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Posts Tagged ‘german’

There is a tweet being retweeted heavily within the German Twitter community right now which roughly translates as

“BEWARE Nazi-pigs on Twitter! @Heil_Hitler_88 Please block so that the account gets deleted. #nazi #block #rt Please!” (original).

Now, if Twitter had servers in Germany an account like @Heil_Hitler_88 (we’re not linking BTW) would be illegal and would be deleted right away.

As part of a “digital classroom” roadshow currently underway in Germany, Samsung is showing off it’s new “e-board”. This e-board, in 65″ and 82″ sizes, is a really interesting convergence of e-book reader, smartboard, and classroom display solution. In addition to typical smartboard functionality, it can also display the desktop of a connected PC or laptop, as well as display contents from Samsung ebook readers using their new “emoLink” technology.

Read more from the original source: 
The Samsung 650TS is a gigantic e-board

The wording in the headline may not be, you know, exactly what HTC said – but it might as well be. After the folks over at Crave UK woke up to a broken screen — which they swear isn’t their fault, as the device had just been sitting on a desk charging — full of inky purple rage on their Nexus One , they shot a call over to HTC support.

Go here to read the rest:
HTC: Don’t put the Nexus One in your hipster jeans

The Audi A8 is a nerdgasm on wheels. It was the only car that had a line to sit in it yesterday during the last press day at the Detroit Auto Show. So I skipped it

Continued here:
The Audi A8 Google Earth integration gets a video demo

We’ve noted before that LED lights are, while energy efficient , a bit cool in color, leading to the “my house looks like an operating room” effect. There have been attempts to warm them up (with “quantum dots” ) but this panel looks a hell of a lot more promising, even if it’s not particularly bright. J.H

Read more here: 
Color-temperature adustable OLED lighting? Yes, please

The last of the “FIGS” has been completed. Twitter has rolled out a German version of the site today. The microblogging platform previously launched Italian, French, and Spanish versions of the site.

As we’ve said in the past, Twitter is crowd-sourcing much of the work for these translations and the speed at which they’ve added the translations is impressive. Twitter was previously available in English and Japanese. As usual, Twitter has written the latest blog post on the matter in the native tongue, so we’ll (roughly) translate it below.

German is one of the most widespread languages of the EU and is the last language we introduced in 2009 on Twitter.com.

To set your language preferences, visit your preferences page and select German in the drop-down menu “Language”. The whole web interface is now translated! As a next step, visit and follow the official “Twitter in German” profile @ Twitter_De. Thus, our German users can stay informed about news at Twitter up to date. Last, tell your friends know and go ahead and twittering!

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For most of us, the term ’smartbook’ (a device that’s somewhere in between a smartphone and a netbook) is nothing but the latest tech buzzword du jour. For German company Smartbook, however, it’s apparently a chance to score some free publicity by vigilantly defending a multinational trademark and threatening to sue everyone who dares use it in conversations.

Let me kick off by saying that Smartbook AG does indeed own a trademark on the word smartbook in most of Western Europe, Australia, Singapore, South Korea and a couple of other countries. The company sells laptops that are named Smartbook, so I guess the company is well within its rights to try and protect their trademark in any way it deems appropriate.

In the past, the company has gone after companies like Qualcomm and Freescale, who use the term as a generic denominator for portable Internet-ready devices that are neither smartphones or netbooks in product descriptions (and this dedicated website). That is understandable, and Qualcomm for one has already somewhat complied with the request by restricting access to some of its website for visitors located in Germany.

But Smartbook AG has also targeted media outlets who use the word generically to describe some next-generation devices. For instance, electronics industry newspaper EE Times has removed all references to the word, and even downright deleted an article that dealt with the legal threats put forward by Smartbook against the media company. Do a search and you’ll find some articles (including the one that has now disappeared, second result) referencing the term ’smartbook’, but you won’t see the word mentioned in any article.

And the German company is growing more aggressive. Today, Sascha Pallenberg from blog and video publisher NetbookNews got in touch with us to let us know that he has recently received a letter from a German lawyer asking him to refrain from using the term ’smartbook’ on his online network.

Now it appears the company is actively going to pursue international bloggers and press too, no longer limiting themselves to those in German-speaking countries (watch out, CNET!). And conveniently, exactly at the same time the company is announcing its international expansion. Add to that the fact that Steffen Wilde, Smartbook AG’s outside counsel, told a Forbes reporter that they’d be willing to sell the trademark (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and we can safely conclude that the small Cologne company is raising all this ruckus for attention and money.

And I realize we’re helping them with the former. Not very smartbook of us.

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Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com, a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me.

But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures.

When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale. The new architecture will now also be able to support third-party developers via APIs, which companies can also use to integarte MFG.com into their existing business and ERP systems.

