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.
At the beginning the guys from amiando showed us their office and gave a little insight into their “working culture”. After that we (around 40 attendees) got a chance to chitchat and network. Food and drinks were available - thanks to amiando! Due to the laid-back atmosphere it was pretty easy to get in touch with a lot of new people.
After an hour of networking and before Felix Haas of amiando could begin with his presentation we started going around the room introducing ourselves one after the other by giving ourselves 3 tags each. The audience was pretty mixed: software & web developers, startup entrpreneurs, marketing executives and also people from well-known companies such as the Boston Consulting Group, Süddeutsche Zeitung or Autoscout24.de - even a doctor joined this Webmontag :)
After his introduction Felix got a chance to start with his presentation about amiando, a web service to invite people and send out customized invitations to your events. Talking about founding and funding the company as well as developing the platform amiando, he gave us some interesting insights and good advice.
Then Florian Steger of Kupferwerk talked about Micro communities and how brands, media companies and organisations can enhance their customer life-cycle through online communities. It was also a very interesting presentation with quite interesting marketing insights on top.
The last presentation was held by our very own Rocco about Mobile AJAX. Compared to the other presentations his was more technical-oriented, but still very interesting. There were a lot of questions about the mobile web in general and the use of AJAX on mobile devices. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so Martin had to postpone his presentation to next Webmontag.
After the three presentations we got another chance to network. Although it was planned to change the location and go to a pub, amiando offered us their office and even provided us with some free beer - very cool!
The event started at 7:00 pm and the last people left after 12 midnight.
All in all it was a great evening, very social and a great opportunity to meet new and interesting people, to discuss business or technical related topics and to talk to start-ups and entrepreneurs like Johannes from kesto.org (web based password manager). Even if you look for a job in the IT business, it is a great opportunity to meet your new employer. Right now every company that presented is looking for new employees. So get in touch! Also refer to some pics of the evening.
We also brought up the idea of doing a PechaKucha (20 slides with 20 seconds each) session next time - just like what we have done at last years XML conference in Boston. It was a real blast there and maybe a perfect way to do presentations (or at least part of them) at such an evening, because of the limited time reserved for presentations. So we’re encouraging everybody interested to respond!
We are really looking forward meeting more interesting people at the next Webmontag.