-European tech blogs' reporters, which could pick up the most interesting pieces of news and most exciting startups and cover them in English (in addition to their own research and stories).

So in the end, what's lacking aren't only more local blogs in English, but the Pan-European player bringing their news to all other European countries + the rest of the world.

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