With more than 15 active member companies in 2012, Silicon Trust now forms a strong community of like-minded companies. Today, the driving force behind the Silicon Trust are the three executive board partners: Gemalto, Giesecke & Devrient and Infineon Technologies, supported by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the Fraunhofer Research Institution AISEC in the Silicon Trust advisory board. Many other companies along the value chain of silicon-based security participate in Silicon Trust discussions and activities

The Silicon Trust Program is one of the most established marketing programs in the security industry. It is also one of the longest standing Krowne projects. Since the founding by Infineon Technologies in 2000, Krowne has administered and marketed the activities of the Silicon Trust and it’s partners.

In the course of 2011, it became clear that the program’s focus was to move more towards the public sector and ID applications. The Silicon Trust Board agreed with Krowne’s suggestion that a look and feel redesign would help reinvigorate the brand and would go some way to help emphasize and support this new direction.

Krowne designed a new logo under the auspices of the program’s committee members and developed a new look-and-feel that Krowne thought gave the program a classic, trustworthy, yet current look, which is suitable to address the target group of international governments and political institutions. The design symbolizes the different partners that make up the Silicon Trust as well as the multitude of applications and topics it addresses. So far, feedback has been very, very positive!

Krowne Communications is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Silicon Trust, lobbying event facilitation as well as the blog, silicon-trust.com <http://silicon-trust.com> Krowne Communication also published The Vault, the program’s custom publication.

Our editor takes all our B-Roll footage and puts together a little video that kind of sums up Cartes for us. This years film reminded us about the NXP NFC bike (try saying that 10 times fast!), the constant tagging of badges via phone, Watchdata’s crazy foam-rubber guy walking the halls, the Turkish musicians and food scrum (Turkey was this years country of honor)  and the constant walking, walking, and even more walking on green carpets.

But if we are honest – it was fun this year and it didn’t snow! Yeah!

Here’s the film.

That makes our award even more special and we are mighty proud. More than that, we think that it proves our point of view, that investments in corporate publishing can bring a return if you are brave enough to think outside the box a little.

This is what the panel of judges had to say:

“The excellently designed magazine surprised with a wide interpretation of the theme “identity”. Bundesdruckerei as a manufacturer of identification documents has the courage, to illustrate this topic with unusual content. The magazine tells compelling stories, sets new standards in terms of design and “thinking” beyond the company’s horizon – it produces a real image boost.”

A couple of days later, German business paper The Handelsblatt, commented on the awards in a similar tone:

“The Bundeswehr (German Army) proves that public sector institutions do not have to hide behind private sector companies in terms of corporate communications. This analysis can also be applied to another winner: Bundesdruckerei GmbH, with the help of financial investors firmly back in the hands of the government after an unsuccessful period of privatization, received for her magazine “EINMALIG” platinum, the highest award in a category at all. This lavish magazine captures with intense imagery and varied editorial contributions and guest commentaries society issues, whose relation to the company is not always immediately recognisable. “Identities” was one of the focus topics. Bundesdruckerei produces, among other, ID cards “  Original quote in German here 

This coverage by a leading business paper shows once again that even the most critical target group – namely journalists – can be reached by corporate publishing. With Einmalig 12, Krowne with the excellent Art Director Angela Ziegler, proved that innovative design carries a message more effectively and creates lasting resonance.

PS: Next up are the European Excellence Awards in Amsterdam – we will let you know how that went in December.

November brings good tidings, it seems:  The League of American Communication Professionals – the LACP in short – awarded one of Krowne’s Corporate Publishing projects not only the Platinum and Best Narrative Award, it also made the Top 5 of all communications materials submitted. 

And hey, before you question just how many submissions there were, let us quote from the press release: “More than 1500 entries were submitted, representing nearly a dozen countries and 400 entities, so competition was exceptionally tough.” Well, there you go.   

So, if we won Platinum, with whom are we sharing the victory podium? Find out here:

Yet his visions, innovations and products have touched most of our lives in one way or the other and certainly changed the landscape of the technology industry. An industry that I have lived and breathed for almost 25 years, both here in Europe and on the West Coast of the US. So I couldn’t let this day go without putting a small post up to acknowledge Steve’s passing.

