PavingWays

As I was reading an older issue (#7 in 2008 from 17.03.2008, current one is 9) of Germany’s premier computer magazine c’t I spotted a mentioning of Frost, our open source Ajax library for mobile browsers.

The issue’s title topic was “The web in your hand” and the article starting on page 112 was about “Webdesign for Mobile Devices”. On page 114 Frost is mentioned in one sentence. Yay!

“Event the first JavaScript library for mobile browsers, that are getting increasingly mightier, has been released; Frost is supposed to make simple Ajax manipulations possible.” the article reads (translated from German).

Just a small clarification here: we’re still trying to get the first real release out of the door, shame especially on myself for not bringing up enough time to get this thing done. Anyways good to know we’re on the radar, stuff like this certainly encourages further developments, but time always is an enemy.

If you wanna know more, check out Frost here.

Last week we attended the Mobile Internet Conference in Berlin. As already mentioned in an earlier post, Rocco was chairing the pre-conference day (31th March). A few startups were presenting at this day, amongst them Trutap and itsmy.com. Other presentations (YouTube Mobile, Cyworld, Yahoo! Spain) also gave interesting insights.

YouTube Mobile for example is most accessed in Japan followed by USA and UK. Its first launch version (alpha version) featured only a few thousands of videos and the distribution was mainly through carriers and mobile phone distributors. While its launch of the second version offers almost all the YouTube videos and experiences a 15 times increase in views per day. Right now YouTube Mobile does not include advertisement, but since it belongs to Google we can expect some kind of advertising soon.

On the next 2 conference days the presentations were mainly held by carriers (3 AUSTRIA, Magyar Telekom, O2 Germany, Swisscom Mobile, etc.). It was interesting to hear that carriers still (try to) open up. A very good example was 3 AUSTRIA. The presentation was very insightful and Alexander Franz showed how they are dealing with the changing environment and the shifting from voice to data. He introduced some interesting business models and explained the “Skype Phone” for 99 EUR.

All in all it was a very interesting event with many interesting and diverse companies. And of course another great networking opportunity.

There was another MMM (Mobile Monday in Munich) today. We missed all the presentations, they were almost exclusively about mobile gaming, so no biggie for us. We met the “usual suspects” and I’m getting the feeling to get into a MoMo community somehow. Lots of software vendors and game programmers were around.

I talked to the guys from DeviceAnywhere and had to learn they were actually also the guys from “Mobile Complete”! While talking to them I somehow thought these would be separate companies, but they are not. I scored a 3hrs free trial for the DeviceAnywhere service - will try later this week with our current Groupile alpha. I already know the service and it’s great. They just launched the Japanese devices and if you have an account with them you get the Japanese ones for free for a while. So now we’re really thinking about getting an account. Need to check pricing again.

Also I met someone from the MoMo team who told me about the Demo Night they will have on May 19th. We’ll see if we submit Groupile for that. Might be nice, 5 min presentations w/o PowerPoint slides - only live demos. By then we should be in public beta.