Everybody is so exited about the soccer world championship in South Africa. Not all europeans like the "Vuvuzela-noise" as you are unable to hear anything else. The south africans - I just read an article - are very unhappy about the critizism and want to even bring more of these "devices" to the next game. One question towards my english friends: Isn´t the golf course the better place for a "greenkeeper"? Anyhow, I would like to get your input for the soccer poll on our website. Have fun the next couple of weeks. Let the best team win and let South Africa enjoy the party.

The EMEA Summit is coming close. Lots of people are very very busy with organzing this fantastic training event around Novell (and Partner) products. Specially Corne, Diethmar, Erno, Marco and Paul are very busy these days. To create some fun for them (and us) I created a little nice video called the OH EMEA Summit 2009 HipHop. If you want to see these guys live, join our EMEA Summit in Vienna (29th of Nov. - 2nd of Dec.). Here is the link to the video - have fun.

Have a look at these impressive pictures from GWAVACon 2009 in Berlin. It shows, why people feel it to be a kind of BrainShare EMEA. Of course I´m not 100 % "independend" on this topic. But GWAVACon has proven itself, that the concept is working. Getting together all the technical experts from Novell, GWAVA and other sponsors, putting some fun around it and you end up with a great community event. The Open Horizons meeting point was very well received and we had a very nice breakfast event together with Ken Muir and Johan Rosius. And I´m pretty sure, that we will have the same fun in Vienna at the Open Horizons EMEA Summit.

I´m an iPhone user and I really like this device. It has some disadvantages (of course) and is not the best business tool (BlackBerry is probably the best - never tried the Palm Treo). But my type of business is not doing email with a mobile device. I do my email mainly with my laptop, my PC or my netbook. My mobile device (= iPhone at the moment) makes sure, that my wife and kids (and of course my customers, partners and collegues) could reach me during travelling. My real business is mostly done in personal meetings. No mobile device or video conferencing tool could ever replace a personal meeting. But back to the main topic....

Ken Muir from Novell has been presenting Project "Cockpit" at GWAVACon in EMEA. I was very impressed - probably like all other attendees, partners and sponsors, which have not seen it before. Something new, something "sexy" is coming from Novell. And it was presented with a huge big bang - Novell executives showed how Pulse communicates with Google Wave at the Enterprise 2.0 keynote in San Francisco. If you have not heard of "Cockpit" or Pulse so far, have a look at the following video from Andy Fox, VP Engineering at Novell. Watch the video

Last year it has been a big shock for me, that Novell cancelled BrainShare 2009. Nothing did stop me from going to Salt Lake City to "celebrate" this wonderful event in this beautiful city. Last week Novell (officially) announced, that there will be a new BrainShare in SLC again. Novell is changing the concept and is going back to its roots. Please visit http://www.novell.com/brainshare to get more information. Open Horizons is already discussing with Novell to have a booth/meeting point at this conference. Hope to see all of you in SLC again.

I got access to a very interesting video presentation from Kent Erickson (Senior Vice President & General Manager Workgroup Solutions) and Ken Muir (Chief Technology & Strategy Officer Workgroup Solutions) which I would like to share with you. Kent and Ken are explaining Novells collaboration strategy including the cockpit project, which is driven by Ken Muir. Really exiting stuff. Have a look at the video here. By the way, Ken Muir is going to be Novells key note speaker at GWAVACon EMEA in Berlin.

For the last couple of years I have been using already Mozilla Firefox, but was using the Internet Explorer from MS as well. My favorite browser is Firefox, there is no question about that. From time to time I had some very minor problems, but bugfixes on firefox are very fast. Bugfixes on IE seem to be redefined sometimes to become (unwanted) features to get the vendor more time fixing them. But that is my (probably stupid) opinion. I have to mention, that I´m not a technical guy. Today the new version 3.5 of Firefox is launched, it should be 2 times faster compared to version 3. And there are many other great new things. So it is time to move your IT and remove IE. Check it out... Below the complete press announcement from Mozilla Europe.....

That was a real shock for me, when I got the first rumours and later on the confirmations, that there will be no BrainShare next year in Salt Lake City. For me Brainshare was a personal MUST HAVE event. I would have paid private money and would have take holidays to attend Brainshare. So from an emotional point this is hurting me privately. But leaving the emotional area and thinking about it in a professional way: I think Novell had to take this hard decision.

My Christmas this year started pretty early. End of November I got - for the first time in my life - a new car, which was not produced in Germany. Since about 23 years I do have a drivers license (continuously) and I have had cars from Opel, Volkswagen, BMW and Audi.This time I decided to move away from these German vendors. I saw an advertisement in the German television about a new car called Skoda Superb, produced in Czech Republic. The advertisement made me very interested in the car, so finally I went to a local dealer and he gave me a presentation of that car. After about 20 minutes (it takes a little bit to see all the benefits and nice things of this car) the dealer did ask me, if I would like to do a test drive.