PavingWays

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.

Last week we attended the monthly held Mobile Internet SIG: Mobile User Experience at the ACCESS building in Sunnyvale. The event started at 6:30 pm with pizza and free T-Shirts and it was our first mobile-oriented event here in the Bay Area.After 30 minutes of networking with quite some interesting people, e.g. Dr. Paul James of Nokia Inc. (Nokia also sponsored this event), the presentations started. The first one was held by Sergei Krupenin, Director of Business Development at ACCESS. Sergei showed some interesting innovations which we will soon see in upcoming versions of the NetFront mobile browser:

• Smart Swing Navi: By using the captured image of phone camera, you can scroll or zoom contents by tilting phone vertically and horizontally.

• Visual Bookmarks: Visual bookmark helps you to select bookmarks by showing page thumbnail together with page title and URL.

NetFront also supports web standards for web applications. They developed a widget framework that supports the creation and use of dynamic Web applications based on open standard Web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript/Ajax - sounds familiar, but they actually showed a widget in action on a windows mobile device. It was quite impressive to see how the widget was launched from the top menu bar and then became usable on top of the currently open application. In this case an excel sheet, just like a widget should work. Here you can find some more info and pictures of the NetFront browser in action.

The second presentation was held by Deborah Johnson, Technology Manager at FrogDesign. She introduced her company and their Celltop technology, which enables users to access, manage and organize a wide range of information already available on their Alltel Wireless phones. Celltop is only available on Alltel phones, free-of-charge and features 10 “cells” that come pre-installed and via download. Each cell is a category- specific half screen comprised of graphics and text that provides shortcuts for wireless users to navigate through information and applications including: call log, weather, news, baseball, basketball, football, rodeo, stocks, text messaging inbox and ringtones.

Both talks were very interesting and caused a lot of questions. It is very interesting to see how slowly data plans grow in the US. Mobile internet still seems like being in its early stages to some extend around here. Also if you compare the numbers of visitors (it were about 30) to the ones of Web 2.0-centered events like geekSessions, you get this impression.

After all it was a great evening in a nice location and hopefully there will be more of those - thanks to ACCESS and SDForum!

Yesterday we attended the geekSessions at City Club in downtown San Francisco. This event is pretty new and we were happy that we still got tickets (all of the 150 tickets were sold out on Monday). geekSessions will be held every month and they started it in June 2007.So, we were at the second geekSessions event and this months topic was Web Infrastructure: Surviving The “Hockey Stick”. The event began at 6:00 pm and after some networking around 6:30 pm the panel started. The speakers were Sandy Jen - founder of Meebo, Nick Heyman from VideoEgg, Ron Gorodetzky from Digg and Jonathan Abrams - the founder of Friendster and Socializr. They were talking about their experience how keeping a web infrastructure alive and thriving when demand goes through the roof.Here are some pieces of advice from the panelists:

• build your web application and look how people adopt it
• listen to your customers
• keep it simple and stupid (i.e. always choose the easiest solution)
• track your costs (especially expenses for servers can be huge, when your user base of your web app starts to grow rapidly)
• if you are not the best person for the job, find the right person for that job
• if (server or scaling) problems appear, find out why it happens
• light-weight non-sticky sessions can help
• cache as much as you can (memcached was mentioned by almost all panelists)
• decouple slow processes from the web app
• segment your database (vs. replication and load balancing)
• scale up not out
• avoid queries in loops (no brainer)
• MySQL replication is not good for scaling

They all agreed that you can not predict everything. But if problems appear, deal with it, try to find out why it happened and don’t be afraid to ask for help.After the panel there were two drawings. One company drawed 8 skateboards and another one an Apple iPhone. We weren’t lucky that day :(After that the social networking part started (free beer thanks to Arcscale). We’ve got in touch with a couple of interesting people. I had nice chats with Daniel from bitpusher, Tristan from Bebo, Mark from techcrunch and Chris & Scott from Havadot. We also heard about new projects in social video sharing and an interesting dating project.We want to the afterparty in a club nearby, but couldn’t stick around for too long. All in all it was a great evening and a great opportunity to get in touch with the web scene in the Bay Area - looking forward to the next geekSession.

