Most of you probably followed the ongoing lame, impolite and controverse discussion about Steve Jobs’ Health. There has been a rigorous debate whether a publicially traded CEOs Health should be someone’s business, especially to Investors and Shareholders. Silicon Alley Insider argued that, contrary to most other comments, it IS the shareholder’s right to know every aspect and detail about the respective company’s CEO. Especially in the case of Apple and Jobs this seems to be crucial, due to his influence on the brand of Apple and furthermore the valuation of the company. 

Eventually, 1 day prior to the start of this years (and final) Apple’s presence at Mac Expo in San Francisco, Mr. Jobs wrote an open letter to Apple Consumers, Shareholders and other concerned people.

 

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

. . . As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing�? me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

 

I don’t want to focus on whether it is morally correct to discuss Mr. Jobs’ Health publically or not, but I would like to state my thoughts from a medical point of view. Being an MD I am obviously foremost interested in his medical problem, rather than anything else regarding this discussion.

The media generally speaks of a “pancreatic carcinoma” when speaking of Jobs’ Cancer, yet this is not really true – and in medical terms this is totally untrue. When looking through Wikipedia or the official Steve Jobs Biography (or the plethora of them available) you’ll notice that he had a Carcinoma of the islet cells of Langerhans IN the pancreas. The pancreas is a rather complex organ balancing our body’s sugar and insuline homeostasis. The Langerhans cells are responsible for a plethora of different hormones and their balance in the body. It is only obvious to me that his current “Hormone Imbalance” results from his cancer back in 2004. Especially the “superior hormone testing” he adressed seem to be providing evidence  that it’s got something to do with his Langerhans Cells (Their endocrinic cocktail is a blend of glucagon, insulin, somatostatin, polypeptides and grehlin – doesn’t sound that simple, does it?)

Grehlin, one of the hormones produced by the pancreas is responsible for managing the body’s fatty tissue; it’s the counterpart to Leptin and is a fundamental regulator when it comes to hunger, fat depots and your body’s  substance. I am rather sure that his current state is affiliated with, at least, Grehlin. Surely these effects (weight loss, fatigue, etc.) can easily be eliminted by substitution, yet this would then only be a “cure” of symptoms, not of the actual cause (this is a genral problem in modern medicine). All these facts emphasize the possiblity that his current state of health is somewhat realted to his prior Cancer Diagnosis.

There are plenty of possiblities of the WHY and HOW, yet it would be irrational, stupid and nonserious to continue speculating about reasons of Mr. Jobs’ weight loss. Therefore I will stop here, also due to my respect to Mr. Jobs Accomplishments and my admiration for him as a CEO, thinker and doer.

In any case, my dearest wishes to him and his family. I truly hope everything will be fine

Updated: One thing I forgot to mention and which i totally believe is true. Overal survival rates for pancreatic carcinoma are simply not that good. I don’t know the last studies but there is a median survival of around 6 months or so I believe. Jobs being still alive, 4 years after the diagnosis, is an inidcator that it hasn’t been “classical” pancreatic cancer, but a langerhanscell tumor

Renowned Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson summed up what went through my head for quite some time now, backed by Jeff Jarvis. information just replaced physical infrastructure.

Clearly the economic downturn is the direct cause of most of these failures but I believe it is the straw that broke the camel’s back in most cases.

 

The internet, now closing in on 15 years old in its mainstream incarnation as the world wide web, is in many cases the underlying cause of these business failures.

Bits of information flowing over a wire (or through the air) are just more efficient than physical infrastructure….

This downturn will be marked in history as the time where many of the business models built in the industrial era finally collapsed as a result of being undermined by the information age. 

 

Since I see myself buying more and more records (strictly speaking, vinyls) lately I discovered some nice web 2.0ish music startups from all over the planet.

POPULIZER

Populizer lets bands and artists upload their tracks and makes it easy to share them in (almost) any possible way. The idea isn’t new, yet the service does a pretty good job in serving several web based services (twitter, etc.) and non webbased distribution forms (sms, etc.). Although there aren’t a lot of bands up and running I am pretty sure stuff like this comes pretty near the future of the music industry. With struggling Majors and numerous evolving (and sometimes pretty pretty good) indie artists this is surely and efficient way of promoting their music. On a large scale Services like these need to be fully compatible with existing SNs and Services.

MOJO

Remember the good ol’ times of Napster or Audiogalaxy? Well, Mojo might be kicking in where those two died. It’s basically a Jabber based IM Client for sharing Music. It has a slick and easy to use iTunes integration, making it possible to share your entire library – from anywhere to anyone. I tried it out with my bro the other day (who is on Windows) and we experienced some issues with the .net Membership and a router firewall. Nevertheless I love the usability the app provides and hope this might bring back the old day of Napser & Co. Just wondering how long it would exist if it shows success. Other Services like TuneCore offer a similiar Service also by adding  Support for itunes, amazonmp3 or Rhapsody.

SONGTEXTE

Thomas Gabriel from Internetszene recently re-launched Songtexte.com. With a database of 220.000 existing lyrics and an attached Social Net for finding similar minded Pals the service is an enjoyable rival of the tons of bulky-ad-flooded lyrics sites on the Net. Nice Add-ons such as aggregated and affiliated YouToube Vids, Band descriptions and the semantic link between people who have the same taste in music.

