Siegfried Reich

BCCS Business Award

Today I joined a committee for awarding the most innovative diploma theses (of FH Salzburg and the Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg). I cannot comment on the results: these will be announced on November 21, at a Gala dinner in Salzburg (see www.bccs.at).

The BCCS’ mission is to foster academic spin-offs. The centre has been founded in 2005. It’s part of the so-called A-plus-B programme (academic spin-off programme), in Austria.

Add comment October 30th, 2006

Mobile Applications and New Technologies in Tourism

ANET – Austria’s network for eTourism – organised a transfer workshop on mobile applications for/in tourism.

Manfred Bortenschlager of Salzburg Research presented a “software framework for the development of prototypes for early acceptance tests.

He started by describing the difficulties in requirements engineering. See the following images:

Within the “Mobility Lab” of ANET-Salzburg Manfred and his colleagues will now develop a software framework that focuses on easy and rapid prototyping of mobile applications. The idea is to start as early as possible with “real” prototypes in order to get user feedback about acceptance, etc.

Watch this space …

Add comment October 19th, 2006

3. Salzburger Medientag

Partners from the “Plattform Digitales Salzburg” organised the 3rd Salzburg Media Day (one day in advance to the Munich Media Days).

We had an exciting programm, reporting from the 2nd field trial with DVB-C (“C” for cable”); workshops in the afternoon. See http://www.medientag-salzburg.at/ for further details.

I organised the workshop on “User-generated content”. Panelists were

• Manfred Perterer, Salzburger Nachrichten on “Citizen Journalism”
• Gerhard Faltner, Telekom Austria AG on “User generated content, Buntes Fernsehen”
• Solveig Grothe, on the “Readers’ Edition” of Netzeitung.de
• Edgar Zwischenbrugger, Head of Innovation, mediamid digital services GmbH on “collaborative medie archives”
• Georg Güntner, Salzburg NewMediaLab on “interactive TV-Services for sport events”

My personal summary:

• Users do want to contribute (think of the 80.000 new blogs starting every day, the many initiatives to post photos, etc.).
• However, the demands on quality of content is paramount. Therefore, contents need to be verified.
• There are limitations to good content (therefore, see above).
• The situation on digital rights is complex, both from a legal as well as from a technical perspective.
• From a business model perspective, I found the following answers. CRM/customer binding as one argument; extended use and thus selling of broadband connectivity as another one; Information on the users’ desires/preferences as the third argument (which, IMHO counts in particular for the $1.65Bn google paid for youtube.com last week, see e.g. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34961 …).

Add comment October 17th, 2006

On the highway to Lissabon

The Austrian federal ministry for Education, Science and Culture organised an event on the theme of “The Lissabon objective” and how well we are doing on the way towards that.

Xabier GOENAGA from the Commission presented the international perspective; Hans SÄNKEL, Gerhard RIEMER and Ludovit GARZIK presented more national views; Ingolf SCHÃDLER, Michael LOSCH and Peter KOWALSKI provided insights from the perspectives of the three ministeries (BMVIT, BMWA and BMBWK).

Some conclusions:

• Europe is falling behind (the US and Japan; also China and India)
• Research and innovation go together; the 3% target can only be a symbol
• Austria is doing well (and gaining momentum)
• We (Austria) need to change from a “catching up” to a “front runner” strategy. For instance in the European Innovation Scoreboard 2005 Austria was No. 8 worldwide (2004: 15) and No. 5 in Europe (2004: we were on 8th position).
• To keep improving we need a yearly increase in resarch funding (both from government as well as industry) of about 7-9% until 2010. This will be hard to achieve!
• Mr. LOSCH presented an interesting argument in that he mentioned that the structural funds should be targeted towards innovation (and research). He sees a tremendous potential in these funds.

All in all a very interesting meeting, inspiring, lot’s of good presentations.

Add comment October 13th, 2006

European cities declare themselves as “Cities of Science”

For the first time cities from all over Europe confederate as “Cities of Science”. At the European Congress of Science Cities they sign a “Declaration of Magdeburg” and enforce thereby their interests to advance the structural change under the use of science and to make their cities sustainable.

See www.sciencecities.eu for further details. The declaration can be downloaded here.

Add comment October 11th, 2006

Download the Internet

… a nice joke I found on www.w3schools.com (an excellent site, btw!).

Here it is (copied from http://www.w3schools.com/downloadwww.htm). Enjoy!

Add comment October 6th, 2006

eBusiness Workshop at SRFG

Salzburg Research organised a workshop on e-business and SMEs. Mag. Peter Harlander representated the group “Consultants and IT” of Salzburg’s chamber of commerce.

The keynote was given by Hannes Selhofer, senior consultant from Empirica in Bonn. He presented the European e-business W@atch study and finally, showed three hypothesis

1. The scepticism towards e-business is gone. There is a renaissance of the term “e-business”
2. e-business is not a key- but a base-technology
3. there has been a paradigm shift: in earlier days cost-cutting has been dominant, nowadays it is more issues of customer-relationship management that are addressed.

Veronika Hornung-Prähauser talked about e-business and change management; Thomas Peruzzi talked about open source and SMEs.

Further information can be obtained from http://info.ebusiness-impulswerkstatt.at/.

Add comment October 4th, 2006

How to integrate Wikimapia into your blog

Wikimapia is a sort of combination of wikipedia and google earth. The general idea is to have space as one (important) criterion for organising information.

How to use it/see examples? There are good descriptions available at

• http://wikimapia.mattjonesblog.com/2006/09/15/how-to-1-adding-a-new-place/,
• http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-maps-on-your-site-in-60-seconds.html and
• http://wikimapia.mattjonesblog.com/2006/09/20/how-to-2-upcoming-places/.

Also: see the FAQ, http://www.wikimapia.org/faq.htm

Basically the way it works is as follows:

• Start www.wikimapia.org
• Select the place you want to mark/highlight (via menu entry in the right top corner “WikiMapia” -> “Add New Place”)
• Wait until others (your friends?) have voted for this location/object with “yes”. There is a toggle “upcoming places”. These are the criteria that need to be true for a place to be a “real place” (i.e., to change from upcoming to granted).
  • must be at least 24 hours old;
  • must have more than 2 positive votes (yes) and 0 negative (no);
  • with 1 negative vote, it needs at least 8 positive;
  • places with only 2 positive votes and 0 negative will be automatically approved after one week.
• Enjoy …

The frame below shows “Salzburg Research” at the technoloy centre Salzburg. You also see the domain registry “nic.at” in close distance.

Add comment October 3rd, 2006