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The Mobile Jam Session event - focused on developers - I’m organizing with Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) during the Mobile World Congress, is taking its’ final shape. Hosted by MyStrands in their new MyStrands offices, the event takes place on Tuesday, February 12, 2008. It is a day to inspire new ideas and innovate solutions to existing challenges.

The event is free of charge for all participants, coffee breaks, lunch and networking cocktail included. Check the attendants list, we’re quite surprised and happy with the enthusiastic reactions and feedback we got so far!

Attendants include developers from companies like Admob, Accenture, Access, Bango, Vodafone Betavine, Bebo, Kyte.tv, Dell Mobile, Facebook , Future Platforms, GetJar, Google Inc., Idean, Intrinsyc, Kimia, LemonQuest, mBricks, Mippin, Mobile Complete, Mobile Distillery, MyStrands, Nokia, OpenID, Peperoni, PixSense Inc, Qualcomm, Reuters, scanR , Seesmic, Six Apart, Shozu , Skyhook Wireless, Sun Microsystems, Telecom Italia, Telefonica I+D, Truphone, Trutap, UIQ Technology, Vertu, Vodafone, W3C, Wavefront, WURFL and Yahoo! to name the most prominent. It’s a great combination of big and small companies; carriers/operators, device manufacturers, content aggregators, platform and developer programs reps and some great start-up companies with a lot of experience in mobile and web convergence.

You can still sign up here if you’d like to attend the morning and/or afternoon sessions or want to join us for our closing networking cocktail.

Check out the Speakers and Topics designed on feedback we received by participants:

• OPENING PANEL
• IMPROV SESSIONS
• CLOSING ENCORE PANEL

Check out the Topics and Speakers:

1. Open ID
2. Mobile Web Development Frameworks – Widgets/Ajax etc
3. Mobile OS / Platforms
4. Usability / UI / Localization / Mobile Interfaces
5. Mobile media / Web Convergence
6. Open Source in Handsets

10:30am – 12:00 noon
Pre-Session for Developers Only

Come early to grab some talk time, croissant and coffee with your peers about what you are developing and your important issues. These will then be brought forward for the rest of the day.

12:00 Noon – 1:00pm
Registration, Lunch, Networking

OPENING PANEL – 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
We have a complete line-up of players to open up our Mobile Jam session. A great combination of big and small companies; a carrier, a device manufacturer, an aggregator, a platform, reps from developer programs and two great small companies with BIG experience. What a great way to get started – don’t miss this one!

The Players:

• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist at Vodafone Group
• Carl Uminski, CTO, Trutap and formerly of Yahoo!
• Souheil Gallouzi, CTO, Intrinsyc and formerly of Qualcomm
• Terrence Barr, Technical Evangelist, SUN Microsystems
• Tom Libretto, VP of Forum Nokia
• Ray Anderson, CEO, Bango

IMPROV SESSIONS 2:30pm – 4:30 pm

The Six (6) Improv discussions are designed for more one-on-one discussions and a deeper dive on topics. Also a better way for you to meet the speakers and your fellow participants.

Note: As this is about improv and flexilbity, so the speaker list still has room for some last minute additions!

1. OpenID
Discussion Leaders:

TBC

2. Mobile Web Development Frameworks – Widgets/Ajax
Discussion Leaders:

• Representative from Forum Nokia
• Dominique Hazael-Massieux, W3C

3. Mobile OS / Platforms
Discussion Leaders:

• Vincent Berge, Co-Founder & General Manager, Mobile Distillery
• Rich Killmer, Sr. Sales Director, Mobile Complete
• Oscar Gutierrez, Vodafone Betavine
• Terrence Barr, Technical Evangelist, SUN Microsystems

About this topic:
From Mobile Java to other platforms like Symbian, BREW, FlashLite, Android, PalmOS, Access Garnet and Windows Mobile.

4. Usability / UI / Localization / Mobile Interfaces
Discussion Leaders:

• Mikko-Pekka Hanski, Idean
• David Mery, Editor - Developer Program, UIQ Technology
• Morten Hjerde, Senior Interaction Designer at mBricks

5. Mobile Media / Web Convergence
Discussion Leaders:

• Carmen Sales - Product Development Coordinator, Kimia
• Jakub Danilewicz - Alembik project architect

About this topic:
Return of Prometheus: bringing the web to mobile devices. Giving the power of free media transcoding and web rendering to the mortals.

6. Open Source in Handsets
Discussion Leaders:

• Bill Lee, Developer Relations, ACCESS
• Luca Pasani, Admob and founder of WURFL

CLOSING PANEL: MOBILE JAM SESSION - ENCORE 4:45pm – 5:30pm
We’ll start off with some closing remarks from our panelists and then add in other players from the audience to ‘jam’ with them.

The Players:

• Fabio Ricciato, Mobile Handset Evolution, Telecom Italia, Mobile (TIM) Access and Terminals in Technology Division
• Bill Lee, Developer Relations, ACCESS
• Karel De Beule - co-Founder, Kimia
• Open seats to rotate audience members.

Jam - gather and play without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements.

5:30pm – 7:30pm
Reception
Let’s end the day raising a toast – Salut! Other player’s will join us.

Rudy and Caroline will choose their favorite Jazz picks for a perfect cocktail mood.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at Torre Mapfre in Barcelona.

