There is a kind of software that only exists to fix the pitfalls of so-called standard software. Especially in the Microsoft world. Take for example Xobni (backwards for: Inbox). Xobni tries to organise the data rubbish created by Outlook. That's quite an ambitious task, and Xobni is not the first vendor to take on this endeavour. Xobni creates profiles from the tangled mass of mails and files you exchange on a daily basis.

Earlier this year, Xobni launched a Blackberry app that promises to manage your mobile address book. This promise reminds me of the Address book 2.0 created by Cellity (which was acquired last summer by Nokia and the service discontinued).

Yesterday I shelled out 10 bucks and installed the Xobni app on my Blackberry. The installation process went smoothly, and after a short while I found the Xobni address book populated by 1171 contacts, sorted by popularity. According to Xobni, the people I correspond with the most should be listed at the top. Well, seems that I babble to myself most of the time, at least that's what Xobni thinks.

The import process clearly has its flaws. For example, in at least one case it pulled credit card information from a mail and transformed it into telephone numbers. That shouldn't happen. On the other hand, the LinkedIn and Facebook integration works well: Xobni pulls profile data, at least profile pictures, from both platforms and saves it to the address book. Over time this should lead to a self-updating address book, and that would save a lot of hassle.

Anyone remembering Webvan? Well, despite common wisdom, the brand is still alive, now owned and run by Amazon. And so is Online Grocery Shopping. A report recently published by Datamonitor touts it as the next star performer of online retailing:

The comparatively low percentage of the sales of online channels to the overall grocery industry has already captured wide interest in the industry trying to utilize consumers' general experience of shopping online. Convenience is a major motivator of consumers' interest in the online channel for sourcing groceries. It requires less physical effort and a more organized shop compared to the in-store experience.

This sound pretty much like the pitch of YourSmartCart.com, launched last week by two university students in South Carolina. YourSmartCart.com ships groceries through UPS, meaning that orders usually take 3-4 days to arrive. "We want to change the way people think about groceries," says Benjamin Frear who founded the company together with Benjamin Ellison.

The founders cite a survey recently conducted by The Nielsen Company, according to which half of Americans hate grocery shopping or, at best, find it a chore. YourSmartCart.com promises to reduce the time consumers normally spend at the grocery store to five minutes of shopping on the website. The site currently offers more than 1,200 grocery items with weekly additions made based on customer feedback.

Another approach to the promised land of Online Grocery Shopping is taken by Chronodrive, a french online food retailer founded as early as 2002. Chronodrive dropped the home delivery while keeping the online ordering, thus saving the high costs of delivery that french consumers weren't willing to pay. Consumers pick up their orders at Chronodrive outlets themselves instead.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the format is expected to reach a 4%-5% market share of grocery shopping by 2013, compared with 0.6% today. "People want to save time on grocery shopping," says retail consultant Laurent Thoumine of Kurt Salmon Associates in Paris. "The drive-through offers a very original solution."

Our good friend Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners appeared on This Week in Venture Capital last week. The show is hosted by Mark Suster and part of the ThisWeekIn network launched by Jason Calacanis.

Besides Mark and Paul, there is also Om Malik of GigaOm fame on the show. And the fun thing is: Paul just jumped off the plane from Germany to show up at the studio in Santa Monica, while Om is dialing in from San Francisco. To be fair, that's a distance of 400 miles (or 640 Kilometers), not just round the corner.

Paul has been working in Venture Capital for almost ten years now. On the show, he talks about his time at SAP Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of SAP. Asked about the advice he would have for entrepreneurs who work with corporate VCs, Paul answers:

One of the biggest pitfalls is probably setting your expectations too high. As to what the corporate can deliver above and beyond the money. Because a lot of people go in and think that if they are getting money from a corporate VC that means that they are going to have immediate access to business units or to the sales force, or getting on a price list. It just doesn't happen that quickly. Or it just doesn't happen in a lot of cases.

Amongst other things, Paul also explicates the investment strategy of Neuhaus Partners where he is a partner. The show is definitely a must!

By the way, Gottfried Neuhaus joined us back in 2006 for the very first next conference. Watch the video (in German)!

I confess: We are somehow guilty for inflating a bubble. And this time it is, you already guessed it, the App Economy Bubble. Tomi Ahonen did the math, and the numbers just don't add up.

On June 7, 2010 Steve Jobs announced not only the iPhone 4, he also brought us the news that Apple has paid out 1 billion US-Dollars to apps developers over the course of almost two years since the launch of the App Store. And as Apple takes its 30 per cent revenue share, that means the total size of the paid iPhone apps market was 1.43 billion US-Dollars. Remember, that's two years!