I am speaking at the Mobile Web Americas conference, in October in Orlando, Florida. The Mobile Web Americas conference will take place 2 - 4 October 2007.

I am pretty excited, because this conference is all about the mobile web. My presentation will be about “Pragmatic Mobile Ajax - an Ajax Library for constrained browsers in action”. I am speaking about Mobile Ajax and how it can improve the user experience in mobile web applications. I will introduce the Frost Ajax Library as a tool for Ajax development on constrained browsers, such as those on mobile phones or gaming consoles. The session will show how and why the Frost library came to life and sheds some light on the underlying approach, which is quite different from other Ajax libraries.

If you are attending or speaking at Mobile Web Americas too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

Finally I get to post something about my visit to Paris and specifically the XTech conference 2007. I went to XTech to speak about “Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous” and of course to attend as many of the other sessions as possible. Here’s some of my observations:

The location (Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel) was ok, I liked the last location in Amsterdam better though, because the different tracks were closer to each other. The organization was excellent as usual, special thanks to IDEAlliance and Edd Dumbill for that. I even did not have a problem accessing the wireless network - contrary to many others.

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I am speaking at this year’s Xtech conference, on the 17th of May in Paris, France.

The Xtech, Europe’s premier web technology conference, will take place 15 - 18 May 2007. The speakers include some famous people and I am looking forward to meeting some people and friends I met during other conferences before, especially Håkon, Mike and Jeremy.

My presentation will be about “AJAX on mobile devices - making mobile web apps ubiquitous“.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

A week after our visit to Mobile Monday we attended the Webmontag in Munich. Webmontag is a great platform to meet interesting people from the web business. Organized by Martin Szugat and taking place at the amiando office the event was quite the opposite from the Mobile Monday because of its very relaxed atmosphere and start-up minded people attending.

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We have been at this week’s MobileMonday in Munich, Germany. Being the first “real” MobileMonday for us, except the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco last November, and being the first MobileMonday in Munich at all it has been a premiere in many ways. The overall topic of the evening was “Next Generation Mobile Internet” and it sounded like the perfect topic for PavingWays.

Here’s a quick review of the event from our perspective.

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In my presentation at the XML 2006 conference in Boston I tried to show that AJAX - as a technology in part based on XML - is a useful and promising tool to create web applications on mobile devices.

To emphasize this, I updated our event finder application that we had used on this year’s Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. The application basically is a website for mobile phones that shows the currently running events of a trade show or conference. In the updated version for the XML 2006 conference I added some AJAX stuff to show and test it’s usefulness:

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Additional to co-moderating the Vendor PechaKucha Night at the XML Conference in Boston I also co-presented a talk on Mobile AJAX and the Mobile Web in general at the XML 2006 conference in Boston together with Michael Smith from Opera.

This was my first presentation at a conference except a lightning demo at this year’s XTech conference about CarCulatr (price finder for used cars to demo mobile AJAX using Opera Platform) and I have to say it could not have been worse…

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We went to Boston for the XML Conference 2006 from December 5-7. I got invited by Michael Smith from Opera to do a co-presentation together with him and so I prepared a talk on the Mobile Web and XML, mostly focusing on Mobile AJAX, but more on that in a separate post.

The first day of the conference featured a Vendor PechaKucha Night, which Michael had proposed to the conference committee and which he moderated together with me. I want to share some insights to this experience here.

The concept of Pecha Kucha is pretty simple - it is a special type of presentation where every speaker brings 20 slides and gets 20 seconds to present every slide. This results in 6 minutes and 40 seconds of presentation time and thus helps to keep the audience interested - add the fun the audience has when the presenter runs out of time on a slide and some free beer sponsored by JustSystems and you have an interesting and funny night.
Many of the presenters handed in their slides in the last half hour before the presentations started, there were also some last-minute changes to the order of presenters. As a result the first presentation started and ended after 10 seconds, because the presenter had handed in the wrong slides - we continued with the second presenter - it was really funny.

