Martin Recke

Co-Founder @nextconf, corporate editor @AccentureSong, PR guy, blogger, journalistic background, political scientist, theology, singer, father, landlord, roman-catholic.

How I Migrated from Entourage/Exchange to Google Apps

As some of you may know, SinnerSchrader is going Google. The switch from an Exchange/Outlook/Entourage setup to Google Apps is work in progress so far, but should be completed until April. I won’t discuss the rationale for this (that might be done in a future post), but instead report how I migrated from my Entourage account to Google in just a few days without spending too much time on it.
Last Tuesday, Holger Blank asked me how adventurous I would be. Curious as I am, I countered with the question what he had in mind. It turned out there was already a brand-new Google Apps account for me on our sinnerschrader.com domain in store. The account was activated on the very same day. I now had mail in two different flavours: the classical Exchange style and the all-new Google mail style, both with the same set of messages.
On Wednesday, I opened my new account, did some initial configuration and set up Entourage for IMAP use with the Google apps account in parallel. This step isn’t really necessary, but I was impatient and didn’t want to wait until my mail was imported from Entourage. Since I am a digital pack rat, I’ve quite a lot of mail. I tend to keep about 20,000 messages per year, amounting to more than 100,000 mails since 2005 when SinnerSchrader deployed the first Exchange server.
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The mail import was done server-side, from the Exchange server to Google’s servers, started on Thursday and took more than 24 hours. This is a required first step and should be done before the first login, to ease the transition. Folders from the Exchange server translate into labels, making things a little bit noisy at first sight.
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But this can be fixed easily and isn’t mission-critical in any respect. I also got about 110 mails from Google Mail Migration, telling me about messages left on the Exchange server, most of them because Google detected a virus or the message was too big to move. A few message fetch requests returned an IMAP „NO“ response from the server, for no obvious reason. This amounts to 0.1 per cent of my total message count. Another result of the migration process was a bunch of more or less empty messages without subject or sender. Don’t know how and why this happened.
The next step was the migration of my calendar. I set aside some hours of time at the weekend, but if I had known before how to do it, far less time would have been needed. My first step was to sync the Entourage calendar with iCal (and while I’m at it, sync my contacts with Addressbook).
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Having done this, the rest is a child’s play: Just export the Entourage calendar and contacts from iCal and Addressbook to files, and import the files to the Google calendar and contacts. The calendar import is pretty straightforward:
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I’ve also set up my Google calendar in iCal, giving me a pretty nice interface to play with, compared to the Google calendar web interface which is not very neat. Time will tell whether I’ll stick with iCal or use the Google calendar.
To get my contacts into the Google world, they had to be saved as vCard file. I did this in Addressbook. Don’t forget to select all contacts, otherwise Addressbook just saves the current contact. The import to Google again is simple:
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The Google contact management is pretty frugal, but at least my duplicates are now gone and the contact data is in place.
One last thing: It’s always a nice thing to have „mailto:“ links opening directly in Google mail rather than firing up the retired Entourage again. To accomplish this, I had to install Google Notifier for Mac. The links Google returns seem to be somehow broken, but Holger passed his copy of Google Notifier to me. In Preferences, it’s important to add the correct account, check the box „Start Google Notifier at Login“, and choose Gmail as default mail client. The notifications itself can be deactivated.
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That’s all! There remains just one step to be done when we switch the booking of conference rooms from the old to the new environment. Then I’ll have to renew every appointment that needs a room reserved. But that doesn’t look like too much work.
So I’ve started the fresh week, a new month and even meteorological spring with an all-new setup for mail, calendar and contacts. Looking forward to the new era that started today!

Evan Doll on Designing for the iPad

Since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad four weeks ago, legions of app developers are pondering their design options. Now there has help for them arrived by Evan Doll who recently posted his slides from a guest lecture for Stanford CS193P (iPhone Application Programming) on February 12, 2010. You can even watch Evan’s presentation through iTunes. [via]

In his talk, he cites the legendary Alan Kay who was shown the iPhone by Steve Jobs shortly before the public launch.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.

So let’s see if the iPad will rule the world. In the meantime, join us at next10 on May 11 & 12 in Berlin. We’ve just added a whole new conference track called next apps to the conference, dedicated to the exploding mobile app store ecosystem. next apps @ next10 will explore the new market opportunities that are emerging for developers, content creators, service providers, and other market players. Learn more.

