04/02/2012

Beta 4 of the iPhone OS 3.0 is out

29/04/2009 By

Continuing it’s 2 week release cycle, Apple has released Beta 4 of the iPhone OS.

This time it requires to in addition install a pre-release version of iTunes 8.2. I’ve just upgraded all our devices and it worked like a charm.

  • Upgraded iTunes 8.2.
  • Manually executed a full back up of the device.
  • Chose to upgrade to the new firmware (not restore).

Took some 15 minutes and the device got upgraded seamlessly. Hope this fixes the annoying “dial pad displayed with downwards offset” bug which prevented users from accessing the “CALL” button.

Now heading into a full day workshop in Cologne. Keep you posted later. For real-time updates, please follow me.

Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With:

Bootstrapping, continued!

24/04/2009 By

(You might want to follow me on twitter for my Microblogging updates!) 

The recent weeks have been like a roller coaster ride!

While the global economic situation is not exactly ideal to jump into a new venture, bootstrapping GrandCentrix has been so much fun so far. I’ve been talking a bit about how easy it has become to deal with most of the low level standard tasks you’ve got to do.

In the past two to three weeks the GrandCentrix team and I have started entering into discussions with a couple of industry players, that we have come to appreciate over the years. The interesting aspect of this is, that while these folks did or still do run billion dollar companies, they’ve remained pretty accessible. And their precise advice and market perspectives have helped us a lot to further narrow down our go-to-market ideas. (It’s also one of the reasons why we’re still holding back our marketing folks and stay below the radar for a few more weeks.)

This week has been very intensive for me. I’ve met Steve Chambers who runs Nuance Mobile Division and is probably the most precise analyst when it comes to how mobile input patterns evolve. Nuance owns T9, T9Nav and acquired SNAPin which does application launching by keystroke interception (in a nutshell). Steve is an exceptionally person to talk to and will definitely have an influence on parts of our strategy.

We also sat together with Paul Wahl, former CEO of SAP Americas and Ex-Siebel COO. The amount of stuff you can learn from somebody who discontinued a product line like SAP R/2 and growths the next major version (R/3) to a world market leadership position is enormous. During the two hours Paul provided us with his crystal clear and straight forward advice as to how to move forward in some key areas of our undertaking. I hope we can win Paul as one of our constant advisors. We are working on that! :-)

I love being self-employed for various reasons. It’s not so much the often overrated “freedom”, because ultimately you’re not that free anyway. You’re driven by your will to succeed. You cannot rely on others paying your paycheck at the end of the month. You’ve got to be passionate – every single day.

What I definitely do like most about starting a new venture is this kind of very rewarding networking. It helps you doing the best thing for your business. It also is extremely valuable on a very personal level, and helps growing yourself.

Next week will be almost as busy as the one laying behind. I keep you posted!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: ,

Annemarie Eilfeld performs Purple Rain

19/04/2009 By

In the 6th “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” theme show (the German version of Pop Idol) Annemarie Eilfeld performed Purple Rain.

While the official jury did not like it – most likely because Annemarie’s raising popularity increasingly endangers main juror Dieter Bohlen’s favorite participant – the German audience voted pro Annemarie.

You might want to listen to her life performance yourself and leave a comment. Click the play icon of the embedded mp3 player below. This is a 320 bit high quality mp3 version of the audio as provided by the TV show.

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And here, due to popular demand, is her version of Pink’s Nobody knows which she performed in the 5th DSDS show.

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Looking forward to the next show.

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Bootstrapping in 2009

02/04/2009 By

Just a quick note: I love bootstrapping a start-up in 2009.

All the routine tasks have just gotten so easy. SIP based telephony, Skype and Skype group chat for business partners that are distributed across the globe, Dropbox based file servers with integrated backup, local sync and automagic versioning, hosted Microsoft Exchange with iPhone push mail and calendaring, Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine for staging and testing incremental software releases and many other SaaS offerings just make life of an entrepreneur so much easier.

The single most important aspect of it for me is: It let’s you focus on the core of your new company.

In the past you needed office managers, an IT department and a whole lot of other stuff which did not directly contribute to the value of your undertaking – but very often to increasing cost.

At GrandCentrix (announcement impending) we leverage technology wherever possible; but focused on letting us concentrate on our core values.

The last two companies where I’ve been involved in the primary growth phase followed a more traditional path and it worked out fine, too.

However, I really do feel excited about setting things up differently and personally feel way more productive than ever.

By the way, there’s one thing we did VERY traditional, though: Our office :-)

Yesterday was our first office day in our new offices. Maybe purely coincidence but yesterday was also the day, the sun finally came back to the town where GrandCentrix is headquatered.

So far, bootstrapping in 2009 has been a great experience – against all odds!

I keep you posted. Thanks for all your feedback (predominantly via twitter these days).

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iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 2 brings incredible performance boost

01/04/2009 By

The news are out: Apple on Tuesday released the second beta of its much acclaimed iPhone OS 3.0. I’m running it for some 10 hours on two iPhones now – both not jailbroken and not unlocked – and my overall first impression is extremely positive.

While the first beta had severe quirks, the biggest one being it extremely slow which even rendered it useless for some folks, this second beta performs even better than the current official version 2.2.1. This is not only true for all the built-in applications. Tweetie, Byline, VisualDial and other applications are launching way faster than on 2.2.1.

Another area which seems to have improved a lot is keyboard responsiveness. From a developer’s point of view iPhone OS 3.0 has a ton of new features that I already love. From an enduser’s perspective the landscape-mode-everywhere highly responsive keyboard is the single most important feature for me. (I tend to write a lot.)

Spotlight search has been redesigned slightly and is almost twice as fast as on Beta 1.

MMS and Tethering work just fine with the two German carriers I’m using (T-Mobile and Vodafone).

For a second beta this seems to be a great release and it’s a promising outlook towards the final version which is expected for the June 2009 timeframe.

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