Our upgrades went smoothly and now we are back on line thanks to the great team at Epublica.

In addition to the previously mentioned features you might like to check out the way the Memo function works now (a bit more web2.0 :-) )

As you may have noticed openBC is in the process of upgrading so the site access is restricted.

We will be back on-line (Providing all goes well) at around 14:00 Hamburg Time.

We hope that you are able to bear with us until then.

Some of the  things being done are new features:

- separation of individual unlocking of birth date into birth day and birth year
- Sorting of group articles by date of last comment

Other relate to scaling up the site to handle more traffic while maintaining our customary speed:

- Events will be put in a separate cluster and will be r/w enabled (obviously this is pretty technical)

I am checking the blog every so often today so feel free to leave comments.

Bill

There´s a new cool kid on the German block with an easy but mind blowing concept.

Since searching for products in Internet is more or less like a walk on a sunny sunday afternoon, finding an appropriate service that has the solution for your issue and making things easier is not.

Asking your friends all the time for their recommendations of course works and has natural limits as well ("uhmm...you´re not playing video games anymore since having a baby?").

Asking people passing by which glasses they wear, where they bought this fantastic slice of pizza and what perfume they would give to their mother is either helpful for one person or turns out embarrassing for both.

The big plus with Qype is that people like you and me share their experiences with services, recommend it and tag it. So, on your marks, get set, Qype!

Why would I use it?

1. Because I am new in a city
2. I love to share and give
3. I don´t want to carry the yellow pages with me

Stefan Uhrenbacher is the name you have to remember.

PS: it´s for free and made for the german-speaking market :)

Visible Path raised $17 million in a second round of venture-capital funding. We hear through the grapvine that Facebook is generating about $1 million per week in revenue and that Linkedin finally broke through too. Social Software isn´t hype anymore, it´s serious big business.

And there´s an important question poping up: What if media 2.0 is less profitable than media 1.0?

Are we facing Bubble 2.0?

(Thanks! TechCrunch & Publishing2.0)

Finally Google updated it's great Google Maps service, and now most of Europe’s street maps are now available. In addition, Google Maps received a huge satellite update.

Timo defeated 42,195 km of asphalt at the marathon in Hamburg last weekend. His sporty optimism gave him some extra energy to run the distance in an incredible 3hrs 47mins 40secs. Kudos Timo!

Did anyone watch all these (101) movies and can he lable himself as a movie literate? I was impressed by the list film critic Jim Emerson compiled ... and I am pretty sure that more great movies like Starwars are missing.

Here comes my top 17 out of his list:

Alien
Bonnie and Clyde
La Dolce Vita
E.T.
Easy Rider
Fight Club
Frankenstein
From Dusk till Dawn
The Godfather ("...are you talking to me?")
GoodFellas
Lawrence of Arabia
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Pulp Fiction
Rebel without a Cause
Schindler´s List
Some Like it Hot 
Starwars
Taxi Driver
Vertigo

Popcorn anyone?

(Thanks! kottke)

PS: maybe we should do a list of "best gadgets ever" or "inventions of the universe" as well?

...throwing a great party in Stockholm, Sweden. See the pictures to make sure that your imagination fits reality.

Martin says: "Ola, our lead fonero in Sweden organized a great event/party for Fon in Stockholm. The co organizers of this party where OpenBC and Skype. The pictures are here. The party itself was great and there were around 700 people there but one thing deserves special mention. I was very happy to be there with Skype and OpenBC, two of the best European internet companies...

Working in teams, Europeans and Latin Americans sending Americans off?

...As we know most of the internet developments are done in Silicon Valley. While that lead will probably stay there for many years to come it is great to see also that we can build technology/internet companies in Europe. When I was at Columbia University in New York City the Europeans and Latin Americans used to work in teams while the Americans would be more inclined to work alone. I hope that now that the internet is mostly about communities that we continue our collaborative spirit over here and while competing we can help each other enough to succeed."

Geez, that´s easy. Please welcome another "star" to our series of openBCs´personalized RSS feeds

https://www.openbc.com/protect/companychanged https://www.openbc.com/protect/companychanges

and give your feed reader something he can´t live without. Some of us tested feedreader 3.0 today to see if it can handle secure RSS and it seems that it worked fine. I am still busy with testing out your recommendations. ;-)

Yesterday I got the opportunity to chat to Stowe Boyd, a prominent voice in the Social Software space.

