Kategorie: Technology

Welcome to the tech section of my blog, where I share my thoughts and insights on the latest developments in the world of digital, data, and AI. As someone who is passionate about the transformative power of technology, I believe that staying up to date with the latest trends and innovations is crucial to success in this field.

In this section, you’ll find a wide range of articles and posts on topics such as digital transformation, data privacy, artificial intelligence, and more. I’ll share my perspectives on current events, emerging trends, and the future of technology, with a focus on how these developments will impact businesses, society, and individuals.

Whether you’re a technology professional, business leader, or just someone interested in the world of tech, you’ll find plenty of valuable insights and knowledge in these posts. My goal is to make complex topics accessible and easy to understand so that everyone can benefit from the incredible advances happening in the tech world today.

You can also find a lot of technical product reviews on my Amazon reviews page. These are mostly in German.

So, join me on this journey as we explore the cutting-edge world of digital, data, and AI together, and discover new ways to harness the power of technology for a better tomorrow.

I Built an App to Fix My Relationship with Coffee & Sleep

It’s 10:30 PM on a late flight out of Frankfurt. My eyes are wide open, staring at the dark cabin ceiling. The culprit? The double espresso that had felt so crucial just a few hours ago. Coffee has betrayed me again. This constant struggle between enjoying coffee and reclaiming my sleep is exactly why I built Mindful Coffee.

It’s 10:30 PM, and I’m on a late flight out of Frankfurt. My eyes are wide open, staring at the dark cabin ceiling. The culprit? The double espresso that had felt so crucial just a few hours ago. Coffee has betrayed me again.

Sound familiar? If you’re like me, coffee is essential—not just a morning ritual, but a productivity booster, a creative muse, and yes, a simple pleasure. But there’s a flip side: sleepless nights, jittery afternoons, and a constant guessing game: “Did I have one espresso too many?”

I decided enough was enough. I didn’t want to give up coffee; I wanted clarity. How could I keep the joy of coffee without paying the nightly price?

Enter Mindful Coffee

This frustration sparked a personal project. As a technologist, data scientist, and coffee enthusiast, I started asking myself: what if there was a way to scientifically manage caffeine intake?

That’s how Mindful Coffee was born—an iOS app designed to remove caffeine guesswork, enabling mindful enjoyment of your coffee without compromising your sleep.

Who will benefit from this app?

  • Coffee Lovers who want to enjoy their favorite drink without sleepless nights.
  • Productivity Seekers aiming to optimize their energy and focus.
  • Health-Conscious Individuals interested in understanding how their diet affects their body and sleep.

Clarity Instead of Guesswork: The Core Features

Mindful Coffee lets you effortlessly log your caffeinated drinks and immediately gives you an estimate of when you’ll be ready for sleep. It eliminates the mental math (“Did that cappuccino push bedtime past midnight?”) and replaces it with clarity, simplicity, and confidence.

I’ve also included a „What-If“ feature—your caffeine crystal ball. Wondering about another latte at 4 PM? Mindful Coffee shows exactly how it’ll affect your bedtime tonight.

The main dashboard of the Mindful Coffee iOS app. The screen displays three main circular progress indicators against a light green background. The first, labeled "Caffeine in body," shows a value of 77 mg. The second, labeled "Total caffeine today," shows a value of 189 mg. The third, labeled "Ready for sleep," shows a time of 0:24 (Tomorrow), indicating the user will be ready for sleep in 24 minutes after midnight.
A screenshot of the Mindful Coffee app dashboard showing caffeine levels in the body, total caffeine consumed today, and the predicted time until ready for sleep.

Go Deeper with Mindful Coffee Pro

Recognizing every body is unique, Mindful Coffee doesn’t offer just one-size-fits-all guidance. With the Pro subscription, you get deep, personalized insights:

  • Personalized Metabolism Assistant: Understand precisely how your body processes caffeine.
  • Personalized Sleep Analysis: Syncs seamlessly with HealthKit to correlate your caffeine intake and real sleep data.

