Over Christmas Russia has successfully launched another GLONASS satellite (see here and there). While the European Galileo project is still far from seeing the light of the day, and while its future is still uncertain despite the EU taking over the project and its financing, the Russian system could go live for civilian use in just two years from now. I was wondering now if the US GPS and the Russian GLONASS system could actually be combined and found this article on the web that suggests that this could indeed be a neat idea. The authors are Americans working for the company Ashtech (link leads to the Magellan Professional website) so I guess the credibility is a bit higher than if it had come from the Russian PR agency.

Of course, both systems have their origins and current usage in military applications. The Register gives a background of where GLONASS originated from. Officially the use will be for such things like pet finders, so at least these applications promise to bring in money and not only waste it in the sky.

As reported by this German ICT online news portal, Amazon in Germany reached a new sales record this Christmas season. On the busiest day this year, December 17, they managed to sell 880k books, which is ten books per second, compared with seven last year. In the comments area of this news portal more than 200 people commented on this news. I skimmed through them and practically all said something along the lines of "great service", "they deserve it", etc. Now in low-service land Germany that is not necessarily such a big achievement one might think, but still it proves that Amazon can scale their operations and run them highly efficiently too. Of course, not without their mail logistics partners, who are DHL in Germany, who also seems to mostly do a great job. Although they screwed up two of my deliveries. Then I was told in Switzerland the Swiss Post takes over and it was their fault, but still I expect end-end responsibility - OK nobody is perfect.

At last the African continent is set to get access to affordable high-speed data communications. Three projects seem now to have secured financing, and want to start operation before the Soccer World Cup in 2010. Details can be found here: EASy, Seacom and TEAMs. I must admit that apart from being in South Africa and in the Maghreb, I left the African continent to hard core sales and marketing people who don't care too much who pays them, and I did not dare to enter. After reading the depressing book The State of Africa and seeing the movie Blood Diamonds my desire has been pretty much zero so far. I really hope these three projects indeed come off and will help the people (and not a few "selected" ones) to get a slice of the global ICT markets. Building it is one thing - ensuring that usage will be guaranteed for everyone, something else.

If you have read our blog regularly you might have found out that we are Research in Motion (RIM) fans (the company behind the successful Blackberry smartphones). This admiration comes purely from RIM's excellent product market focus, which I personally saw more than 10 years ago for the first time at a wireless trade show in San Jose, California. I well remember stopping by their tiny booth, grabbing a device and playing around with its great e-mail functions. It was totally clear to me that they had hit the right spot by doing this one thing extremely well and leaving out all other stuff that was not needed. Now I have to out myself: I have never ever owned a Blackberry device, although I was already sold on it more than 10 years ago. I think the reason was simply that the monthly pricing plan seemed too steep and that I am not a road warrior (with some exceptions a few months each year).
Now RIM has focused on small business owners and even consumers with some of its latest models, and this has paid off nicely for them. They beat all the expectations of analysts, who had been expecting a downturn for RIM due to the banking problems in the US and subsequent layoffs. No such thing happened though - in fact they doubled (not a joke) their quarterly sales from a year ago, and profits are also up. That in spite of every other vendor having a smartphone in their program. But even ten years later hardly anyone can match the Blackberries. Great product marketing is not easy to do and requires top notch talent, particularly when the target market is moving. Their consumer / small businesses model series is called the Curve. Their latest business phone the 8820 includes WLAN support, and is on my list to become my first Blackberry. As one of our customers said (who had just got an iPhone): The iPhone is for the look and coolness while the Blackberry makes more business sense. Emotions vs. intellect. But this distinction will get more blurry over time as RIM and also Apple and others will move into each other's areas. So the job for product marketing is not getting easier.

The ultimate The Bubble is Back video had 1 million downloads since it was uploaded early December. The guys behind this hilarious video can be seen on their blog site.