Sven Herold (SAP AG)

Watch our live broadcast from the press conference in china, which is just to begin. Everything looks great and we are expecting and exciting event. There are 3 cameras rolling and we have established several independent live streamings. Two internal only streams for our employees and remote locations in apj, where our managing directors are watching the press conference with local journalists (e.g. in japan, vietnam, singapore, malaysia, etc.) Also there are two external live webcasts, which are accessible globally. Some of the encodings are done directly onsite in beijing, some others are initiated in germany for saftey reasons and to guarantee a backup out of china. In addition journalists can dial in via telephone or listen to an audio only webcast.

The press conference will start 12:45 pm china standard time, which is 6:45 am in germany and 0:45 am est.

Feel free to join! You can find all information about the different dial in options on www.sap.com/press

This week, SAP TV is broadcasting from the Middle Kingdom where several Board-level events are under the spotlight: an all-China employee meeting, a board meeting, keynote presentations at a premier customer event and two press conferences. Preparations are well-underway and here’s a quick progress update:

Due to bandwith challenges in China, we’ve decided to run the internal employee event with live audio only, but we will provide a video recording to our Chinese colleagues afterwards. For one of the the press conferences, during which the Board will provide to the APJ media with further insight to our acquisition of Sybase, things have proven a little more challenging. Also for this event, we struggle with the external Internet bandwith. We had planned to have two internal streamings (one for back up) and two external streamings (the other also for backup). As far as the internal broadcast is concerned, things are looking good; we have a dedicated 20 Mbit line (up and down), same is installed externally. However, we’re just finding out that internet signals leave China very s-l-o-w-l-y. We’re going to see if we can sort this out tomorrow. Pull a rabbit out of the proverbial hat perhaps?! We’ll keep you posted! And one more thing; we’ll have top TV networks on-site on Friday – Reuters, CCTV and Bloomberg….

Some pictures of the setup in the Regent Hotel we took today:

DowJones (German only – Interview in English)

SAP’s McDermott Excerpt on Sybase Acquisition
Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) — Bill McDermott, co-chief executive officer of SAP AG, discusses his company’s acquisition of Sybase Inc. (This report is an excerpt. Source: Bloomberg)

Deutsches Anlegerfernsehen (DAF) – [German only]

The press conference about SAP’s Sybase acquisition, co-hosted in Frankfurt and Boston is just over. N24 already broadcasted the interview with Jim Hagemann Snabe – stay tuned for Deutsches Anlegerfernsehen, Dow Jones NewsWires, n-tv and Rhein Neckar Fernsehen, as well as Bloomberg and CNN international (as stated in my earlier post). The stage is already re-built. Just some other impressions…

Today SAP is announcing its strategy behind the acquisition of Sybase in a huge press event co-hosted in Boston and Frankfurt. Sybase CEO John Chen and SAP’s Co-CEO Bill McDermott will be presenting in Boston together with SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka. In Frankfurt the event will be hosted by Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe.

Both venues are connected live, also there will be a live broadcast on the internet and an internal stream for all SAP employees. In addition there will be TV broadcast activities in Boston as well as in Frankfurt.

In Boston the day begins with a TV interview conducted by CNN International. The segment with John Chen and Bill McDermott will be broadcasted on tonight’s Quest Means Business show. Chen and McDermott will also appear in an interview with Bloomberg on Street Smart with Carol Massar & Matt Miller.

Jim Hagemann Snabe will have interviews with the German TV networks N24 and n-tv. These will first time be conducted in German – keep in mind Jim is Danish and usually speaks English.

Just right now we are facing some connection problems between Boston and Frankfurt. Reason is an internet problem in the city of Boston. Due to the instability of the network, we decided to switch from video conference technology for the connection between both venues to satellite. Problem: As a satellite link between the US and Europe was not planned, our truck is only facing a domestic satellite in the US to reach CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Also we had to organize a satellite truck, parking permits and a parking slot in front the Frankfurt venue within only 6 hours over night. Now the crew is dealing with the satellite issues. Hopefully we do not need to go up and down three times, as this would cause a huge sound delay.

Join our livestream at 4 pm CET/ 10 am EST to watch the event.

Please also have a look at our two new videos we just published for the event. One is a first exclusive behind the scenes look in our development departement. We show first impressions and screenshots of our mobile software, which will hit the market 2011. The other film tells the mobile strategy of SAP. There is special b-roll material available for journalists and bloggers on our stockfootage platform as well. We are happy to hear your feedback!

This Friday was a special day for our employess in India. At the SAP’s Leadership Talk Series, organized by V R Ferose, managing director, SAP Labs India, former Inidan president Kalam held forth for 45 minutes in a thought-provoking and motivational speech. The session was opened by board member and CTO Vishal Sikka with an address to the Indian employees.

See some behind the scenes comments and videos of the prodction….

