Lunch over IP

Flying Close To The Sun

(I've written the "Business Europe" column for today's Wall Street Journal Europe. The article is on the WSJ website and below. I've added the first picture to this post).

In a big hangar at a former military airfield near Zurich in mid-May, Bertrand Piccard stepped into a prototype airplane cockpit (picture) and began "flying." And kept on going. For 25 hours straight.

The test, followed a day later by another 25-hour dry run with pilot André Borschberg, went well. It was the first real-scale flight simulation for Solar Impulse, an unconventional aircraft designed to circumnavigate the Earth powered uniquely by solar energy, without producing any polluting emissions. Mr. Piccard's team is planning the first real takeoffs in mid-2009, and then a few months later a 36-hour trip aimed at assessing the feasibility of manned nighttime flights – when the energy source, the sun, is "off."

If everything goes according to plan, a five-leg, monthlong tour of the world will follow at some point in 2011 or 2012, with Messrs. Piccard and Borschberg each flying alternating stretches of five days and five nights between landings. "We're not in it just for the adventure," Mr. Piccard told me. The team wants to use this attention-grabbing challenge to inflect energy and climate policies and "to become a testing ground for the development and exploitation of renewable energies and clean technologies" – with an eye also to their future commercial potential.

Crazy? Sun-powered prototype planes have been around for a while. But this would be the first with a man on board; the first to stay aloft day and night; and the first to take off with its own power, after sitting on the runway until the sunrays, and only the sunrays, have charged up its batteries.

In a world dependent upon fossil fuels, the Solar Impulse project is certainly a provocation. But it comes with credentials. It's the brainchild of Mr. Piccard, a 50-year-old Swiss aeronaut and scientist. His legendary grandfather Auguste in 1931 became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. In 1960 his father, Jacques, together with U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh, was the first to reach the deepest trenches of the oceans, the Mariana's, in a bathyscaphe.

Unable to beat them up or down, Bertrand went horizontal. In 1999, alongside Brian Jones of Britain, he completed the first nonstop, round-the-world flight in a hot-air balloon. The duo prevailed over a number of competitors, including Richard Branson.

Mr. Piccard and his team have already lined up €40 million ($63 million) in sponsorship money from Deutsche Bank, Belgian chemical group Solvay, and Swiss watchmaker (and NASA supplier) Omega. The project also has technological and scientific cooperations with French high-tech firms Dassault and Altran, the European Space Agency, and the Swiss Institute of Technology, among others. The project has even received the official patronage of the European Commission, which sees in it "an example of what industry and energy policy makers should be doing to foster energy efficiency and clean mobility."

The first Solar Impulse aircraft, dubbed HB-SIA, is currently under development (picture left: a virtual rendering of what the plane will look like). It will have the weight of a car (a bit less than 2 tons) but the wingspan of an Airbus 320 (about 60 meters; a subsequent version will be 20 meters wider). The wings will be covered with solar cells. Stacks of batteries will store the energy accumulated during daylight to power the four engines at night.

After sunset, the plane will also glide to preserve energy, gradually dropping to 2,000 meters altitude from the cruising level of 8,500, before climbing again. In this scheme, altitude will become a virtual form of energy: The higher they fly during daytime, the longer they will be able to glide during the night. Dawn will be a critical moment: Have they stored enough energy from the day before, and have they been able to glide long enough so that the plane can "encounter" the sun and start recharging the batteries?

The project presents a variety of extreme design and technology challenges, and it may still fly into turbulence. To succeed, Mr. Piccard's team will have to produce or benefit from others' advances in materials and composite structures, which need to be solid and lightweight. They'll also need ultraefficient solar energy capture (cells) and storage (batteries) that don't exist today, along with more-developed aerodynamics and propulsion. "The key is really energy efficiency," explains Mr. Borschberg. "We need to find ways to extract maximal power from minimal energy, and to fly using as little of it as possible."

They will also have to push the boundaries in meteorology, routing and human physiology monitoring. The pilot will be up there alone for days and nights in a row, wearing a special shirt filled with sensors and even a vibrating system that can be remotely activated to wake him up. He will also have to manage his sleep, food intake and other physical needs in a cockpit built to be narrow and spartan, to help keep the airplane light.

Could this technology one day be used on all airplanes? Even Bertrand Piccard doesn't envision solar planes replacing today's aircraft anytime soon. But the Solar Impulse project aims to become a catalyst for the development of solar and other technologies that could lead to future applications in air travel and in areas other than aviation.

