• The ICT markets in Europe continue to show single digit growth as reported in the EITO October. Strongest growth is in Spain again, while Germany is growing less but remains Europe's largest ICT market. Slides 9 and 10 show historical data dating back to 1994. Interesting to see the double digit growth in the IT markets in 1998, 1999 and 2000 and the crash from 2000 to 2001 followed even by declines in 2002 and 2003.
• Since yesterday Google has added blogs to its successful Google Alerts service. Now it is possible to also see blog posts in your Google Alerts next to news and new web search results. This seems a minor thing but it actually means that blog articles reach the same status as news/press articles from press agencies and other traditional media sources at least when using Google Alerts. Analysts would say, the beginning of a paradigm shift?
• If you want to get a quick overview of the currently available support sites and contacts for faulty Sony LiIon batteries that are affected by the recall, go to this site here which was set up by the popular German radio station SWR3.

• More and more bad reviews of the new - delayed - Sony Reader ebook suggest that this product seems to not fulfil the high expectations we had. Criticism is about useability and the download store. I suggested some time ago that it will probably take Apple to make this category finally a success by offering a full user experience. Of course book reading is maybe not what the iPod crowd is doing in their leisure time so we will, unfortunately, never see this happen and have to live for some time with second class products from the named company...
• "Business is very, very good here at Google", is what its CEO Eric Schmidt told analysts and then the numbers more than proved that he is right. Doubled profits from a year ago, 70% higher revenues from a quarter ago. Yahoo on the other hand is quite in the shade, so its CEO sounded much different: "I am not satisfied with our current financial performance and we intend to improve it." Of course Yahoo is still doing great and most companies would wish to have their results, but Google is setting the tone and Yahoo and analysts compare with them.
• Another company that seems to be doing things right is Ericsson (see CEO's report). This is in spite of strongest competition from China (although we have not heard so much recently anymore from Huawei and ZTE). While their competitors are busy with mergers (Lucent/Alcatel and Nokia/Siemens) they are taking the opportunity to grow their business in all areas. Most importantly, the Marconi purchase seems to be showing positive results as recent customer wins show. The fact that they are very late to the WiMAX markets does not show - yet. Of course they also know that bringing out a new technology like WiMAX with carrier grade performance and reliability cannot be done in a rush. So it has to be seen how fast WiMAX proponents will be able to get their product testing done, in a way that they are stable and do not crash in the field when put under real world stress for the first time. Finally, its mobile phone joint venture SonyEricsson is doing well with a growing market share and successful product launches. In short the Ericsson motor is firing on all four cylinders: Mobile Networks, Fixed Line Networks, Services, and Mobile Phones.

• How info tech blogs can be also used to make money with advertisement has been demonstrated in the US with e.g. TechCrunch. The recent TechCrunch party in San Francisco attracted the whole Online Marketing and Web 2.0 crowd, it seemed. Now GigaOm (investor is True Ventures) and Guy Kawasaki (Federated Media) got money to leverage their readership, too.
• Apple has also now announced the recall of 1.8 million Sony batteries. Dell had recalled 2.4 million just a few days before Apple and suggested to agree on vendor independent standards for laptop battery manufacturing. Both vendors' costs will be in the $100 million range whereas Sony is talking about even higher numbers (6 million recalls so far) and is being questioned by the Japanese government on the incident.
• AOL showed a strong sign of life this week when they announced deals with a multitude of film studios (20th Century Fox, Universal, Sony Pictures) to sell movies online for $10-$20 a piece. While AOL is otherwise in free fall with regards to losing visitors, this announcement shows that the movie/video business is a Time Warner domain that they understand. Could well be that this is the life saver for AOL.
• Nokia announced -next to others- that they will not participate at the Cebit next year. This comes after they already decided to also abandon the IFA in Berlin. Nokia said that they plan to go less to general public events but do more of their own events or join forces with partners. Our two cents: Once you have build your brand a more targeted approach to differentiate it makes sense. We have, by the way, also seen that Nokia Infrastructure is doing interactive things like a knowledge game on their website. E.g. they have a game on their site that lets people build a greenfield telecom/data infrastructure in a developing country. Great idea!! All the would-like-to-be operator CTOs (and the real ones?) can have fun.
• Seth Godin a week ago published his new book called "small is the new big thing" which is basically a collection of "nuggets of wisdom" from his blog site. One nugget example he published on another blog site to market his book is " The top five mistakes entrepreneurs make when they market". Maybe its about time that I buy one of his books now too.

Sony's mylo is our Gadget of the Week. It is a combined entertainment and personal communicator device for teens and twens although some older folks might also like it. The list of features contains what one needs to stay well connected and entertained:

• Media player: Digital audio and MPEG-4 videos on a 320 by 240 pixel 2.4-inch LCD
• Internet access: built in Wifi, Opera browser and QWERTY keyboard lets you surf the web
• IM and VoIP: Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Skype are all on board
• Can wirelessly stream music to other mylo users using iTunes (not sure how/if this works though with Apple's stringent digital rights management measures)
• By numbers: 1GB flash memory, memory stick pro duo slot, $350 retail price, launch in September

In an historic step (largest recall in the history of consumer electronics) Dell has recalled 4.1 million laptops due to problems with LiIon batteries. The batteries are from Sony as Dell reported. Now the story that everyone told so far when a laptop LiIon battery burst out into flames, that cheap and low-quality China made batteries are the reason for it and otherwise there is no potential danger, are not valid any longer. I am just thinking again about the Tesla Motors sports car from Southern California debut. The car has about 7'000 LiIon cells built in (behind the dashboard). Tesla of course says that they have done very high circuitry protection and also put the cells into metal containers but this somehow reminds me of the nuclear power plant evangelists who also always said that there is no danger at all and they would control the technology. If the Tesla car catches fire then we probably have a few celebrities less in this world (saw Arnold S. test driving it and quite a few prominent VCs from Silicon Valley too, who put their money into it as well).