This means less guesswork and more targeted insight to maximize both your coffee enjoyment and restful nights.

An Invitation to You

I built Mindful Coffee first for myself, but soon realized countless coffee lovers and productivity seekers face the same struggles.

I’d love for you to try Mindful Coffee, see how it enhances your relationship with caffeine, and let me know your thoughts!

As a special thank you for joining me on this journey, I’m offering you one month of Mindful Coffee Pro entirely free:

👉 Click here to redeem your FREE month of Mindful Coffee Pro

Let’s Connect

Follow along on Instagram (@mindfulcoffeeapp) and X (@MindfulCofApp) for tips, insights, and behind-the-scenes moments.

Together, let’s reclaim our sleep without sacrificing the joy of coffee.

Cheers to mindful drinking!

— Alexander

AI Won’t Replace Fundraisers. It Will Make Them Super-Fundraisers.

AI is not a magic wand for fundraising, but it can be a game-changer. This strategist’s guide shows nonprofit leaders how to move beyond buzzwords and use AI to transform engagement. Learn how intelligent automation can handle routine tasks, freeing your team to focus on building the human relationships that drive your mission.

Every week, I speak with nonprofit leaders across Germany and Europe. The core challenge is almost always the same: how to deepen donor relationships and drive mission impact with teams that are already stretched thin. The administrative burden of fundraising—from research and data entry to personalized outreach—can often overshadow the strategic, human-centric work that truly inspires giving.

This is where Artificial Intelligence, when applied thoughtfully, is becoming a game-changer. It’s not about replacing the human element; it’s about augmenting it. Based on successful AI deployments I’ve seen with NGOs, here are some key strategies to enhance fundraising and engagement.

1. Start with the Problem, Not the Product

The most successful AI adoption begins by embedding solutions into existing workflows. Instead of a massive, disruptive overhaul, focus on a specific bottleneck. For instance, automating donor qualification or personalizing outreach with a tool like M365 Copilot delivers immediate, measurable results and builds momentum for broader change.

2. Turn Raw Data into Relationship Intelligence

AI excels at transforming complex data into actionable fundraising intelligence.

  • Smarter Prioritization: AI models can analyze historical giving data in your CRM to predict future potential, helping your team focus their valuable time on the relationships that matter most.
  • Personalized Campaigns at Scale: By segmenting donor lists with a level of detail that would be impossible manually, AI allows for highly tailored messaging that resonates deeply and boosts engagement.

3. Unify the Entire Donor Journey

Donor outreach, stewardship, and engagement have often lived in separate silos. AI-driven platforms, like Dynamics 365, can unify these functions. This creates a seamless, consistent experience for every donor, ensuring they feel understood and valued at every touchpoint.

4. Empower Your Team with AI

Equipping your fundraising professionals with AI tools makes them more effective, not redundant.

  • Tailored Outreach: AI can help draft personalized messages for each donor, fostering stronger connections.
  • Dynamic Proposals: Imagine generating a proposal that instantly pulls in a donor’s specific interests and past engagement. This is the power of AI-driven content generation.
  • Optimized Timing: AI analytics can even suggest the ideal time to reach out, improving response rates. The recent work Malteser in Germany has done with Copilot is a fantastic real-world example of this principle in action.

5. Master the Art of the „Prompt“

Getting the best out of generative AI depends on the quality of your instructions, or „prompts.“ This is a new, crucial skill.

  • Instead of asking: „Summarize this donor.“
  • Try a strategic prompt: „Act as a fundraising strategist. Based on this donor’s profile from our CRM, summarize their giving history, highlight their stated interest in our youth programs, and suggest three talking points for a renewal conversation.“ This focused approach unlocks far more powerful and useful results.

The Future is Collaborative

The future of fundraising isn’t a choice between humans or AI; it’s a powerful symbiosis. By letting AI handle the routine and complex data analysis, fundraisers are freed to focus on what they do best: building authentic relationships, crafting compelling stories, and thinking strategically about the mission.

