PavingWays

Yesterday we attended the Webmontag at Optaros in Munich. Nice people, interesting event, relaxed atmosphere and you always meet new people, but also see familiar faces … like Claudia (CScout), Georg and Raju.

Before the networking part started, there were some presentations. Since we were a bit late, we only catched the rest of Hartmut’s presentation about WTF (World Tag Framework). Flash developers out there, please check out this stuff! BarCamp was presented by Nils - in general and especially the one in Munich and the one for women coming soon.

After this presentation Magdalena did a small introduction to Netvibes’ widgets. The last presentation held by our friend Raju from Optaros (formerly at OpenLaszlo) was about E-Commerce and WebTV. He gave us some insights about IPTV and how video and multimedia can improve and enhance e-commerce/online shopping.

When the final presentation was over, the networking part started. We had a nice talk with Igor and Thomas. Igor is the founder of flaMap, a visual social network, and Thomas is founder of the job portal Spirofrog.

All in all: great event! Many thanks to Martin, Raju and the other helpers for organizing this event.

Last week we attended the Mobile Internet Conference in Berlin. As already mentioned in an earlier post, Rocco was chairing the pre-conference day (31th March). A few startups were presenting at this day, amongst them Trutap and itsmy.com. Other presentations (YouTube Mobile, Cyworld, Yahoo! Spain) also gave interesting insights.

YouTube Mobile for example is most accessed in Japan followed by USA and UK. Its first launch version (alpha version) featured only a few thousands of videos and the distribution was mainly through carriers and mobile phone distributors. While its launch of the second version offers almost all the YouTube videos and experiences a 15 times increase in views per day. Right now YouTube Mobile does not include advertisement, but since it belongs to Google we can expect some kind of advertising soon.

On the next 2 conference days the presentations were mainly held by carriers (3 AUSTRIA, Magyar Telekom, O2 Germany, Swisscom Mobile, etc.). It was interesting to hear that carriers still (try to) open up. A very good example was 3 AUSTRIA. The presentation was very insightful and Alexander Franz showed how they are dealing with the changing environment and the shifting from voice to data. He introduced some interesting business models and explained the “Skype Phone” for 99 EUR.

All in all it was a very interesting event with many interesting and diverse companies. And of course another great networking opportunity.

There was another MMM (Mobile Monday in Munich) today. We missed all the presentations, they were almost exclusively about mobile gaming, so no biggie for us. We met the “usual suspects” and I’m getting the feeling to get into a MoMo community somehow. Lots of software vendors and game programmers were around.

I talked to the guys from DeviceAnywhere and had to learn they were actually also the guys from “Mobile Complete”! While talking to them I somehow thought these would be separate companies, but they are not. I scored a 3hrs free trial for the DeviceAnywhere service - will try later this week with our current Groupile alpha. I already know the service and it’s great. They just launched the Japanese devices and if you have an account with them you get the Japanese ones for free for a while. So now we’re really thinking about getting an account. Need to check pricing again.

Also I met someone from the MoMo team who told me about the Demo Night they will have on May 19th. We’ll see if we submit Groupile for that. Might be nice, 5 min presentations w/o PowerPoint slides - only live demos. By then we should be in public beta.

We’ll be going to Berlin on Sunday to attend the Mobile Internet Conference. The event is organized by IIR Telecoms and they asked me to chair the sessions on Monday 03/31/2008.

The topic for my introduction for that day is ‘Mobile Web 2.0′. I’ll start learning all the buzz words of the past 3 years by heart over the weekend to be prepared ;)

Maybe I can slip in a little announcement concerning the long awaited launch of the Groupile Beta that’s due in April. We have about 140 people waiting, they signed up without really knowing what to expect, some of them are waiting since last year. April will clear things up.

The conference is gonna be a big opportunity to network and get in touch with many great people in the mobile and mobile web area. The speaker roster looks great even though CTIA/IEEE WCNC 2008 in Las Vegas is at the same time. On Monday the following companies will be presenting and hold a roundtable discussion at the end of the day:

• Google YouTube
• Bluenove/Orange
• trutap
• Cyworld
• itsmy.com
• Yahoo!
• emap
• Zed
• Telecom Italia
• Eyeka
• blinkBox

The W3C, Jamba and many international carriers will also be there and present throughout the conference.

We’re looking forward to meet you there, too!

