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Belgian compatriot Robin Wauters is setting up the Plugg conference on March 19 in Brussels, an excellent opportunity for you to get up to speed on the state of the European Web 2.0 industry.

Robin asked me as a speaker to give an overview and current state of Mobile 2.0. Some interesting speakers are attending as well, such as Lisa Sounio (Dopplr), Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK), Reshma Sohoni (SeedCamp), Tom Raftery, Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital) and Rodrigo Sepúlveda (Vpod.tv), amongst others…

Next to the panels and speakers’ line-up, the conference hosts a European Start-Ups Rally. No less than 65 valid submissions from 18 European countries were received by the organizers and jury, resulting in a selection of 20 start-ups who will get to present their wares at Plugg. In alphabetical order, here below:

1. 123people
2. Alenty
3. Assetbar
4. Business IT Online
5. Caleido / Wuala
6. Cellity
7. Floobs
8. HumanGrid
9. Mobiya
10. MyOwnDB
11. Nugg.ad
12. Radionomy
13. Refresh Mobile - Mippin
14. Sportme
15. Trampoline Systems
16. Trutap
17. TVtrip
18. Viewdle
19. Workhound
20. Zilok

Good to see some mobile companies in there, such as Cellity, Mippin, Mobiya, Trutap, amongst a truly interesting selection. Looking forward to this one!

The selected companies will have the opportunity to pitch the jury and audience at Plugg in a morning session, 2 minutes each. A vote will then decide which 3 finalists get to present for 10 minutes each in the afternoon, after which a winner will be chosen and awarded.

If you haven’t yet registered for Plugg yourself, now’s the time! As of next Saturday, the early-bird rate expires and the entrance fee will go from 400 to 500 euro.

I’m heading to San Francisco next week for the Mobile 2.0 and Web 2.0 Summit related events. One of THE events I’m looking forward, organised by friend Caroline Lewko from WIP Connector is the Essence Event on October 23.

Only 2 blocks away from Moscone Center to party, mingle with Mobilists and to network with rogue influencers; probably one of the most essential get togethers during CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2007.

es•sence (s ns)

the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience

Subscribe here to the invitation only list, only 160 places left when writing this…

One of the those things you have to live with when you grow a little older in today’s digital era is that one looses the snappy looks one used to have - this happens for everyone in any era obviously, but it gets tougher confronting yourself everyday in that upper left screen corner of the social networks you visit

Luckily there’s Nathan Muntner from Phophoto.com who does magic with his digital pencils vectorizing your pictures whether those are recent or not. Nathan officially launched his site Phophoto.com in May 2007, providing vector-based graphic renderings of photos. Phophoto offers a unique service by transforming photos into digital art and creating a very personalized avatar.

Phophoto distinguishes themselves from the numerous photo manipulation sites that rely on Photoshop, by instead digitally hand drawing and inking the portraits using vector based software resulting in sharp, detailed graphics that are incredibly scalable and perfect for integration with logos, banners, and animations.

Phophoto creates a new captivating image, so the user can stand out from the crowd in the social and business networks, but an image that is still very much them.

Apparently it works since I got several people asking me who did my new buddypic when I uploaded it to Facebook yesterday. If you like what Nathan did to me, try Phophoto.com, currently only $30 for your Manga Caricature or Vector Portrait!

It’s strange sometimes how things come and go (and come back) on the internet these days. After having been tagged earlier this year by Helen and Enrique, I blogged previously 5 Things you might not know about me. Recently, I got tagged twice again, but now with 8 Random Things by Heike Scholz and Jonathan Greene, so I digged up my 5 Things again and added another 3

So, here are the rules of the new 8 Random Things tag game:

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And here 8 Random Things About Me:

1. I played the saxophone in the early eighties. I made it to Mr. Shiseido’s (himself) private club in Tokyo to play there for week with Elisa Waut, an at that time popular Belgian jazzy pop band. I was playing the alto-sax. BTW did you know that the saxophone is a Belgian invention from Adolphe Sax (patented in 1846)?

2. There exists a picture of me with Dennis Hopper when hosting the Brussels Film Festival in 1998 at the Cybertheatre, I was managing at that time - If ever the photographer who took that picture reads this, please send me a copy The Brussels-based “CyberTheatre” was a precursor of the now classic cyber café idea. Based in an old movie theatre, it was renovated to a three-floored space including a graphic-design workplace, a 3-D studio, video and sound producing facilities, and giant-screen displays with a trendy club and restaurant. All events happening in the CyberTheatre were tightly meshed with the Nirvanet web site (offline now), constantly providing it with fresh content. Our web team won the UNESCO award Web Prize in 1999 and many other prestigious awards. We also hosted the first online live streamed concert of The Simple Minds. Many “cyber” artists like Jaron Lanier , Stelarc, Atau Tanaka, etc. peformed at the CyberTheatre, we even had a 2.0 version back in 1997