Strategic AI adoption is a transformative lever for accelerating fundraising, deepening donor relationships, and, ultimately, amplifying social impact.

I’m interested to hear your perspective: What is the single biggest administrative task you wish AI could take off your team’s plate?

ChatGPT User Limits for Plus, Team, and Enterprise Users (2025 Guide)

A fun and colorful digital illustration for a blog post about ChatGPT user limits. The image depicts several cute, cartoonish robots queuing up at a gumball machine that has a sign reading "Daily Limit." Instead of gumballs, the machine is dispensing glowing chat bubbles, visually representing the message caps on different AI models.
An illustration of friendly robots waiting in line for chat bubbles from a machine, symbolizing the user limits on ChatGPT models.

For users of ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Enterprise plans, understanding the specific message limits for each model is essential for an efficient workflow. This guide provides a straightforward breakdown of the 2025 usage caps, categorized by model type. Within each category, the models are sorted from the most restricted to the least restricted.

The various models in the ChatGPT suite are designed for different types of tasks. Below are their current limits, separated into two functional categories.

Creative Models: For Content Generation

This group includes models primarily used for content creation.

  1. GPT-4.5
    • Limit: 50 messages per week.
  2. GPT-4
    • Limit: 40 messages every 3 hours (this cap includes interactions with custom GPTs).
  3. GPT-4o
    • Limit: 80 messages every 3 hours.
  4. GPT-4.1
    • Limit: 80 messages every 3 hours.
  5. GPT-4.1 mini
    • Limit: Unlimited usage.

Thinking Models: For Foundational and Research Tasks

This category consists of specialized tools and foundational models often applied to research, data processing, and other analytical functions.

  1. Deep Research Tool
    • Limit: 10 queries per month.
  2. o3 pro
    • Limit: 20 messages per month.
    • Availability: Exclusive to ChatGPT Team, Enterprise and Pro plans.
  3. o3
    • Limit: 100 messages a week.
  4. o4-mini-high
    • Limit: 100 messages a day.
  5. o4-mini
    • Limit: 300 messages per day.

How Usage Limits and Resets Work

When you reach the message cap for a model, you will be notified and the model will become unavailable for selection until the limit resets.

To see when a limit will reset, hover your mouse over the model’s name in the selection menu.

  • Weekly limits reset seven days from your first message.
  • Daily limits reset at 00:00 UTC.
  • Three-hour limits reset on a rolling basis.

There is currently no interface to view how many messages you have used against your current limit.

Note on the ChatGPT Pro Plan

A higher-tier subscription, the ChatGPT Pro plan, is also available. It offers unlimited access to the o3, o4-mini-high, and o4-mini models, removing their standard daily and weekly caps for users with high-volume requirements.

„ChatGPT User Limits for Plus, Team, and Enterprise Users (2025 Guide)“ weiterlesen

Beyond the Buzz: Unlock Better Sleep and Energy with Smart Caffeine Tracking

Mindful Coffee main screen showing current caffeine level and logging options

Track your current estimated caffeine level

Many of us rely on caffeine to kickstart our mornings or push through an afternoon slump. Coffee, tea, energy drinks – they’re staples in modern life. But have you ever stopped to think about how much caffeine you’re actually consuming and how it specifically impacts your body? That groggy feeling, the unexpected energy crash, or the trouble falling asleep might be more connected to your caffeine habits than you realize. This is where caffeine tracking comes in.

Why Bother with Caffeine Tracking?

Mindful Coffee main screen showing current caffeine level and logging options
Track your current estimated caffeine level and quickly log new drinks.

