24100.net :: Ralf Rottmann's Internet Home

I feel honored to announce that starting as of today I'm going to co-author posts on iPhone-notes.de. The site is 100% dedicated to the German speaking market so I thought it would be a perfect idea to further separate my various activities in this field and contribute to one of the most popular German speaking independent iPhone sites.

Those running jailbroken iPhones (I myself don't as for the professional iPhone apps development business it's important to have a model which is compliant with the ones shipped by Apple) definitely know iPhone-notes.de and it's linked Installer/Cydia repository – sendowski.de – as it still is one of the most favorite sources for iPhone tooling and software.

I'm looking very much forward to working with Andre on expanding iPhone-notes.de reach and keeping you up-to-date with the latest and greatest in Apple Smartphone Land. :-)

More announcements to come. Stay tuned!

iPhone-notes.de

Changes

Ralf Rottmann — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:26:32 GMT

Things in life change.

This is true for presidents, mobile telephones, the universe and life. After more than four consecutive years of successful growth and the recent acquisition of our spin-off by Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys I've decided to withdraw from my daily operational job at VoicInt Telecommunications. As a loyal shareholder I'll remain very grateful to the company and stay in touch from a healthy distance to accompany its future evolution. VoicInt has become a software vendor with an exciting future and I'm happy that we were able to build a strong new management team from its existing employees. I'm sure they will continue to further drive VoicInt's positive development.

Taking a startup from incorporation to crossing the chasm is such a grateful task and I'm really thankful that I could play such a vital role in this process at VoicInt Telecommunications.

I've incorporated acceleract GmbH which will serve as my own holding for the next entrepreneural adventures I'm starting. acceleract GmbH will allow me to invest into and partner with businesses that share my passion for innovative technologies that make our lives more easy and comfortable. acceleract GmbH predominantly will hold the shares of VoicInt Telecommunications, straight2market and soon-to-be-disclosed other partners.

Operationally I'm going to help straight2market to become the leading management resulting company for go-to-market strategies and profitable product sales engagements. straight2market's mobile marketing arm has already been cited by TechCrunch and several other important technology blogs for the outstanding applications for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch, so we are pretty much on track here :-) .

We've incorporated straight2market in early 2008. The one thing I like most about creating and growing businesses is that it allows me to work closely and creatively with extremely gifted and dedicated teams. I'm glad that we could win Karl-Heinz Land – which Time Magazine considers to be "a tech pioneer that's changing our lives in amazing new ways" – as being our chairman. I'm looking forward to working closely together with two of my friends, Roland Freygang and Martin Willnow, who have been such a tremendous source of inspiration over the years and are among the best sales people I've been working with.

I'm eager to get in touch with everybody who values integrity, honesty, openness, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement, mutual respect and has a passion for technology. If you want to get in touch here are a variety of classical and Web 2.0 options:

Drop me an email.
Follow me on twitter.
Connect with me on XING, LinkedIn or Facebook.
Subscribe to my blog.

With that said, I'm extremely excited and amazed in light of 2009 with so much new things to come!

Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for your continuous loyalty. Let's go for an amazing, exciting and new 2009!

More App Store Confusion

Ralf Rottmann — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:32:05 GMT

Yesterday something cool happened: TAXIRUF, one of our iPhone applications, hit the "New & Featured" list in iTunes and the device store. We were experiencing a peak in downloads and wondering why. In the past we saw this happening when Mac Life, TechCrunch and others were reviewing our apps so we googled for reviews. Finally we found out about the updated and very prominent listing of TAXIRUF on iTunes.

While we definitely appreciate this move and do feel honored, we once again wondered about the statistical analytics Apple applies. We already knew that the review system is, well, far from ideal. Now we add "Featured & New" listings to the what-the-heck-goes on bucket.

Here is why: TAXIRUF was submitted to Apple during the first week of September 2008. It got approved September 17th, 2008. Shortly thereafter it hit the Top 10 Sold apps. Since then TAXIRUF moderately continues to sell across Germany.

So what's the reason for the application to appear on the "Featured & New" list five months too late? And in light of this how reliable are all the other ratings and listings? Or is it all a big mess?

By the way, just in case anybody from Apple happens to read this: We're not asking to remove TAXIRUF from its current prominent place. In fact we do like heavy download days. :-) Messed analytics constitute a problem but having an app on the iTunes landing page is just fantastic!

App Store, straight2market, TAXIRUF

Adium no longer connects to MSN Messenger service

Ralf Rottmann — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:14:55 GMT

Since approx. 20:00 PST January 11th, 2009 Microsoft's MSN Messenger servers have stopped accepting logins from clients that use version 15 of the protocol. This includes Adium Version 1.3.2 and the latest 1.3.3b1. Debugging the problem it seems as the MSN servers fail to find a certificate required to load the user's MSN Address Book:

Until the producers of Adium fix the issue you can work around it by

Using Microsoft Messenger for Mac
Downgrading to the older Adium 1.3.1 version

I did the downgrade and it worked like a charm. In case Finder complains about a running instance of "Adium Spotlight Importer" you have to wait until Adium shuts down completely and try installing again.

Fixed!

Adium, MSN Messenger

Help testing my microblogging adventures (Laconica on EC2/S3)

Ralf Rottmann — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:42:19 GMT

I'm currently evaluating running a microblogging engine on Amazon's elastic cloud computing (EC2) and cloud storage platform (S3). Laconica, the popular open source engine driving Identi.ca, seemed to be a good package to start with. So I grabbed a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy (AMI provided courtesy of alestic) and based my instance on ami-1c5db975.

After installing the entire LAMP stack plus sendmail to the base Ubuntu system configuring Laconica took about 10 minutes only! Finally assigned a permanent IP address to the EC2 instance and that's it!

So here we go, I'd like to kindly ask you to register and try the engine for a couple of days. I'd like to get some usage stats. Thanks for your help!

Test Drive 24100.net microblogging

Finally some links if you would like to start digging into the fantastic Amazon cloud computing platform by yourself:

Elasticfox, a Firefox extension that simplifies handling your cloud instances

S3 Firefox Organizer, another Firefox extension that works much like an FTP client for your Amazon S3 cloud storage

In case you'd like to see a detailed step by step tutorial on how to setting up Laconica on Amazon EC2/S3 please do let me know in the comments. I might go for one...

Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2, Laconica, Microblogging, S3

Sign of Life

Ralf Rottmann — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:40:30 GMT

Some of my readers were wondering about the "long period of silence" here at www.24100.net. Others expected an exhaustive year's end post. Some have asked whether I'm still alive. Rest assured: I am!

2008 has been an amazingly exciting year for me. And it has changed everything. 2009 will be even better and I'm looking so much forward to disclose the details. I cannot, however, go into much detail today but I will during the second half of January. Please stay tuned for a major update on personal and professional stuff. This post is merely meant as a little sign of life from my side.

As so many of you guys I'm also kind of a gadget nerd. While I've got to hold back the real news, my latest new technology purchases will keep me busy meanwhile.

I can highly recommend all of the latest toys I've bought:

Nikon D90

Elegato's Turbo.264

Apple TV

Apple LED Cinema Display

iWork 09

iLife 09

Canon MX7600

Expect more posts related to digital photography, movie making and the digital lifestyle in general.