Think! by Özgür Aksakal

I am always impressed with people who find a new use for an existing technology and show a fresh perspective.

Remember the frustrating captchas which are supposed to block bots and computers from automatically registering for websites, webmails and spam people.

A cumputer scientist comes with the idea “What if we display two captchas, one to identify the user is a human and second to solve a problem”.

So as a second captcha, you display a text which can not be processed with OCR from a manuscript to be digitilized.

You can read the full story here. It gives a very interesting perspective on online gaming as well. Recaptcha example is on the second page:

Today, by coincidence, I discovered an interesting Swiss startup in Zurich: imusiciandigital.

IMusicianDigital does digital distribution for independent bands and musicians non-exclusively. Musicians pay 40 euros per year plus 15% fee on sales, and IMusicianDigital distributes their music to online music stores worldwide, not only iTunes.

I really liked their business model. It is an example of the business case that works in non-consolidated markets: There are too many service providers (in this case, music stores) and it is too much of an hassle for client (in this case, musician) to deal with each of them. Such markets create opportunities for those who can ease the pain and be the middle man between services and clients.

I have realized, I am using delicious -the social bookmarking website- more and more for my day to day search. You may object that I am a tech-savy user, but my wife started using it  as well after seeing how relevant results delicious can bring in certain cases.

To find restaurants, service providers, tools, specific information, I often search at delicious first, and get a sense of what other people find worth to bookmark.

At a different end, on social voting, we know that Google is experimenting with Digg style social voting on search results.

Combining the two, voting, and tagging, could be an extremely useful relevancy booster in search.

World Economic Forum has published the 2008-2009 Global Competitiveness Report. According to WE, top three of “The most problematic factors for doing business” in my home country Turkey are:

• Inefficient government bureaucracy
• Tax regulations
• Policy instability

which I could not agree more. What also caught my attention is, “Corruption” ranks quite low in the list. I have been living in Switzerland since 2001. If true, I am happy to know that.

Interestingly, Switzerland’s top three of ” The most problematic factors for doing business” are:

• Inadequately educated workforce
• Tax regulations
• Restrictive labor regulations

Those, who don’t know Switzerland may be surprised by the first. I was surprised as well, when I first came to Switzerland.

Switzerland has good schools, top notch universities but at the same time there are less incentives for youngsters to go to university. Wage differences are low and many young people, after high-school, do apprenticeship and start working immediately.

I and my wife are preparing for a 2 week holiday in Sicily. We will first drive to Munich, later attend a wedding at a nearby town, fly to Palermo, rent a car, do an Island tour, fly back to Munich, and drive back to Zurich.

For our trip, we have booked a cheap flight from Munich to Palermo with TUIFly, 2 hotels in Munich, 6 hotels in Sicily, and we have rented a car to pickup from Palermo.

Our itinerary is quite complex, with several booking confirmations from different booking engines like Venere, Expedia, Booking.com, and some booking directly made at hotel websites. It took us (ok, my wife so much time to plan the itinerary and find the “best deals”, that, now I am not sure, if it was worth the effort to book them from different websites.

Anyway, now the “search for deals” is over and we have a new challenge; To bring all these booking confirmations together, in the right order, including telephones, addresses (for navigation), reservation codes etc.

Being the techie in residence, I thought it is the right time to give TripIt a chance. With technology, I take certain people’s comments seriously. If Joel Spolsky says TripIt works well for him, I think it should work for me as well.

So I gave TripIt the chance. I created a TripIit profile, and started forwarding our booking confirmations to plans@tripit.com. It looked very simple… Only at the beginning.

After seeing how well it recognized the first hotel booking in Munich, I even got excited. But my excitement faded after few more bookings. TripIt, overall, recognized less than 40% of our bookings only.

I guess, TripIt is optimized very much for large booking engines and especially the ones in US. I have no doubt it is only a matter of time until they add the parsing intelligence for more sites.

If it works, the idea behind TripIt is great and ther service is very useful. I will wait for my next complicated trip, to try TripIt again. For now, my wife and I will go for a one 42 page PDF document (that includes all confirmations) loaded to my Nokia E71.

I was looking for a new phone for the last few months, and finally I got one. Actually my wife gave it as a birthday present: The Nokia E71.