3. Before that I managed ‘Le Beau Bruxell’, at the time the most cosmopolitan cultural centre in Brussels. I remind organising great concerts with now legendary soul artists, such as Isaac Hayes, Afrika Bambaataa, Gil Scott-Heron, Junior Walker, Rufus Thomas, and many others…

4. I fell in love with technology when I got the chance to work with a Macintosh Plus, when working at Les Disques du Crépuscule. My passion for mobile started while working in Helsinki in 1999 with Mindworks. In that period, I saw my first mobile video on a Nokia. In 2001, with RandomOne, we introduced SMS to TV in Spain. We went live on TV early 2002 in a talkshow with Jordi Gonzalez, a famous TV presentor over here. We managed to convince the popular Jordi to dialogue with live SMS messages send from the audience through a moderated screen - this dialogue became so popular and led to numerous spontaneous fun scenes and became an important part of the show that run for 2 years on CityTV before the presentor went national (again).

5. My all time artist is Miles Davis, which leads me to my favourite quote of him: “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there…”, and that’s still what I’m trying to do every day

6. I co-founded MobileMonday in Barcelona. I’m running this now with Carles Ferreiro and the help of Barcelona Media. You can check out which topics we covered and who spoke at our events the first season (including downloading presentations). Our Flickr Group here. MobileMonday has been a lot of work but very inspiring and rewarding, I met a lot of great people through this global network. A lot of exciting stuff to come next year too!

7. I quit smoking on January 6, 2004 with the help of SMS text messages. Together with Juha, Kasimir, and founders Javier Creus and doctor/writer Miguel Masgrau, I was part of the original development team that worked out the whole concept of Dr. Masgrau’s ideas to quit smoking with the help of the mobile phone. Basically, smokers could send a date they wanted to quit smoking to an SMS short number; one week before you wanted to quit, the system tracked your smoking habit -> every time the user lit a cigarette, he/she needed to send an SMS, then the system sended back a text message preparing the user to quit; when the user finally quit, the system send back a kind of positive ‘haiku’ text message supporting the user in this process; after a week the system knew your habit, thus pushed an SMS to the user at crucial moments. This went on for a week and afterwards on regular times whenever the user needed support. I was the first to test the system and simply quit After delivery, I don’t know how come the project never got out of Spain, I thought it was really great and I still believe it’s one of the better mobile projects I was involved in. Some original press release available here and a website of the current project conelmovil.com (both only available in Spanish!)

This one actually to just give a thumbs up to Darla

8. I was born in Bruges, also called the ‘Venice of the North’. One of my favourite songs, called Marieke by the Belgian Jacques Brel, describes the environment and spectacle of the nature between ‘Bruges et Gand‘, the area where I spend most of my childhood. Afterwards I lived in Ghent and Brussels - maybe next time I have to write 8 Random Things I still like about Belgium I moved to Barcelona in 2002 and enjoying it still… By the time this tagging game gets to 11 Random Things, you might just want to knock my door and get out for a drink with me to know more about me

I’d like to tag: David Harper, Ajit Jaokar, Daniel Appelquist, Mike Rowehl, Russell Beattie, Carlo Longino, Xen Mendelsohn and Judy Breck (just let me know if I’m I too ambituous here

Got invited last week by Nokia for their new mobile sharing community platform called MOSH. I must admit it’s great to be invited to all exciting Alpha and Beta mobile testing, still it’s quite difficult to test them all in-depth with a lot of workload on the shelves these days. However, as with anything good in life… quality, curiosity and surprise always make a good cocktail and make you want to try out things immediately before others.

MobSharing, a term originally coined by Mike Evans in September 2005, didn’t figure in my 2007 predictions but was already mentioned as a future trend in my 2006 predictions and now it’s finally here from Nokia Still in closed Alpha, but with the advantage we won’t have to wait another couple of years for it to get a critical mass…

“Create, Upload and Share all of your mobile content”:

MOSH is a content sharing site where community members upload, distribute and manage content to be viewed and enjoyed on mobile devices. With MOSH, anything from applications like mobile games, to videos, blogs, songs or photos are now accessible and distributable on your mobile device.

How does it work?

There are three key elements to MOSH:

1. A website
2. A mobile website
3. An application for mobile devices (available for download on Nokia devices only)

The website is your main source for accessing the wide range of content available through MOSH. It is here where you can create your profile, upload content, manage your collections and specify which selects to send to your mobile device as mobile feeds.

The mobile website is where users with both Nokia and non-Nokia devices can access mobile feeds and view the MOSH service.

I played with it for the first time today and the interface looks simple & smart, ideally for the creation of mobile social media: users can create ‘collections’ around topics, tags or keywords to organize content which can be ranked, ‘raved’, filtered and shared.

