Listening to the mobile technology, device and communication industries’ big players currently puts into place two core assumptions about how mobile device usage is going to develop within the years to come:

1. Location is everything
2. Location doesn’t matter anymore

As though these seem quite contradictive at first glance, there is some truth to be found inside these paroles, as soon as one takes a closer look:

While mobile devices give you (and the rest of us…) the power to make more informed decisions depending on where you are and where you intend to be in near future (think of navigation, public transit guidance or ), they also disconnect us from the necessity of presence e.g. at airport counters for check-in or .

Despite these advantages, there is an obvious difference between if you go to let’s say an airport on a daily basis for work, occasionally to catch a flight, to pick-up somebody who is arriving or simply for plane spotting and having fun with your kids.

As J. P. Barton already figured out more than a decade ago, real world situational context is not simply about location, but much more about people, places and the things at hand, along with time and the conditions/limitations you encounter.

Barely none but location, however, has been targeted by technological approaches on an end-user scale this far.

This comes out even more interesting, as the technical and organizational hurdles involved have already appeared to be taken an entire decade ago.

Some of the more relevant reasons, why the industry is nonetheless quite slow in anticipating the market potential coming with services like intelligent tickets, context-aware travel-itineraries or automated product-matching for webshops, appear to lie in the integration of already existing, but widely distributed and differing data sources.

This is, where I believe Linked Data can go a long way in easing the adoption process by providing common means for exchanging information online and in near- or even realtime.

Solutions to practically showcase the application of Semantic Web technology to provide such services are to be developed by our appliance team within the coming moths. Stay tuned.

Though the times, they’re changin’: With Apple’s stock price ranging as high as it may ever get, but their once-superior phone engineering at the same time showing inceasingly more weeknesses in both concept and execution, this is the dawn for their competitors again. And since it can be quite hard to impossible sometimes, to beat huge corporations such as Apple in the business they themselves created, the guys at Nokia did wisely, to leave to others what others can do better.
 
In the past, Nokia’s own developments haven’t ever really been up equally with their counterpart’s products in terms of UI and OS engineering, which in recent years more often than not resulted in quite limited software capabilities even on the newer Nokia handsets. In following this inevitably lead to a shrinking community of application developers willing to take the hassle to write software for e.g. the Symbian or maemo.org platforms.
 

With the introduction of their new LUMIA smartphone series however, the NOKIA management left building the smartphone OS to Microsoft and their Windows 8 product. This did not only bring a new, sophisticated though proven, system base to their latest generation of completely re-engineered phones without causing too much hassle on the run, but brought in a huge crowd of new application developers as well, who already had long-yeared experience in programming for the Microsoft platform.
 

The other strength which NOKIA has just turned into a USP again, is their experience in engineering high-standard cellphones. And even though the current models’ hardware may not always be able to keep up with the installed Windows operating system’s hunger for computational power yet, they focus on the customers’ outcomes by providing them a high level of tools to ease a phone user’s life. And no, I don’t think so much of the literal ˮbells & whistles“ here, but more of features like
 

• Mutiband Phone Networks (including LTE broadband) Where competitors stick to supporting only certain partner-vendors’ networks, Nokia Lumia customers always get the full spectrum.
   
• High Quality Multi-Brand Location Services With the strategic purchases of NAVTEQ and earthmine, Nokia product designers get their hands on powerful features like sight-based navigation, making up for a nicely designed AR display of your environment, accompanied by corresponing quality guides: Besides the omnipresent crowd-sourced content, Nokia services provide a wide range of professionally authored information from providers like Michelin, HRS or Expedia.
   
• Realtime Public Transport Information The one-of-a-kind just-on-time routing for those of us travelling by foot and public transport.
   
• Phone Calls Almost forgot about it: No, they haven’t forgotten about building reliable voice calling into the latest generation phones. No antenna-issues involved here…
   
• Above Standards Camera With photo shooting among the most popular phone features in recent years, Lumia devices come with ZEISS lenses, optical image stabilization, sequence-shots and HDR-like processing tools.
   

