So, as last year, I have the chance to be able to participate for the fourth time to the Helvetia Patria Group‘s Management Forum.

What is the Management Forum?

This is our yearly group-wide Executive Managers meeting (Board of Directors and local Executive Board members, special Group functions). About 50 persons from the 4’800 employees within the Holding. A great honour for me! Near all the strategic workshops and presentations (some very interesting guest-speakers as last year), these 3 days are a great opportunity for me to discuss with all my internal clients from the different subsidiaries (CEO, CIO).

Main topic this year

The main topic this year is linked with growth as future source of additional earnings. Cool, I am quite excited.

I have searched some good earphones for a while and I have bought the Shure E2c isolating earphones.

Technicals specs

• Speaker Type: Dynamic MicroDriver
• Sensitivity (at 1kHz): 105dB SPL/mW
• Impedance (at 1kHz): 16 Ohm
• Cable Length: 1.57m
• Net Weight: 30g
• Input Connector: 3.5 mm gold-plated stereo plug

Sound Isolating Technology: How it works

The E2c’s in ear design works like an earplug to block background noise naturally. This enables you to listen comfortably at lower volumes — even in loud environments. And unlike bulky headphones utilizing active noise cancellation technology, no artifacts are introduced into your listening experience. Sound isolating earphones are also much smaller and don’t require batteries.

Canal phones: How it works

Canal phones are a cross between ear buds and earplugs. They actually fit into the ear canal, and the tiny speakers vibrate the air between the drivers and the eardrum, producing sound. Since the phones seal off the movement of air in and out of the canal, outside sounds are muted and only the vibrations of the driver are pushing air against the eardrum. Historically, one annoyance with canal phones has been micro phonics – unintentional sounds that are amplified by the design of the canal phones. Contact with the wires may produce a scraping sound and footsteps a deep thudding.

Some reviews

• DesignTechnica
• amazon.com
• HomeTheater
• cnet.com

My review

– tricky to place in ears
– somewhat expensive (but worth it…), about 100$

+ excellent pro sound quality
+ very precise and detailed rendering
+ ambient noise isolation
+ storage case
+ different size of flex sleeves
+ you can really decrease the volume to obtain the same rendering feeling

I registered in September for the 2nd edition of the conference Les Blogs in Paris. A draft of the program is published here. Interesting.

It is not only about blogging, it’s about changing the way we think

What defines this new way of thinking and acting ? Difficult to say, let’s try to define it together. I would say that transparency, openness and collaboration are the key values that drive this phenomenon. It is not only about blogging, not only about social software and other tools, it is much broader. Of course bloggers are at the forefront of this way of life: unformal, friendly, no powerpoint and no ties…

Let’s define together these new values and understand :
1. How they challenge the corporate world
2. How they change the media landscape
3. How they bring more democracy in politics
4. How education evolves
5. What are the tools used and how we can all best benefit from them
6. Where we are going in the near and longer term future

A companion wiki is also opened here.

I am very proud to announce you that Nick Stefania and myself are invited by hp Financial Services Industry to present our ecenter solutions case at the coming International Life & Pension Insurance Conference in Moscow, Russia. We are integrated in the following session:

Energize the Life Insurance Market with Hot New Technologies.

The title of our presentation is:

An innovative approach to support new products and multichannel distribution.

We are very excited to be able to show how we are supporting the Business with our technology. Great opportunity!

Now some information about the Conference itself.

It is about…

“We are proud to announce the first ever international life insurance congress to be held in Moscow, Russia. We have brought together many highly regarded international experts in the field of life insurance who will share with the audience their ideas and strategies for successful investment in emerging markets. Among the speakers are CEOs and executive managers of leading USA, European, UK, CIS and Asian financial services companies; Heads of Financial & Insurance Supervision Authorities; International Actuarial Association; Senior Representatives of Financial and Investment institutions; “cutting edge” information technology firms, and other insurance experts. We are sure that this important conference will help to boost the development of the life insurance industry in the CIS region”. Olga Ruf-Fiedler, Chair of the Organizing Committee and Vice President of Winterthur Group, Switzerland

Conference topics

• International experience in developing life & pension insurance in emerging markets. Lessons and opportunities
• Investment climate for Eastern Europe, CIS and Asia
• Regulatory framework and economic climate in Russia and CIS. Prospects and tendencies. International standards for life insurance supervision
• Life insurance local features Eastern Europe & CIS (regional peculiarities) – Transformation process Eastern Europe
• Marketing & Distribution strategies for long term life insurance – how to increase demand and win customers’ trust
• Bancassurance – global trends and developments
• Modern technologies in life insurance – learn from the experience of Western European insurers and technology firms
• Asset liability management – popular financial instruments and Long term financial instruments

We will address¨the above-marked 3 topics in our presentation.