We were invited to speak at this year’s FMC Summit on rather short notice about three weeks ago. The event was organized by IIR Telecoms & Technology and took place in Munich from 03/11/08 to 03/14/08. We had a chance to present PavingWays and Groupile in the first of two “Innovation Showcase” sessions on Wednesday. It was a nice opportunity to present what we are working on to a critical and at least in part mobile-web-oriented audience.

To be honest we didn’t really know what FMC was before the conference, but since it apparently was a topic incorporating “mobile” and “convergence” we felt like it was a good fit for us. FMC, belonging to the wide field of IMS, actually encompasses a wide range of services and technologies, mostly related to network infrastructure and the bundling and the convergence of various products, such as mobile and fixed line tariffs or DSL, phone and TV bundles also known as Triple play.

We met many interesting people from an incredible amount of different countries, such as Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, Turkey, the UK. Most of them were representatives of major mobile carriers/network operators. We also had interesting discussions with representatives of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Device Management Forum.

Some interesting points and thoughts from the presentations at the conference:

- Question: Will cool and ubiquitous devices (GSM, WiFI, Homezone) be network operator independent? That means the user could then choose the cheapest or quickest connection on demand across providers.
Answer (T-Mobile): Users would love it, because polls show they see their mobile handset as a friend, but the provider as the cleaning lady. Users also want a cheap handset, but T-Mobile don’t think that this will be happening. On the contrary T-Mobile Germany has an exclusive partnerhsip with Apple and they think this will be the way to go in the future.

- T-Mobile is relaxed about VoIP coming to the iPhone, because you can already make phone calls with it as opposed to a laptop where VoIP fills a gap.

- telephone numbers will become less relevant, sometime in the future it could be replaced by something like your Facebook or MySpace account

Thanks go out to Alex from IIR Telecoms for the nicely organized and well managed event.

I totally forgot blogging about that and more or less for completeness reasons I want to mention that I have been attending the Google Android developer day in Munich (actually in Aschheim/Dornach) on January 29, 2008. I met Jason Chen, one of the presenters at the event, the day before at the Mobile Monday in Munich.

The people attending, at least most people I have been talking to, were mobile developers sent by their companies, pretty big ones. There were some start-up people there too, but not many. Comments and questions in general were pretty critical, detailed and practical. Interesting was the big interest of taking part in the Google Android development competition from the audience. Apparently mentioning 10 mio USD in price-money creates some interest ;)

I was of course mostly interested in the WebKit-based web browser in Android and I have to say it worked pretty well in the SDK emulator, it even has the same “bug” that I had experienced while testing the Frost library on the iPhone when it came out. So no surprises there too and one more browser to look at when developing mobile web apps, even though it’s almost the same browser as on the iPhone or Nokia’s S60 3rd edition phones (also exhibiting the “bug” mentioned above - so it’s apparently a WebKit issue after all).

Bottom line is: no surprises after all, Google leaves no event without mentioning that they’re looking for developers and if you’re interested in Android development, get the SDK and read the docs.

Yesterday we went to the Bloggertreffen in Munich which was loosely related to the DLD. Thanks to the sponsors Hubert Burda Media (the organizer of the DLD event), and Telegate (11880), every guest received an 18 EUR voucher. So, beer and food were free.

It was a nice event and a good opportunity to meet some people (not only) from the German blogosphere. We had some interesting talks with people from the CCC, Focus, Townkings, BlogWerk and Xing. Almost the whole CScout team was there too.

Many thanks to Klaus Eck for organizing this event!

There are some interesting events coming up:

• Bloggertreffen: Jan. 20, 2008 starting at 7:30 pm, Munich, Germany
• Mobile Monday Norway Peer Awards 2008: Jan. 21, 2008, Latter, Aker Brygge, Norway
• Mobile Web USA: 22-23 January 2008, San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Monday “Open Portals, Open Platforms, Open Communities”: Jan. 28, 2008, Munich, Germany
• Mobile Monday “Mobile Ticketing”: Feb. 11, 2008, Frankfurt, Germany
• Mobile Jam Session: February 12, 2008, Barcelona, Spain
• Mobile Monday: Feb. 18, 2008, Berlin, Germany
• Mobile Monday “Mobile Advertising”: Feb. 25, 2008, Frankfurt, Germany

Are there some other events coming up in the next couple of weeks? Please let us know!