In my oppinion, these new approaches will, in the longer run, put NOKIA at the heart of an eco-system fucussing much less on what is possible, than on services users actually need to navigate through life on a daily basis.
 

Fighting irrelevance and ambiguity

There are uncounted homepages of businesses of all sizes and industries, who cannot answer every visitor’s most pressing question: Am I right here?

Lots of homepages cannot tell if the business is an investment bank, a pharmaceutical or tool manufacturing company. Non-telling images along with ambiguous headlines, such as Beating The Competition In Every Single Field do not demonstrate anything but corporate PR hybris.

So always makes sure your homepage appearance immediately reflects your industry and value proposition to any visitor stopping by.

Avoiding the Paradox of Choice

This is the opposite extreme (and a widely discussed issue): A website trying to be everything to everybody and thus leaving alone the most relevant ones, overwhelmed and helpless. Hey come on — you’re not Yahoo! or some other general web entry-point. Instead admit your visitors some intelligence and trust them to be able to figure out, if your company’s offering is right for them or not.

Have your homepage provide descriptive entrance points (ideally no more than 4, with one pre-selected a.k.a. The Power Of Defaults) leading prospects deeper into your site, where you provide them the means to refine their search, so you can guide them to the relevant infomation much more reliably as a one-size-fits-all homepage could ever do.

Catering to the wrong half of the visitors’ brain (in all the wrong places)

You likely have learned at school already, that both halfs of the human brain take care of different aspects of your daily life: To most people their brain’s right half is heavily involved handling body perceptions along with the more emotional data to be processed, while the left part caters more to the rationale.

Since, just as with your eyes’ fields of view, the processing of visual impression crosses and overlaps, which is why it has turned out to be wise to place visual information more left in the viewer’s field of vision, while adding the facts (e.g. product USPs to its right). If you like, visit Amazon to learn how to do it.

And now: Have fun adding impact to your own site.

It indeed has been beneficient to online production, that web standards (much different from their associated markets…) have only used to change slowly over time and that chances are good, web content will display properly for the time being, from the date it has been sent live.

Though, unfortunately, over the years the arising argony caused by interest conflicts, political games and bureaucracy at W3C, the standards giving institution for the web, created more and more resentments among the more practically engaged part of the online creative community. It just hat become too obvious, that the old standards (more often than not from an entire decade ago) were not to keep up with the functional requirements of today’s advanced web applications.

That said, the absence of a credible authority sparked the uprise of open opposition by ambitious revolutionaries, putting themselves and their daily needs at the heart of their very own web standards revolt.­­

As enlightning as the ideas of these freshly founded ”working groups“ are, just by their nature, these concepts lack any kind of official recognition. With a groups core members (often just 1 to 5 people…) by chance even refusing to name a final publishing date or even a version-system for their so-called ”standards“, from a creator’s perspective, it is more and more becoming impossible to publish online content which can be reliably assumed to work for most of its prospective users. ­― So, who cares at all?

The part, which makes the topic worth discussing, is that (after years of rather slow, incremental improvements and despite the missing assurance about the outcome) browser vendors just seem to have waited for a chance to add tons of brand new funky bells ad whistles to their widely adopted software – in order to show off their superiority over any anticipated competitor. But, just as with the standards revolutionaries themselves, every company also tries to add their own approach for deploymemt. Along with unique features to each webbrowser-product, the most advanced developers shall eventually be lured away from the competitors’ software – in pretty much the same way Microsoft wasted billions pushing its free Internet Explorer webbrowser in the late nineties.

The current result now appears only too well-known to year-long web developers: we go back in time and again start to engineer every webpage template separately for any software-client in question, including the upcoming new mobile ones. And to really get the results right, the required adjustments add to development costs by at least a third – which, of course, may be fun for web agencies, but much less for their customers – companies simply needing these websites to run their business.