The best way to do this (in my opinion) is to share Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Address – it’s available on YouTube and as I write it’s been viewed 6,053,274 times. It’s is probably one of the most poignant speeches I have heard and listening to it again today, it seems even more so. The full text is available below the video.

The man was a visionary, an individual and a pioneer. He was what the tech industry is all about. He was a pivotal individual in the last days of the 20th Century and the early days of the 21st Century. He will be missed, but thanks to his products and design vision – never forgotten.

R.I.P Steve Jobs

Speech Transcript

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last-minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

NMA spares no punches  as the narration describes Motorola as a once mighty mobile giant who has lost its way and Google as a one-trick pony. But mostly it’s funny just to see Steve Jobs portrayed as the Dark Lord himself – Darth Vader!

How would you know? I’m talking about the use of buzz-words and jargon. Typical marketing speak and other phrases designed to confound the reader while at the same time making the release seem as though it has something coherent and meaningful to say.

A German computer programmer has created a website that can measure whether a piece of text is trying too hard to wrap itself in jargon. The website, blablameter.de, can analyze both English and German text. It works by determining whether writing uses common bombastic phrases or replaces verbs with terms like “optimisation of processes.” It also scans for excessively long words – perhaps meaning that the piece is out to impress? The site rates writing on a scale of 0 to 1, which 1 considered to be almost complete “bullshit.”

Go ahead – try the blablameter here (if you dare!).

This piece rated 0.23 on the bullshit meter, meaning that it showed some indications of ‘bullshit’ English but remained within an acceptable range.

Who are we to disappoint? So without further ado – the film itself…

We love awards, we do. 

Actually, we don’t.

It hurts too much when you have to walk home with a “silver” version of whatever it is they are giving out. Nevertheless, we live in hope and can announce yet another nomination that we are quite chuffed with.

This time around it is the ECON Awards. It’s a German award that covers all aspects of communication – from PR to annual reports to corporate publishing  – and is published by the business printing house Handelsblatt. We won’t know anything until November but as they have kindly provided us with a nominee logo, we will put it out there.

What’s the nomination for? The issue #12 of the Bundesdruckerei corporate publishing project called EINMALIG (as in one-of-a-kind). Followers with good memories may remember that we got a shameful silver BCP award for issue #10 – so keep your fingers crossed for this one.

We came back from this year’s Intersolar with our pockets full. Nah, not what you are thinking right now. Giveaways! Fun stuff, like little solar cars und funky bottle holders and massive carrier bags. What is my point?

Well, this industry is buzzing and you can tell by the marketing effort that is being put into the branding, booth presence  and so forth. For Krowne it was the second year at this show and we were delighted to develop and execute the investor and VIP events for Hanwha SolarOne, formerly known as Solarfun Power.

Whereas last year the event took place in a trendy bar in central Munich, this year customers needed to be convinced by the new brand and the powerhouse that stands behind it, namely the Korean Fortune 500 Hanwha Corporation. Massive in Asia but relatively unknown in Europe, the Hanwha brand and the Hanwha Logo is (thankfully) modern and stylish, so the design for invitation and collateral really were fun to implement.

The location search proved more difficult. Where to go to leave a lasting impression, preferably with a tint of the logo’s orange? Well, in Munich there is only one location that can tick both boxes: the Tantris restaurant.

Rewarded with endless accolades, including two Michelin stars, this location was a perfect match for the Hanwha brand. Customers left happy and – we are sure – will not forget the evening and it’s hosts.

Andreas Liebheit, Managing Director, Hanwha SolarOne GmbH said of Krowne, “The skill that Krowne brings to the table is communication experience:  They understand what needs to be done and deliver bespoke solutions – even at very short notice. For Hanwha SolarOne’s customer relations activities during Intersolar they were a key partner, developing and implementing a VIP event perfectly fitted to our new brand – our customers are still talking about it now. “

A short film, made on a ‘Krownie’s iPhone, of the event can be found on the opening page of www.krowne.tv.

Related articles

• Hanwha SolarOne to Attend Intersolar Europe 2011 (prnewswire.com)
• Hanwha SolarOne Files Its 2010 Annual Report on Form 20-F (prnewswire.com)