While Europe excelled in old style industries such as automobiles (which are now facing lots of problems), it seems to be a much smaller player in IT, Internet and - data-communications. So is that perception based on reality or just what we read and see every day? Let's first look at what I experience daily - and I might not be so untypical, I would think.

Lenovo laptop used. OK, this is a shared China-US domain. Now Lenovo is a China-based company, manufacturing is done in China but I think still designed in the US. Lots of components are from US companies like Intel CPU, NVIDIA video processor and the Windows operating system. The software I am using is mainly a US domain too: Mozilla Firefox, Seamonkey e-mail client, Microsoft Office, online calendar, web collaboration, VoIP (Skype is US owned now), web presentation, photo sharing, online CRM; Ok I think you've got the picture (for the record: my security software is from Europe).

Now let's look at my mobile connectivity: Apple iPhone, Samsung D600. Sorry, Opera guys, but you do not show up, although you need to be mentioned here as the number one mobile browser vendor.

Things look a little bit different, though, behind the scenes. While my Swisscom last-mile provider is definitely a Cisco shop, they work with Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent I think for the mobile infrastructure. OK, here we are still present but Chinese guys are on our heels (Huawei and ZTE).

So overall, a mostly lost game, although things look a bit more friendly in business software with many local "no-name" players and SAP as a powerhouse even now. Of course Oracle, HP and IBM are rolling up the little players here, too, and will do so more in 2009.

Looking at the above, while we do not have the same problems with basic infrastructure such as
airports, railway systems or mobile and fixed line telecom systems, I think we also will need a reboot for the IT, Internet and datacom industries.

I therefore call for a bail out plan for the IT industries in Europe. Use the money to catch up again and set ambitious goals. Along the same lines are recent calls for supporting the space programs in Germany with a plan to fly to the moon. At first I had a good laugh, asking myself "when was it again that they first landed on the moon? Why would hundred of millions spent to do something that is the same as others did nearly 40 years ago be any good for general competitiveness? But the good thing is that for once they are trying to come up with a general plan for high-tech too (and not only for the bank and automobile vendors)- Even if the first ideas seem a joke maybe it could lead in the right direction once they start thinking some more?

One thing I can say for sure: If the US. thinks they can reboot from their total current mess, then it should be possible to have a reboot of the IT industry in Europe and come back as well.

Come year end, you start reflecting on what happened in the past year, and of course what to expect for the new year. Here's my very personal list of some of the things I enjoyed most in 2008. This list is only a way to show what I liked and therefore not a "list of 2008" as many of the things I only discovered this past year but had been around for much, much longer, without me knowing about them before...

Best gadget I spent money on

Also for me as for many others, the iPhone was the highlight. I still have the 2G version as I do not like the ultra-short battery run time of the 3G model. The iPhone apps are simply revolutionizing mobile communications and for me lots of great applications have already totally changed the way I do things. Mostly, travelling has become easier as you can find many great apps for the major locations. Also, I started to listen more to podcasts with Stitcher and, lastly, could find some nice language tools as well (Chinese e.g.). And of course it stores hundreds of pictures and songs and a few videos as well, helping to make travel times on long distance flights seem much shorter.

Best places I visited

Living in one of the best places to live in the world - in Zurich - makes traveling a bit harder in the sense of measuring everything against what you take for granted in your home town. I still enjoyed going to places such as Stockholm, Shanghai, Barcelona, and this time around I even had a pleasant stay in hectic and traffic-jammed Paris. One of the most surprising places I went was in the US during a family reunion: Northern Michigan. It was picked by our US relatives and turned out to be a great place to go to, and not only because of the so-suitable summer hit song from Kid Rock.

Best countries I did business with

This is a tough one to call as it typically depends much more on who you can do business with than on the place. One would e.g. imagine that it should be easy to do business in Switzerland compared with places in Southern Europe like Italy, Spain or Greece, but my personal experience showed that this is actually not always true. A very mixed experience we had with Israel where the range is from very bad to excellent so it definitely depends on the who rather than the where. China is of course the same: if you do not know the people well and are not able build up a trusting relationship, you should not enter into any business relationship at all. But my personal best this year was Sweden. Interestingly, in Finland, where you would expect things to be much as they are in Sweden due to the proximity, my experience was rather negative and I got confronted with lots of local protectionism and not very trustworthy managers. But maybe in 2009 this will change when I can finally meet the right people there as well?

Best business books I read

I stopped reading business books that are not based on very concrete first-hand studies or personal experiences or interviews. They turn out to be too theoretical/academic and do not add much value for me. This year I read two very practical books that I can highly recommend: Entrepreneurial Success in Shanghai and YES! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion.

Best food I ate

When it comes to food the best places for me are in Italy. If you like seafood you might be surprised to hear that Milano is a great place to have excellent seafood. Milano is a trading hub for seafood even if it is not at the coast at all (1-2 hours drive way) which is the reason why you find some of the best seafood restaurants here.