While the service is optimized for use on Nokia devices, the service is compatible with all mobile handsets, provided they support the kind of content you are downloading and that you are able to access the Internet.

One quick remark: how do I know the content or apps I’m uploading is compatible with what kind of devices? Creating some groups of phone categories might be handy for the users here.

I’ll keep you posted with more feedback and mosh moves of course.

It was one of those inspiring days yesterday at Martin Varsavsky’s ranch in Menorca, an event gathering originally intended for the Menorcan tech scene ending up with so much interest outside of the island and Spain, the event TechTalk Menorca ended up with some 100 enthusiast entrepreneurs, developers and pure geeks mostly working in the next generation web ‘connected’ services.

Marko Ahtisaari introduced Blyk and Dopplr, Anil de Mello gave us a preview on Mobuzz going completely user-driven soon, Ivan and Rodrigo anounced a complete update of vpod.tv for their 1st anniversary on May 15 - check out their updates during next week! Tariq Krim explained how Netvibes got from 15.000 users on day 1 to 10 million users without a logo and spending 0 on marketing (!) Ola Ahlvarsson from Result explained how to create an ‘ecosystom for growth’ and Michael Jackson (no joke!) how Skype will continue ‘enabling the worlds conversations’.

Hans Peter Brondmo impressed already at iNNOVATE!europe’07 with Plum, still in private beta, to be launched on May 24. Plum is a free service that lets you save anything you care about – web pages, videos, photos, documents, emails, feeds, and more – and organize everything into collections. Something I have been looking for since longtime, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot from this new service the coming months.

Then Thomas Crampton and Loïc Le Meur did a dynamic and funny presentation on their next project, still in beta obviously, but already with a great vision of things to come, instant media now! Jonas Birgersson explained us about the infrastructure 2.0 plans of Labs2, something I can just dream about now but they’re making this already a reality in homeland Sweden. Ricardo Galli of Meneame explained how, without having a clue or a plan, his site became one of the most used website in Spain.

The sessions closed with a session on online games with Alexis Bonte from yesnomayB and Mathieu Nouzareth from cafe.com, anyway both worth following.

Martin Varsavsky invited us for a cocktail at his precious Torrenova finca not without giving us an update of just released stuff from FON, Gmail Uploader and Fon.gs, 2 simple features no one seemed to have thought of before. Check the What’s New section on their website, always worth checking!

All in all, it was a great day with great people in Menorca and a superb initiative from Martin to bring all these interesting people together to learn, share and connect. Entrepreneurship is all about a good idea and execution, and we have seen a lot of those yesterday. Stay tuned for a lot more exciting stuff to come from the next generation web connected services on this side of the ocean

My Flickr pictures here, Loïc’s video feed from yesterday here, you have to get through the morning boat excursion first however

UPDATE May 14: Loïc just posted seperate video’s of the TechTalk presentations on his blog here.

More pictures of the event here and here.

twitter was already accessible on the mobile phone through text messaging of course but now it’s also accessible through a ‘mobile web’ interface at m.twitter.com, this means you can now also send your messages connected with your phone to a wi-fi network (or over 3G if you have a flat rate plan). This is a great new option for people like me who spend around 80 % of their time using the mobile phone when not ‘on the move‘ - I mean in a place (home, office, friends) with a wi-fi connection around, so obviously I prefer to connect to such a network when available.

I haven’t been twittering too much before since I didn’t really saw the added value of it using Skype or other IM apps already while communicating with others from my laptop and sending a ‘tweet’ to the UK twitter number from my mobile cost me 0,60 Euro - price of an international SMS in Spain, huh! - sending a couple of tweets/day at this rate would easily become an expensive hobby.

But since I discovered Twitterrific I have the app always on. For the ones who still don’t see the utility of twitter, tweets with your global friends are just fun but above all, news is spreaded faster these days on twitter than anywhere else it seems. For example yesterday I saw a tweet from Kelly trying out the m.twitter.com, I tried it out myself and sended “1st tweet from m.twitter.com hurray!“, then the news was anounced on Mashable and other blogs; and today, I received the tweet from All About Symbian for this weeks Carnival of the Mobilists #72 before I saw it on any other blog…

You can connect with me on twitter here.

Fabien invited me yesterday to Dopplr. Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers as a tool for their own use, then decided to open it their global friends. The Dopplr “beta” service is open by invitation only.

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

What is interesting here is the future location-awareness. Unlike past and real-time mutual location-awareness, it’s impossible to capture future locations. This makes a lot of sense to me with quite some travelling ahead this year. Especially for the conferences I’m attending, it’s always good to know who’s around and in town. I configured it for my mobile too, so I’m really curious how the service is going to work when travelling.

