PavingWays

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.