Facebook – a platform to spot when companies go bankrupt? Real world example.

In the Germany the drug store chain Schlecker announced to be insolvent, see the Reuter news post. If you look at the company’s Facebook page and scan the comments from the last 4 weeks it is apparent that some people in the crowd and employees expected it already last year.
Schlecker is a large drug store chain with probably over 10.000 outlets in Europe and more than 30.000 employees.

The following screen shots show some selected examples I took from the following page: http://www.facebook.com/schlecker.drogerie 
The posts are in German – the minimal summary should give you some idea…

This one the company wishes a happy Christmas and reminds people of a chance to win a car. The first replies echo the holiday greetings but then one complains that they let their shops bleed out (run empty) and that the order good do not arrive (probably posted by an employee). One further speculates that the company is close to bankruptcy. (over 3 weeks before the official note of insolvency)


The company announces a 2 euro discount on a product. Then employees post that they would like to sell the goods to the customers but that they do not get the goods for their shops. Additionally they complain that the goods they get from other closed down shows are not what they need. One says we want to work but we cat (as they are running out of stock). (over 2 weeks before the official note of insolvency)

The company announces price reductions in some goods. Some says that is great – but would be much better if these goods would be in the shops to buy them. (9 days before the official note of insolvency)

Overall I think this is an instructive real world example of the information that can be found in social networks about the health/value of companies. In particular the mix of customers and employees posting makes it a good example to study. I would expect that companies will learn lessons from this with regard to guidelines for the employees… and about transparency / openness…to understand how reliable such posts are we probably need to do some more research? let us know if you are interested in working this with us.

Talk at demola, Finnish Ubicomp program

Jari Ikonen from the Finnish Ubicomp program contacted me last week – interestingly because I shared on this blog the information that I will be in Tampere – and it worked out that we met.

He showed and explained me the demola approach. I find this concept of teaching, training and innovation very exciting. In short demola offers space for students to work on challenging problems that are real and creates opportunities opportunities. Basically companies offer tasks/project to works on. Teams of students (potentially from different universities and fields) will work together to solve it as part of their studies – but the students also will own the IPR. I think that creates interesting teams in realistic settings and has probably a great potential for creating start-ups. Perhaps we should look at this model closer and see how we could create something similar…

As always when meeting interesting people time was too short… I gave an ad-hoc talk based on previous slides on “Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing and Beyond: Mobile Communication changed the world – what else do we need?” and we had a short but very interesting discussion.

AmbiViz Project Presentation at DoCoMo Eurolabs in Munich

In the AmbiViz project we investigate how context information (explicitly or implicitly collected) can be provided to the user. The aim is that the display of context is meaningful to the user but at the same time abstract and privacy preserving. For context collection we integrated the IYOUIT platform as well as an application that runs as an app in facebook. Examples of abstract presentations are implemented for the Nabaztag and for digital picture frames. More details will be available soon in a WIP paper at Percom 2010. Currently we run a longer term study and are already curious about the results.

Recently launched TVs with Web browsing capabilities include special widgets for certain services (e.g. Philips Net TV offers widgets for youtube, ebay, etc.). This is a first step in the market towards the switch-over of traditional TV we discussed some time ago in Seoul. I wonder what other information services may become hype as widgets or Web channels on TVs.

New project on ambient visualization – kick-off meeting in Munich

We met in Munich at Docomo Euro Labs to start a new project that is related to context and ambient visualizations. And everyone already got bunnies 😉

Related to this there is a large and very interesting project: IYOUIT. Besides other things it can record and share your context – if you have a Nokia series 60 phone you should try it out. As far as I remember it was voted best mobile experience at mobile HCI 2008.