I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2006. Thanks for reading this blog and taking part in the way openBC  changes the way social networking is  been done.

Since the openBC team consists of people from 24 different countries, let me be international:

American - Merry X-mas and happy new year :-)
Brazilian - Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo
Dutch - Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!
English - Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
Finnish - Hyvää Joulua or Hauskaa Joulua
French - Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!
German - Froehliche Weihnachten und ein glückliches Neues Jahr!
Hindi - Shub Naya Baras
Hebrew - Mo'adim Lesimkha. Shana Tova
Irish -Nollaig Shona Dhuit
Japanese - Shinnen omedeto. Kurisumasu Omedeto
Korean - Sung Tan Chuk Ha
Hungarian - Kellemes Karacsonyiunnepeket & Boldog Új Évet
Malay - Selamat Hari Natal dan Tahun Baru
Mandarin - Kung His Hsin Nien bing Chu Shen Tan
Polish - Wesolych Swiat i Szczesliwego Nowego Roku.
Romanian - Craciun fericit si un An Nou fericit!
Russian - Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva i s Novim Godom
Spanish - Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo
Swedish - God Jul och Gott Nytt År
Turkish - Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun

On January 3rd, Margarethe Meleszczuk will start as an intern  in the "Marketing & Communication" department - another reason for Sally and me to look forward to the year 2006  :).  Sales is also growing, with 2 interns starting in the first week of January. 

And openBC stays international: 3 interns - 3 different nationalities. Let me quickly introduce our new team members:

Margarethe  is of originally from Poland, has a BA in Modern Languages and Cultural Mediation from the University of Southern Denmark and has worked in a PR and event management agency before. She will support the MarCom team (Marketing & Communication) for the next 6 months.

Gloria comes all the way from La Paz, Bolivia, to support our sales team for the next half year. Gloria studies business with a focus on marketing and advertising and is a member of the world's largest student organisation AIESEC.

Dagmar has completed her business degree at the European School of Business in Reutlingen (French-German double diploma)  and collected a lot of professional and international experience through a number of  internships.

We would like to give all three of you a warm welcome!

openBLOG is live for almost 3 months now and we have been collecting our first experiences with running a company weblog in the meantime. Case in point: Bill's blog entry What's the sincerest form of flattery? has caused a bit of a stir and unfortunately evoked some rather defaming comments. While we were still discussing the possibility to delete the respective comments we received a fax demanding just that. Someone who was called a liar and a cheater wanted those comments to be taken down.

We have no idea if these accusations are justified or not, because they weren't backed up with any facts. So we decided to delete them. We really welcome any kind of opinion on openBLOG - including criticism. But no mud-slinging, please! Stick to the facts and back serious accusations up with links to reliable sources. That's how the web works, right?

And btw: If somebody wants to call somebody else names, perhaps he should consider starting his own blog.  ;)

On Wednesday 14th December at 6.30pm 40 of us found ourselves in taxi's going to an unknown address in Hamburg. The evening was a secret; all we knew was we had to bring trash presents for a German game called "Wichteln" (Yule club). After about 10 minutes of driving we came across a lovely Cafe called TH2 that was ours for the evening.

The evening started off with a speech from Lars Hinrichs giving a happy overview of the previous year at openBC. And new people were welcomed, yes we have grown again! The new additions to the team are:
Johannes Haus from Germany
Yuka Yano from Japan
Julika Schwaan from Germany
Udo Hamm from Switzerland

We welcomed them into the team and pondered over the fact that here at openBC headquarters we have about 17 different nationalities, making a VERY international environment and an enthralling place to work in!

Afterwards we sat down and ate some typical German food for this time of year - carrot and orange soup, followed by roast Duck, red cabbage, kale, potato casserole and much more! Dessert was roast apple with a custard sauce - leaving us full, contented and ready for more fun and games. Oh, I almost forgot, some of us washed the food down with some delicious sambuca ;-)

Then came the Wichteln, which involved all of us sitting in a circle and throwing dice. The rules where easy, throw a 6 and you could pick up a trash present (something you don't want at home), throw another 6 you can steal someone elses present OR open your present (a lot of stealing was going on)! The presents really were trashy and very amusing, to name just a few: a furry pink Furby (I think this won the trashiest prize), bad taste crockery set, a crate with an empty bottle of water.

The openBC band was next to strut their stuff and they were excellent. After weeks of training they played us 3 songs:
* Mama's and the Papa's "Dream a little dream of me"
* Boney M "Sonny"
* Fairground Attraction "Perfect"

More importantly the openBC band members are:
Tanja Möbius was singing,
Sabine Brockmeier on bass,
Daniel Silva Yanez on electric guitar,
Erick Dennis on the bongo's.

