christof's blog: Digital Lifestyle : Status

Sunday, February 19, 2006

The sun is shining, things are moving forward greatly.
A good moment to make a short status check on my digital lifestyle progress:

Sharing words: My blogging discipline has become much better, I'm quite happy with both my private and my work-related blogging frequency
Sharing pictures: I provide picture content, partly to the public, with Flickr
Sharing social bookmarks: del.icio.us

My Dopod (I love it - it was a great buy!), my laptop and my docking station give me three tiers of mobile computing power
Whereever I have Broadband Wifi connection to the Internet (at home, at friends' places, in airports or soon - free because sponsored by Google - in the entire city of SF), I am in full control over my digital lifestyle.
Everything else computing related is hosted and outsourced (incl. IT administration)

Airline Networks and special airpasses are a great enabler for my digital mobile lifestyle. Here are some numbers:

Last year I was 123 days on the road (34%), I have visited 22 countries (incl. double-counts) and still spent less than $20K on airfares
In comparison: At APSIS in 2001, I travelled 71 days (19%), I have visited 4 countries abroad, and spent an estimated $60K on airfares
Last year, I got overseas visit to SF from Raphael Leiteritz, Bernd Wiessner, Anou, Carl (2x), Petra & Family, German & Family as well as an all-hands company meeting in December.

Skype is the voice enabler, that connects me to colleagues, customers, my Mom as well as facilitates company meeting calls, customer conf calls and even our upcoming BOD call.
My skypename is cwittig, but you can also SkypeIn on the numbers +49-89-2351-3122 (in Munich, Germany) and +44-(0)20-7193-2469 (in London, UK)

Our company db4objects is designed for the "flat world"
We're working heavily with our online community of users as an open source company by means of forums, Blogs and many other platforms
Our staff is distributed over 3, soon 4 continents and communicates by forums, e-mail, wiki and Skype
We are heavy users of networked buiness systems, esp. Salesforce.com which is entirely integrated with our website and community frontends. All customer interactions are digitally logged, automatically or as an activity entry by our sales and support staff, and is thus immediately available for reference to anybody else in our network of salesforce users around the globe (US, Japan, Hongkong, Germany, Brazil, Argentina)
We sell and ship our products entirely digitally, worldwide. A webshop for customers with transaction <$10K will complement the current mostly e-mail based approach

Photography: My new Dopod helps to catch moch more moments, which I then transfer to Flickr (where I now have 4,703 pictures online), with more and more friends and family joining into my contact network to view them (or share theirs)
Music: I have started to use my new Dopod as a portable music player, and - given that I never used walkmen before - certainly started to enjoy it. I play music both, transferred from my personal CDs as well as music bought from online stores such as Real's rhapsody.com (since they are our neighbors here in SF, up one block from where we live)
Movies: Current status is still heavy Netflix user, which is a hybrid of digital and analog lifestyle, but one I can live with for the time being. The service just rocks, you get really good and rare movies to see, and the whole thing is great value for your money! I have bookmarked Movielink, though, to start experimenting with Movies on demand, but then they don't support Firefox...
News: I read 4 online titles of general news (2 German, 1 British, 1 US) and some 6 IT related titles on a regular basis, often by means of a newsletter subscription
TV: Never had one, don't miss one. You have to make choices in life.