Stowe shares with us his ideas on "Experiential Marketing", what makes him tick, and those hats amongst other things.

This podcast was recorded using Skype and we lose a sentence towards the end of the show from Stowe...

But other than that, it was a great chat, and we appreciate Stowe's time.

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I was pretty much enthusiastic, when we launched the personalised RSS feed the other day. I really love things like that. They make my life more comfy. Fabulous!

So imagine me sitting in front of my laptop, being all exited and looking forward to get this feed running, no one could have stopped me from installing this new little awsome feature. And guess what, it didn´t work. Me, still exited and far away from being disappointed, searching the whole office to find a geek telling me how blonde I was. Well found one, he didn´t agree on the fact that I´ve a lack of technical understanding and installed it.

Now, what I realised was, that my feedreader (feedreader.com) doesn´t work perfectly. He`s a kind of web1.0 feed reader I guess. I can see the people who´ve recently visited my contact page but not where they´re coming from. Mmmhm?

After talking to some of you I realised that there are probably better solutions available. Which feed reader is on top of your list? And did any of you had the same hassle as this little RSS chap?

PS: using a PC btw

Some sobering news did the rounds recently: Germany is still firmly in the developing world when it comes to blogging. No, this is not a late April Fool’s joke, even if the current UPS Europe Business Monitor was published at the beginning of April. And the figures aren’t getting any brighter, no matter which colours we use for our bar charts and pie graphs.

The Germans are trailing way behind the rest of Europe in the illustrious blog league. Take a little closer look at the results and you could be forgiven for thinking that the blog god lives and works in France. Whilst 57% of all managers interviewed in Germany did not know what blogs were, this figure was just 16% in France. What a difference! But what could be the reasons for this?

Here are some completely subjective thoughts from me:

• Managers who get their secretaries to print out their emails because they can’t or don’t want to work their email programs, are bound to be left behind in the blogging evolution of mankind.
• The majority of decision-makers in the so-called top 15,000 companies in Europe are over 50-years-old and simply use other means, e.g. internal sources, to make decisions and gain access to information.
• Even if managers have heard of blogs they often lack the courage to post their thoughts in writing – across the world. Someone might read it after all. Not to be forgotten: “business blogging” only forms a small part of the entire study and 29% of all those interviewed had heard of weblogs. Better than nothing I suppose.

But the question remains: what are we going to do with the 1% of managers that read blogs and blog themselves?

Last Thursday afternoon I had the chance to catch up Stowe and we had a chat about social networks, experiential marketing and it finally beginning to stop raining in CA. I introduced him briefly to the idea of The Comfy Sofa. He is looking forward to curling up on my sofa and being interviewed by end of this week. Keep your fingers crossed that we find a date to chat and that Skype supports us with an excellent connection :)

Time to prepare my questions. You are happily invited to give your curiosity a voice.

If  you´d love to leave your questions via comment function, do it! Thanks.

And if you don´t have any clue what The Comfy Sofa is, click here for more meat to the bones.

A better indicator of the growth of the blogosphere than simply the number of new blogs created each day is the rate of postings to those blogs. Daily Posting Volume tracked by Technorati is now over 1.2 Million posts per day, which is about 50,000 posts per hour. The blogosphere also reacts to world events. I've pointed out a number of the spikes in posting volume that have accompanied major news events in the chart below of posting volume

I wasn't able to identify all of the spikes, but I did find some of the notables. For example, it certainly appears that technology product launches attract great interest in the blogosphere - seems that we just can't restrain our inner geekiness when products like the iPod Video and the Intel Macintoshes were launched.

It´s sort of weird to see, that the London bombings and the launch of the Intel Macintoshes had nearly the same awareness and coverage in the blogosphere...

A cool feature which makes your business life more efficient: https://www.openbc.com/protect/cpvisits

We have just introduced our first personalized RSS feed - with many more feeds planned for the near future. If you are a premium member you can view the list of members who have visited your contact page.

Basically this list is not open for public view, which means that you have to authorize your own access by entering your openBC user name and password.

