I have been experimenting with Voice over IP phone software, but none had worked so well (and without tweaking) that I could recommend it to friends and colleagues who are not computer geeks. I have found one now, amazingly enough it is a commercial software that I recommend to all who want to do VoIP: The Gizmoproject. It is basically Skype using open standards. The graphical interface looks very similar and it works basically in the same manner. With the difference that it is using the open SIP standard. Which means you can call any other VoIP software using SIP (nearly all nowadays), and all the hardware VoIP phones that exist today. It even includes a Jabber account, so you can “instant message” all people which are online on a jabber account (and phone call all who are using google talk). It is technically using a sipphone account (the company behinf the gizmnoproject). Did I mention that it was founded and is still run my Michael Robertson of mp3.com and Linspire.com fame?

Congrats, Matthias, my office coworker became a daddy yesterday. Welcome Lionel Semion StÃ

Warum bin ich nicht Ã

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

(Bacon, Francis 1561ââ

I finally have a new home: The wesite of our new chair is finally online. If you are interested in issues related to Strategic Management & Innovation, this is going to be a hot place :-).

Via Nat Friedman’s post on design by committee

National favorite paintings is a link to a set of paintings designed by committtee; residents of various countries were polled using professional market research techniques to discover what characteristics they would most like to see in an ideal painting (ballerinas, the seaside, water, refrigerator-sized) and then the paintings were created, without any regard for coherence. The results are wonderfully bad.