Best blogs I enjoyed reading

I have subscribed to many blog feeds and try to check them daily. Unlike some US VCs who seem to have nothing else to do all day long than read and write blogs, I have to restrict my time to maybe 30 min per day which is not as much as I would like to but as much as I can spare. I have checked out some of the blog posts with the announcement of Google's Chrome browser and tried to take a snapshot on the quality of the articles. Of course this was only a snapshot and not representative of what they write about all year around. Still it gave some flavour of what you can expect and could run into. Blog post quality can range - not surprisingly - from excellent to total rubbish and all coming from the exact same blog (not on our blog site of course ). Ars Technica won that snapshot contest while quite a few other highly visible ones turned out to be pretty bad. My favorites typically are: Techmeme, I, Cringley (now he has a new blog), and Seth Godin. Lots of press recently has gone to Valleywag with is celebrity (both bad and good) co-founder. For me Valleywag reads quite boring, lacks deep practical experience with anything I would call marketing and sales and also has no technology understanding. It is from an analyst who turned into a writer, and that is what you get. Interesting of course is how he looks at it from a pure financial point of view, as this is what you can expect VCs and financial analysts would do as well, so still worth looking at it once in a while. It's the money speaking...

Best airline I flew with

Swiss is still in a class of its own and seems to be blossoming nicely ever since Lufthansa put their protective arm around them. The leather seats are simply the most comfortable I have found in any airline and the service is always excellent. Most pleasant surprise in 2008 was the fact that pricing is now also highly competitive, to the point where flying with a no-frills, zero-customer service airlines like Easyjet is not worth it any longer on certain routes.

Best movies I saw

It should have said "best DVDs" here as I hardly ever go to the cinema, and if then only with my kids. Madagascar 2 was great and actually also entertaining for adults as the dialogues are written for us grown ups as well. The kids loved it and the "movin, movin..." song gets you shaking for sure. Some of the others are actually not from 2008 but I saw them this year for the first time so that's why they show up here still. A Good Year with Russell Crowe, directed by Ridley Scott, is a great movie making fun of both the French and the Brits but at the end they come together nicely. Letterheads with George Clooney and Renee Zellweger I enjoyed on a long-distance flight and liked how the main actors enjoyed making this movie themselves. The German comedy "Männerpension" made by Detlev Buck with Til Schweiger was macabre but very refreshingly unconventional and not US style at all. For action Mr. & Ms. Smith was surprisingly top when I saw it on the plane. The story is dull but the action scenes are outstanding and also I think it becomes obvious that this was the beginning of the Brangelina story...

Now in case you like Abba (come on admit that they are not so bad at all, ) then you HAVE to see the movie Mamma Mia. One Abba hit after the other and quite well matching each scene in the movie. They had real fun making this movie too, that is for sure and it shows. Great! So I say "Thank your for the music, the songs I am singing, thanks for all the joy it's bringing - and thanks for giving this movie to me."

Best music I came across

Sophie Zelmani was my very personal discovery this year. The other favorite turned out to be The Killers. Don't take the band name literally, in fact I have no idea why they picked this nonsense name, but still their music and latest album is simply fantastic IMHO.

1. Reach their target groups: blogs can be sent out automatically to your clients, media and analysts, portals and just about anyone who is relevant in your product markets.
2. Monitor success of PR and marketing campaigns: either you measure a certain key word combination and how your own content and company is linked to it across the whole Internet or you take other metrics taken from your landing pages to measure success of a PR and marketing campaign. These tools are often even entirely free.
3. Do competitive analysis: of course you can do monitoring of your competitors' activities as well and in real time.
4. Save costs: many monitoring tools are free, as mentioned; changes can be done instantly; and face-to-face meetings and seminars are very costly compared with a webinar.
5. Do reputation management in realtime: in fast-moving ICT markets it is impossible to fix a reputation issue by traveling around or making phone calls with media and analysts. The way to do it is in a high-quality content blog and then distribute the link to thousands in your market so that it becomes widespread.
   
6. Collect leads: if you have excellent information on your web such as webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, podcasts, ROI/TCO calculators etc., people are willing to leave their contact details. Key is the quality of the information. Excellent content is needed.
7. Host/organize your own online community: if there is not yet a leading portal out there for your specific product market then you have the chance to set up a leading portal. Once your competitors have done it and succeeded you will be too late even if you invest lots and lots of money. People will not look for more than maybe 2 or max. 3 information sources for a particular field. If one provides all they need, they only have to look at that.
8. Influence media and analysts: where do media and analysts gather their information from? From the Web online, of course, as everything else would be way to slow. You are still trying to reach them with phone calls? Sorry, they are busy with their RS readers and information filters reading what is going on from the web, no matter how charming (or attractive ) your PR people may be.
9. Measure market buzz and fine-tune marketing/sales campaigns: for large corporations with a multitude of products, it is difficult to communicate as they have simply too much information at hand and coming out. So why not monitor what is being discussed out there in each product market currently and adapt your own marketing campaigns.
10. Get customer feedback for product improvements: information collected online is often more reliable than focus group feedback. Online, people say what they think, as they feel it is anonymous. In a focus group or face-to-face interview there are group dynamics that are difficult to filter out and lead to wrong results. At trade shows, people also like to talk a lot of (nonsense), and information gathered there often bears little relation to the real world.