The internal event was one of the largest all hands meetings in India so far. Over 4000 employees were attending onsite.

I also tried to capture some video footage of the moment, when former Indian president APJ Kalam arrived at the venue. Unfortunatelly my new camera had some problems with the autofocus, but I thought this moment might be interesting as well for you. Please apologize, that the video is not really sharp at the beginning, but I meant to include it into this thread:

In addition many colleagues were watching the event online. It was broadcasted live throughout India via SAP TV. When I was getting back to the office to pay for my driver, I had the chance to capture some video footage in the office as well with my blackberry.

(I will add this video as soon as I can connect my blackberry again)

SAP had to use its over one hundred busses (all operated by SAP), to get the employees safely from the campus to the event hall. There was the need of switching away from the SAP facilities, as the event rooms in the SAP Labs building could not host a live audience of 4000 people. Just as an additional inside: SAP runs 150 taxis with drivers for the SAP labs in India….

Since SAP also has offices in Mumbai, Delhi and other locations in India, SAP TV had to offer additional streaming. For that the team had to bring in four cameras and a bunch of technical equipment, such as streaming encoders, audio mixers etc.

All was installed in a remote control room directly in front of the stage. But productions like this across the globe are just usual work. Also for the Indian colleagues it is not the first happening like that. E.g. the event location was used for this years D-KOM, an internal event for the SAP developers. The only thing which was new this time is that an employee meeting was moved to an external venue. These internal so called “All Hands Meetings” take place not only in India but in all main SAP regions. We just had a similar event for all North American employees with a combined meeting between the US headquarter in Newtown Square and our California labs in Palo Alto. Also there was a session broadcasted from Singapore with our APJ president Steve Watts. Our new MD in China will share information with her Chinese employees through an event hold in Shanghai in August.

Depending on the importance of these events (board attendence, huge audience) and the need of interaction we decide to either broadcast live or only to provide a recording. The replays are published on our internal SAP portal and are available just only one to two hours after each session.

The largest meetings of this kind are the so called “Global All Hands Meetings”. These are events reaching out to all SAP employess globally. We just had such a meeting Tuesday, July 27 to inform the SAP employees about the Q2 figures. Attended by Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe + the whole board, this event was broadcasted globally and had almost 10.000 viewers online (audience figures can be 20.000 and more though). In addition there were almost 3000 employees attending the event live onsite in Walldorf. Already in the morning, Jim and Bill recorded a video message prior to their interview with external TV stations, print and online journalists, which was published internally just 15 minutes after the initial recording.

Just right now my team is preparing several media events, including locations in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Las Vegas and many more. Keep reading this blog, we will try to cover as many behind the scenes stories as possible.

Some pictures from the event in India last Friday, July 30:

Update August, 2: The final interview has been broadcasted throughout the weekend on CNBC and is now also available online:

As part of our different activities regarding SAP’s Q2 announcement this Tuesday we also had a CNBC team in our Walldorf headquarters.

Patricia Szarvas from the Frankfurt CNBC office conducted an exclusive interview with our Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. Contentwise it is about leadership and the overall strategy of SAP.

During this exclusive, Bill and Jim unveil their thoughts and ideas about leadership styles and SAP’s strategy. The interview will be airing several times on CNBC globally during Friday, July 30 and Sunday, August 1. First broadcast is on Capital Connection, a show with three different anchors in Singapore, Barhain and London. The exclusive will also be shown on “Europe this week” Friday afternoon CET.

Some impressions from the shooting (Tuesday, July 27, Walldorf)

Update, July 30, 9pm CEST:

CNBC just published a first teaser of the interview on its internet platform

Our reporter Jessica Seilnacht is back from her trip to Israel. She had additional shootings also in Germany. Right now the team is working on the final video, which will be published soon. Today we disclosed for the first time pictures of SAP’s mobile software, which is just in the development process and will run on iPads, iPhones and Blackberrys beginning January 2011.

The material is offered to Journalists through our stockfootage platform to enhance the coverage about the quaterly results (Q2) which were just published this morning. Our strategy is, to provide TV networks around the world more than just only interviews. For the future we will increase our offerings of b-roll packages, which allow TV stations to produce news segments and packaged films. Until now we only offered pure b-roll material, which the networks could use to underlay news about SAP with moving pictures. With this change in strategy we expect the journalists to pick up and broadcast more stories about SAP and how the company helps thousands of businesses to run better. We also want to show, how and where SAP’s services and software are touching and affecting all of us in daily life.

