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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.

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.

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.

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.

Earlier this week we started working from the Citizen Space offices. It is more efficient than working at coffee shops. We met Tara and Chris from Citizen Space there and a couple of other interesting people/companies. Everybody is very friendly and we really like the idea of coworking. Instead of sitting alone in an office you can meet lots of new and also international people.

If you are in San Francisco and need a place to work, then you should definitely try Citizen Space located at 425 Second St on the third floor - make sure there’s a place available by calling them before.

It has been a busy month and our last post was already a long while ago. So here’s a quick heads-up …

Our Ajax library, Frost, is still in development, but we already received some good response and many requests for more info ranging from freelancers to people from well-known companies. There is a lot of interest out there and we try to get the initial library online within the next couple of weeks. There’s also a definite plan how users will be able to contribute by extending the library and by testing browsers. Let us know if you want to help either building the lib or the community pages around this (based on WordPress)!

For now we have a video on YouTube that shows how the demo page of the Frost library works and looks like on the iPhone (we actually found a bug in Safari), so check it out!

Meanwhile we moved to San Francisco, at least for the next few months. Our goals are to get in touch with like-minded people from the Bay Area, build-up some interesting contacts and cooperations and introduce Frost and our upcoming mobile service to as many people as we can. So, if you are also in the Bay Area, please let us know!

There are a lot of events happening and we gonna write about it and let you know what’s happening.

We’re currently looking for a space in an office (for 2 people) - we talked to Chris from CitizenSpace in downtown SF and might end up working there, but if you have a better idea or even a little space in your office, please let us know!

The Mobile Ajax FAQ is created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger and is maintained at the Horizon Channel. We welcome comments and feedback at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com.This post has been moved to a page on PavingWays - the following questions link directly there.

• What is Mobile Ajax?
• Is there a Mobile Ajax checklist/minimum requirements?
• What does Mobile Ajax look like?
• Why should one do Ajax on mobile phones / what problem does it solve?
• What are the options to Mobile Ajax?
• How do Flash Lite and Java compare with Mobile Ajax?
• What is the difference between Ajax Platforms, Frameworks, Toolkits and Libraries?
• What existing Mobile Ajax frameworks, toolkits and libraries should I use?
• Can I use existing frameworks, libraries and toolkits?
• What is the relationship between Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets?
• Which browsers support Mobile Ajax?
• Which enterprise applications employ Mobile Ajax?
• What is the role of the Apple iPhone with respect to Mobile Ajax?
• How do applications like mojax or bling software fit in?
• How can you develop for and test on all those browsers?
• What are the (current) hurdles in implementing and running Mobile Ajax applications?
• What is AHAH / AJAH?
• Is there any standardization initiative for Ajax?

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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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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