Standards vs. ergonomy
The main entrance door to the Deutsche Post branch office at Frankfurt railway station.

There’s a fire safety regulation in German law which says that such doors have to open to the outside so that in case of emergency, the panic crowd may escape without any obstacles.
Despite of this regulation and although most doors [...]

In 2008 haben die meisten Internetsurfer ein Konto bei Skype, Gizmo oder anderen sog. Internet Messaging Diensten. Der große Nachteil von Skype & Co ist jedoch, dass man nur online erreichbar ist (PC muss online sein), eine Weiterleitung auf ein Telefon kostenpflichtig ist und/oder bei Skype zB eine lokale Nummer - wenn überhaupt - nur [...]

“Ich möcht Dich mal sehen wie Du drei Tage lange im Altersheim hockst und Händchen hältst….aber einen Tag lang können wir das gerne mal machen.”
Das Fest der Liebe, das (christliche) Weihnachtsfest steht vor der Tür und schon jetzt im November wurde ich mit der Frage konfrontiert, “was wir eigentlich an Weihnachten machen”.
Meistens weiß man ja [...]

I’ve been using Twitter as a form of microblogging for quite some time now - and what I really like about it is that you constantly get to meet new people from different backgrounds with fresh ideas and different perspectives. For those who are willing to play this game, it comes close to a virtual [...]

Back in 1998 when a group of two friends and I applied for venture capital for a smart mobile phone-related web project*, we were told that VCs in the US would normally finance 100 projects and call it a success if 10 out of 100 would take off. Contrary to that, this “success rate” was [...]

A rather older news item that triggered my interest, especially since I saw Eagle Eye last night - a Hollywood movie that deals with a super surveillance computer gone wild in a “2001: A Space Odyssey“-sense:

Mobiles are assigned a temporary anonymous number by the network called a temporary mobile subscriber identity, or TMSI, which the [...]

It’s almost one year ago that I published three (1, 2, 3) articles on mobile blogging - and nothing has really changed since then.
Back in 2007, both the Nokia N95 and the Apple iPhone were released - two completely different phones that were only compared on numerous blogs due to setting new standards on each [...]

What you see here is the first page of a brand new textbook for 12-year-old German kids who want to learn Spanish (as a foreign language).
It starts with a listening comprehension unit and provides relatively short exercises throughout the whole textbook. Nothing really new so far, but with the difference that most pages come within [...]