The exhibition guides you through her life by starting off with her CV read by herself in a video installation which moves around her apartment. Every single piece from her films, paintings to appliquéd blankets convey a very personal insight into her life with all its problems. These not only cover her childhood in her home town Margate or sexual experiences, but also her two abortions, among others. Things which used to be usually taboo topics in art.

It seems that her autobiographical art helps Tracey Emin to emotionally process all the traumatic experiences in her life. One example here is the video “Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children” (1998) that is staged at the same location as Edvard Munch famous “The Scream” (1893) – with the exception that her hearable scream is truly shocking.

The exhibition last until June 21, 2009 and is definitely worth visiting for getting a closer understanding of this unique artist.

I just discovered by accident a tiny link called “Book a table now” below the review of Cheyenne restaurant in Zurich Oerlikon. When you click it, a widget appears allowing you to actually make an online reservation in three steps. Not yet that powerful in its usability as e.g.  you still have to manually type in your address details though you are logged in, but definitely an important step in leveraging the presence of restaurants in Qype.

I have not found this feature at many restaurants and, as far as I know,  Qype has not yet made a big buzz in releasing it. Furthermore, I found it interesting to see that this restaurant is not a premium partner, opposite e.g. to this one here in Hamburg that also has this feature. Hence, I am curious to learn if the business model behind this lead generation is already implemented and how deeply into the restaurants’ booking system this is already implemented.

And, of course, there can be even more useful features built around the profile of restaurants, such as their menu.

As XING’s VP Product & Engineering, Felix Menden, clearly states in his blog post this is just the beginning of many possibilities to bring the dimension of location into social networking and hence increase radical the value of XING to its users. Beyond thinking of bringing this feature to your mobile while on the go, other possibilities include to connect it with users’ current and future locations. Platforms such as Plazes or Dopplr, among others, deal with this and would bring certainly value to business travelers.

Plazes (disclosure: portfolio company of my employer b-to-v) for instance just put more focus on developers with its platform plazes.net allowing them to use their API more efficiently, also beyond MAC address geo-targeting. Furthermore, the recent acquistion of Bluetooth-based location service Imity with Zyb reveals that mobile applications are becoming more compelling to users by implementing the most important feature location, and thus becoming real mobile social networks. More use cases we will see soon in this space – hopefully also on XING.

How easy it is in fact, Index Ventures reflects in its website relaunch, which is based on a virtual snapshot of a town – at day and at night.

So just walk around with your eyes wide open to find the most successful ideas. For some who want to have it more precise, Max Niederhofer from Atlas Venture is writing up his 100 ideas for start-ups – so far the counter stands at four.

After I have not managed to blog this last year I at least want to keep up the tradition of blogging the theme of my Christmas mailing. For the upcoming days I wish you all some time to relax, to look back at the outgoing year and to make your intentions for the new one – of course only, if you belong to such kind of persons. For me these will also include that I will devote more of my time blogging. Here mostly about personal musings. Business-wise, we just set up a new blog at blog.b-to-v.com. However, important postings I will cross-link here as well.

I wish you all a merry Christmas time with your families and friends. That all your dreams may come true in the New Year 2007!

Here a blogging example:

GRAND BLANC, MICH. — Tiger Woods closed in on his second straight victory with a big assist from a fan Saturday, birdieing two of his last three holes for his third straight 6-under 66 and a two-stroke lead in the Buick Open.

Newsvine – Woods Leads Buick With Fan’s Assistance

Technorati tags: flock

I just signed up as # 68,163 to Martin Varsavsky‘s FON community. I waited for a long time as the router seemed with EUR 25.00 plus transportation /VAT not that cheap. With the new pricing of EUR 5.00 plus transportation / VAT – thanks to FON’s incredible EUR 18m funding – also I am convinced. Not that I think that the business model will work out to be extremely succesful because for this the FON hotspots so far, such as the 572 in Switzerland, are by far too decentralized – only a few being in city centers -, not easily to detect without a Wifi connection and worldwide too many own city Wifi projects are on their way – without FON. I am still waiting for the big deals with ISPs here in Europe, such as T-Mobile or Swisscom – after FON already announced some in France, Spain and Sweden.

However, I am excited how FON will develop and if they will reach their goal of 1m active hotspots end of 2007. Hopefully, these get more traffic than ours at the office and enough Bills will come up to make the business model work.

Technorati tags: FON Martin Varsavsky Wifi

However, after recognizing this today I took the decision to look at Zooomr a bit closer again. The team around the 18-year-old Kristopher Tate took the basic ideas of Flickr and all its clones further with many enhancements, such as geotagging, trackbacks for single pictures, etc. They combined these in a very easy to use multilingual user interface. So, my decision to move over to Zooomr was even made easier after having read that they give all bloggers a free pro account.

But beyond all the praise for Zooomr, the site still needs some development when it comes to more user-friendly upload possibilities beside the web-based one, easier to understand geotagging – I still have to figure it out for my pics (too bad it is not yet integrated in Plazes ;) -, and albums. Therefore, I am really looking forward to Zooomr 2.0.

Find below a picture two weeks ago, when my university colleagues Harald and Thomas visited me here in St.Gallen.

Technorati tags: Flickr Zooomr web2.0