It has been a while since I talked about WiMAX. I guess this reflects the reality of its slower than expected rollout in the US primarily due to its prime backer Sprint's troubles. But now I came across a few interviews and announcements that look quite promising. Sprint is rolling out WiMAX large-scale finally starting with Baltimore in September and then have Chicago and Washington follow in Q4 and other cities in 2009. There are many other regional players who were faster with rolling out their WiMAX services but Sprint will be the first doing that on a really large scale.

Ah and take a look at this embedded video which is an interview with Sprint's operations manager for WiMAX. This sounds now finally like the right thing to do. I would expect if they build the network well, even an Apple iPhone or a Google Android phone could offer WiMAX built some time in 2009. That would rock the market and be far ahead of LTE for sure... As I mentioned some time ago the WiMAX vs. LTE race is on. It is a slower than expected one but speed will catch up in 2009, and LTE is far from seeing any commercial deployments yet it seems.

iPhone apps have catapulted the wireless mobile industry into a new millennium. Everyone will benefit: Apple of course, the app developers now having a platform to make good revenue quickly; the other wireless device vendors and developers as they now also have a path to tap into the market of the billions of mobile phone users, allowing them to profit, too, if they move fast.

• the neutral app recommendation site www.appvee.com contains lots of copied and neutral info on iPhone apps, plus reviews. This site helps with finding your applications.
• there are apps restricted to use in North America only: WeatherBug (temperature in Fahrenheit only), Pandora radio (does not run in Europe), AirportStatus (also keeps crashing on startup, latest: now it works!), NWA travel...
  
• my favorite apps right now are (a snapshot as things change daily):
• Evernote, great notebook that also has a website that lets you better organize and share your notes
• MProfs, nice short marketing tips and how to stories, with some good contributions in it
• SBB Timeplan, giving you fast access to the Swiss public transport timetables
• 20min, free Swiss news source, best are the available news videos, I think
• Bloomberg, this has proven to be the so far best stock market news and tracker application for me, its counterpart Swissquote lacks basic usability features, which is a shame, as otherwise they could be even better I think, so right now I'm still using Bloomberg
• WinWeinReb, a big database in German for wine grapes, after you key in the wine grape name you get infos about its major locations and also a description of its to be expected taste, a database that gives access to the wines itself would be a great extension, hope they do that for free then too
• AeroWeather. There are many other -- it seems great -- to-be-paid for tools for pilots available, but AeroWeather is for free and provides the latest reported weather at all major aiprorts worldwide, including METARs and TAFs in both raw and decoded versions: very nice tool!
• nice stuff for just playing around: Mandarin phrase book, Cocktails, Brain Tuner, Newtons Cradle, Blanks (new English words), PangeaVR (3D panoramas), Midomi and Shazam (recognize songs)
• more useful tools: Currency, ZIPcodes, Units, Translator, Cards, WeekNumber

Two days ago American Airlines launched as the first airline in the US Wifi access aboard three flight routes from New York to San Francisco, to LA and to Miami. Next airlines to follow will be Virgin America and Delta Airlines. Delta will offer it even on all their domestic flights. The technology company behind this is Aircell who is in business since 17 years and is the provider of the inflight telephone communications.

The Wifi service is called Gogo and it seems to work very well as this test report here shows. Unlike its European counterparts (I have yet to find any flight with this service although they all talk about it for quite a while) who use satellite links, Aircell's Gogo service uses ground base stations scattered across the US. This seems a much better, for sure higher-speed service than going over the slow satellite links. Maybe an idea for the European community to think about building such an infrastructure as well. I will for sure try to check out Gogo on my next trip in the US and then report back my experience with it. One time flat fee is 13 USD BTW which is not that cheap but also still affordable.

I have to warn everybody from some annoying experience I made. While I am overall quite impressed with the product as you can read below, sales as well as support response times are horrible. It takes days if not even weeks to get anyone to return e-mails. Then you need to also be aware that the product costs between 6-8k USD per year so is not to be compared with salesforce.com like pricing. Lastly, I am still waiting that they confirm to me that all my uploaded data from a trial is indeed deleted and not used by anyone. I have already asked twice in the last three days but still did not get any response. They also cut you off the trial without any warning so that you won't be able to take such actions yourself.


One year ago I already trialed Genius.com organizing initial e-mailings to prospective clients. At first I was excited - as far as I remember - but then I decided to drop it anyway due to a lot of missing features and also lack of stability.
Now I am impressed with it and Genius.com got much closer to deserving its name.
As with many good software tools usability makes the difference. Exactly this is what the Silicon Valley based VC funded startup does extremely well now and most importantly very reliably and stable. Investment into the platform and into the Ajax client user interface have paid off.

They also addressed the spam filter issue now very well. No cookies are used. Genius.com solves this problem, at least for now, by giving your websites a unique new URL which is all that is needed to identify who, for how long and in what order clicked onto your websites. You can even replay what someone did on your website showing its path and time spent on each page, so you can draw real conclusions that help decide what to do next with each prospect.
Equally well done is the management of emails and contacts organized in SmartGroups. Here a lot of goodies have been added compared with a year ago.

One nice feature is the possibility to add a remove footer when you send out the e-mail to more than 20 recipients. This complies with US anti-spam regulations and is also in Europe good to have.

Overall Genius.com is a very good tool that solves a current problem very nicely. I will have to test the integration with salesforce.com still but also here it appears the company's product management is eager to provide a complete user experience. With regards to it's business model one can expect that they position themself for a trade sale to one of the BIG players such as Microsoft, salesforce.com or maybe Google. I can so far fully recommend Genius.com to create, execute, analyze and coordinate your business e-mailings and have it all integrated with other website analytics or CRM tools.

More than 2000 applications are available already for the iPhone. My own favorite ones right now are:

• Salesforce Mobile, in case you use salesforce.com as a CRM tool, access is available with the iPhone now too
• Swissquote, leading Swiss online broker
• Currency, showing you the latest exchange rates
• 20min, nice online version of the popular free Swiss newspaper
• NetNewsWire, RSS reader providing me with the latest online news
• Bloomberg, news headlines and a quick overview of the world stock markets
• NYTimes, New York Times news, business articles and latest photos
• PangeaVR, great tool to see 360 degree panoramas, amazing what's technically possible already
• GottaGo, front end for all public transportation in Switzerland, great tool
• iOlympics, latest news, events, schedules, sports and country specific news
• ZIP codes, let's you find zip codes or towns and provides quick access to maps
• Labyrinth LE, my kids liked it!
• DizzyBeeFree, dito
• Shazam and midomi, in case I hear a song on the radio that I like and want to buy, I can identify it now within a few seconds...