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This post is a little late, but busy as we are I couldn’t make it earlier. Still I wanted to share some more insights and experiences we acquired while being in the Silicon Valley in November/December. So here’s a short summary of 2 interesting things we did on Nov. 29.

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On Friday, November 17th, we were at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, which is a nice and impressive complex of buildings. We were at building one, the Microsoft conference center (pic below). The event started pretty early with an extensive breakfast buffet and the usual networking.
What was different though was the crowd of attendees: more formal and not as “geeky” as what we had experienced in former events. It was also harder to get in touch with other people than before, probably because everybody seemed to be really keen on talking to the VCs and the representatives from the other big companies (cf. title).

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After a week busy working on “legacy” projects we were able to attend the second SF beta on Thursday. It was a quite interesting evening, because of the setting, the people we met and the way the evening was organized (by Christian Perry from Zaptix) .

SF beta took place in a club called “Shine Lounge” on Mission Street. So there was a security guy on the door and a bar inside and everything you would expect from a club.

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Last Thurdsday we attended an interesting “unconference” in San Francisco, called “Web 2point2 - the point is still the people“. It was organized by Chris Heuer and the other folks from the Social Media Club. Taking place in the Microsoft Building on 1 Market St. the event, being an unconference, did not follow the usual scheme and it was more like a workshop than a conference.

We started with going around the room introducing ourselves one after the other. There was another German company there - interesting!
After that everybody from a startup company (about 50% of all the people there) sat on chairs arranged in a circle, everybody else in another circle around the former one. Then every couple facing each other had 5 minutes to talk about what everybody does. Although it felt a little weird at first, we soon realized that this was a good training for telling other people quickly what we are trying to do. Therefore this method of networking was a good success and we met many interesting people.

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We kicked off our stay in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley with the Mobile 2.0 event organized by the folks that normally organize the Mobile Monday here in the Bay Area. There were around 300 people attending, the location was great as was the lunch and the free drinks afterwards.
So what does Mobile 2.0 stand for? As Dan Appelquist described it, the concept or the idea behind this term is: “mobile web connected apps on the mobile platform”.

The whole event, apart from the keynotes, was held in panel discussions with panelists also taking some time for presenting on their own. The most interesting topics for us obviously was everything related to the mobile web and to browser based applications of which there were not many to be seen. The highlights were the presentations and demos of:

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The PavingWays team, will take part in a hot event that will take place in San Francisco on November 6, 2006. The “mobile2.0 conference” is a one-day event organized and hosted by Daniel Appelquist (Mobile Monday London), Mike Rowehl (Mobile Monday Silicon Valley) and Gregory Gorman (The Open Group).

We actually planned to be in San Francisco from the middle of November, but re-scheduled because of this event. Michael(tm) Smith form Opera will also be there - I met him at this year’s Xtech conference in Amsterdam where I presented the CarCulatr - our first mobile AJAX web application based on the Opera Platform.

We’re eager to meet as many people as possible from the mobile web industry, for example Tony Fish, since we recently purchased his book on “Mobile Web 2.0″ (written with Ajit Jaokar) we purchased recently.

Please get in touch with us, if you wanna meet up during or after the conference - we’ll be in San Francisco until early December. After that we will head towards Boston where I will attend this year’s XML Conference - this time as co speaker, but more on that later on.

Jeff Barr of Amazon has just finished his talk about all the APIs and web services of Amazon and Alexa. That means d.construct 2006 has officially started.

For those who saw Jeff’s presentations at e.g. Xtech earlier this year, there was not much new stuff to be heard, except maybe the EC2 service of Amazon. The EC2 is sort of a root server providing on demand offered by Amazon for 0.20 $ per hour. This would mean you pay about 144 USD per month for a decent root server. Not really cheap, but since the service works on a on-demand basis and you only have to pay when you are actually using the server it might be an interesting alternative to renting a real server.

The service is in beta testing still and Jeff mentioned that it might be hard to get in right now, but he promised the situation will improve soon. Maybe we’ll give it a try.