If you need to hop from Zurich to London at short notice you don't have to wait for Easyjet to come back (I think in October) but can simply use Air France, which operates at extremely low costs and offers a much better service than the low-frills, low customer service Easjet. Now on my last trip I found a nice gadget in the airline magazine. An electrical bicycle that seems the ideal vehicle if you live in a small to medium-sized city/town, don't want to add to the pollution, but want to be fast. It seems like a great idea. You simply recharge from a normal electrical outlet and then obtain up to 25km/h speed and 30-45 km of traveling distance. Recharge time is 6-7hours, so overnight basically. Price is 790 EUR which seems reasonable as well. So in short I can see some good reasons for people to use it, particularly in central European cities and especially in the summer. In the US, distances are usually too big so I would think not an appropriate fit unless you live 5-15km or so away from your work place.

Not surprisingly, Swisscom has won the license to build and operate a (DVB-H most likely) mobile TV network in Switzerland. Yesterday the regulatory organization ComCom gave a 10 year license to Swisscom. The other bidder was a joint venture between T-Systems and South Korean Telecom. While such license grants have to be a public competition, it is highly doubtful that these decisions are entirely neutral. Not in Switzerland, nor in other countries.

The good news for the mobile TV market is of course the fact that the network has to be built immediately for the major Swiss cities to be ready for next year's European soccer championship. Switzerland is a good test market for new IT technologies. The success of IPTV has shown that the take up rate is quite high and people are willing to sign on, and they can afford such new services.

CIGS solar panels are the focus of lots of venture investments in the last few years but no-one has been able to enter production yet. Such companies like Miasole and DayStar Technologies have had to postpone their production launch due to technical issues (I assume). Now Nanosolar's CEO has made a bold statement yesterday saying that they would start production ramp up end of this year and already have production capacity lined up for the whole of 2008. I once saw the Miasole CIGS solar panel and remember that it basically looks like a centimeter or so thick flexible rubber material that can be rolled out like foils and then - and that's the idea - simply used to cover roof tops or be integrated into roof tiles. If Nanosolar indeed succeeds first then this company would have a nice lead and a bright future ahead. Investors are BTW also the founders of Google.

Lots of high-tech markets eventually mature and will over time turn into a commodity market. The players in those markets often don't even realize what is happening, and only see that it gets tougher to win customers every year. Also Chinese and/or Indian companies enter as competitors, and while they are often still looked at with a smile, they win over price-sensitive accounts not only in Asia or Africa but also in western countries. One other way of telling that commodity is on the rise is when marketing slogans sound the same across all the market players and don't really offer any differentiation. I have taken a look at some broadband access companies attending the Broadband World Forum Europe event in Berlin and compared their taglines and banner ad slogans with each other. Can you tell who they are and would you think that these slogans have ANY value at all? In such markets it seems that total turnkey solutions are the only way to go and that's why Ericsson seems to be on a very good track. Or you can be the clear leader in one sub-market segment such as e.g. FTTH with a complete leading solution there.

• Access to the world
• Because the world is always on. Enrich people's lives by transforming communications.
• The Portfolio for smart Telecommunication
• Taking Your Broadband Services to the Max!
• Full Service Broadband.
• Video, Voice, Data, Wireless.

This list is from the excellent book - which I can highly recommend to all sales and marketing people - "Achieve Sales Excellence", from Howard Stevens and Theodore Kinni:

• What drives the company's culture?
• How does the company segment its markets?
• How efficiently does the company adapt to market changes?
• How are customers served by the company's IT initiatives?
• How evolved are the company's sales, service, and technical support systems?
• How does the company solicit customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction?
• How does the company recruit and select salespeople?
• How does the company train and develop its sales force?

Carnegie Mellon University reports today the 25th anniversary of emoticons.

Scott Fahlman, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, never dreamed that his suggestion for identifying a humorous post on a b-board would have such an impact on the future of the e-world.

"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in ten minutes to something that has spread all around the world," said Fahlman.

He added, "Wherever the Internet has become a part of people's daily lives, the smiley has soon followed. I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have
turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."