• Berliner Morgenpost: “So machen Berliner Megageschäfte mit Rabatten”
  http://www.morgenpost.de/wirtschaft/article1313709/So-machen-Berliner-Megageschaefte-mit-Rabatten.html
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “Groupon.com übernimmt Citydeal.de”
  http://faz-community.faz.net/blogs/netzkonom/archive/2010/05/16/groupon-com-uebernimmt-citydeal-de.aspx
• TechCrunch: “Groupon Invades Europe With Acquisition Of Citydeal”
  http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/groupon-invades-europe-with-acquisition-of-citydeal/

Go tell your parents!

Würde sich auch in diesem Spot sicher gut machen!

Hier mitmachen, Slogan für eDarling ausdenken und bis zu 2.250 € gewinnen. Wenn Euer Slogan besser sein sollte als meiner.

Screenshot www.rocket-internet.de

Rocket Internet, the company which I currently work for as an investor and interim manager, and which has made some pretty interesting internet investments in Germany has finally launched its new website. Most important probably: the various job postings. We are looking for lots of new employees right now. I guess there’s always possibilities for cool companies – even in tough times like these.

Rocket is a venture capital investor with the in-house capabilities to support and accompany investments during the first steps, i.e. with business, IT and marketing experts. It is also known for the legendary soccer meetup every Wednesday, which usually results in significant bodily damages for Berlin’s internet industry.

Walk tall,
kick ass,
learn to speak Arabic,
love music
and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

- Hunter S. Thompson

Unfortunately, the embedding doesn’t work properly – the video can be found here: http://www.condition-critical.org/

It is taken from the website Condition: Critical, published by Medecins sans Frontières. While it doesn’t contain a lot of background information, it gives a depressing impression of individual situations in the Kivus.

I wrote some more about Congo here and here.

Fighting has errupted in the past week in the area around Goma, located in the Nord-Kivu region bordering to Rwanda. Having spent a big part of 2006 working on the UNICEF and UNHCR transports going from Dar es Salaam (in Tanzania, and a major port, more information see here) to Goma makes one feel even more desperate.

However, the Maniema region and its capital Kindu seem to be largely unaffected. In fact, the provincial government has enacted a deescalation strategy which apparently seems to work fine. As it looks right now, my stay in Congo from January to March will not be affected.

Short TV segment on esanum, dated spring 2008. Check my t-shirt in the second half of this report about Jugend gründet.

Ulrik and Ronnie, two old friends of mine whom I know back from doing a student magazine in highschool, launched the public beta of txtr.com yesterday (see wizpac blog). I was able to take some look at it beforehand – and I really liked what I see. A very smart startup. Congratulations to everyone being involved in the project.

Best of luck, guys. Hope no sheep get in your way.

by Grant MacDonald

A really nice ambient track produced by Alex. Note to self: Be sure to check out all the other ones.

Maybe it is slowly getting time to get home.

In Puerto Escondido, I learned that I was wrong about what surfing is all about. I thought it means freedom, maybe some nature connection. Turns out, the ultimate goal is being interviewed and featured in some surfer movie which is then showed in all hotels during dinner.

A lot of pictures can be found here.

By the way, check some great pictures of Mexico City in Carraol’s photoblog.

With presidential candidates Obama and McCain using services like Twitter and YouTube extensively, scepticism about all new ways that politicians take seems to be a German trait – and even one that two of Germany’s progressive media elements like Der Spiegel and Sueddeutsche Zeitung have incorporated. While Heil’s reports obviously are highly subjective and not always 100% correct in spelling, they do represent a politician opening himself to the public, sharing personal insights both about politics as well as about his own daily life – and in fact using Twitter’s reply function to engage in dialogues with interested followers, of which there are 900, now, at the end of the week.

For other blog reactions in German see Thomas Knüwer’s Indiskretion Ehrensache, Christian Soeder or Nico Lumma.

Minor flaws remain, like umlaut support, but this is also just a first beta. It uses Growl on Mac, yet I’m still experiencing some problems regarding display, e.g. the fonts look ugly and I’m lacking the cool sun graphics that we can see here for example. Will have to work on this later.

Including maps into Gmail alone might be a killer and this whole thing takes the mash-up term to a real new level. Check the below video for some cool examples.

What is Mozilla Ubiquity?
Ubiquity is a Firefox expansion which might prove to be a big step forward in user interaction in the Internet. Basically, it is a step backwards in time, introducing a command line which accepts written commands. Such could include:

• translate azucar to Danish
  (would recognize the Spanish word “azucar” as “sugar” and would translate it into Danish)
• twitter status
  (would set the Twitter status to, well, “status”)
• calculate expression
  (doesn’t know e or p yet, though)
• email message to contact
  (currently only working with Gmail)

A good overview is also delivered by Mozilla themselves:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

How to improve Mozilla Ubiquity?

Just a bunch of first thoughts: Hope there is a currency and measurement converter soon. Should also integrate with OmniFocus, though the email command might be a workaround. Voice recognition would be awesome – especially if combined with a Star Trek LCARS skin. Allow call number for Skype Out. check-calender is cool, what about check-mail? That Ubiquity recognizes words like “it” and “that” and automatically refers to previous entries is great, yet it has also left me with some problems already.

Also check Mashable, tech.blorge.com or the recently redesigned TechCrunch. for further reading. Aza Raskin’s blogpost announcing Ubiquity is also a great collection of further links on the topic.

News concerning 2009: I’m most likely going to finish my studies with a final stay in DR Congo. I’ll be stationed with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) in Central Congo, namely the Maniema province and its capital Kindu. I got some first impressions – as seen below – out of the great flickr photo stream of Julien Harneis.

My task there will be in the microfinance area and I will be writing my final thesis about this topic. I’m looking forward to an excellent first hand experience on the ground, as well as hopefully being able to help developing this activity further. The region is also home to some United Nations presence, including Nepali peacekeeping forces, if I’m not mistaken.

Just ran across this trailer on Spiegel Online. Sitting in my room here in Mexico City, I can at least relate to some of the scenes shown here. The story is about a German medical student, doing a part of his practical training in Colombia. I liked August Diehl ever since his great performance in 23 and Dr. Alemán is one of the flics I’m trying to see as soon as possible. The movie was shot in Spanish with actors from the actual town of Cali. Unfortunately, the above trailer is the German one, but visit the Dr. Alemán website for the trailer in original Spanish.

I originally intented to compile a list of useful ressources on grids, yet on Vandelaydesign.com you can find an already exhaustive list. My personal favorite is the 960 Grid System, which is very nice for rapid prototyping and hitting the ground running.

The first static page is the one with information about me. Even though this whole site is on the verge of being egoistic, it’s the only possible answer to re-claim your identity from Google, I guess.

Also, I currently use the incredible ugly standard Wordpress links, since I didn’t have time to configure my lighttpd correctly yet. Hope to be able to tackle that soon, will however first devote my time for some Rocket projects now.