 

Besides, this is my first post written and published with Qumana – I hate the name but i like the app. Check it out…

 

 

 

Although my blog is mainly focused on international topics I would like to share this Site from Austria on which I am working on as a Marketing guy right now. 1. Because I am working on it as a Marketing guy right now and 2. because I truly think email charity is the long missed Step of NGOs into the web. The concept of email charity is pretty easy to follow. The main idea is that fundraising is generated and executed via a widely used Appendix of nowadays communication – Email Signatures a.k.a. Sig lines.

we launched some weeks ago and are currently cooperating with Austria’s largest NGOs from all fields. However I do see the big chances for smaller and very independet NGOs. The web makes it possible to aggegrate people from all over the world. Nobodies become popstars and people make money while writing weblogs. Getting your project spread via email signatures, thus fully webbased, is, in my humble opinion, a mandatory next step for NGOs to acquire the young and internet-educated Youth.

Email Charity more or less provides an independet Service or transportation medium open to any NGO out there. Through the snowball effect you can easily generate a decent amount of people in a decent amount of time. Email charity itself doesn’t earn a Cent providing this Service. Thus, it’s actually a NGO itself.

I personally think that the Design of the given email signture designs needs an urgent re-design and the the overall usability and design need to improved to hit on a large scale.

23andme, the first commercialized Genesequecing Service hits Europe starting now. Anyone who wants to know more about his ATCGs should spend 900 Bucks on get a true insight.

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I’am about to depart to be at the DLD – one of Europe’s most recognized Conferences on – as the name says – Digital, Life and Design. It will be held in Munich starting next weekend.

Here’s a short video of last years conference:

Besides that I am truly looking forward to hopefully get in touch with some Masterminds, like John Brockman (edge.org – via lutz dammbeck’s documentary the net), Adam Bly (Seed Media Group), Tyler Brulé (Founder & Publisher of Wallpaper and Monopol) or Craig Venter (Celera, the human genome project) that kept my brain busy for several years.The conference itself is a highly respected meeting of global Opinion Leaders from various walks of Entertainment, Media, Web, Science and Culture. It is “invitation only” and organized by Hubert Burda Media. I’ll be twittering and blogging live from the Conference. Still not sure wether there will be a report on FM4 and/or thegap.I’ll also be attending a germanwide bloggermeeting within the Conference where I hope to get to know some interesting people and especially people interested in 123people. Speaking of 123people, if there is anyone who is interesting in receiving one of those highly demanded 123people invites drop me a line and I will grant you access to test it.

Aside from Naomi Campbell, Christoph Schlingensief and the german T-mobile CEO René Obermann the following Speakers have been confirmed so far (Hope to have a cocktail with some of them at the bunte.de Night on Saturday):

Shai Agassi – Project Better Place (the former “wunderkind” at SAP)
Paola Antonelli – Museum of Modern Art
Pim Betist – Sell a Band
Adam Bly – SEED
John Brockman – Edge.org
Tyler Brulé – Monocle Magazin
Rivka Carmi – BGU
Paulo Coelho – Author (my good old pal from waldzell)
Matt Cohler – Facebook
Steffi Czerny – Hubert Burda Media
Chris Dercon – HdK
Dan Dubno – Blowing Things Up, Inc
Gerhard Florin – EA Games
Stefan Glänzer – Last FM
Olaf Göttgens – Mercedes
Konstantin Grcic – Grcic Design
Zaha Hadid – Architect (only female Architect who won the renowend Pritzkerprize)
Reid Hoffmann – Linkedin
Dr. Herbert Kohler – Mercedes
Morten Lund – Lund Kenner
John Maeda – MIT Media Lab
Marissa Mayer – Google
Sugata Mitra – Newcastle University
René Obermann – Deutsche Telekom
Hans Ulrich – Obrist Serpentine Gallery
Tero Ojanpera – Nokia
Carolyn Porco – CICLOPS
Lisa Randall – HarvardUniversity (amazing woman)
Viviane Reding – European Commission
Marcel Reichart – Hubert Burda Media
David Rosenblatt – Doubleclick
Ken Roth – Human Rights Watch
David Rothschild – Adventure Ecology (A famous name and the ambition to get the world a better one)
Antonio Rodriguez – HP Printing Division
Marc Samwer – European Founders Fund
Christoph Schlingensief – Artist
Joanna Shields – Bebo
ClayShirky – New York University
David Silverman – The Simpsons
Martin Sorrell – WPP
Roby Stancel – Nano Solar
Martha Stewart – Martha Stewart Living
Oliviero Toscani – Photographer
Martin Varsavsky – FON
Craig Venter – J. Craig Venter Institute
Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia
Alex Willcock – Imagini
Anne Wojcicki – 23 and Me
Richard Saul Wurman – Author
Gaby Zedlmayer – HP EMEA Corporate Marketing
Niklas Zennström – Joost (the founder of skype)

We recently launched a corporate i5invest blog. The blog is mainly dedicated to new web 2.0 ventures, industry developments and interesting insights in up to date topics of the media industry.

check it out here

felix turner from airtightinteractive recently presented his new creation to which i truly feel attached to – tiltviewer. It’s a new beautiful web environment to look at photos in a 3dimensional space with an intuitive interface. no wonder this guy received several prestigous awards. besides i admire the his way of combing flash technology into basic html websites. it’s slick and quick.

the only thing we can look forward is a public release of this nice peace of code.

das web 2.0 macht auch vor wissenschaft nicht halt. gerade in diesen eher traditionsbeladenen und konservativen metiers besteht noch überaus potential an webimplikationen und neuen revolutionären system die das leben eines arztes erleichtern und spitzenwissenschaft nach den aktuellsten stand der wissenschaft erlauben. einen der ersten schritte, macht scivee.tv in im ersten alpha release. das ganze sieht noch ein wenig holprig aus aber der gedanke wissenschaftliche information in visueller form für jeden zugänglich zu machen ist sehr reizvoll. man darf gespannt sein wie sich dieses portal noch entwickelt.

http://www.scivee.tv/