And since the total number of downloads has now reached the 5 billion mark, the average earnings per app download are a whopping 29 cents. Of course that's before Apple takes its cut - after that there's 20 cents left.

Well, there are also free apps. In fact current numbers (look at Tomi's post for details) see the amount of paid apps as high as 73 per cent of all apps. That means 164,000 out of 225,000 apps divide the 1.43 billion revenue, leaving the average developer with a revenue of 8,700 Dollars. Apple gets 2,600 out of this, so 6,100 Dollars remain to cover the development costs. In two years. And that's the average.

The average skews too high because of the long tail. There are a few who make several millions, who distort the average number, so it is not true that half of iPhone App Developers earn more, and half less, than $3,050 per year. It is definitely true, that the median will be significantly less than this.

Tomi calculates the median with 1,363 Dollars over two years or 682 Dollars per year. Median means that half of all developers earn even less. That's bad news for the App Economy.

It is currently in hype mode, it is a bubble where most developers will not recoup their costs, and in the case of paid apps, will for the vast majority, never reach desired usage levels, and for free apps, will never achieve reasonable reach.

Today this industry is in over-hype mode as to apps, and most app developers will make losses - but not all app developers. Some will be lucky. In the future a stable viable business will emerge out of this, and we can thank Apple for revitalizing this opportunity. But don't invest in it today.

You've always wondered what an entrepreneur really is? It's someone who steals office supplies at home and brings it to work. That's how it starts according to Ola Ahlvarsson, who takes us on a tour of what entrepreneurship really means and illustrates that there are six types of different entrepreneurs. After all it's not a job title but it's the way you look upon yourself and your obligation to create cool stuff.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

We need a master. This is Andrew Keen's request. He not only challenged the audience but also the previous speakers addressing social media themes. It's not about the cult of individuals, not about social ubiquity. It's about a profound shift in nature, it's the way we organize. According to Andrew, the competitive world of social media is the most unsocial world, reflected by a radicalized individualism. And that's why we need someone to put the whole thing together.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

How is social media affecting businesses? What kind of implications does it have on me as an individual? And which influences will social media have on society? Ola Ahlvarsson discusses these questions with Stowe Boyd and Stefana Broadbent.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

It's his third time at next (check out number one, and two). None of that has been blurred but has been kept in mind very well. This time Stowe Boyd talks about the social media blur. He focuses on blogs, networks and streams, their continuous rise and how they tend to be blurred nowadays. He clarifies why the open stream model is becoming the dominant social motive of all technologies moving forward and why we're going to be living in a web of flow.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives. And don't miss the F.A.Z. interview (in German) by Holger Schmidt with Stowe on the future of Facebook and the significance of a „third network".

Let's stick to the botanic imagery. Rene asks us to imagine a company to be a rose. The story behind it: Roses always have a romantic touch to them, emotions will be associated. And this is what a future manager needs to understand and assemble - the story behind it is the key. To create outstanding stories is what creates value for a company. Rene Jansen, story teller and founder of Winkwaves, explains how important it is to know what everyone knows but furthermore how important it is to stand out from the wisdom the crowds.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

It's as easy as that: Good social leadership is like good gardening. Setting boundaries, encouraging growth and doing the pruning if necessary.

"Monkeys with Typewriters: Myths and Realities of Social Media at Work" is the title of the presented book by Jemima Gibbons. She is sharing insights about new types of social leaders with a bunch of well-known examples, i.e. Barack Obama. The very bottom line: Be yourself and commit yourself to empower others.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

"We thought the only nuts are on our shelves, but perhaps we are mistaken." Not the only humorous comment Paul got for invoicing companies for his money and time he spent on them - in this case cranberry, a British retailer for fruits and nuts. Paul McCrudden is a digital strategist and shows us his results and experiences of his project #sixweeks. See what the development of social media relations and location based services can empower consumers to do.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Special treat. Let's go nuts!

There's an argument going on wether the Internet makes us smarter or dumber. If you follow the research Stefana Broadbent has done, you'll be astonished to learn that the number of people we communicate with on a daily basis is pretty stable, despite all the new communication channels that show up every year or two. For example, 80 per cent of all private phone calls go to four or five people who belong to the inner circle, and our use of channels becomes more mono-channel the more toward the outer space, the weak ties, we get.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives. And don't miss J. Martin's excellent write-up of Stefana's talk.