After all: Is there anything in it for the avage web user with this game? Sure. Since most revolutions, despite considerable collateral damage, use not to go all-bad, there are clear end-user advantages involved:

1. The death of the plug-in: It already today is very unlikely you will need to install additional software only to properly display an average webpage’s content, such as sound, video, animation, immersive imagery or even 3D objects.
    
2. Easier-to-handle forms: Web forms will start verifying your input already as you type and assist you to easily enter appropriate values, especially on mobile devices.
    
3. High performance content: Previously unseen display quality for web content will become common to an amount as it has only been available to high-end computer games just a couple of years ago.

So please prepare for the most innovative technical changes to online experience since the late nineties, and watch out for those just wanting to cash-in on you for plain eye candy that will likely available to a selected few only anyway.

Undoubtedly there are things that get better the more often you cook them up: e.g. sour kraut, bean stew or chili con carne. And then there are those whose state tremendeously degrades away from “desireable” with every re-heating, but that nonetheless are getting boiled-up over and over again. Deep-frozen pizza and marketing-paradigms obviously belong to the latter.
 

Salesology in the early 1900s
 

It was no sooner than in 1898 when one of the early experts of American sales theory, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, came up with the concept, that described the structure of a typical selling process as it may be encountered by a typical salesman of its time:
 

Attention

which needed to be grabbed, in order to spark the customers’

Interest

for which it was the salesman’s job to turn it into

Desire

for the customer to buy the product, and thus taking the necessary

Action

to complete the deal.

This is the way A.I.D.A. has been taught ever since. Over the years, however, many people forwarded and developed the idea without any regard of its original intention: Some praised it as instructional guide, which it isn’t as it only shows the stages of a sale, rather than any advice on how to reach them. Others thought it to provide a universal structure for largely any kind marketing/sales process, which it cannot deliver as well, since it has been constructed for a mainly direct-selling audience with their particular requirements in mind.
 

So shouldn’t we finally put this thing to rest in our history books as a 19th/20ieth century legacy item? Hm. Not so fast…
 

It wasn’t until the advent of the internet and e-commerce, that for many industries the ability to deliver perfect direct-buying experiences has become essential to both their survival and everyday business. This comes to matter even more, since most online-experts and first-class web citizens like programmers, designers and writers have never encountered any type of selling education. Many of them are now trying to make up for it in rather expensive ways (notice the boom in web analysis and multivariate testing within recent years…!?), and a lot of people nowadays become ”experts“ on the run at challenges that had actually been believed to be solved for an entire century now.
 

Among the most impressive tools for modern-style product show-offs (probably beside video keynotes shot in front of large audiences… ) is the pitchpage.
 

A forever-long/high-running webpage, that concentrates solely on selling a single product or service by deploying the entire arsenal of modern online technology, including (but in no way limited to) detailed imagery and packshots, video presentations, animated visuals, interactive 360°/panoramic images, customer credentials, along with fact sheet and demonstration downloads.
 

Crafting a working pitchpage is an art, which (as of now) only few have really mastered.
 

Different from other kinds os online presentation, pitchpages provide the necessary linearity required for a show to successfully build up suspense and momentum — which is hard to achieve otherwise and has for long been missing from non-linear interactive media.
 

Keeping that in mind, skilled authors finally have the means to make use of proven rhetoric concepts for their online promotions and sales. Just as they have aleady got used to offline e.g. by deploying the Heath brothers’ SUCCES(S) framework, Zig Ziglars long-running/going hardselling encounters or Cialdini’s ”50 Scientifically Proven Ways“ to get to ”Yes!“.
 

While the first tests using white paper instead of chalk colour under the Matrix shape turned out quite promising, the final result on asphalt was not readable at all, despite having added the mandatory "quiet zone" around the actual code display (not shown on the picture) before running the readability tests.

Anyway, with future expriments I’ll start with a more even surface as a background and less colour, so that the individual squares hopefully will not bleed into each other as much as they did with this first print.
 

Will keep you updated about future outcomes.
 