Zalando: Der Copy Shop Samwer kommt in Fahrt

Spätestens seit Zappos für großes Geld an Amazon ging, steht das Thema Schuhe auch im hiesigen E-Commerce auf der Agenda. Zu den ersten Bewerbern um die Position des Category Killers zählt Zalando aus dem Hause Samwer. Samwer? Zalando? Da war doch was? Richtig: Alando + Zappos = Zalando.
Das Start-up, das die drei Samwer-Brüder Anfang 1999 gründeten und im Sommer des gleichen Jahres an Ebay verkauften, hieß Alando und war eine Copycat von Ebay. Zehn Jahre später wiederholt sich ein Teil der Geschichte mit Zalando, einer Copycat von Zappos.
Doch damit nicht genug: Zalando kopiert nun auch schon mirapodo, das sich derzeit noch in der Private-Beta-Phase befindet. Martin Groß-Albenhausen hat sich für das Mailorderportal die Mühe gemacht und genauer hingeschaut. Faszinierend!

Neu ist es – aber eben ein Kind der „beta“-Kultur -, dass die Plagiate schon entstehen, bevor das Original auf dem Markt ist. Darum ist es um so wichtiger, dass ich mirapodo schon vor dem Start öffentlich machen konnte. So ist zumindest klar, wer hier bei wem abgekupfert hat.

mirapodo ist ein Kunde von SinnerSchrader.
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Google launches Buzz, Game Changer for the Social Web


There was a lot of buzz yesterday in my timeline. All of a sudden, Google revealed its brand-new social web product and called it Google Buzz. From what I can read on the web, it’s Gmail going social (maybe going even Facebook or Twitter, I don’t know) and mobile at the same time. Unfortunately, I still don’t have Buzz in my Gmail.
As Googler Jyri Engeström explains, Google Buzz has its roots in Jaiku, the Finish start-up that Jyri founded and sold to Google more than two years ago.

When the Jaiku team joined Google, we were tasked with doing „something cool with mobile and social“. The problem at the time was that there was no Google-wide social graph. There was no sharing model or friend groups. There was no working activity stream back-end. There were not even URLs for people. All this had to be built, and parts of the whole (such as Google Profiles and Latitude) were shipped incrementally along the way. The archstone that brings everything together is Buzz in Gmail.

To me (and Tim O’Reilly) Buzz even sounds like the dream of Gina Trapani: a merger of Gmail with Google Wave. The latter was hot when it launched last year, but, as TechCrunch puts it:

So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet.

So maybe Google Buzz is what we get for now while Google Wave might indeed be the future. By the way, the first glimpse of what was later revealed as Google Buzz was „buzz“ reserved as a system name which couldn’t be used as a label in Gmail. This story broke on one of Leo Laporte’s shows, I don’t remember if it was This Week in Google or This Week in Tech.
What’s missing in Buzz for now? While Twitter is integrated, Facebook isn’t. Facebook is the real competitor for Google Buzz. And Facebook is said to be working on a potential Gmail killer. It remains to be seen if Google gets Facebook somehow in the game or not.

Facebook becomes Gmail while Gmail goes Facebook

Things are starting to get funny on the convergence side of the Web. If the latest reports and rumours are true, then Facebook is going to launch a full-featured webmail service soon.
In what might look as a response to this potential threat to Gmail, Google is reported to launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends soon. Maybe as early as Tuesday.
In other words, Gmail goes Facebook (and Twitter), while Facebook aims at becoming Gmail. This reminds me of the old days when it looked like Amazon, Ebay and Google were up to converge.