A visit to another, sealed-off part of the hangar reveals a skunkworks where cockpit and wings are being assembled, aerodynamics tested, engines miniaturized, software developed, special ultralight and resistant foams shaped into craft parts. Here lies part of the sponsor's interest in supporting the project: The Solvay engineers, for instance, are working on the foams, intended to protect batteries and engines from big temperature differences – and promise significant future commercial applications, should Solar Impulse succeed.

"We want to show people that renewable energy is not a step backwards but a jump into the future," Mr. Piccard told me. "If we can go around the world in a solar aircraft, that means that we can do incredible things with renewables."

The Swatch co-inventor welds wood -- and bones

Elmar Mock believes that "most people talk of innovation but what they actually do, is renovation". He should know: in 1980 Mock, together with fellow engineer Jacques Müller, co-invented the Swatch, the plastic watch that started the rescue -- and led to the current triumph -- of the then-depressed Swiss watchmaking industry, which was suffering in particular from the competition of Japanese digital watch manufacturers such as Seiko.

Mock and Müller sketched out the lightweight, iconic, fashionable and colored plastic watch in May 1980. Codename of the first prototypes: "Delirium Vulgare". The first collection of 12 Swatch models went on sale in Zurich in 1983. The key engineering innovation of the Swatch was to use an integrated production technique that reduced the number of parts by half, to about 50; but the key design and marketing innovation was to put on the market a plastic watch that, at the beginning, met with legions of skeptics. But which went on to sell hundreds of millions of pieces -- the 333-million mark was past in 2006.

Mock (picture left) left Swatch in 1986 and to launch his own innovation firm, Creaholic, in Biel/Bienne, a city along the language divide between the German and the French parts of Switzerland, which someone dubbed "the Swiss Liverpool" for the industrial turmoil of the 1980s and the creative and economic renewal of the last 15 years. Mock will also be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Forum des 100 conference in Lausanne, which I've been producing.

I visited with Mock the other day at Creaholic's headquarter, nested in a former soap factory in the center of town: high ceilings, a suspended meeting room reachable through a short glass bridge, and plenty of room for the 30-something employees and partners. Creaholic has worked and works on a whole range of products, from hearing aids to ski gear, from packaging to flavors, from software to micromechanical devices. Their creative model is, says Mock, inspired by nature: ideas travel from a "gas phase", that of high-energy creativity, fantasy and dreams (and chaos), to a "liquid phase", where they start to coalesce and take a tangible form (here is where design comes into play, where thinking about usage and aesthetics are at work), to a "solid phase" where the value of the idea can be truly measured, and where the practical aspects of the development are dealt with (materials, production, industrialization).

The problem of innovation, says Mock, is in the love-hate relationship between the "gas" and the "solid" phases: it is in turning an intuition or a dream into an actual product that can "bring a timely business advantage" -- because competitive advantages, so thinks Creaholic, are always limited in time, and only constant innovation can keep you ahead.

Mock told me about some of the projects Creaholic has been working on, and one in particular, which is now a spinoff, caught my attention: WoodWelding. The starting point was some research into using thermoplastic elements (resins) to weld, reinforce or anchor wood. Said in very simple terms (I'm probably oversimplifying) WoodWelding's technology uses nails or seals or pegs made of synthetic resins as fixations. Put a resin nail into wood, for example and pass ultrasonic energy through it: the resin will start to liquefy and penetrate into the porous material. It then cools rapidly, resulting -- in a few seconds -- in a stable and durable bond. Look at the bottom item in the picture: the resin nail has basically "melted" into the wood, becoming "part" of it. This is applicable to most porous materials, such as chipboard, concrete, or paper.

The technology however had a slow start, and for what I know only one company has licensed the technology for things like cabinet and window assembly. However, the part that I found most interesting is that several companies have licensed it for medical applications. Because  -- and this was nowhere in the inventor's initial thinking -- bones are also a very porous material, and the WoodWelding technology has turned out to be ideal for cranio-maxillofacial usage (welding a broken skull, for instance) or for orthopaedics.

This is a very telling example of how innovations often find their best/ideal applications outside their original field of reference -- and spotting this lateral opportunities (finding ideas and solutions outside your field, etc) is a key way to gain a competitive edge.

Swisster: English-speaking news for Switzerland (and a daring business model)

Among the many attempts to develop new business models for quality online media -- from ProPublica's philanthropic funding to MediaPart's subscription-only to the FT's finite-free -- a new Swiss site launching today offers a novel and intriguing approach.