How would you come to describe the emotional reationship towards your insurance provider? Pure business? Not viable? Suspended? Well, then you are probably not alone….
 

 
Being quite aware of the difficult standing with clients in their industry, the Zurich insurance company lately came up with a quite innovative and ambitious concept for their Normadz® offering to hit the road and probably every other location frequent travellers would find themselves in a hassle. With a target market of "anyone using a Blackberry on a regular basis" they set up "help points" at Europes most frequented airports i.e London Heathrow and Frankfurt, where a lot of their targeted customers were likely to pass by on a regular basis.
 

At these service outlets travellers can get free internet access, basic concierge services and, of course, an introduction to the Nomadz service, which provides from a mixture of emergency alert and rescue services to concierge style amenities.
 

To make sure the effort gets noticed, e.g. at Frankfurt airport the entire way from the main check-in hall to the help point has been plastered with fullsize ads making often heard (bold goes without saying) claims like "Need a question answered?" or "Help when it matters most.".
 

 
However, as the accompanying – and after two years still not quite complete – website suggests, some not entirely thought through points come with the promotional demo:
 

You won’t get any assistance (or even the free internet service) at these spots outside regular working hours, not on weekends and, of course, not on holidays. And the loudly advertised power outlets are available for free to passengers all over the airport anyway.
 

Left-alone and all monitors dark (except for reflections and the advertising):
The Zurich „Help when it matters most”-stand.

 
Though, isn’t exactly this the core benefit of any insurance offering (and even more with the one being promoted)? A service providing "help when it matters most" and not "when it comes along the cheapest"!? Just as emergencies don’t use to restrict themselves to opening hours.
 

You may now argue, if there is a lot of sense in keeping such promotional stand occupied at times, when salaries for the operating staff are higher, with the number of prospective contacts decreasing at the same time. But if, as with insurance, your entire industry’s main USP is to be reliable come what might (and with the advertised offer even focussing on this fact…), then saving on the pennies for an approach to publicly demonstrate it may backfire quite rapidly. Because if already your very own promotions fall short of delivering the advertised values, how will then your services do for a customer?
 

So think again when planning the next pitch to prospective customers: How can you have the way you deliver your presentation support, rather than contradict, the message you want to send out? Get this answered right and you’ll be surprised by your audience’s honest and welcoming reactions.
 

So I initially thought it to be a great idea to deploy my existing experience of semantic data logic for search engine optimization. This has become increasingly popular lately with the rise of RDFa and adoption of commerce ontologies like Good Relations through major search engines.
 

As experience in this field is not easily replicable, the knowledge about and deployment of Semantic Web technology could have made for a great USP.
 

But after playing around with these fresh options for a while and much to my disappointment, I discovered that (at least a the time of this writing), most relevant search engines, including Google, do not actually parse the semantic markup, but rather string-search it with the rest of the respective page.
 

What may sound quite reasonable from an efficiency or productivity point of view, unfortunately also misses an important opportunity derived from the triple-nature of RDF data: To match and co-relate information across different domains, which could help filter a lot of false positives out of search engine results. This leads to strange feature restrictions, like the ability to recognize only one product per page, which makes semantic markup rather useless e.g. for catalogues or category overviews.
 

That said, apart from the early island solutions like Intel’s Mash Maker, by now not a lot of companies have successfully managed to use structural data of semantically rich webpages to co-relate it with content from other domains.
 

Nonetheless, I’ll dare to offer semantically enhanced SEO services, which we create for use with Google’s Universal Search or Yahoo!’s Monkey Business, as fully query-able semantic data endpoints, so not not only search robots, but any application willing to use and promote the outcomes will be able to use these in real time.
 

Sounds intersting ?  Wanna give it a try ?  Then you are very welcome to get in touch with us via the Semantic Search Engine Optimization site.
 

I tried it out and it’s really impressive: You just pour some of the gel into your hands, rub them firmly, possibly casually dry them with a handkerchief — and that’s it. You got clean hands from just about half of the tube’s content.
 

