I have participated to a pilot-phase by Helvetia Patria since about 4 weeks with 20 other colleagues, to be able to test and to validate the usage of Blackberry within the company.

I got (and still have ;-) a Blackberry 7100v.

Features

• Complete functionality including:

• Phone
• Email
• SMS
• Wireless Data Access
• Address book
• Browser
• Calendar
• Memo Pad
• Tasks

Architecture

After one month…

+ clear screen
+ very user-friendly
+ online synchro with emails and agenda
+ data compression
+ access to the enterprise contacts (fix, mobile, mail, etc)
+ mobile size (no “pizza-box”)
– keys confusing at the beginning
– battery! for chance, yu can use the USB connector to solve this issue

Overview

Email

Agenda

Internet Browser

[via BetaNews]

That could be interesting :-) It is the first time I read somewhere that an On-line music download service wants to deliver real high-quality sound files to “audiophiles”, that means for people who can make a difference between 192kbps and 256kbps MP3 encoding.

Ask many an audiophile what their number one complaint about digital music is, and you’d likely get the same answer from just about everyone: quality.

The door has been left wide open for a high-fidelity music download service, and with the further ubiquity of broadband and larger capacity digital music players, file size is no longer an issue.

Enter MusicGiants. The Nevada-based company quietly launched its self-titled service September 29, but if my first look is any indication, the service may be about to make a big splash in the world of digital music. For a $50 annual fee, users are given access to a catalog of music from EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music.

While the current music selection obviously pales in comparison to that of iTunes or Napster, the company says that it is in the process of securing deals with the other major labels to expand the catalog.

MusicGiants users can download each track for $1.29, which initially would be “free” through a $50 song credit given for joining the service. However, unlike competing services that encode their songs at 128 kbps, all tracks from MusicGiants are in Microsoft’s Windows Media Lossless format, which encodes songs between 470 and 1100 kbps.

[via Netcraft]

In the October 2005 survey we received responses from 74,409,971 sites, an increase of 2.68 million sites from the September survey. The large gain makes 2005 the strongest year ever for Internet growth, as the web has added 17.5 million sites, easily surpassing the previous annual mark of 16 million during the height of the dot-com boom in 2000.

[…] With this month’s growth, Apache now powers more than 50 million sites.

Have a look at the new Bugatti’s Veyron. What for a car :-) The Veyron is produced at Molsheim – France, at about 80km from where I am living. This is a “back-to-the-roots” process because Molsheim is the historical place of Bugatti since 1910.

Specifications

• Engine: W16 (two W8 engines mated together), 4 turbochargers, 8.0l
• Power: 1’001 metric horsepower
• Torque: 1’250 Nm
• Transmission: DSG with 7 gear ratios, all wheel drive
• Weight: 1’888 kg
• Time 0-100 km/h: 2.5s (!!)
• Time 0-200 km/h: 7.3s
• Time 0-300 km/h: 16.7s
• Average top speed: 407 km/h
• City driving: 40.4 l/100km
• Combined cycle: 24.1 l/100km
• Price: about 1.1 million euros

Some articles

Great Wikipedia’s article about the history of Bugatti and the Veyron itself.

Some pictures

[via BetaNews]

Microsoft and Yahoo announced on Wednesday a blockbuster interoperability deal that will reshape the landscape of the fragmented instant messaging market. The companies will connect their IM networks so users on each can communicate with one another using text and voice chat free of charge.

Starting in the second quarter of 2006, customers of both services will be able to see their friends’ online presence, share emoticons, and add new contacts from either Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger to their buddy list.

Yesterday evening, I was invited by Dominique Freymond, who is Partner of Management & Advisory Services and, among others, Member of the Board of Directors of the Swiss Post at a conference of Etienne Jornod – CEO and Chairman of the Galenica Group (pharma industry). This conference was organized by an informal Executive French-speaking club called “Les Quatre Saisons” in Zürich, Switzerland. Very interesting discussion about the role of the pharma industry in Switzerland, which is homebase of a lot of huge companies as Roche, Novartis, Serono, Galenica. For the size of this country, this is great :-) About 1 million people are working directly and indirectly for the pharma sector (there are 7 million inhabitants in Switzerland!).