Infused with the spirit of the early days of Jazz, the Mobile Jam Session is a day to inspire new ideas and innovate solutions to existing challenges. The purpose is focused, but the agenda is improvised along the way.

Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) and myself are ‘jazzed’ about working together to bring you the first of - hopefully - many Mobile Jam Sessions. The idea emerged to open up the mobile ecosystem and connect experienced and talented developers, with industry experts and decision makers.

Most importantly we want this event to be driven by developers – what they want to hear, who they want to talk to, what they want to say… Any mobile developer can propose a hot topic he would like to to discuss with other mobile value chain players in a workshop and productive environment, simply add your name and topic to invitation list. Be prepared to be an active participant in the sessions.

The event is free of charge for all participants, coffee breaks, lunch and networking cocktail included. We’re looking for passionate, exciting and talented developers. We have confirmed participations from Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Telecom Italia, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Mystrands, Mobile Distillery, Trutap, Kimia, …

The event is hosted in the new MyStrands Barcelona offices in the Torre Mapfre at the Villa Olympica. MyStrands generously offers us the superb 350 square meter space on the 20th Floor of the building with a breathtaking view on all Barcelona, the city, the Olympic port and its beaches.

New tunes often come from unlikely associations, so… Jam on!

The future of online TV, music and video content is going to be personalized and recommended, Mystrands just released a personalized online video service called MyStrands.TV. Nothing really mobile just yet but sooOOO cool I had to blog it here.

My teenage daughters and their friends TV viewing patterns changed completely the last year: they just don’t sit and watch TV anymore, they sit in front of the PC with their friends, deciding themselves what to watch, receiving links and recommendations from their IM peers - now I just need to get another free wi-fi connected pc or laptop connected to the plasma screen and they’re all set for the perfect interactive viewing experience

I had the pleasure to discover the new MyStrands service a couple of days ago and it’s really adding value to just watching YouTube video’s - MyStrands.TV is powered by MyStrands APIs and the music videos come from YouTube. Logging to MyStrands.tv proposes you an endless playlist of music videos that are personalized specifically for you…. based on your music listening history and recommendations. The first time you might find that the recommendations are based on existing channels, genres and a-like artists but actually this new recommendation tool is proposing music and concert video’s of my favorite artists based on my existing MyStrands profile, now isn’t that cool?

Richard MacManus researched the Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time a couple of weeks ago at Read/Write Web. He mentioned that “7 of the top 10 are music videos. So music videos are something that people want to watch online and there is a need for an easy way to organize or personalize this.”

Typing some of my favorite artists like Roxy Music, Miles Davis and Serge Gainsbourg for example brings up an excellent choice of all-time music video’s and concerts, a real delight to see some stuff again I hadn’t seen in years and discover some new video’s I didn’t know about.

Watch the recommended video’s on the right, the recommendations are really excellent, you can view more vid’s of the same artist or a similar one - or jump to another artist, view the community people who listen to this artist as well; you can favorite video’s and send them to friends. To me, this has been a great experience with many pleasant surprises and my kids LOVE it!

FYI: If you don’t have a MyStrands account, and you just want to try out MyStrands.TV before deciding whether to sign up, just type in the name of an artist and MyStrands builds a custom music video channel for you.

I believe MyStrands is taking a major step towards how online media is going to be consumed in the future, it’s community-based, personalized and with recommendations from peers and friends.

More links on MyStrands.TV personalized online video service here:

Mashable - MyStrands Launches YouTube-Powered Custom TV
TechCrunch - MyStrands Launches Music Video Discovery Service, MyStrands.tv
Read/Write Web - MyStrands.TV Launched - It’s last.fm For Video

And oh, for mTrends readers and mobile enthusiasts, if you haven’t MyStrands Social Player installed on your mobile yet, click here to download MyStrands for Symbian; you may also want to visit MyStrands labs page to check out their latest beta.

(disclosure note on my MyStrands involvement here)

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

Spotted on Mashable Twitter channel, checked it and works fine! The m.youtube.com site has now gone live, providing easy browsing access to YouTube from mobile devices. The mobile homepage carries a warning message: “YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application. We highly recommend that you upgrade to an unlimited data plan with your mobile service provider to avoid additional charges.”

I haven’t tried the upload clips from my mobile phone option to YouTube by following these instructions for this simple reason: users need to upload videos from their mobile phones (or cellphones) to YouTube by sending an MMS message to an email address. Depending on your connection, this can take some time, even to upload short video clips, so be sure to check your dataplan first and/or your MMS pricings before to try this out to avoid surprises. BTW: to all PARENTS: whatch your teenage kids dataplans

Below a short ‘collage’ I made of the browsing experience with example of Paris Hilton Diaries, videos in Real Player. Sorry for the bad picture quality, for one reason or another my mobile screenshot shortcuts don’t seem to work in my Nokia browser

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.

Dave Troy just released Flickrvision Mobile beta. Dave recently amazed the online world with twittervision, now he did it again with flickrvision. Twitter went already mobile earlier, now Dave is looking for feedback on what platforms it works on. Confirmed already on Nokia N80 & N95, if you want to give this a try, this is fun!

FYI: twittervision.com 3D & flickrvision 3D views are now also officially available!

(thanks to Hector for the tweet tip

NOTE: better not try this over 3G without a flat rate plan

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.