It’s always nice to watch the advertisement billboards in the London area especially when you are on your way to the airport.
The two below are currently placed near the Luton airport. The 118118 directory service one you can also see all over the city, the Maestro ad I only saw there.

Obviously what they want is grab your attention and get a place in your mind. Both did the job well with me…

I came across this neat tool that helps to set up meetings with colleagues or friends avoiding the endless e-mail exchanges or SMSs until you finally find a common day and time to meet for dinner, drink or whatever.

The founder would probably think it is more than a "tool" and I am sure he will find like-minded VCs who will fund his business. If not, it should be easy for him to do a very early sale to one of the many collaboration or social network sites.

I used this tool and it works nicely. Some improvements are necessary, such as more online calendar (Web 2.0) supports, but with just $37k self-financing lots has been achieved. Try it out and see if you like it too!

This morning I read an article in Heise Online about the widening gap of engineers in Germany. Currently 95k engineers are missing in Germany according to this study. I would have thought that is a problem in pretty much all Western countries but, as the diagram below shows, that is not true at all. Between 1995 and 2006 the percentage of engineers and science students dropped from 23,6% to now just 15.4% in Germany. After reading a book on India and the fact that they bring out 500k engineers every year I see a solution for them...

This tip here comes from Seth Godin's blog site and I repeat it here so you can also profit from it in case you have not seen it yet.

Flickr is a great source for high-quality inexpensive pictures. With this tool you can also search it nicely. The search word "quality" got me these amazing ones below. If you even want more check out this here too and search for "most interesting". Seth uses them for finding "connections between ideas" when brainstorming. I'll check this out...

While there will be apps available this summer certified by Apple to run on the iPhone, Fring let's you chat and do VoIP calls incl. Skype and all the other major ones now. How to install it on an "open" iPhone can be read here. Also watch the video.

All I know of Russia is - I admit - from books ( I am reading an excellent one from Peter Scholl Latour right now) and a one-time experience doing a large sale through a German reseller to the world bank in Moscow about 15 years ago or so. I will spare you this story although it would make for some nice entertainment...

Now you can read that the Russian government requests all Wifi-enabled devices be registered before they can be used. Yes they mean all, so your laptop, smart phone, PDA or whatever comes with Wifi connectivity. Details can be read on this blog site here. As the government agency in charge seems to be new, it could still be that they announced this by accident, not having the technical understanding. We can only hope so as otherwise the ten-day registration process will certainly not be followed by everybody and as a consequence create lots of illegal Wifi users. If this story is indeed true and this is really enforced, I will certainly have no reason to visit Russia any time soon as open-access Wifi I consider as a basic requirement now to do business. Buying a gun instead is not a investment I will do.