And it gets better: for being anti-competitive!

This was one headline that landed in my mailbox which I couldn’t ignore. How bold! How brave! How – stupid? Telecom TV‘s final sentence makes it worth a read through, from headline to the last bit, with a lot of interesting stuff about the machinations that are part of lucrative government contracts. We’re talking here about the e-mail contract for the Department of the Interior. Voters in the US are thinking today about where their tax dollars go, and re-shaping Congress based on where they think their tax dollars should be going. I wonder how many of them would vote for Google, how many for Microsoft.

Telecom TV’s reporter Leila Makki has just put out a video with all the little gadgets you need, including an iPad and waterproof cases if you want to avoid caveman camping. So if you’re planning to invite junior out for a week in the woods or on the mountainside it looks like you might want to find out first what he or she thinks is necessary, in addition to canned beans. True, there are great little powering up gadgets and GPS systems that might save your lives, but this sure isn’t camping the way it used to be!

Media rumour has it that I’ll soon be able to get free GPS from Google Maps Navigation for my iPhone – that the company is starting with the UK and Ireland this summer and then the rest of Europe will follow. Google people in Zurich, surely you can push Switzerland up the list? After all, most Europeans taking long car trips pass through Switzerland as they drive somewhere else, since we’re on the north-south and east-west axes.

I hope 20 Minutes is right about this.

Chat, message and do whatever else you do as a social networker, but don’t forget that the world is watching: Estée Lauder has decided we have to look good while we do it. Ad Age reports that the venerable cosmetics company is now offering free department store makeovers with professional photo shoots in the US for those precious mug shots we post on our accounts.

Geneva-based Ago Cluytens, who occasionally contributes guest blog posts on GenevaLunch and who writes marketing blog brandingthroughpeople, picked up on something I sent him to write about the marketing woes the newly re-named Willis Building in Chicago in the US might face. I was intrigued by his point that the foes – Chicagoans have always loved a good fight (think boxing, Al Capone and anti-war protestors) – are using Facebook and Twitter to get the word out, but the Willis insurance group is not. Check back in five years and we’ll let you know if Big Willie is a household name in Chicago. Sounds like the same kind of Pickle a famous building in London found itself in, in 2004.

In fairness, here is a lengthy article from the Guardian in 2004, singing the praises of Norman Foster’s SwissRe landmark building in London.

Simply the best news I’ve heard all day: one charger for all cell phones. 2012 sounds like a long way off, but three cheers for the world’s cell phone makers for finally getting us all plugging in together. According to CNet News they’re planning to make the charger use 50% of the energy required by today’s chargers. Now to get them running on solar and wind power, hmm. Anyone care to comment on how well solar chargers work right now?

Twitter, or microblogging (you send a max. of 140 characters from your cell phone or computer) will undoubtedly get a boost from the latest publicity, a software engineer who scrambled out of last week’s plane crash in Denver, Colorado, USA, pulled out his iPhone and started telling the world what it was like to be a crash victim in a ravine. Times, UK

MinnPost in Minneapolis today carries an article that looks back at the recent history of particle physics and the shifting role of the US, as American physicists contemplate the LHC startup 10 September. Author Sharon Schmickle notes “The buzz of activity last week at CERN’s Swiss campus dramatically illustrated a changing of the guard on the frontier of physics, with Europe taking over from the United States, Alan Boyle of MSNBC reported” and she goes on to explain why physicists everywhere are so excited about what’s happening at Cern.

Ad Age today explains the astonishing success of Spam,
the meat and not the other annoying stuff. I read this article all the way to
the end and I still just don’t get it: spam or Spam, it’s disgusting
stuff and we’d all be better off without it.

Sorry, Hormel, I’m a fan
of Spam-free living (spam-free, too). Give me peanut butter for my sandwich, any day.

It’s obvious: people sit down for meetings. And then along come people who notice the obvious and think about it and suggest standup meetings. Martin Fowler and/or Jason Yip at Thoughtworks caught my eye with a post on the rights and wrongs of standup meetings, which it had never occurred to me is an option. The idea behind it is wonderful: if people stand up, the meeting will be shorter.

I came across this in an odd way, part of the joy of the Internet. I had googled "standing on hands too long" and came up with several links to Beatles’ lyrics ("I saw her standing there") and then the post from Thoughtworks. The only problem is that the post is too long so I started to glaze over just as I do in long meetings – and that is when I hit "Who attends? All hands" and then something about getting everyone moving in the right direction, so the image I’m left with is a little confusing but I can see why Google sent me here.

I still don’t know how long you can safely walk on your hands, at a meeting or elsewhere.