Some other great discussions with Jean-Pierre Klumpp, the CEO of one of the oldest Swiss Private Bank – Ehinger & Armand von Ernst, which will be integrated in a bigger one – Julius Baer in the coming time.

Plus, some good exchange about culture and international projects & HR frameworks with Garry Wagner, Chief Human Resources Officer of Siemens Building Technology.

And, last but not least, with Marina de Senarclens, Chairman of the communicatiojn company Leu+Partner.

I was there with Manu, the CEO of Boomerang. A picture of Manu about 10′ before the start of the conference:

The Lake of Zürich is marvelous at the end of the day:

[click]

Great business evening, thank you Mr. Freymond!

So, I have merged all my posts about our last holidays in Calvi / Corsica / France. A kind of “all-in-one”.

[click]

[via TimesOnline]

The first Chinese car to be sold in Europe has scored zero — the worst-ever score — in safety tests.

The JiangLing Landwind was displayed at the Frankfurt Motor Show last week and is expected to arrive in British showrooms within months. It is already on sale in Holland, Germany and Belgium and has been billed as the vanguard of a new invasion of Chinese vehicles.

The two-ton 4×4 scored zero stars in crash tests last week by the ADAC, the German automobile club, which carries out tests for Euro NCAP. “It had a catastrophic result,” said a spokesman for the ADAC. “In our 20-year history no car has performed as badly.”

Testers calculated that a driver would be unlikely to survive a head-on collision at 40mph, and in a side-on collision at 30mph the driver would suffer severe head and chest injuries due to a lack of side protection.

[via BetaNews]

eBay announced Monday that it would form a strategic alliance with VeriSign in order to strengthen security on its PayPal online payment service. As part of the alliance, eBay will also purchase VeriSign’s payment gateway business.

The online auction site will pay VeriSign $370 million for the payment gateway in cash and stock. The service is expected to generate an additional $100 million in revenue for eBay, the company said in a statement.

VeriSign’s gateway would be rolled into PayPal’s already present merchant services, and will give users a wider choice of processing options for online payments. VeriSign’s gateway processed more than $40 billion in volume during 2004.

Account security will be strengthened by VeriSign’s two-factor authentication, which gives customers a one-time password or digital certificate that will help them prevent identity theft. The new process is expected to be implemented sometime next year.

[via InformationWeek]

Some *very* good thoughts in this article, have a look!

As large companies move in [the Open Source] direction, they’ve got some issues to deal with. First and foremost, they must find a way to integrate open source into their commercial software environments and support it on an ongoing basis. They want reassurances that open-source code won’t be subject to intel- lectual-property lawsuits. They need procedures established to avoid violating licensing terms that are different from what they’re used to. And, as they move up the open-source “stack” of operating systems, databases, and application servers, they have to decide where to draw the line. Are open-source applications in their future?

Much of the work companies are doing with open source revolves around their key Web-site applications and increasingly around those applications’ underlying databases. There are no sales figures for software that can be downloaded for free and is often introduced into organizations by developers acting on their own rather than going through purchasing departments.

Licensing is one of the greatest challenges for open-source users. “The fact that software is open source doesn’t mean a company can use it in the way they want to use it,” Yahoo’s Zawodny says. Different licenses have different requirements in terms of distributing and modifying code. Yahoo has designated an employee to manage open-source licensing terms and legal issues. “It shouldn’t be scaring people away; people just need to know what they’re getting into,” he says.

It’s a different story at Sabre, which five years ago embarked on a $100 million project to move its air-travel shopping and pricing services off mainframes and onto 13 HP NonStop servers and a cluster of 45 HP Itanium database servers running the open-source MySQL database on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux. The move was calculated to help the company keep up with growing customer demand for online services.

The initial success of Sabre’s migration toward open-source technology spurred further adoption. Over the past 18 months, the company has migrated more of its services off mainframes to run on 48 Intel Xeon-based HP servers and 177 AMD Opteron-based HP servers running Linux. Sabre’s experience with open source extends to The Ace Orb, or TAO, a Corba 2.5-compliant C++ object request broker, as well as JBoss and Tomcat. Sabre now considers open source whenever it has an IT project up for review.