PavingWays

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.

I met Cameron after his first conference talk in Europe at the @media conference in London in June 2006. He was talking about the same thing there - Mobile Web Design - and I really liked his presentation. Since then we both kept on doing research in the mobile area and Cameron just released his first book and it’s a great one!

Early chapters entitled “Mobile Web Fundamentals” give a great amount of background information on the mobile web market and usage, the concept of being “mobile” (it’s not the device, but the user that’s mobile) and on the fundamental limitations in this area (screen size, input methods, carriers etc.).

I especially liked the focus on what I really feel is important about the mobile web, even though it is in contrast to the newest developments in the browser and handset market: it’s not about bringing the desktop web to mobile devices, people, it’s about creating mobile web applications that serve people’s needs while they’re on the go!

Browser differences are also thoroughly covered in Cameron’s book and even Microformats are mentioned as a possible way to solve context-related problems in browsers, i.e. adding contextual info to things like contacts and phone numbers in the markup, so the device knows what do do with this type of content (add it to the address book/call the number).

The main section is divided into four approaches how to implement mobile web sites and applications: do nothing, reduce images and styling, use handheld stylesheet, create mobile-optimized content. It also covers topics like testing and validation as well as advanced techniques, such as SVG and Ajax (I’m mentioned in a book, yeehaa!). The final chapters contain things like promoting your mobile content, dotmobi and semacodes.

Overall the book is an excellent summary of the current status in mobile web design and a great resource for anybody who thinks of creating a mobile version of his existing website or better yet, a new, web based, mobile service (that should actually be almost everybody in the web design/development community).

The book is a must-buy and it is available as a PDF at the book’s homepage: http://www.mobilewebbook.com.

I want to recommend a book by Jeremy Keith, called “Bulletproof Ajax“. I recommend it for several reasons. First of all, the book is an excellent introduction to Ajax programming in general and everybody starting to write JavaScript code to do Ajax should read it before touching any of the libraries out there.
Secondly the book is especially suited to anybody who is interested in writing Ajax powered apps on mobile devices and constrained browsers. After all the book is all about making JavaScript code bulletproof and that’s exactly what you need to do if you are facing browser constraints, flaky implementations of JavaScript engines and a hugely fragment environment overall.

Jeremy’s book is suited for the beginner, but also for the seasoned developer, since it makes it clear what it all comes down to: writing clean code that gracefully degrades (Jeremy calls his method to do this Hijax) if the application runs in a less-than-ideal environment. There are many best practices and useful code snippets contained and topics such as JSON, web services and accessibility.

The book is not entirely new but nevertheless a must-buy, it was published New Riders Press in February 2007 and I urge everybody interested in Ajax to grab a copy, e.g. at Amazon.

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!

If you can’t hear words like “Facebook”, “social”, “networking”, “friends” or “community” anymore, then maybe you should have a look at the antisocial networking site Bugroff.

This “website” has launched by Gray Dring - the person behind the Clever Little Pod comedy podcast. No wonder why Bugroff is nothing more than a spoof service :)

Source: http://uk.blognation.com

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).

I just found an interesting article about Ajax development for Windows Mobile. It looks like the Microsoft crowd is really into Ajax on their mobile platform, which makes sense…after all makeing a platform appealing to developers is a good thing for the platform. The approach is however different from ours - Microsofties (can you call them like this?) tend to rely on their own tools, namely ASP.net, not open source based tools and libraries.

The article mentions a nice hint for debugging directly on the device: turning on the display of script errors in IE mobile. This is achieved by editing a registry entry, which can be done e.g. with the PHM Registry Editor, a freeware tool. The registry key to change should be this:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

There you need to add a DWORD value called ShowScriptErrors and set its value to 1.

The Article also describes how to enable cross-site access for XMLHttpRequest, which might be useful for development purposes, not so much for end-user apps. And there’s also a workaround for a JSON relates quirk in IE mobile, which does not allow cross-site JSON scripts to be executed if the browser is in “One Column” view mode - I decided not to think about the “why ?” in this case, probably it’s a weird bug.

So make sure you check out the article if you’re interested!

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.

We are constantly monitoring the web for blog posts about Mobile Ajax and I came across an interesting one. I want to use this occasion to reflect on some of the points in Ben’s post on Technology Evangelist in which he discusses Ajax as a future platform for phone applications and in which he brought up 11 random points on the topic and I want to comment on some of them here (don’t want to spam his comments):

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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!

I found an very interesting article about mobile social networks on mashable.com. It is about a report of M:Metrics, which indicates that mobile social networks are growing worldwide and that they actually can be seen as a driver for mobile web usage in Europe as well as in the US.

By the numbers:
M:Metrics is reporting that in June 12.3 million consumers were accessing a social network via their mobile phones in the US and Western Europe. The US had the largest number of users (7.5 million mobile subscribers), followed by Italy (1.3 million), then the UK (1.1 million) and then Spain, Germany and France.

The most visited mobile social networks:
In June the most visited mobile social networks in the US and the UK were:
- MySpace (3.7 million mobile users in the US and 440,000 in the UK)
- Facebook (2 million mobile users in the US and 307,000 in the UK)
- Bebo (288,000 mobile users in the UK)
- YouTube (901,000 mobile visits in the US)

In France, Germany, Italy and Spain the most popular mobile social network was MSN’s Live Spaces, which is only available off-portal. That means users were accessing this service through their mobile web browser and not through their operator’s site.

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