Was ich mir von Schirrmacher wünsche

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Ich bin ein Fan von Frank Schirrmacher. Der Mann versteht es, die richtigen Fragen zu stellen und die wichtigen Themen auf die Agenda zu setzen. Und doch hat er mit seinem jüngsten Bestseller Payback und der anschließenden Debatte im FAZ-Feuilleton knapp am Kern der Sache vorbeigezielt.
Was ist spannender als die Frage, die Schirrmacher umtreibt, ob nämlich der Mensch im digitalen Zeitalter sein Denken und damit sich selbst der Technologie und ihren Imperativen unterwirft? Es ist die Frage nach den Grundwerten, die in die revolutionäre, disruptive Technologie namens Internet selbst eingebaut sind.
Das Internet ist zwar als Forschungsprojekt des US-Militärs entstanden. Doch die in Code gegossenen Wertentscheidungen sind alles andere als militärische. Das Internet ist nicht auf Command and Control gebaut, sondern auf radikale Dezentralität. Für die Militärs war das Internet nicht mehr als eine robuste Infrastruktur, die auch Atomschläge überstehen sollte.
Doch sind in die frühen Baupläne des Internets auch idealistische Vorstellungen vom freien Austausch von Ideen und Informationen eingeflossen, die nichts mit seinen militärischen Wurzeln zu tun haben. Hier hat sich ein starker Widerstand gegen jegliche Reglementierung eingenistet, ein liberal-anarchischer Zug, der im Prinzip die Rechte und Interessen einer kleinen, radikal-liberalen Minderheit stark bevorzugt.
Und an dieser Stelle verbinden sich zwei Interessengruppen, die auf den ersten Blick nichts miteinander zu tun haben: die extremen Individualisten und die Unternehmer, für die das Internet ein Instrument unbeschränkter wirtschaftlicher Tätigkeit im neoliberalistischen Sinne ist. Das ist eine sehr interessante Koalition und ein Thema, das ich mir für Schirrmachers Debatte wünsche.
Hinzu kommt eine transatlantische Differenz in der Gewichtung der freien Meinungsäußerung, des freien Marktes und des freien Unternehmertums. Hätten die Amerikaner ein bürokratisches Monster wie die Europäische Union zugelassen? Hätten die Europäer eine anarchische Technologie wie das Internet erfunden?
Der interaktive Konsument revolutioniert das Marketing. Das Internet revolutioniert unsere ganze Gesellschaft. Auf welchen Werten diese Revolution fußt und in welche Richtung sie unsere Gesellschaft verändert – das wäre spannend zu diskutieren, auch für Schirrmachers Feuilleton.
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The War on Open vs. Closed is Fought Inside Both Apple and Google

apple_ipad.pngWith the long-awaited iPad now revealed by Apple, things become a lot more clear on the secular war between closed and open systems. On the Internet, many people believe that open systems always win, at least in the long run. But in the meantime, things may look very different.
The lines between open and closed models have always been blurred. The IBM PC won because the hardware platform was open, and even the closed-source operating system, DOS in the old days and then Windows, was open to third-party developers. The user always could install whatever software he liked, be it on a PC or a Mac likewise.
Even smartphones have been more or less open devices, allowing for some kind of third-party software to be developed and installed. With the advent of the iPhone, we’ve come to see a new model, the app store, tightly controlled by a hardware and software vendor called Apple.
Google is challenging this model with the more open Android platform, based on the open-source OS Linux. On Android, there’s no authority controlling the app store like Apple does with iTunes, the app store and now the new iBook store.
But on the netbook and tablet class of computing devices, both Apple and Google now place their bets on iPhone-like closed systems. The iPad runs a modified version of the iPhone OS which is closed, and Google is working on Chrome OS which is closed, too. It’s even more closed than the iPad, because everything is supposed to run in the browser and there’s no way to install software besides the Chrome OS and the Chrome browser.
Are the days of open hardware and software platforms finally over? Or do we see a paradigm shift where the open element moves from the software layer to the browser? You may remember the old days when there was no app store on the iPhone and everything third-party was supposed to run in the browser. From this point of view, the introduction of the app store was an act of opening up the platform while retaining control.
Besides, much functionality that once resided in local applications is now on the move to the browser. With HTML5, the browser experience is going to be even more OS-like, thus reducing the need for applications. Maybe Open wins in the long run, as always, but moves entirely to the browser, while the OS layer will be more closed.

Chris Anderson on the Next Industrial Revolution

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The Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine strikes again. After his blockbusters The Long Tail and Free Chris Anderson is now up to The Next Big Thing. This time, it’s nothing less than the Next Industrial Revolution, concerning atoms as the new bits. Anderson describes how networks, 3D printers, and other technologies are causing game-changing disruption in the traditional industrial business.
In his must-read Wired piece, he uses Local Motors as his first example for this kind of change. Founder Jay Rogers took the Threadless model and applied it to car manufacturing. Anderson’s story line:

If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. „Three guys with laptops“ used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

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