Swisster (tagline: "local news, global views") is a Swiss English-language site that will cover business, finance, politics, science&tech and lifestyle stories "with a regional twist", says editor Christophe Rasch. Switzerland has four national languages, but English is not one of them. It is becoming one in fact, though, being increasingly spoken daily in banks, multinational corporations, academic and media organizations, design and advertising firms, and well beyond. It's now commonplace in Switzerland to find English-language national advertising campaigns or English-named stores and products and sports clubs. But this hasn't yet translated into national locally-produced English-language media (although the average newsstand carries a generous variety of British, US and international -- Monocle, IHT, WSJE, etc -- publications).

This situation has been slowly evolving in recent years, with the likes of Swissinfo and World Radio Switzerland (a web site and a radio channel produced by Swiss Public Broadcasting), or with the launch of the "English corners" on newspaper websites such as Geneva's Tribune de Genève and Basle's Basler Zeitung, and of independent sites such as GenevaLunch.

Now Swisster wants to fill the vacuum (Disclosure: LunchOverIP will be featured on the site's blog section). "Our core target are the 100'000 expatriates or Swiss who live in Western Switzerland (the Lake Geneva region) and use English as their main daily work language. Later -- we plan to go national with our coverage within two years -- we will also reach out to the 300'000 in the rest of the country", says Rasch.

Although impressive for Switzerland, these are small figures, which explains in part why no significant national English-language news outlet has existed so far. It also explains why Rasch and his team are adopting a very unusual business approach to make Swisster economically viable. The site of course carries advertising. The rest of the revenue will come from a particular, and daring, form of subscription. "Our potential market is a niche", says the editor, "and the people in that niche can be generally found in big organizations". Swisster is published by Edipresse, one of Switzerland's top-three publishers, and SNP, the Swiss branch of France's Hersant, but counts a number of other "founding members", big multinational corporations, leading private banks such as LODH, and academic institutions such as EPFL, which have contributed to the initial funding and will contribute to developing the readership by buying subscriptions in bulk and distributing the accounts among their executives and staffers (and their families). While anyone will be able to subscribe individually -- yearly subs will cost a rather steep 300 CHF apiece -- Swisster will focus primarily on selling group subscriptions to big companies and organizations, where its target readers work.

Additional twist: the general (non-paying) public will also have access to the site, but only to the stories that are 48 hours old or older (and some stories will never be "free access"). Subscribers will instead receive breaking news, daily news, newsletters, service information (from detailed information on snow conditions on the Alpine slopes to housing info) and have access to a social-networking platform. Partnerships are also being established, including one with TimesOnline, the web site of the UK's The Times.

Swisster will be produced initially by an editorial staff of 6, based in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, and Edipresse has been able to attract professionals with both significant journalistic experience (they come from the Economist, the Guardian, Reuters etc) and a good knowledge of Switzerland. "Editorial independence is guaranteed", Rasch stresses when we argue that the chosen business model will put it under pressure: "the founding members have committed for several years and will have no say on our editorial choices".

The "Forum des 100" trailer

The trailer (in French) of this year's edition of the Forum des 100, the annual one-day conference I'm producing with newsmagazine L'Hebdo in Lausanne. The Forum gathers 650 entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, artists and media types from Western Switzerland (the conference takes place in French). This year's gathering -- the fourth -- will go under the theme "Creativity/Competitiveness" and among the featured speakers will be Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Italian carmaker Fiat; Swiss federal minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf; the director of the ECAL design school Pierre Keller; and Swatch co-creator Elmar Mock. Here are the summaries of the Forums of 2006 and 2007. The trailer (2min40) is available on YouTube as well as Vimeo. It was realized by Swiss podcaster Thierry Weber.

Swisscom's new logo/brand: bah!

Swisscom, the biggest Swiss telecom operator, will be launching a new brand identity: the new logo, which will be rolled out across fixnet, mobile and Internet services next spring, is the one at right. The choice and detailed crafting of the font is good, but personally I find the graphical element confused, unclean, emotionless and meaningless -- simply unappealing, even in the animated version ("a dynamic logo designed for the screen"). It's one of those logos that you understand only (maybe) after reading the agency's brand manual ("The implied Swiss cross in the logo, the warmth of the red shade and the axis as the central starting point create a sense of closeness, combining and uniting our customers’ different experiences. The dynamism of the logo shows that life is a moving force and full of surprises. Swisscom gets things moving, has its fingers on the pulse and is part of everyday life." - quote via Alceste ). Bah! Your opinion?

