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I spend some time in Amsterdam for the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition for Dutch mobile startups, combined with a presentation I gave at MobileMonday Amsterdam. I have been nicely surprised by the quality of the local startups  presenting in the competition, I can’t say much about them yet… the winners will be announced shortly and will present at the coming MOMO event at the PICNIC conference.

MobileMonday Amsterdam #7 on Value was a GREAT event. The MOMO team has been building reputation since their kickoff event in June 2007 with Jyri Engestrom, putting together quality events ever since. I have been around seeing many MobileMondays a bit everywhere but MoMo Amsterdam is definately one of the best events in Europe focusing on mobile specific topics. What makes this a good event is the original venue and the TEAM working in perfect symbiosis with clear objectives to produce exciting events and not afraid to take risks trying out new concepts.

This time Raimo, Yuri, Claire, Maarten, Marc and Sam created a circle in the theatre for the first part of the event to stimulate audience participation. The discussions were in Dutch, the statements challenging and a bit controversial (user value vs. shareholder value) - why not? I particulary liked the discussion on the bankrupcy of a promising Dutch mobile startup, called Skoeps, as a learning experience towards the community. Wrong timing (flat fees not yet in place), contrary shareholder interest and not enough user base to create a user-driven news content site I believe were amongst the reasons the company didn’t make it.

The 2nd part included keynote presenations by myself, buddie Ajit Jaokar and Yme Bosma from the biggest social network in The Netherlands Hyves (5 million active users!). Ajit gave another interesting talk on what he expects to become a new boom on - non-voice - devices.

Yme presented (in Dutch) the coming rollout of the Hyves mobile platform, including rich adressbook (presence, status, profile, content, etc), communication options such as voice, sms, notes, www, blog, chat, video, photo, email, money, etc), location-based (cellid & GPS), bluetooth for physical identification in public area’s and multiplatform (J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile & iPhone). Yme and his team are very ambitious about the mobile platform, expecting mobile interfaces to be the dominant acces method on their platform in a couple of years. Note that Hyves was originally intented as a mobile social media platform years ago before its actual internet succes.

You can view the presentations of Ajit and Yme on Slideshare. The complete Flickr set of the event can be seen here. I’ll post my presentation in another following post.

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