It might sound like another thing to monitor, but understanding your caffeine intake offers significant benefits:

  1. Uncover Your Sensitivity: We all metabolize caffeine differently. What gives one person a gentle lift might leave another feeling jittery or wired for hours. Consistent caffeine tracking helps you pinpoint your personal tolerance and sensitivity.
  2. Avoid Energy Crashes: By seeing how much caffeine you consume and when, you can start correlating it with those dreaded energy dips later in the day. This knowledge helps you time your intake more effectively.
  3. Improve Sleep Quality: This is a big one. Caffeine has a well-known half-life (the time it takes for your body to eliminate half of it), but this varies. Tracking helps you understand your „caffeine curfew“ – the time you should stop consuming caffeine to avoid interfering with falling asleep and staying asleep.
  4. Manage Intake Limits: Health guidelines often suggest daily caffeine limits (e.g., around 400mg). Tracking helps you stay mindful of these recommendations and avoid potential side effects of overconsumption.

Introducing Mindful Coffee: Your Smart Caffeine Tracking Companion

Mindful Coffee screen for adding a new consumption entry
Effortlessly add new drinks, adjust dosage, and set the time.

Understanding the benefits of caffeine tracking is one thing; doing it easily and effectively is another. That’s exactly why I developed Mindful Coffee, an iOS app designed to make tracking your caffeine intake simple, insightful, and personalized.

Mindful Coffee isn’t just about logging cups; it’s about providing actionable insights based on your data and your body’s estimated response.

Here’s how it helps:

  • Effortless Logging: Quickly add drinks from a customizable list (now with plenty of pre-added options!) or add your own. Adjust dosage and time with ease.
  • Intelligent Sleep Prediction: Based on your logged intake and personalized metabolism settings (half-life, decay model), Mindful Coffee estimates when your caffeine levels should be low enough for restful sleep. Plan your last coffee accordingly!
  • „What-If“ Scenarios: Wondering if that 3 PM espresso is a good idea? The app can instantly show you how a potential drink might shift your predicted sleep time before you take a sip.
  • Personalized Metabolism: No two people are the same. Choose decay models (Standard Exponential, Linear), adjust your caffeine half-life, set your sleep threshold, and more to tailor the calculations to you.
  • HealthKit Integration: Seamlessly write your caffeine logs to Apple Health and import your sleep data to see real correlations.
  • Data Management: Easily Import or Export your entire consumption history as a CSV file for backup or further analysis.

Good-to-Know Caffeine Facts

Mindful Coffee screen showing caffeine and sleep correlation analysis in dark mode
Visualize how your caffeine intake correlates with your sleep patterns (Dark Mode).

Beyond tracking, keep these general points in mind:

  • Half-Life Varies: While often cited around 5-6 hours, caffeine half-life can range significantly (2-10+ hours) based on genetics, liver function, medication, pregnancy, and other factors. Tracking helps you estimate your effective half-life.
  • Timing is Key: Consuming caffeine later in the day has a much higher chance of disrupting sleep, even if you don’t feel „wired.“ Our sleep prediction feature aims to help with this.
  • Hydration Matters: Caffeine is a mild diuretic. Remember to stay hydrated, especially if you consume multiple caffeinated beverages.
  • It’s Not Just Coffee: Remember sources like tea (black, green, matcha), cola, energy drinks, chocolate, and even some medications contain caffeine. Mindful Coffee helps you track them all.

Take Control of Your Caffeine

Ready to move beyond guesswork and understand how caffeine truly affects your day and night? Caffeine tracking with a tool like Mindful Coffee can provide the clarity you need.

Download Mindful Coffee today and start your journey towards better energy management and more restful sleep!

👉 Get Mindful Coffee on the App Store

Let me know what you think, and feel free to reach out with feedback or feature ideas!

Sleep Better, Without Giving Up Coffee: Introducing Mindful Coffee App!

A lifestyle shot featuring the Mindful Coffee app displayed on an iPhone, placed next to a cappuccino with latte art and scattered coffee beans on a wooden surface. The app screen shows a morning energy level analysis with a smiley face icon and a message indicating „Good morning! Your energy is balanced – great for a productive afternoon.“ The graph on the app illustrates caffeine levels over time. This image showcases how Mindful Coffee integrates into a user’s daily routine, helping them track their caffeine intake for balanced energy and improved mindfulness about their coffee consumption.