This is Sophia Berglund. Right now she is 25months old and growing so fast in her capabilities in communication - already she can muster small sentences in English, Korean, Japanese and some German! She can even translate! Sophia can create lines, shapes and forms by way of painting her communication…

But what makes me the most excited is seeing her grab technology with an incredible desire to learn and experience - she explores, she examines, pushes, prods, de-constructs the technology in some cases (i.e. she breaks my expensive “toys”)

Part of her 1st and 2nd years were spent in S.Korea where she was born into one of the most advanced mobile “handphone” cultures in the world - literally 5minutes after birth her first ever picture (and video) taken by a mobile/handphone and sent to our friends and relatives, she made her first mobile location based phone call at 5months and at 6months she was surfing mobile internet and watching mobileTV! She had her first “co-location” experience in 2006 when friends “broadcast” the 비 / Bi (Rain)**concert live over their handphone to my handphone - Seoul - to - Jeju…

Sophia is growing up into a digital world. Already she has a real-demo phone given to her by a friend at LGe - which she mimmicks her immediate social circle in making calls and surfing data.

Wow! Yes but today we question what is next - we talk of ubiquotous computing, mobile internet, mobile2.0, mobileTV, mobileGaming, mobileAdvertising, mobileMarketing, Location Based Services, Bluetooth, Proximity Marketing, smartphones, convergence, m-YouTube, moblogs, iMode, 3G, 3.5G, CDMA, FOMA, RFID, Flash-Lite, SVGt, mobile-Image recognition, mobileCameras, mobileVideo, Vlogs, iPhone (iPhone aka LG Prada), mobile UI, touch-screens, thumb-tribes, handy, handphone, keitai - blah blah blah and all of this jargon and often mind boggling marketing “psycho-babble” has made me think - where is it all going - how much “smarter” will the next generation of “phones” like my SonyEricsson P990i become - how much more can we cram into one single device!?

How many more times can my P990i crash - a victim of its own “smartness” - Yet I put up with it as when my P990 is alert and working it blows my mind with all of its functions and how they are symbiotic* to my daily needs - I can Wi-Fi (well not in Germany they lock their Wi-Fi connections), Google movie reviews before entering the cinema, take videos and pictures and Flickr them, I can use Googlemaps when lost or curious, watch movies, RSS Feed news and blogs, email, VoIP, Messenger, listen to music, video call whilst on business trips, bemuse my wife, and entertain my colleagues like I am a mobile guru! Seriously though what is next?

So - I think “convergence” will continue as a trend for maybe the next 2-3 years - not only in hardware but in software and services that we can ever expand the phones capabilities - with it computing power, battery power and size! Multi-media will play a big role - motion graphics - advanced touch-screens (iPhone aka LG Prada)
smart phones that know what you use and like and build a UI around your user preferences - broader personalisation with iTunes music and video, enhanced imaging and editing functions, more Bluetooth functions in urban locations, free ubiquitous Wi-Fi - oh I could go on with a list of endless options I could do with…

Sophia in 28years time will be 30 and the date will be 2035 - what do you the mocom (mobile community) think will be next and what will “mobile” have become - we all see attempts at mobile technology in clothing, e-paper (with Wi-Fi connectivity), cyborg like integration of receivers/chips into our bodies, organic and nano-technology - but really I would love to hear your thoughts!

* BTW thanks to Bear in the Big Blue House
on Disney Playhouse for re-introducing me to this brilliant word “symbiotic” Children’s TV is great!

**비 / BMW Meets Truth**
and www.bmwmeetstruth.com

I would like to introduce you to Andrew Berglund, another regular guest blogger next to Yasmine Abbas and Martin Sauter who joined me here a couple of weeks ago. More great contributors will be joining M-Trends soon, if you would like to become one of them, drop me a line. If you have any ideas, comments and feedback on the contributions made or presented here, let me know; we’re covering different opinions on various topics in a ubiquitous mobility era, written from different locations, by people who are always on the move… If there are any subjects you would like to have covered here, feel free to suggest.

Andrew will cover the “creative” side of mobile society and the culture that surrounds it. In his contributions he will report on new trends that IHO push boundaries within the digital realm. Check his profile at his very - as he calls it - “un-web2.0 and un-mobile friendly” website. Just recently he left Interone as the Executive Creative Director - Worldwide working mainly on BMW (Global - EU, Asia, North America markets) and Unilever (Europe) digital media communications. As of April 1st he will have moved to Framfab and LBi as Head of Strategy & Innovation - an exciting remit to push boundaries of newer / emerging interactive medias such as mobile and social networks. Andrew has extensive experience in mobile development, concept, and creative communication strategies within the European and Asia markets - with the majority of his mobile work in S.Korea and Japan for clients such as NTT DoCoMo, MTV, Samsung, and LG (Cyon)

I know Andrew for a couple of years now and admire his work, his original views and valuable opinion, needless to say I am looking forward to his contributions!