The winners of the Eugen Swiss Media Award 2007

The Eugen Swiss Media Award 2007, which recognizes every year the best Swiss technology journalism, has been given tonight in Bern to writer Cornelia Schmid and photographer Daniel Boschung for a report on "The Future Makers" ("Die Zukunftsmacher" in the original German version) published in September 2006 in the ETH Globe magazine. This is a science-popularization mag published by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

As I said in the commendation tonight ('m a member of the jury, I was awarded the prize a few years ago), the work is a good example of a very complex topic (the story deals with ubiquitous computing, virtual reality, weather models, quantum crypto, synthetic biology, etc) explained in understandable terms, and accompanied by pictures that help relate these technologies to daily life.

The Eugen prize for radio broadcast has been awarded to Reto Widmer, Guido Berger and Lucius Müller of Swiss Public Radio DRS (the German-language station). They produce a weekly tech show and podcast called "Digital Plus", and we picked a particular report, on the release of Windows Vista. It's always very difficult to discuss technology on radio. So they wrote a fictional job interview, where Mr Vista meets an HR director seeking a replacement for Mr XP -- and then added all the useful context.

The prize for television broadcast went to Peter Berni an François Cesalli, of the French-language channel TSR of Swiss Television, for a report on synthetic world Second Life produced for the weekly magazine "Mise au point".

The award ceremony also featured a keynote speech by writer Esther Girsberger, who mused brilliantly on political blogging, including that of the Swiss Minister of Telecommunications Moritz Leuenberger -- who, she said (and I agree), "understands the spirit of blogging quite well".

The Eugen jury is chaired by prof. Louis Bosshart of the Department of Sociology and Media of the University of Fribourg. The annual (since 1992) prize, which is sponsored by IT firm Bedag, is meant to encourage technology journalists to produce works that "further the understanding of technology and of its social and business impacts for the broader public".

A parallel series of Eugen prizes, for the best websites from Swiss public administrations, went to the town of Weggis (small towns) and Köniz (cities), to the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden (the smallest Swiss canton) and to the Swiss Federal Aviation Administration.

Talking about Weggis: the picture above is the homepage of the region's portal. Or when a picture says more than many menus, links and icons.

Web 2.0 in Switzerland: Slow but significant change

-- by guest blogger Marcel Bernet

Our firm Bernet PR has realized a study on the usage of Web 2.0-applications in Switzerland, together with the Center for Media Training. We asked the 200 largest Swiss corporations, public institutions and organizations about their usage of tools like blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, user-generated content, online social platforms, and online monitoring. The full report (written in German) can be downloaded here. Here are the most surprising results:

• Swiss communicators open their websites for comments -- 24 % of the responding organizations say they implemented this function already; another 24 % plans it for the near future. Technically, this is of course a very easy thing to do. I was surprised that so many decision-makers seem to have allocated the necessary resources to manage comments and feedback and to react to it. (Well, that's what their answers say: I hope they did).
• Blogs are being read widely -- Two-thirds say they read blogs as a part of their work. Even accounting for "politically correct" answers (difficult to acknowledge that you ignore blogs or you don't know what they are these days) the widespread mention of blogs as a source of relevant information surprised me. The most read fall in five categories: specialized/trade blogs; news blogs; consumer blogs; political blogs; corporate blogs by the competitors.
• Wikis are gaining traction -- 13 % say they are using wikis, mostly for internal purposes. Another 13 % plans to do so within the next two years.
• Online monitoring is a fact -- Almost half of the respondents regularly scan the Web for relevant content. And 15 % said they plan it. I expected less, yet it is also true that 40 % said "no" and "not planned". Looks like a classical divide at the moment. Among those who perform monitoring, two-thirds do so daily, and 60% use internal resources.

Not so surprising:

• Blogs are not commented, not written, not contacted -- Only 15 % comment on blogs and 12 % write their own, most of them for internal purposes. Bloggers are almost never invited to media events or supplied with news.
• RSS is spreading very slowly -- 13 % use it to distribute content, vs 45% who still say they use e-mail.
• Social platforms and Second Life hardly acknowledged -- 5 % publish their links on platforms, 7 % their photos, 10 % their videos. And just 7 % have some kind of presence on Second Life; 92 % say "no" or "not planned".

So for the first time we know a little better what major Swiss corporations and organizations are really doing with Web 2.0. To me it looks very Swiss: have a close look at what is happening (monitoring), leave the playground to pioneers (social networking, Second Life), adapt items with high benefit and test them internally (blogs, wikis). Slow? I would speculate that it reflects what Swiss users are currently ready to accept. And at the same time I see a constant and significant change towards a wider and deeper conversation happening online.