Cathy Bazabas also surprised us with a song about finding love in Göttingen, sung beautifully in French..

Now it was (almost) everyone else's turn to sing because the Karaoke was unveiled and the next 4 hours were spent with people singing everything from Frank Sinatra "My Way" (Timo I am still very impressed) to "I'm a barbie girl"!

I think ;-) the Karaoke was turned off at about 12.30am and the night at TH2 came to an end at about 1.30am. A big thank you goes out to Lars Hinrichs, Daniela Neumann and everyone else who helped organise this fabulous, fun-filled night!

Not that it stopped there, some of us went onto a Salsa club round the corner from work called "La Macumba" until about 3am - yes lots of tired faces at work the next day!

For photos please follow this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/openbc/sets/1590239/

I am not a big fan of news watching in terms of traditional media as I find the focus on the negative to be very wearing.

So imagine my delight when my good friend Marco pointed me here;

Happy News

It is a bit US centric till you find the International section and still is a great relief for me from CNN

Especially since we have Yuka working for openBC in Japan (Welcome to the team Yuka) I particularly enjoyed the following article

:-)

Bill

Every now and then you come across a really nice piece of online humor that describes something you are in the middle of.

Our business intelligence process here is looking good and I am terrified it ends up like this....

The truth about IT consulting!

I am sure it won't :-)

For non-members, openBC newbies and everyone else who likes to get a general idea of what openBC has to offer,  the new Guided Tour might just be the right thing. If you are logged out and go to the openBC homepage you'll find the Guided Tour in the middle of the page as usual.  Looks the same on  the outside, but is completely new on  the inside. The flash-tour has been replaced by a  HTML-tour  that allows you to browse through the pages, a  navigation on the left hand side helps you to find the information that is relevant for you.  Screenshots illustrate the functions and benefits being explained. The good thing about it: The new static variant of the tour enables us to easily adapt to new functions and features on the platform.

So on a more serious note in my role as head of product development I have an issue I would dearly like to solve.

Our invitation system has several canned invitation messages and we have tried many different texts to invite new users and we still have not cracked the best message text to get people who are invited to join openBC.

It must be clear, inviting and not annoying and unmistakably not SPAM.

I remember Coca Cola ran a huge competition and spent millions of dollars to come up with "Coke is it" and while I don't have quite the same resources I thought why not throw the question to all users and ask here in the blog for the best possible invitation texts.

I can then trial the suggestions and give some free life time memberships for the best possible and most effective invitation texts.

So please post suggestions as comments and I will check here regularly.

Michael and Hanno are core developers of openBC I am not going to say who put on the wig to be the female silhouette.

:-)

Hi Bill,

if you wish, for the blog. Here's how Michael's image ended up on socialBC.

Our "no photo" image is an outline from a photo of Michael Otto.

The guys from socialBC took our "no photo" image. Obviously, they simply blurred the outline and changed the greyscale value a little bit.

See the attached images.

Regards,

Hanno

Congrats to Loic for setting up this fantastic conference. We have done some great Handshake deals, expect some GEO location applications, personalized news, Wifi alliance and more RSS Support in the future.

Impressive list of participants, great comments from the audience, very active crowd here.

Technorati Tag: lesblogs

According to this press release, there is a new star in the social software sky. Its name: successBC - written with small success & BIG BC. Sounds familiar ? Well, that's what I thought.  It's probably a coincidence, right ?

So let's have a look at their logo...

Click here to view successBC's logo.

...and compare it to the logo of some other social software service, for example this one...

Hmm,  and  we don't want to draw any hasty conclusions.

So lets have fun and open source this a little bit!

If you spot any additional similiarities between openBC and successBC, leave a comment here and I´ll give you a six month free premium membership...

Right then, 'nuff said ! ;-)

Technorati Tags: copycats, successbc

So in order to improve our blog I am here at Lesblogs
in Paris and there are some very key messages here that are changing my view of the blogosphere.

There also seams to be quite a bit of tension between the various views on corporate blogs.

Key learnings from my question to Adriana www.mediainfluencer.net

Montior, Engage then Participate in the blogosphere

Obey the etiquett eg. never delete posts and comments.

Find your neigborhood find interested constituents.

Attention is a an expensive commodity so deliver value back when you receive it be altruistic as well as commercial.

Technorati Tag: lesblogs

Just when you thought it was over....

Well I identify with Generation X and I know that my younger brother identifies with Generation Y now comes the kicker someone has just coined the term Generation @ perhaps this is the future of all networking....

Sigh!