Being already aware of NH’s innovation in the food area (like the healthy fast food created by Ferran Adriá) or the hospitality sector (think their nhow design hotels), I now also became a great fan of their cosmetics series and immediately bought a dozen units of this impressive handcleaner to accompany my future travels.
 

While the talk by a Adobe representative’s talk on XMP did not exceed much what can be found on their respective websites, Hans-Peter Schnurr, CEO of Ontoprise GmbH, brought in not just some very insightful experiments with the audience, but also impressive case studies showcasing their Service Resolution Management software, a structured and centralized repository of technical repair information to help companies fulfilling contracts all over the world learn from mistakes.
 

If you like to take a peek at the lecture yourself, I recommend having a look at the video documentation on the event organizer’s website.

Not only by the presenters’ track records, but also by the sheer number and diversity of researchers and practitioners Prof. Dr. rer. nat habil. Heinrich Herre managed to bring together for the event. Commonly such gatherings here in Germany would consist of ten people at most — this time there were more than 50 experts, including international guests, from institutions and companies all over the country.
 

Nevertheless, something extremely re-assuring that I am taking away is not only the obvious development progress in the ontology sector, but also the fact, that even the most renowned experts in the field struggle with the very same technical insufficiencies as we do, when designing new data models for our SemaWorx application base.
 

Therefore we also had a very enlightening (entertaining goes without saying…) evening at local Cafe Madrid, where over the delicious meal discussion focus lay more on the practically achievable short-term benefits of current semantic modeling approaches, rather than their long-term optimization wishlist (hopefully I didn’t get this imprecise now… ).
 

 
This time the public event includes an update by Ines Falkenhan on Family Affair: Balancing Family And Work for working parents living in the Leipzig area.

   In case you are not from here or don’t know the Radisson, this map will assist you finding us. The facility exists right opposite from the well-known Augustusplatz.
 

Radisson Blu Hotel Leipzig, Augustusplatz 5/6, 04109 Leipzig, Germany

 
See you on Thursday !
 

Once you got used to sentences starting with expressions such as "networking super-hubs like me" , you find this book to be a suprisingly complete guide to enhancing your very own interpersonal skills — always one connection at a time.
   At the beginning Keith Ferrazzi convincingly explains, why he believes reaching out to other people and offering your help being together the most effective (if not the only) way towards a happy as well as successful life, constantly telling examples from his own experience. You learn how to define your personal goals and then identify the right people to help you complete it. Then one gets instructions on how to get into the right mindset, while avoiding common pitfalls.
   Afterwards, Keith Ferrazzi teaches you the trade of how to successfully making connections, from in-advance research on the people you would like to meet, over pre-warming "cold" phone calls and adding meaning to small talk by showing some vulnerability, to detailed advice on how to make sure, the people you once contacted won’t forget about you, while you still successfully survive the information flood caused by phone calls, appointments and contacts you gather.
   Then you proceed to the advanced concepts, containing guides to mastering typical business scenarios: You learn to systematically expand your network by e.g. finding "anchor tenants" out of other social groupings, getting most out of conferences by adding your own events and finally, well, not eating alone by inviting other people for dinner.
   Here it has to be said, that Keith Ferrazzi knows the art of pulling together the right people inside out and that his single chapter of tips on running successful dinner parties probably makes up for more substance than some entire magazines devoted to solely that topic.
 

Though some of the author’s advice may need some adjustment to your particular cultural environment, following his guidelines building your own brand by neither giving in to hubris, nor getting boring, will inevitably allow you to get along with other people in your own life much more joy- and successfully.
 

Want to give Ferrazzi’s practical approaches a try ?  Take this video as an example:
 

 
Unfortunately the book-accompanying website has been replaced by the one of its reportedly even more renowned successor Who’s got your back ?. But it’s still worth a visit, especially for Keith Ferrazzi’s blog, containing a multitude of valuable networking tips (many of which "never eat alone" discusses in greater detail…), and its community section where you can connect to and exchange with many other people practicing Ferrazzi-style business networking.