by Sören Stamer November 03, 2007 at 03:49 AM

A few very nice friends complained about my poor blogging performance the past weeks. I may take this as a very good sign: There is demand out there. Thanks for this nice motivation :-)

Well, there are at least four poor reasons for my lack of postings:

1. I was gone sailing for a while. Awesome!

2. Twitter is kind of addictive: heartnsoul

3. Our new internal CoreMedia Blog is addictive as well (partly public). This blog will be merged with it soon.

4. I am currently preparing to publish a book on Enterprise 2.0 and needed some material their.

Stay tuned.

by Sören Stamer August 06, 2007 at 11:07 PM

Recently, I have learned an interesting lesson about running a successful (beach club) business: Killing your business is pretty easy.

Beach clubs are a big thing in Germany for quite a while now. Hamburg has quite a few spots and they are still gaining momentum. (Actually, I wonder why nobody invented them earlier. With hindsight the idea to have a nice and clean beach with a fancy bar and happy people right next to your place seems to be a no-brainer.)

Some people may even say that being successful in the beach club business looks kind of easy. If the sun shines every beach club is pretty crowded anyway.

However, there are differences. Little differences, but important ones. With three separate beach clubs right next to each other, Hamburg offers a very good opportunity to feel the differences and discover a little bit of beach club wisdom.

I took the chance and tested three beach clubs in a row. It was a nice and warm Sunday evening a few weeks ago when a friend and I wanted to find our favorite beach club. We entered every single beach club for a few minutes and got a good first impression – enough to make a choice.

The first beach club offered a pretty good atmosphere. It was not too crowded since we arrived pretty late. However, all seats were taken and the mood was relaxed.

The second beach club was different. It was pretty crowded with loads of cool and stylish people. The music was louder and more aggressive. There were three security guys at the door and a lot of party people were sitting at the pool and tried to make a good impression. You can tell, all barkeepers were pretty busy.

The third beach club was well known to be the best place for families. Actually, it was not going too well that evening. To be frank: It looked pretty much dead when we arrived! Only very few seats were taken and – which was the worst part – the atmosphere was uneasy at best.

You may wonder, what was wrong with the third place. Why did they perform so badly? And what did they do about it?

Well, I guess they have struggled with their positioning and tried to fix it. It looks like they tried to attract more party people and therefore were not too happy with their family friendly image at all. Obviously, they really started to change their image (and their karma) with a big sign at the entrance:

“Dear parents and children, Our beach club is NO playground!”

It worked. At least they are not know to be the number one beach club for families anymore. Now, they are known to be the beach club with the worst karma ever.

I wonder if this sign would have served them a little better:

“Dear parents and children, playboys and playgirls, Enter YOUR PLAYGROUND and have fun!”

Well, I am still wondering what this tells me about the software business in general and CoreMedia's legal terms and conditions in detail.

by Sören Stamer July 19, 2007 at 07:32 PM

I like French movies, Champagne, Paris (the city), the lovely accent of French women speaking foreign languages. I like Le Grand Bleu, Nikita and French kisses. I like Cannes, Bordeaux wines, Luc Besson, Jean Reno and Sophie Marceau. And I like French cheese too.

What I really don't like is the Tour de France obsessed with doping and being treated arrogantly by an Air France supervisor in Paris after they have messed up my international connecting flight. I don’t like to be told that it is the fault of another Air France subsidiary instead of offering any help. And I don’t like to be sent on a 3h journey through the various terminals of Charles de Gaulle Airport to get some help from this other Air France subsidiary.

Hello Monsignor Supervisor, it was a quite expensive Air France ticket for four Air France flights. Your company sold it, your company got the money, and your company created the problem in the first place. Therefore, as a simple matter of fact, I expect your company to be kind and handle the mess without any discussion.

By the way, telling me and the other passengers from the US that this connection fails every other day wasn't too smart either. I didn’t solve any problem. And to hear that you knew about my misery even before we bought the flawed tickets from your company is even worse.

Why has your company told me to use this inaccurate flight connection, just to annoy me?

And what have you done about it personally?

Go ahead with your silly dog fight with your local sister company but don’t expect me to fly again with Air France.

by Sören Stamer April 19, 2007 at 04:30 PM

Dear CoreMedia

Happy Birthday and all the best for your bright future!

We are celebrating your eleventh birthday today - and that means a lot these days. The Internet was still tiny when Andreas Gawecki, Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes, Prof. Dr. Joachim W. Schmidt, and I founded you. Mobile communication was a niche market in 1996. And imagine this: The world could live without Google those days. Really!

Thanks for being special. And thanks for eleven fantastic years that changed my life. It is great fun being part of you. I adore you for your great personality.

We ain’t seen nothing yet.

All the best

Sören

by Sören Stamer March 13, 2007 at 09:55 AM

Here is the network that brought dpa and CoreMedia together: Christian Volbracht, one of the chief editors at dpa, wanted to publish information regarding his library of great mushroom books on the Internet. The Internet was the latest buzzword in 1995. He asked Christoph Dernbach for help since Christoph was dpa's IT reporter and therefore very well respected for his insights into IT. Christoph asked Nastaran Matthes, who he knew trough his wife Claudia Musekamp for support. Nastaran, who studied computer science at the University of Hamburg, told Florian Matthes about dpa's request and Florian finally told me about it. However, at the time when I met the team at dpa, the mushrooms were off the table and dpa's future in the Internet era was on the agenda. Thank you all, it has been amazing ever since!