03/09/2010

The Bees Awards: First International Social Media Award Show, San Francisco November 9th, 2010

02/06/2010 By Ralf 3 Comments

I’m proud to serve as a Jury member for the initial iteration of The Bees Awards, the first International Social Media Award Show.

One-fifth of the planet’s population is active on social media platforms. The Bees Awards will showcase how companies make the best use of new communication tools. This prestigious event will be held in San Francisco on November 9th, 2010.

“Social media is a growing phenomenon that calls for new communication and marketing expertise,” said Bastien Beauchamp, Founder of The Bees Awards. “Contrary to advertising, social media is “real” – it involves real people, real conversations, real products, real companies and real brands. Marketing legends David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach advocated the necessity of being in constant contact with the consumer’s reality. The Bees Awards will recognize those who have most expertly married this original spirit with today’s technology to create social media that transcends all marketing that’s come before it.”

The Deadline for Entry Submissions is October 1st, 2010.

1st International Social Media Award Show for Communication and Marketing Professionals – The Bees Awards from BeesAwards on Vimeo.

Nominees will be announced October 21st, 2010 at 7pm PST on the Bees Awards website at http://www.beesawards.com and via Twitter (@beesawards #beesawards). The Awards Gala will take place in San Francisco on November 9th, 2010. It will be streamed live at http://www.beesawards.com and via Twitter (@beesawards #beesawards).

The Bees Awards seek to  fill the gap in current marketing awards competitions by focusing solely on recognizing excellence in social media across multiple platforms. The Bees Awards team has established three key criteria:

  1. The Bees Awards are for communications and marketing professionals including: public relations and advertising agencies, advertisers, consultants, freelancers, students, business managers, and entrepreneurs.  People who pay or are paid to leverage social media tools to accomplish a corporate purpose may enter. No other social media awards exist for social media marketing practitioners.
  2. The Bees Awards are  the first social media award show with representation from an international jury panel. Social media has no boundaries, but every country has its own expertise and practices.  The Bees Awards goal is to incorporate this ever-changing global knowledge base in its selection/judging process.
  3. The Bees Awards will be awarded for delivering excellence in the various categories as judged by a jury of expert practitioners. It is not about being famous; it’s about executing impressive communications that are recognized by the jury to stimulate and challenge the industry. The jury has the responsibility to be the guardians of emerging media brilliance  and to help give  direction to the industry.

Looking very much forward to fantastic submissions and a great event in November!

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Filed Under: News, Personal

Ten reasons why Android is not at all working for me.

30/12/2009 By Ralf 10 Comments

On 26th November, 2009 I’ve started The Android Experiment as part of my work for The Next Web:

Given my known addiction for All-Things-Apple and my fairly open bias when it comes to Android with all of its attributed iPhone killer potential, I decided to give Android a fair chance to win my heart.

I handed my iPhone to my wife for her to store it in a secret place and force myself to solely use the Motorola Milestone.

The setup

The Milestone is the European version of the US market’s Motorola Droid and is known as a flagship Android based smart phone. It ships with the latest version 2.1 of Google’s mobile phone operating system and I got it bundled with a Vodafone flat data tariff.

I believe from the hardware & services perspective it would be fair to say that I’ve chosen a leading Android setup for my experiment, thus making sure that in case of a failure nobody blames the device or mobile operator. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Android, motorola milestone

Getting in charge for The Next Web Germany

19/11/2009 By Ralf 1 Comment

tnwdeToday I’ve agreed to become the Editor for the German branch of The Next Web network: The Next Web Germany.

I’ve long been an author for The Next Web International and occasionally contributed to the German blog, too. We all know that many of the really, really cool technology news originate from the US. Even in our almost 100% virtualized world, that’s a clear location advantage for blogs targeting an English speaking audience.

The Next Web Germany is available since roughly two months now and I’m planning to make some slight adjustments to the content strategy over the course of the next weeks. We might add more commentary posts and will also increase the number of articles from our mother, that we offer as a German translation.

I’m also looking forward to add some really cool new resources to our German team.

They’ll add upon the many different angles and perspectives we try to provide on the stuff that forms the next web. (If you’d like to get in touch, email me at ralf@thenextweb.com, please!)

That said, I’ll continue to write for The Next Web International but am feeling honored to take full responsibility for our German baby!

Finally, I’d like to ask you for your support by

Thanks and looking forward to get your comments over there!

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: The Next Web

A brief update

01/11/2009 By Ralf Leave a Comment

ralf-rottmann-rounded-borderMy loyal readers have noticed that my updates here at 24100.net slowed down a bit over the last couple of months. My last post is well over a month old. Here’s why:

1. Twitter kills the blogger star

There’s no doubt that we are headed to the real-time web. More capable  mobile devices, a general trend towards mobility and the rise of social networks are rapidly adding new ways to communicate and stay connected to our lives. As in my professional life I’m dealing with communication technologies since more than a decade, it’s quite natural for me to try out all the latest and greatest. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: 24100.NET, The Next Web

Busy times… sort of a personal update.

18/07/2009 By Ralf 3 Comments

Never before my job has been so close to disruptive markets and technologies and I absolutely appreciate it. To me it’s a great privilege being able to deep dive into some of the most amazing new technologies that are currently available.

Brainstorming ideas on how to leverage and take them to market with my peers is so much fun and I’m very much aware that doing this as a job which allows me to feed my family is something I should never take for granted.

GrandCentrix

Many of you have been contacting me over the past couple of months asking me to reveal details about my new company. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Personal

@24z

29/05/2009 By Ralf 1 Comment

In an attempt to keep meta information as short as possible and leave more room for content, I’ve renamed my Twitter account to 24z. You don’t have to do anything. If you followed me @ralfrottmann before, you keep on following @24z automatically. My “old” account is still there so that links in some older posts don’t break.

Thanks for being patient with me during my “twitter-account-merger-mania”!

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: 24z, Twitter

Changing 24100.NET’s Design

19/05/2009 By Ralf 2 Comments

We are currently working on the design of 24100.NET in order to streamline it for faster browsing. If you’re not reading this with your feed reader you might see some quirks while 24100.NET is undergoing maintenance. Sorry!

I’ve chosen to try an entirely new WordPress Theme as it got more and more difficult with the previous theme to include Web 2.0/Social Media features. Having conducted quite some extensive research, I found the Theses theme (created by DIYTHEMES) a wonderful alternative to every other WordPress theme I’ve ever used.

The site will also get a new logo, my designer is still working on it!

While you’re here you might want to try out the new Google Friend Connect integration. Find the “Join this site” link in the Community section to the left. You can log in via your GMail account and start submitting comments and participate in future community services.

I’m planning to have the redesigned finished this next Sunday. Your comments are more than appreciated!

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Thesis, WordPress

Bootstrapping, continued!

24/04/2009 By Ralf 4 Comments

(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!

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Entrepreneural, GrandCentrix

Annemarie Eilfeld performs Purple Rain

19/04/2009 By Ralf 3 Comments

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Looking forward to the next show.

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Annemarie Eilfeld, DSDS
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