This user’s experienceby Matt Henderson, since 2003

Spainish president Rodriguez Zapatero has been meeting with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to discuss reforms necessary to address the battered Spanish economy. One of Merkel’s suggestions, is that Spain adopt policies similar to those in Germany, which tie salary increases to productivity and profit, rather than inflation.

That suggestion, of course, didn’t go over too well in Spain. In particular, I love this quote from Arturo Fernández, vice president of the CEOE:

“Productivity is more a German interest, than a Spanish one.”

In this interview with Hannah Murray at Talk Radio Europe, my friend and training partner Babak Alimoradian and I talk about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and the recently 2011 European BJJ Championship. (As you’ll hear from the interview, nobody ever going to hire me to do a voice-over.)

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Listen to the interview using the audio player above (or download the MP3)

Below is an article from this morning’s Marbella Express newspaper about the Draculino Team’s performance at the recently 2011 European Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Championship.

Last week, after seven months of design and development, we launched RaceSplitter, a high quality race timing application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. (It will also run on an iPad, in 2x mode; although, we are planning on a native version for the iPad as well.)

The application can record split times on multiple lap races, and has an innovative timing interface that provides three timing modes concurrently — the timing of a single racer, a group of racers or a sub-group.

In its first day in the AppStore, the application was the fourth highest grossing application of the day, in the sports category, and so we couldn’t be happier about its reception so far.

More news about the application will be coming soon. In the meantime, follow @racesplitter on Twitter, if you’re interested in keeping up with the application. You can also visit either of the following:

• The app’s website: http://racesplitter.com
• The app’s page in the AppStore http://bit.ly/buyracesplitter

SPRINT ARE BRINGING OUT THE BIG GUNS, with this truly powerful advertisement for the, uh — not sure exactly what it’s called, The Sprint HTC EVO 4G? Doesn’t matter, just have a look:

After a moment to catch my breath, my first thought was that forever I’ve been opening the Weather app on my iPhone, never really imagining the day would come when I could instead watch a man talking about the weather in a Flash player.

My second thought was, “I do need a phone with a peg leg.”

Anyway, more seriously, let’s check out this ad.

FIRST ad displaying more than six trademark symbols.

C’mon, Matt, I said seriously. (And it needs to be taken seriously; Sprint probably paid somebody $25,000 for this ad.) Ok, here we go.

First, I don’t get the usage of “FIRST”. But maybe that’s just me.

The main point of this ad is that the EVO runs Adobe Flash. And in case that doesn’t mean much to you, the ad emphasizes that 85 of the top 100 sites use Flash. (In the small print, they point out that they got this data from Adobe, who in turn, got the data from Alexa.)

Does this mean my poor iPhone can only deal with 15 of the top 100 sites? Let’s go check out the Alexa Top 100.

Google (seems responsible for at least 20 of the top 100). Facebook. YouTube. Yahoo. Wikipedia. Twitter. Amazon. LinkedIn. eBay. Flickr. Apple. New York Times.

Hmmm — where is the Flash on these sites? Oh, I see — mostly it’s the ads. The ads on these sites are often Flash.

So what this ad is really saying is that if I’ll switch to a Sprint HTC EVO 4G, in addition to getting a phone with a peg leg, I’ll finally be able to see all those slide-out, content obscuring ads I’ve been missing!

Daring Fireball just linked to an article about how Toshiba’s new teaser site for its upcoming tablet sends a message to iPhone users. Well, here’s my message to Toshiba:

It seems Apple has no competition these days, and judging just from advertising, I’m thinking we’re a good ways off from seeing any. Why? Try as they may to copy, companies like Samsung just don’t get it. My colleague Alex and I today were discussing the striking difference in advertising, in the latest issue of Fortune magazine (which is full of Samsung Galaxy ads.) Continue reading →