Love coffee but hate the jitters and restless nights? You’re not alone! For years, I struggled to balance my caffeine cravings with getting good sleep. That’s why I built Mindful Coffee, and I’m excited to announce it’s finally live on the App Store!

Let me share a bit of the story behind it.

My Journey to Mindful Mornings

Like many of you, coffee has been a constant companion throughout my career, especially during intense periods like writing my first book, ‚Visual Analytics with Tableau‚. But while caffeine fueled my days, I started noticing a pattern: late afternoon coffees often led to restless nights. Lying awake, I wondered, „How much caffeine am I really drinking, and what’s it doing to my sleep?“ That question became the seed for Mindful Coffee.

The „Aha!“ Moment: Understanding the Caffeine-Sleep Connection

It was during one particularly frustrating sleepless night – after yet another delicious Seattle latte in the afternoon – that the ‚aha!‘ moment hit me. I was tired of feeling wired during the day and then exhausted and restless at night. I knew I wasn’t the only one struggling with this caffeine balancing act. „What if,“ I thought, „there was an app that could actually show you, in real-time, how your coffee habits were affecting your sleep?“ That’s how the idea for Mindful Coffee was born: an app to not just track caffeine, but to finally understand its impact.

Introducing Mindful Coffee: Your Personal Caffeine & Sleep Coach

Mindful Coffee isn’t just a tracker – it’s your personal caffeine coach, designed to help you find that perfect balance between enjoying your favorite beverages and getting restful sleep. Here’s how it transforms your daily routine:

  • Effortless Caffeine Logging: Quickly log every sip of coffee, tea, energy drink – anything caffeinated! Our intuitive design makes tracking your intake a breeze, so you spend less time logging and more time living.
  • Understand Your Sleep Impact: Finally see the real connection between your caffeine habits and your sleep quality. Mindful Coffee visualizes your caffeine levels and predicts your optimal sleep time, helping you make informed choices for better rest.
  • Personalized Guidance for Balanced Energy: Mindful Coffee isn’t just a tracker – it’s your personal caffeine coach! Get tailored insights and gentle tips based on your unique caffeine patterns to help you optimize your energy levels without sacrificing sleep.
Mindful Coffee app screenshots: caffeine & sleep analysis, drink logging
Four iPhone screenshots illustrate the Mindful Coffee app’s features for tracking caffeine intake and analyzing its impact on sleep. The screens shown include the caffeine analysis graph displaying energy levels, the drink logging interface with options for customizing caffeine amounts for beverages like espresso and cappuccino, a screen for adjusting caffeine levels and setting drink times, and a summary screen visualizing caffeine and sleep correlation data, categorized by caffeine intake levels such as „Little caffeine“ and „Plenty of caffeine“. Mindful Coffee helps users understand their caffeine habits and improve their sleep quality through data-driven insights.

My Sleep Transformed – And Yours Can Too

Honestly, using Mindful Coffee myself was a revelation. Within days, I wasn’t just tracking caffeine, I was understanding it. I started making small adjustments – skipping that late afternoon espresso, switching to herbal tea – and the impact on my sleep was incredible. I woke up feeling more rested, had more consistent energy throughout the day, and finally felt like I was in control of my caffeine, instead of the other way around. It truly changed my habits, and I’m excited for it to do the same for you.

Ready to sleep better and enjoy your coffee? Download Mindful Coffee today from the App Store and, for a limited time, get 50% OFF as our launch special! Don’t miss out – this offer ends March22nd! Click here to download and start your journey to mindful caffeine consumption!

Mindful Coffee: Join the Conversation!

Happy tracking (and sleeping)!

How do you manage your caffeine intake? We’d love to hear your stories and tips! Leave a comment below, share this post with your coffee-loving friends, or reach out on social media using #MindfulCoffeeApp: