Zone Out

Friday, July 21, 2006

What will be gooooogled next?

[via pronetadvertising.com]

Google is augmenting its list of reserved domains. It currently contains more than 500 entries! Take a few minutes to go throught it. Besides the expected and really not expected name combinations including the company name, there are several names without any link to the company. We all may construct our own ideas on what the purpose behind the names could be...

A small selection of the most curious ones as "food for our thoughts":
  • allevil.org (ouch)
  • globalgamerscenter.net (!)
  • googleprint (!)
  • googleporn (ouch)
  • googlewifi.org (!)
  • googlegalactic.com (!)
  • googlesucks.org (ouch)
  • issamghanwi.com (?)
  • jennifer-wanderer.com (?)
  • keyholecorp.com (ouch)
  • mainechaos.com (?)
  • smartprogrammer.com (!)
...well, it could also be that they simply want to prevent others using these domains. ;-)

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

To license, not to license or how to license

Yesterday Didier, CEO ecenter solutions, and I had a very nice and fruitful conversation with Stephen Walli, VP Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros.

ecenter solutions is the spin-off company of the Helvetia Patria Group, managed by Didier and myself.

In the past 6 years we have developed a flexible, J2EE based e-insurance platform, which today includes 26 productive applications in four countries, with another 14 applications currently planned or in the implementation phase. The productized version of this group wide e-insurance Software will be distributed together with suitable services to the European insurance market. Intensive contacts with first potential customers in Switzerland, Denmark and Russia are really promising. So we have to hurry up with the definition of our terms and conditions and license model. And here, believe it or not, the headache begins...

We are convinced users of (mature and field tested) Open Source Software (OSS) products. An important and continuously increasing part of our solution stack is based on Open Source Software. Therefore we will offer our own solution based on a brand new licensing model, which will be very close to the open source license models. The main principles of OSS communities will be adopted within our Open Customer Community. Thus our customers will benefit from the principles and characteristics that make OSS so attractive.

Stephen showed to be an excellent support and consultant for the definition of our unique licensing model. Therefore we agreed to collaborate with him and we are glad to benefit from his expertise.

Thank you, Stephen for your precious help. And thanks to Bruno von Rotz (Optaros VP, Country Manager, Switzerland) for having introduced Stephen in our license development process.

Have also a look at those interesting blogs regarding OSS, licensing models, patents, etc.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Dabbawala

Where big oganizations can learn about excellence...

My new colleague, Roy Varghese, an Indian Software engineer has travelled around the world working for important Technology companies, such as HP and Oracle. Now I'm glad that he shares his expertise working in our very young company ecenter solutions in Zurich, Switzerland. Today Roy told me about dabbawala.


A dabbawala, (one who carries the box is a person in Mumbai (Bombay), India, whose job is to carry and deliver freshly made food from home in lunch boxes (dabba) to office workers. For efficiency of their supply chain they are awarded Six Sigma performance rating by Forbes.
More than 175,000-200,000 lunches get moved every day by an estimated 4,500-5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality. According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 6,000,000 deliveries.

The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association is a streamlined 120-year-old organisation providing a quality door-to-door service to a large and loyal customer base. A
twin process combines competitive collaboration between team members with a high level of technical efficiency in logistics management.

AMAZING :-)

Monday, July 10, 2006

1934 - 1938 - 1982 - 2006 !!!

Well, even though I was born and grew up in Switzerland, my Italian blood boils for the Italian football team. After 1934, 1938, 1982 (which at least I remember), now the fourth world cup title for Italy. On Monday some teams of the Italian major league (Serie A), will be relegated to a minor league due to the bet scandal. Winning this cup is what the Italians need to overcome this shame and pain.

Italy has not been able to score a second goal in the first half, when they were playing better. I must admit that the French team did better in the second half and the final result could have been different. After having lost against France both the quarterfinal of the worldcup 1998 (penalty kicks!) and the final of the European cup 2000, this is a small "Italian revenge" - sorry France...

Forza Italia and vive la France!

My dear French colleagues. I know that Zidane had deserved a glorious finish of his career.
It's a pity that he had to leave in the way he did. Zinedines expulsion was justified, no doubts about this. It should however not give the impression that the game was unfair. Both teams played a physically hard but always fair game. Zidane will remain amongst the big football players in the world and still is one of my favorite sportsmans. He played a great final up to his raptus.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Tourist Remover

[via snapmania.com]

How many of your pictures and snapshots taken during your vacation and travels are disturbed by tourists covering the subjects that you wanted to immortalize?

The Swiss company Futurelab has solved this problem now. Their online program Tourist Remover is able to remove all disturbing picture parts. To do so you need to take a series of pictures (at least three) from the same angle but with some time delays in between (good results with 15 seconds delays). All objects and persons that have moved from one pic to the other will be removed. Amazing, isn't it? Find an example below:




















Friday, July 07, 2006

Hello World

Yes, I know I will not be remembered as an early adopter of the blog technology...

Nevertheless "something" tells me that it's time right now for me to start informing, commenting and documenting some of my personal and professional thoughts. It's time to "zone out" and share! So I hope that what I'm going to publish may be useful, funny, interesting, amusing, confusing, disturbing for some of you and I'm looking foreward to answer to your comments as well.

More to come soon...