PavingWays

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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