Look at this picture. It was taken 6 months ago in our new office. Meanwhile we have grown to 35 members from 17 nationalities...we do have a carpet now and our name is on the door bell.

Now openBC has almost reached the grand old age for two and a half, and has firmly established itself amongst the big boys in the professional networking world with over a million active user and counting.

And: We are still hiring! Sneak a peak in our job offering and become a member of the openBC family.

I decided that after 3 shows, it was time spend some quality time with my beautiful Leni, rather than playing the "rockstar" all the time!!!

So I asked a dear friend of mine, Lee Wilkins to step up to the plate, and conduct show number 4 on my behalf.

He has the pleasure of sitting down with Lars for a few minutes for some quickfire questions about the future of openBC.

Not a bad job if I do say so myself.

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I wasn’t angry, upset, depressed, frustrated, argumentative or even out of control… Imagine this. It’s time to go home from a fabulous 4 day Entrepreneur Organisation event. 1 hour sleep. 4:30am wake up call. Marrakech. 6:00am air maroc flight to Casablanca. ½ my bags are missing – my friend had no wake up call. No laptop. No notebook. Casablanca airport 6:47am. No stationery shop. No internet. Assuming I’m on the 11:30am air maroc flight to Barcelona I wrap my raw silk scarf over my face and conk out across the 3 steel chairs. It was either that or the plastic mattresses in the dark prayer room.

Feeling a little groggy I make way to the gate 20 minutes prior to departure. No flight. What!!! I have to make the Air Berlin flight from Barcelona to Hamburg for a photo shoot 8:00am Monday morning. Next air maroc flight I’m told is at 4:30pm.

If you’ve ever been to the transit counter at Casablanca airport you would liken it to a street circus act. Dozen’s of eager spectators circled around a couple of performing out of control staff. All options exhausted. I retreat once again.

10 hours in transit 26 passengers make their way to the 737 plane including one man on crutches who has to struggle down the stairs and on the bus and up the stairs again. Sitting. Waiting. Sleeping… 1 hour later.. nothing. No announcements. No idea what is going on. Alas! I peep out the window and observe a car pull up to the stair case. It’s the air hostess. The German man sitting next to me cannot believe his eyes that such an event would hold a plane up. Jets full blast. We finally take off. Arrive into Barcelona. Miss the flight to Hamburg. The hotel booking machine doesn’t want to play either and crashes as I’m about to pay.

28 hours later I’m back in Hamburg. Miss the photoshoot and totally fascinated about this adventure.

Reading my emails.. I learn that our keynote presenter Nigel Risner had the same experience. Here is what he wrote:

I arrive at the airport look for my flight to Madrid. I can't see one so I check with the staff who tell me there isn't one. Me being me I tell them to start looking because I have a ticket that's says there is one. He looks at my ticket and says there is one from Casablanca which is what my ticket clearly says. Right now I realise I am in big trouble. There is a film crew waiting for me. A business which has put its trust in me to sort them out. In the past I would have lost my cool. Blamed the world and said every swear word in the world. The question now is: What needs to happen to get me back somehow by tomorrow morning?

Well Nigel gets back on time thanks to his super speedy PA. I get back not quite on time and have a story to tell.

Networking on the Internet is now even more important than at events.  As you can see from the graph though, networking at events is not rated as completely unimportant: More than 60 % of openBC users worldwide recognize the benefits of offline networking for maintaining their contacts.

If you are interested in using this and other charts from the survey for free,  please contact us. And if you would like to find out more about international communication and networking behaviour, we will be happy to provide you with the complete survey in English or German.

I had the pleasure earlier today to grab a busy busy Bob Stumpel to discuss Everything 2.0.

Bob has compiled a list of over 1,500 "Web 2.0" companies and in this interview we chat about the how and why it was produced...

Enjoy!

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I will interview Bob Stumpel today for The Comfy Sofa. Bob who..?

Apart from being our country manager for the Netherlands (today that´s not the reason why I want to share coffee cups with him) I guess he refused to sleep for longer than a week to work on a unique, nearly complete and interesting list of (probably all) web 2.0 companies that currently shine on the starry sky of web2.0. And this is only a snapshot!

...need coffee now.