I was attending the Mobile Ajax Workshop at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. The whole workshop was very interesting and I met many interesting people from Japan, Korea, USA, UK, India and companies such as NTT DoCoMo, NHN, Vodfone, Aplix, Motorola, SitePen, NEC and many more.

The event, being a workshop not a conference, was structured a bit different from what I experienced until now. There were different moderated discussions around topics related to Mobile Ajax.  These discussions were conducted in the form of panel discussions, where up to 4 panelists came up on “stage” and held a 5-minute introduction about their position papers that were handed in before the event. I was up in a panel about “one web” with Alan from AOL, Dave from Google and Goro from DoCoMo. Honestly, it  felt a bit strange being in a panel with people from these major players, but it was cool and my presentation went ok too.

Some lessons learnt:

• AOL is using Mobile Ajax in their mobile search (works in IE) on http://wap.aol.com/search
• Aplix is working on a Java based tool that can provide access to device hard- and software to web aplications in the browser through a browser plugin, e.g. web app<->browser<->plugin<->Java<->GPS on phone
• Japan is cHTML (iMode) all the way, but there are full web browsers too, many phones with 2 browsers
• in Korea it’s all XHTML (WAP2.0), many carriers develop their own Flash-like VMs to make content developers use their tools
• Motorola will soon have a widget engine and Ajax support in their browser too
• Content adaptors use many different ways to detect the user-agent, also, but not mainly WURFL, more on DDGW
• Solutions for “offline” detection/browsing/management/handling are crucial, needed and Google Gears looks promising

The minutes of the workshop can be found through the W3C website. Here’s the slides on the Frost Ajax Library from my lightning presentation.

All in all it was a great day and I want to thank Microsoft for hosting the event and lunch, the W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance for putting this event together and especially Daniel Appelquist, Michael(tm) Smith and Jon Ferraiolo for their great work moderating and running the event. Looking forward to the next one.

111 Minna St. in San Francisco is a Gallery during the day and a club/bar at night. It’s also evolved into the preferred spot for the very popular SFBeta events that take place once in a while. We went to SFBeta November last year and it was a great experience, so we had to go to this one too.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of SFBeta. The event started around 6:00 pm and it got crowded pretty soon. We met some familar faces like Daniel from Bitpusher, Vivek from RapLeaf and Philippe from CScout Germany, but we also got in touch with some new people from all over the world doing pretty exiciting businesses, such as Anton from eBlizz.com or a mobile webhosting company from the Czech Republic amongst them. The party ended around 10:00 pm. Afterwards Alex suggested we go grab a drink and we went to a nice place on Divisadero called Nopa, one of the places open late even during the week. Great food and wine there.

The SFBeta is a typical event for why the Silicon Valley is such a special and interesting place for doing web business. It is a very casual and social after-work event where you can meet a lot of people, sometimes well-known, from the industry and can have some really nice talks - not only about coding ;) It is not just an “exchanging business cards event”, but more of getting in touch with like minded people who struggle(d) with the same problems you do. And quite often you end up staying in touch with those people after the event. We definitely will.

So, if you are in the Bay Area, you should definitely go to an SFBeta event. It is really worth it. Christian Perry, the organizer, did a great job - again! Thanks!

Hot, hot, hot up on the roof of the FamilyOven HQ on Jackson St. just on the border to Chinatown: a sunburn is what you can get if you stand up on a roof of a building (with a great view over the bay) with great weather during lunch time. You also can get in touch with many interesting people. I got both at Lunch 2.0 yesterday.

Lunch 2.0 is a get-together of mostly web people in the Bay Area and it is usually hosted by a company that provides food and drinks for free. FamilyOven and their sponsors did a great job at this, they had incredible food and plenty of beer.

I met Christen from thumbble, Terry Chay (Lunch 2.0 organizer and PHP hero), …

Some people from wired were there too and seemed to like it as well they instantly blogged about the event here and included this image…I’m on it too.

By the way I have been told by two people during the event that the Risotto was actually the best they ever had.

Last week I received an invitation for the “AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007” in Santa Clara, organized by SYS-CON Media. I got an expo pass an could attend the keynotes and get on the expo floor for free.  That’s because I am apparently registered as a contributor back from earlier this year when we published the Mobile Ajax FAQ. So I went to AjaxWorld on Monday.