After using the device for last few days, I must say I have been really impressed by E71.

Let me explain the shortcoming of the phone first, since there is actually only one significant for me: The screen size is not very good for browsing.  iPhone with 3.5″ and HTC Touch Diamond with 2.8″ screen sizes are better suited for frequent web browsing compared to Nokia E71 with the 2.4″ screen size.

Let’s look at what  E71 has achieved with this one compromise:

• A -really- slim body. Even with the leather case, I feel comfortable carrying it. The width and height are also reasonable.
• A great keyboard. It is a well designed and engineered. The keys are small but they catch your fingers. Their shapes are very intuitive.
• GPS works well, and Nokia gives the maps away for free.
• WLAN setup is very simple and easy. After the initial configutation, you can connect to and disconnect from a network right from the main screen of E71.
• The built-in browser is easy to use. I tried a number of websites and it simply works.
• Battery life is very good
• I took few picture with the 3.2 MP camera. Even indoors, the results were well. Camera is not the highlight of this phone. But I know, I will use it frequently.
• I tried few applications like card scanner, pdf reader and results are very good.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the E71 and I won’t be reading another mobile phone review at least for 6 months. That is alone a big time-saving and productivity gain for me:)

Two friends, past coworkers, launched their own startups recently.

Fotios Schoinas launched SunDot. He is an UI Expert especially in Flash/Flex. He is also very experienced with CMS solutions.

Daniel Mettler launched PrintScreen. I don’t know Dani’s secret business plan. but I know him from my days at Cambridge Technology Partners. He is a very good techie.

Congratulations to them for their bold steps. I wish them success, fun and of course luck.

In the world of Web2.0 and Social Net, Crowdsourcing is a hot topic.

There are  well selling books and trend news.

And, you see companies such as Dell using it to reach their customers and startups such as Crowdspring and 99Designs developing offerings.

There are two distinct trends in crowdsourcing.

One is to to engage customers more in product or company strategy, like what Dell is doing.

The other one is to using crowdsourcing to get a service, hopefully a better service at a better price.

I recently used Crowdspring for a logo design. Having used Logoworks in the past, I had the chance to compare the two.

At Logoworks, you pay a fixed price and get a limited number of submissions. After selecting a logo, in most cases you have unlimited revisions.

At Crowdspring, you have unlimited entries, and unlimited revisions. You set your own contest price with a fixed fee paid to crowdspring as contest operator. If the project or price is appealing, you obviously get more submissions from designers.

Comparing the two services,  I must say I got better results at Crowdspring.

I still had one issue with crowdsourcing though. For my logo, one of the designers submitted a design that was not his own. He simply copied an existing -probably copyrighted- logo. Luckily it was spotted by one of the other designers. But it could well slip.

This poses an important risk to outsourcing-type-of-crowdsourcing where intellectual property rights, authenticity and confidentiality are important.

I am sure vendors will address this issue somehow, perhaps sharing some of the risk or putting in place better quality controls. Enterprise clients may hesitate to use such services until that time.

But for smaller companies and projects, crowdsourcing is already a definite winner.

I enjoy reading monthly newsletters from Trendwatching. The September issue is out. It talks about how the online world influences the offline world.

Here are few more sites to follow the trend news: Trendhunter, Springwise and Springspotters.

I have the same challenge  as many others. I want a phone that is not too big and not too heavy, yet is usable for internet browsing (3G, WiFi), video viewing and has GPS.

While looking at few candidates (iPhone, HTC Touch Diamond, Nokia E71, Nokia N85), I got curious.

How widely available are GPS and WiFi in mobile phones?

For my very simple market analysis, I checked the swiss online store Digitec.

I chose all phones that were not branded by an telco operator. I did not filter the different language versions of phones. So list has multiple versions of the same phone (French, English, German, Italian).

Here are the results:

Of 311 phones listed:

• 87 have GPS (28%)
• 97 have WiFi (31%)
• 71 have both GPS and WiFi (23%)

These numbers have few flaws. Smart phones are more likely to have multiple listing with different language operating systems. On the other hand regular phones have more color variety. I think these two somehow balance each other.

Regardless of this slight biase, I find it impressive that a more than 20 percent of all new phones have both GPS and WiFi.

The trend is clear.

We will see more and more phones with WiFi and GPS.