Who should attend

CEOs and senior managers of leading CIS, Asian and International insurance companies, Heads of financial and insurance groups, Banks, senior actuaries, insurance and IT experts and consultants.

You can register here.

[via CNN.com]

Wow, original and very nice!

With its spectacular 90-degree twist, Turning Torso consists of nine stacked cubes, each turned slightly.

The bottom three cubes will be office space and the top six contain 147 luxury apartments. Many residents, who are expected to move to the rented apartments in November, will have a view overlooking either the flat farmland of Skane, Sweden’s southernmost province, or the Oresund strait and Denmark.

[…] The HSB housing cooperative that built the skyscraper originally planned condominiums only, but decided to rent the apartments because of the high costs. The most expensive apartment will be rented for about euro3,000 ($3,700) a month.

I have finished to install and to configure the last version of blogkomm (v2.3) developped by Holger Kreis. Thanks a *lot* to Holger for this new release, which contains a captcha-feature (see Wikipedia). That was really necessary for me because I was confronted with a new wave of spams since some days (yesterday, over 100 comment-spam….), although, again, there is *no* chance that a comment-spam appears on this blog because of the moderation.

blogkomm integrates the reader’s comments into your blog without any pop-ups. Besides this you have different features coming along with that, like

• different notification services
• preview feature
• user remember feature
• quick-Editing admin-tool
• recent comment-list
• multilingual interface
• a setup and configuration tool
• comments moderation
• captchas for spam protection (Version 2.3)
• gravatar-feature included

[via Jeff and Business Week]

Most business models rely on giving the software away over the Web, then either charging for a souped-up version of the program or for training, maintenance, and support.

But revenue continues to be a problem. While open-source companies trumpet hundreds of thousands of downloads, on average just about 2% of those customers are actually paying any money. After all, just because every piece of software companies rely on to run their businesses can be replicated with open-source alternatives, that doesn’t mean there’s a market for it, caution analysts.

The upside is that many more companies will try open-source software because it’s free. The viral nature of the Web and the open-source community means companies don’t need a costly sales organization. Instead of hiring expensive, experienced salespeople and investing a lot of money and time in closing deals with skeptical CIOs, open-source companies just put their code online. Developers within companies often download the software for a test drive. Word of mouth spreads the news. Before long, young companies such as SugarCRM and JasperSoft are getting tens of thousands downloads a day, without spending a dime on sales calls.

[via Tom Peters]

Wow!!

600,000/engineering degrees/2004/China
350,000/engineering degrees/2004/India
70,000/engineering degrees/2004/U.S.A.

Source: Rising Above the Gathering Storm/National Academies of Science/Presidential report/October 2005

[via BetaNews]

The milestones keep coming for the little browser that could, and the Mozilla Foundation now has a new reason to celebrate: on Wednesday morning, downloads for Firefox surpassed 100 million. The second major release of Firefox, version 1.5, is due later this fall.

[via O’Reilly]

Sometimes, it is good to bring this kind of discussion down to earth.

While many people see Microsoft as the “enemy” of open source, Microsoft has in fact been busy learning from open source, and has released source code for more than eighty Microsoft projects under a “shared source” license. In addition, there are about six hundred programs (notably dotNetNuke) released by independent developers under Microsoft shared source licenses. As in the open source world, many of these projects have ended up with small license variations, creating unnecessary complexity.

[…] Based on a quick read, the non-limited versions of these licenses look like they might well be able to meet with OSI approval as open source licenses. I’d urge Microsoft to go ahead and to go ahead and submit them to License-Discuss for OSI Approval, and become a full-fledged member of the open source community.