I ended up at a talk by Michael Carter about Comet and a product called Orbited. Interesting stuff and in fact I was not aware that such a big chunk in Comet is related to the server, not the client. The expo floor was rather big with many big companies presenting amongst smaller ones. I had anice introduction to Silverlight,  and enjoyed the cozy sitting-bags provided by Oracle. Even WiFi worked after lunch, which was by the way also very good.

At lunch I met Alex Russell of Sitepen Inc., a.k.a. creator of the dojo Ajax toolkit. He seemed interested when I told him about Frost and he’ll probably also attend the Mobile Ajax workshop on Friday. I ended up sitting at the table of the dojo bunch. It appears that dojo is the framework of choice for big companies. At the booth of IBM I learned that they chose dojo, because of it’s extensibility and overall great performance. Sun is also using it in an upcoming product.

Back in the expo room I also met Max Carlson, founder and original creator of OpenLazlo. We talked quite a while and I hope we will stay in touch. OpenLazlo was also Diamond sponsor of AjaxWorld and they provided for a lot of the free food and drinks - thank you for that. I unfortunately missed the party in the evening.

I also realized that our Mobile Ajax FAQ was printed in the AjaxWorld magazine that was availbale for free at the conference - nice. Overall it was a fun day and a good conference, Ajax is big business now and has definitely arrived at the enterprise level.

Last Monday it was time for another Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley. This time the Mobile Monday took place at Nokia’s Research center in Palo Alto. I am not sure why, but this time there were much more people than last time. I even heard they had to turn away some people because there was not enough space. A compliment to Nokia: there was enough food and drinks for the rest of us who came in :) One thing that was annoying was the registration procedure that required two signatures and showing of your ID in order to get in, all supervised by 4 Nokia security guards.

The Mobile Monday started at 7:00 pm with ab. 30 minutes of networking before presentations started. This time Nokia (Mosh), Bebo and Loopt presented about their services. Too bad that the guys from Rabble didn’t make it.

Unfortunately, there was nothing really new in any of the presentations, they were more or less product pitches with little technological background or helpful insights. But since there were so much attendees, it was a great opportunity for networking.

All in all it was a good event and I did not want to miss it.

By the way we are planning to do a barcamp-style mobile event at the end of October in Germany, probably somewhere in Munich. If you are interested in setting this up or would like to participate, please let us know!

Last Thursday there was another Mobile Internet SIG event organized by SD Forum. This month’s topic was Social Networking & Mobile Phone Services.

The first presentation was held by Steve Granek from NeuStar, Inc. Not only is Steve a great speaker, but he’s also very knowledgeable in what he was talking about: problems with multi-service providing for carriers and network operators. It comes down to the fact that mobile phones (and networks) have originally been created to provide voice service, not data services such as SMS, MMS or web access. The biggest issues with this is address routing and interoperability. We heard in-depth facts about how routing a regular phone call is different from getting the route to someone who is supposed to receive a text message (that’s the address part). Interoperability is a big issue, because carriers tend to approach widespread problems with their own focus only, so e.g. IMS was mentioned as a great thing with the exact same problem.

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Last Wednesday evening we headed over to Fat City on 314 11th St. in San Francisco to attend the SF New Tech September Meetup. A lot of people (more than 150) did the same. It was crowded, so many had to stand at the bar or behind the seats during the presentations that started after 1/2 hour of networking.

There were about five product presentations:

• Wellnesslog
  A diary system for people with medical conditions that require keeping track of what happens, so this info can be shared with a doctor after a while.
• Conduit
  a platform for building online communities via toolbars
• SezWho
  “SezWho aims to be a distributed rating and reputation system for all user generated content.”
• us4real.com
  real estate website / google maps mashup
  
• CrazyMenu
  “Crazymenu makes eating lunches easy as pie through a set of applications and patent pending tools and technologies that connects restaurants to office workers, and enables them to make the most of the short lunch hours.”

Honestly, getting hit by product pitches for 2 hours and paying 10 bucks for that is not our favorite. Drinks (non alc.) were 2 bucks. The special part of the evening was “60-Second Soapbox”. Everybody who had something to announce (job offer, new product etc.) could grab the mic for 60 seconds and tell it to everybody…many people that are looking for developers there (as usual).

