Google acquired Jotspot

Now this is grate news: as Joe Kraus just announces on the Google blog, his company Jotspot has just been acquired by google. Congrats to the whole team, especially to the very nice guy Jim: we (especially Ewa) designed their guided tour just before their first launch back in 2004! It looks as if Jotspot services from now on are a free part of the google web suite. This takes Google a lot more into the direction to become the new Office Suite of the web.

Ormigo Launched!

They did it: ormigo, the company of my dear friends oli and henning, launched their network today. It´s great to see how consequently and professionaly they did their job, finding investors, building a marveless team and always kept smiling even during dark times. I wish you the very best, you´ll really rock the house (and I´m looking forward to a glas of champagne when I´m back in the office ;) And by the way: I really like the design, baby... ;)

Track your runs with jogmap

Now Jogmap is really kind of cool: you can edit a google map API with waypoints from your jogging - runs, and keep track of your times, etc. they automatically generate statistics, too. Have a look at my run from today in Cologne, 8,2 km took me about 40 min. This one I like to go regularly with my friend Dierk. Looking forward to combine gps for automatical waypoint settings with it ;)

Empowering our technology... ;)

T-Community terms-of-service changes

Ok, when you are in the business you know, that user generated content has it´s problems: how can you be able to ensure no misuse of your service, how can you gain a certain quality. T-Community has just changed it´s terms of service now scoring your adress

I wonder how much security this might bring: I guess it might be 75% of the users filtered out, wo offered a wrong, non existant adress.
I´m not quite sure if I like it. I mean, when you have any service which is payment based you certainly need more security about your customers - adress- scoring alone wouldn´t help. And every scoring costs money - I´d like to know which database T-Com is using within it´s Community: when they are using creditrefom or such it´s between 0,10 - 0,25 EUR per scoring - quite a lot - but maybe they have an own one coming from their experience of having a quasi monopol in the german telephone market (at least for a long time).

Another change is a quite popular one at the moment in the world of user generated content:

The community gains all the rights in the material you are uploading. Their goal is clear: in exchange for using their service for free, they want the rights for your content. The problem is, that as long as they don´t have the rights they are legally a service provider in germany, who has not to control every uploaded file - the user is the publisher and is responsible for all the legal questions within his content. By canging this term now T-Community is responsible, and this could cost them a lot of tme and money, if users started to misuse their platform. I would suggest to let the rights at the user - asking him time by time if you might use his content for advertising cases.

Back from Mallorca

I´ve never been to Mallorca before, and have to say: I liked it. Mallorca is a kind of "Volkswagen" within holiday-destinations: it´s high quality, worth it´s money and quite "german" - but sometimes a bit "boring" with too many people driving the same car visiting the same places. We had wonderful weather - no back to work!