Yesterday the Swiss and the Southern German Web scene gathered at Cassiber’s Technopark office to have some beers and discuss two core topics: “How to launch in the US” and “How to make Zurich Europe’s Tech and Web cluster number one”!

Marc Bernegger from Amiando gave an impressive review on how Amiando made it into the exclusive Facebook Connect partnership as first European Company – with a current total of only 24 websites! Congrats from Amazee!

(Marc Bernegger, Amiando)

Ted Shelton, Partner at The Conversation Group gave an energizing speech on Zurich’s potential to become Europe‘s next Tech and Web cluster! A place where tech entrepreneurs from Switzerland and abroad come together to share their passion, where tech ideas build on tech ideas, where friction is reduced because everybody understands the opportunities of a risk culture – and wants to be part of it - from the entrepreneur to the masseuse :)

(Ted Shelton, The Conversation Group)

Together with Farley Duvall (Red Herring) and Jeremy Hulette Ted gave a comforting Silicon Valley view on what Switzerland already offers: Intercultural competence, an inviting tax system, high quality of life, a good educational system, money, some incubators like the Technopark in Zurich and last but not least a rapidly evolving Web scene!

(Farley Duvall, Red Herring)

Ted left the audience with the exercise to think about the top three things to keep the momentum growing and make Zurich the next big tech cluster to come... Create more role models to motivate high potentials to join us? Hold more networking events to create a strong and connected Swiss and German community? Spend more time in Silicon Valley to partner with “The Club” and navigate the current tastemakers? Use the comment function to contribute your experiences and thoughts!

Writing about the strong and connected network: Here two upcoming events: Venture Cocktail and Amazee Grill Mob. Don’t miss them!

we are very happy to announce that since today we have our team supplemented by malte spielberger. just perfect so short before the launch of Amazee's public beta he is joining us as a tech trainee. learn more about him on his personal blog or on his company's site. and soon here on Amazee of course.

and... don't even think of poaching him!

a warm welcome from all of us to the newest Amazeean!

edit: thanks to the almost superhuman commitment of our friends and partners from cyon.ch (who are by the way not at all responsible for the failure!) we managed to solve the mail problem with our domain registrar.

thank you for your understanding and sorry for any inconveniences caused by this.

due to extremely strange, obscure and quite intimidating circumstances (probably caused by evil aliens) the amazee team has lost email contact to the known universe for more than three days now. please excuse any inconveniences, try to contact us using skype or just come for a visit at technopark (there's still a lot of beer left from our great opening party).

we are working hard on this issue and we will keep you updated about any progress.

als openoffice (ok, neooffice) -user sowie natürlich als frischgebackener amazeean - und als solcher bin ich nicht nur persönlich, sondern auch ganz im sinne meiner beruflichen tätigkeit und unseres unternehmenscredos sog. "open standards"* verpflichtet - , ist es mir ein anliegen, kurz auf diese wichtige aktion hinzudeuten.

"What is OOXML (ECMA-376)?
Via ECMA, Microsoft has submitted documentation for the XML-based file formats used by the company's "Excel 2007", "PowerPoint 2007" and "Word 2007" products for "fast track" approval as an "international standard".

Why is this so controversial?
There is already an international standard for XML-based file formats for office documents, known as the "OpenDocument Format" (ODF; standardized as ISO/IEC 29300). Nobody denies Microsoft's right to freely decide that the company does not want to support this international standard in their products, and nobody denies that computer users have the freedom to choose office software which supports this standard, such as e.g. OpenOffice, KOffice or Google Docs. However many people feel that Microsoft's initiative to get their file formats also recognized as an "international standard" is an abuse of the system of international standardization and should in fact be seen as an anti-competitive attack against the company's competitors, especially against Free Software like OpenOffice." (weiterlesen)

hier gehts zum online-unterschriftenbogen

*
Bedeutet in aller Kürze: "development: multi-partisan and open, independent non-profit body; documentation: public specification; use and implementation: open standards are 100% license-free standards."

Nun ist wichtig zu wissen: "OOXML stands for Microsoft Office Open eXtensible Markup Language, which is misleading: it is no open standard.
ODF = OpenDocumentformat is an open standard. It is also an ISO standard."

(Infos und Zitate: http://www.noooxml.org)

i felt a bit like a windows user yesterday when after ten days of testing i downgraded from leopard to tiger again.

although there are for sure nice new options and even some real improvements i think there are still too many bugs. for example i've been having quite an issue with permissions, eventhough i did a clean install and not just an update (ok, i migrated my old user to the new os), some programs don't run under leopard yet (as for example superduper) and many of the new options i actually don't really need...

but what really bothered me was that some programs didn't run as smoothly as they did under tiger and that i even had some kind of a sudden total crash once.

will try again in a few weeks... i'm sure there will be fixes for most of the problems and updates for the common programs. actually i could have known before, but i'm just an unconvincible update junky...

if your keen on ai and robots of any kind in action i can really recommend you to come to oerlikon this evening from 5pm to 6pm. it seems as if there will be a nice show even for a layman like me.

check out  the ailab's anniversary site for more information. the location is andreasstrasse 15, very close to bahnhof oerlikon.

excuse the poor image quality. i'm always carrying my camera with me except for today. really. so this one has to be a phone pic...

...with drupal again and again. it's such a mighty tool, and i'm only scratching the surface... wooooooha! take a look at the urls...pathauto made this possible. what a great module!