Networking after the talks was the best part (also as usual). We met some interesting people like Martin (CEO of Tangler), David (SupercoolSchool.com) and Alex (Altrupreneur Center).

After submitting a position paper, today I got my invite to the Mobile Ajax workshop in Mountain View in late September (28th). I am really looking forward to this since it is one of the rare events that focus exclusively on Ajax on mobile devices and many important and interesting people that are involved in this topic are likely to be present. It’s also the first workshop (= not conference) on this topic. So I am very excited and happy to have the chance to attend this event and meet everybody.

My position paper is about the Frost Ajax library. The only other position paper I have come accross is the one from Mark Baker of Coactus Consulting. It’s entitled “The best mobile Ajax application … is the one that’s never written“, so there’s probably gonna be some interesting discussions.

On August, 18, we attended the BarCampBlock. Although it was almost two weeks ago, I still feel like I should post about it, because it was our first BarCamp and also its anniversary (block)party. The BarCampBlock took place in Palo Alto - at the place it started. We went by bus from San Francisco to Palo Alto and it took us almost 2 hours. But it was worth it. Almost 1,000 participants attended this year. Amazing!
We met so many interesting people and of course the guys from Citizen Space :) Thanks go out to Tara, Chris, Liz, Hillary and anybody I can’t think of now, who all did a great job by organizing such a great event. The center of this whole event was the office of Socialtext, where there were an impressively huge wall with different discussion sessions. You could either open a new session yourself or join an existing one. Socialtext already hosted the first BarCamp in 2005.

At 7 pm the actual BarCampBlock Party started with free drinks and food at the Blue Chalk Cafe right after the DemoCamp which featured many interesting demos from various companies. Among many interesting people we also met Tim there, who started the Webmontag (Webmonday) in Germany.

All in all: great event, great atmosphere, many interesting people, we’re looking forward to the next one!

Last Tuesday we went to a BayCHI meeting in Palo Alto to hear Guy Kawasaki’s presentation about “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” (Yes, tongue in cheek here).

First of all Guy Kawasaki is a great presenter - we really enjoyed his presentation. He has the right mix between presenting and entertaining :)

So, what was this headline filled with so many buzzwords all about?
In his talk Guy introduced his new startup Truemors. Well, at the first look you may think “What’s the point of this site?”. To be honest, when I saw Truemors a couple of days before the event, I was also a bit confused and did not really see the value of this website. But after that event I changed my mind…

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Last Monday we’ve been to the Mobile Monday at the AOL building in Mountain View. Too bad that we missed the Demo sessions (we arrived a bit late). But still we met some interesting (mobile oriented) people there, like Donnie Flood from AdMob or Tim Kay from Boopsie, and many more.

As expected the Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley was more casual than it is in Germany and we definitely met more mobile startups here. We liked it very much. Not too much organization (no registration in advance), pizza for everybody, good location and you could get in touch with people easily.

Still, the Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley has not as many attendees as its German counterpart (but again, the crowd is differently structured). But it seems a better place for showing around your mobile apps, even if your are not a big player in the industry. Great event! More!

Yesterday we had quite a busy networking day. At lunch we met Alec from MoVoxx in Palo Alto. MoVoxx is a mobile ad agency focused exclusively on SMS marketing. The company already has some impressive customers, such as Mercury News in San Jose or NASCAR. You can find some case studies on the MoVoxx Website.

After a yummy lunch we drove to San Jose and were really enjoying the nice weather. It is so much warmer in the Valley than it is in San Francisco.

Around 8:00 pm we went to the Silicon Valley Startup Entrepreneur Meetup Group organized by Philippe Tregon, which also took place in Palo Alto. It was an informal meeting with other founders, freelancers etc. of the Bay Area. After everybody had introduced themselves and why they had come to the Meetup, it was great talking to so many people coming from different business areas and with different intentions.

Around 10:30 pm some people decided to go across the street to grab some food, unfortunately the probably best Greek spot in Palo Alto, Evvia, was closing already, so we ended up getting a coffee at Cuppa Coffee (free WiFi, power outlets and great coffee). We joined Tarun, Dan and Philippe and had a fascinating discussion about the mobile industry and the future of the Web itself. It was a real mind-opener in many ways.

We took off to San Francisco at 1:30 am. Thanks to the Meetup organizers for the organization and the chance for meeting new people so easily. That is what makes the Bay Area so special.