Philipp Conrad

It wasn’t quite freezing in the oldest neighborhood of this ancient city as I stepped inside Shakespeare & Company Booksellers, tucked into a back street behind the medieval Ruprechts Church near Schwedenplatz.

Arriving at the venerable bookstore without a second to spare, I gave the heavy door a good pull – it clattered loudly against the jam, and the assembled literati turned and glared. I shrugged; it would have opened with a gentle tug. Oops.

Half as light as your average book, a new gadget has recently appeared at the first district’s Shakespeare & Company Booksellers.
“In the summer of 2007, a good friend came to me after seeing an e-book reader at a trade-show and said, ‘we’ve got to do something with this,’” said Daniel Schreiner, a 27-year-old with a refreshingly bright idea: an electronic bookshop within your bookshop. “I still go to the bookshop around the corner. They recommend great books. So I wanted to buy my e-books for them. To make this possible, I created HixBooks.”

Benkei Okasan has a proud smile on her face watching her kids run one of the city’s best sushi restaurants located in Vienna’s 3rd district.

“Good day. Nice to see you,” she greets her guests as she takes off her shoes at the corner of your Tatami room to pour you a cup of green tea.

Overseeing the family restaurant with a kind but watchful eye, Benkei Okasan has helped her kids own and run the leading Sushi restaurant in Vienna for the past decade.

There was a pleasant surprise at the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual summit in Berlin this past December. Several iPhone hackers came out of the closet in front of a packed audience at the Congress Center at Alexanderplatz and unveiled their latest breakthroughs.

The Chaos Computer Club, a global collective of hackers based in the German capital, meets annually to show off the year’s accomplishments in breaking codes, hacking into systems, and other nefarious deeds.

Walking into the Congress Center on Dec. 27, the hallways around the central conference room were abuzz with blinking lights, chipboards, soldering irons and a busy mess of young and old gadget freaks who look forward to this event all year long.

Arriving at the venerable bookstore without a second to spare, I gave the heavy door a good pull – it clattered loudly against the jam, and the assembled literati turned and glared. I shrugged; it would have opened with a gentle tug.

 

While Apple is busy introducing its new touch-screen-video iPod, in Vienna, the 'iPod Touch,' some students are already making phone-calls on the yet-to-be released iPhone. All the local reporting on the iPhone had suggested that a two-year contract with AT&T (in America) in order to buy the $399 phone and that it would not work with other operators.

That is, until a Sept. 22 article in the Austrian daily Der Standard reported that two Austrian IT workers have been able to hack the iPhone, disabling the SIM-card lock and enabling all non-phone features within the first few days of the phone's release.