Most of the changes to the site are on the backend. MFG.com finally integrates its 2006 acquisition of Sourcingparts.com, which will allow Free to to pursue a Salesforce.com-like strategy in the supplier relationship marketing (SRM) industry, and tie that to his marketplace. Instead of selling SRM software to manufacturers for $100,000 a pop, he is offering the same software over the Web on a much cheaper subscription basis.

The new site also now supports multiple languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese) and 50 different currencies. The big growth market for MFG.com over the past few years has been China, connecting global product companies with Chinese manufacturers. Now with local languages and currencies, Free wants to go after the internal Chinese-to-Chinese market as well. “Previously,” says Free, “the MFG.com platform was only in English and we were only attractive to Chinese companies who were fluent in English and export oriented. We anticipate a significant amount of China to China business to begin happening on the platform that is virtually non-existent today.” Watch out, Alibaba.

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You could say StudiVZ, the German Facebook clone, has a few problems on its hands – and some unwelcome publicity.

Back in August Facebook officially became Germany’s biggest social network, increasing reach by more than 50% from March to July 2009 taking it to 6.2 million unique users in Germany. By contrast StudiVZ had 4.28 million uniques.

Then StudiVZ became the subject of some high profile hacks which showed up its lax attitude to security. In particular was that by a 20 year old man who used crawler software to harvest detailed user information from all of the “VZ” sites (owned by VZ-Netzwerke), copying 48,000 profiles in just four hours.

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Day two of TechCrunch 50, and the TC50 Drinking Game is in full swing. So far, we’ve seen jokes made at the expense of Arrington, Jason alluding to his personal wealth and countless “great question”s. But disappointingly there has been no real controversy  either from the panel of experts or the startups.

Thank Calacanis, then, for The American flag.

TechCrunch50 may be organised and sponsored by Americans but one of the best things about it is that it attracts start-ups from around the globe. To my right, there’s a chap speaking in German to his colleague, yesterday an Indian startup – iMo – was the  darling of the day, and half of my friends from London seem to have made the journey across the Atlantic so they don’t miss out on the fun.

Each year there’s the inevitable criticism – even from conference judges like Yossi Vardi – that the event is weighted too heavily towards Silicon Valley. But, by and large, that geographical bias is just a natural result of the fact that Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of potential applicants, and also that it’s easier and cheaper to get the Caltrain from Palo Alto to get to the conference than it is to fly in from London, Lisbon or Bangalore. You could equally say that Le Web has a French bias or that DLD has a German bias.

And yet. And yet…

What kind of message does it send that first thing a non-US entrepreneur sees when they arrive at the conference  is a gigantic American flag on the main stage? Moreover, what does it say to non-US startups who are lucky enough to be pitching that the flag is positioned right next to the judges’ desk?

I mentioned this to Arrington yesterday and he agreed with me, without hesitation. More accurately he said “at least we’re not starting with the national anthem like last year.” Ok, so it took him until the very end of the day for it to be moved from the stage, and that was only after I’d build a site called ‘Istheamericanflagstillthere.com‘ – but at least it had been moved.

This morning, though, the flag was back.

For an hour.

And then it was removed again.

It was only then I realised what was going on. Jason Calacanis kindly came over to explain. “This is America, buddy – the flag stays”. Sure enough, he’d dispatched a poor staffer to replace it.

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

I don’t know what to say, really. I love America. I left my home country to move here so I could visit and write about conferences such as TechCrunch50. Many of the thousands of people in this hall feel the same way. We have no issue with American patriotism, or with the flag being flown in schools, public buildings and private homes. It’s your country, and we don’t have to be here.

But, you know what? It’s just not appropriate to fly the Stars and Stripes on stage at a global conference. It smacks of arrogance, xenophobia and ignorance. The same arrogance, xenophobia and ignorance that lead to right-wing commentators forcing (then) Senator Obama to wear a flag pin, lest he be considered a terrorist sympathiser.

If any American in the hall is so insecure in their patriotism that they need a flag in their line of sight at all times, then I humbly suggest they invest in a flag pin or an ‘America: Love it or leave it’ t-shirt. It’s not like they cost much (thanks China!). Hell, you can even strap a handgun to your thigh and listen to a Toby Keith album on your iPod during the foreign pitches if you like. But please – and I implore you this as someone who loves America so much that I moved here – don’t let your personal politics turn a brilliantly welcoming and positive conference into something else. Something that is starting to resemble a grandstanding game of capture the flag.

Oh! Hey! What’s this?

As I write these words, Arrington has just walked on to the stage, picked up the flag and carried it away. Good. It’s the right call, not for reasons of nationalism or patriotism, but simply as a gesture of openness and respect for those visiting from overseas. Two traits that, since the country’s inception, the majority of Americans have held dear.

And I’m pretty sure the German guy sitting next to me, the Indian guy behind me and, yeah, the majority of Americans in the rest of room would agree with me.

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