I’m very glad to welcome Matthias Schwenk on Tech IT Easy. For the record, Matthias already is a prominent blogger in Germany. His personal blog (in German) appears #14 in the consulting section of the German business blogs ranking.

Matthias, who I met through the blogosphere, defines himself as a Web 2.0 evangelist. His vision is that many industrial companies could use Web 2.0 as a framework to enhance collaboration and hence competitiveness – the issue being that few people in Southern Germany know what Web 2.0 is. This is where Matthias comes in to explain to companies how Web 2.0 could be leveraged to compensate with the lack of engineering resources and the competition from Asia.

But let start all over again from the beginning: to make a long story short, Matthias studied business administration (Betriebswirtschaftslehre) not only at the University of Saarbrücken, but also for one year in France. He was at université Lyon II and got a Bachelor in Economics there right before the Berlin wall fell.

Well later on, Matthias worked in the banking-business and finally got self-employed as a consultant. Matthias worked on different new business projects (business planning) and some sales-related projects. This year (2007) he started evangelizing the web 2.0 in southern germany (and started blogging about it too). It is a difficult job: Matthias is an evangelist, but not many folks want to hear the good news! Southern Germany, with Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg (where Matthias lives), is a wealthy area with only litte unemployment and many sucessful companies. There you find the machinery industry nearly in every village: small places with small companies, but these companies sell about 80 % of their production on the world market – and have 80, 150 or 200 empoyees! In some cases the companies are “larger”. Then they count some 500 oder even 1.000 persons.

And now imagine: most of these successful industrial companies have never heard of the web 2.0! And they have difficulties to see what the web 2.0 would be able to do for them. So negotiating is difficult and takes time. Their problems lay in other fields: competing against China and finding enough young engineers – there is an incredible lack of well-skilled engineers and it’s getting worse. So Matthias Schwenk’s job is to make clear that the instruments and possibilities of the web 2.0 are a good help to compete china and to find young engineers.

The idea of having Matthias blogging here is that Tech IT Easy will be his English-speaking communication arm. All bloggers publishing in a language that’s not English and feeling like becoming visible in Shakespeare’s idiom are free to contact me if they like. We are extremely glad to have Matthias on board to share with us his vision and thoughts on the web and we already know this will be a fruitful collaboration.