ComDays07 / Gilles Marchand: Participative broadcasting

(Running notes from the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland)

Gilles Marchand is the general director of the French-language channels (TSR) of Swiss public television. They have quite a number of products and ongoing experiments with new media. He discusses the transformation of the traditional broadcasting model ("even a public and generalist television station needs to leverage participation and personalization") and runs through several examples, showing alot of videos:

• MonCinema.ch (basically, a video-sharing site, but in truth a way for young Swiss would-be filmmakers to submit their works -- 500 of them so far -- that are evaluated and the best among them are broadcast on TSR's channels).
• TempsPresent.ch (one of the leading TRS magazines, which hosts follow-up forums etc)
• Infrarouge (the most popular political talk-show, with part of the content coming from the public's imput through e-mail, forums, webcam video, etc)
• TSRelections.ch (a special site for the recent parliamentary elections, with interview of candidates based on questions from the public)
• TSRvideo.ch (a portal for all the TSR programs)
• TSRinfo.ch ("I believe that in the future video news will be more about segments than programs, and this site allows users to access single reports and segments on topics they're interested in")
• Nouvo (a TV magazine plus multimedia and mobile platform -- actually, a multimedia experimental site that was then expanded into a TV magazine)
• YouTube TSR channel (the TSR page on YouTube)

Marchand shows how the TSR is using the different platforms to distribute information in different formats to different audience segments: newscast; graphics-only on TV (same info without anchorman); web; video-on-demand; in-shop screens; teletext; mobile -- all strongly TSR-branded.

ComDays07 / Beat Lauber: 700'000 new readers

(Running notes from the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland)

Beat Lauber is the a member of the board of management of NZZ, Switzerland's best daily newspaper, and possibly one of the best in the world. He's tasked with talking about "The end of the newspaper?", but he points out that in Switzerland, a country of 7 million, "last year overall readership went up by 700'000 people", so clearly the newspaper is not at the end -- although then we need to agree on what newspaper we are talking about, "the battery-free printed paper, or one of the multiple electronic versions?". (BG: almost all of that new readership mentioned by Lauber refers to free newspapers: Switzerland right now has  4 free dailies in German, with one more coming,  and 2 in French).
For many years however circulation for paid newspapers in Switzerland has been slowly declining. The traditional sources of revenues of regional newspapers (subscriptions and ads, particularly classifieds) are declining. Competition is increasing. The market is less and less predictable. This means that the newspaper's business model needs to be re-imagined. What's really in danger is the quality of content. Lauber speculates that current trends may lead regional newspapers to have to cut back one-fourth of their newsroom resources over the short term. But he believes that this transition contains more opportunities than risks -- new publics, new business models, new geographical approaches, etc. "We need to think harder at the real functions of the newspaper". "The killer application is the reader".

(Others blogging from the conference: the ComDays blog in German, Mathieu Janin and Xavier Studer in French).

ComDays07 / Martin Kallen: Dividing up a top event's media rights

(Running notes from the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland)

Martin Kallen runs the organization of the UEFA Euro2008 football (soccer) tournament, which will take place in Switzerland and Austria in June 2008, one of the biggest -- in terms of TV viewership -- events in the world, right after the Olympics and the Football World Cup.
He talks about how UEFA is selling media rights for the event -- "trying to both maximize revenues and maximize geographical coverage" -- and about the new media platforms that allows for dividing up media rights: pay-TV, free TV, video-on-demand, public viewing -- big screens in gathering places -- mobile DVBH, mobile 3G, Internet. He shows a slide that details the current status of rights already sold in Switzerland (to broacasters, to telecom companies, etc): the last line says "no official blogs nor social networking sites". That's because 60% of revenue is achieved from television (with mobile rights as a new add-on) and on the euro2008.com official site they will have live reports and "a full experience for fans" (starting next Spring) and -- Kallen doesn't say this, it's my speculation -- they will likely do everything to protect these revenues by cracking down on bloggers re-posting pictures and videos etc.
For the first time, the UEFA will be producing the whole broadcasting of the eveng in-house (traditionally, it was "outsourced" to the national television company, but UEFA wants more control -- and more latitude to slice up the rights and monetize the images).
Mobile television: these big events, he says, are a good way to launch new services (see this previous post). What can be expected on mobile television form the Euro2008? All the goals, alerts, highlights (intertwined with messages from sponsors).