First look at the latest SAP Business ByDesign software, running on devices such as iPad, iPhone, and BlackBerry. The software will be available in 2011. You can download the clip and also find embedding codes on our stockfootage platform

When we opened sap-tv.com in April 2008 and the stockfootage platform only in February last year, we had some ambitious plans in getting SAP video content spread around the world. Today it is my great pleasure to share some exciting figures about our two offerings SAP TV and the stockfootage platform with you. Usually these kind of stats are confidential and won’t be shared externally, but with our blog we want to open the closed doors a little bit and provide unique insides into corporate TV. Therefore I think it is essential for you, to also see the metrics behind our offerings :-)

The attached figures back what we so far only heard from you, the audience! Feedback was, that SAP has the unique position compared to its competitors. And even more, you said, with the stockfootage platform our company has a one-of-a-kind offering, not only against Oracle, IBM and HP but also against the global top brands in the world. Especially the combined approach of multipliers with final produced stories on the one hand and downloadable high resolution b-roll material on the other hand turned out to be amazingly successful. The content is used by all major TV networks, which brought us the global reach we could never have achieved with a streaming-only platform like sap-tv.com.

Some facts in a nutshell, external platforms only – we of course have additional internal platforms as well! All stats are from May,27  2010:

SAP TV platform:

• 570.000 video views (page views = video views!) April 22, 2008 – May 27, 2010 (+ additional 150.000 video views on youtube)
• 101,000 video views 2010 only (January 1 – May 27 2010, youtube additional 65.000)
• 100.000 video downloads through RSS Feed in 23 months
• Exceptionally high average visit time of 9 minutes/ constant average visit time on site
•  40% direct traffic to www.sap-tv.com

We are especially very happy with the fact, that ´people visiting the site are actually watching one or more videos for an average time of 9 minutes. Compared to the global market, this is a very long time.

Stockfootage platform:

• 319.000 page views (clicks) February 1, 2009 – May 27, 2010
• 116,000 photo/ video previews (40,000 – until May 2010 only)
• 15,000 high resolution photo downloads (6,200 until May 2010 only)
• 2,000 broadcast quality video downloads (800 until May 2010 only)
• Average visit time of 5 minutes, 8 page views per visit
• 60% international visits (18% North America, 10% Asia, 4% Eastern Europe, 2% South America, ..)
• Organisations visiting the side (excerpt): IDG, PRnewswire, Young & Rubicam, Accenture, Bertelsmann, Microsoft, Spiegel Verlag, NBC Universal, Ogilvy & Mather, IBM, Time Warner, Turner, British Broadcasting Corp., Südwestrundfunk, Oracle, Deutsche Bank, Gruner + Jahr, Reuters, Siemens Business Services, Herausgebergemeinschaft Wertpapier-Mitteilungen, HP, Deutscher Fachverlag, Frankfurter Allgem. Zeitung, RTL Television, Ernst & Young, Süddeutscher Verlag, Axel Springer Verlag, News Aktuell, Vogel Verlag, ZDF, Haufe Verlag, Gartner Group

• Platform internationally established in only 14 months
• TV networks are actually using the content for their programs
• Print outlets, online media and bloggers are actually using the photos to enhance their stories
• New one stop shop for internal stakeholders when it comes to photos

We want to thank all people involved for their ongoing support, be it sending us pictures on time, helping us to find the right stories or providing accurate information for all the content!

It would be great to also get your feedback about our services. What is going well, where do we have to adjust our services? What are you missing? What should be different about the content and our stories? Feel free to comment here or just write  an email to the team saptv@sap.com

When I was walking through New York this Sunday, I found a really amazing installation just across from the Wall Street (Wall Street and Macy’s). The so called  ”Trial By Fire” is a large-scale interactive billboard experience that has pedestrians interacting with the display as if they were part of a movie. For the installation at Wall Street it is the upcoming movie, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.  The system works with 3D gesture recognition. The company, which developed this technology is called Softkinetic and is specialized on gesture-based content and applications.

I strongly believe, that this technology will be the next big thing in Television besides the content- and distributionwise changes which I was just writing about (http://ow.ly/17JPgc)

With this new technology it seems absolutly realistically, that we do not need physical remote controls in the future to control our televisions and other audio visual devices. A finger tip might be enough to scroll through the content and to decide about programs and settings. This new technology is of course still in a very early development status, but when I was testing the system in New York I was pretty impressed how acurate and easy it works.

Seeing the actual speed new technological ideas and inventions reach the real markets, it will not last too long until we see the first TV manufactors offering gesture recognition in their products. It would not be the first technology, which found its way from the gaming market into the TV market.

Watch the videos I did in New York:

Update:
Sony announces Playstation upgrade with gesture recognition

Sony just announced that the company plans to launch the upgraded version of PlayStation 3 videogame. Buzz up!The latest version ‘PlayStation Move’ will allow the users to play videogames by swings, jabs and other natural movements instead of toggle and button commands.
PlayStation Move will hit the Japan market on Thursday, Jul 29, but the worldwide release is not decided. Sony reveals the new plan as part of the competition between gaming rival Microsoft. Microsoft in their new gaming console used a 3D camera and gesture recognition software to let people play videogames using natural body movements instead of hand held controllers.