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Tomorrow I’ll be attending TechTalk Menorca at the Martin Varsavsky’s ranch in Menorca, an event gathering some of the hottest tech entrepreneurs in a informal atmosphere.

From Martin’s blog:

At the farm we will have Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, David Sifry of Technorati, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Loic Le Meur France´s top blogger, Thomas Crampton of the IHT, Ola of Result, Marko of Blyk and Dopplr, Anil de Mello of Mobuzz, Ivan and Rodrigo of Vpod, Ricardo Galli of Meneame, Alex Straub of Truphone, Lukasz Weijchert de Onet (in Polish but the 49th most popular web site in the world), Marc Samwer German serial tech entrepreneur, Janus Friis of Skype, Joost, Felix Petersen of Plazes, Yossi Vardi, Jonas Birgersson of Labs2.

I share Martin’s view on European entrepreneurship culture and I admire the way he builds his business through symbiotic circles of trust with people and ideas he believes in. Watch a snip of the interview with Chris Shipley from Guidewire Group yesterday at iNNOVATE!europe’07 here below.

A complete wrapup of that conference to be published soon here.

Mobile Communities, MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software), Mobile User-Generated Content, Mobile IM & Chat, Moblogging, Mobile Friend Finders, Ping your Buddies, … We have heard a lot of these rather new terminologies the last months now. MySpace, YouTube are the obvious web-based examples going mobile soon; and the big companies have been moving in this mobile space lately: Google bought Dodgeball, Microsoft’s Zune has social network capabilities build-in, adding geo-location to this dimension now is obvious to build the next-generation mobile killer apps but what is their current state? Do they have many users? What do they learn form them? How people use the software? When? Where? Is it really useful for mobile users right now? Do the companies behind make money yet? What are the new business models in this field?

MobileMonday Barcelona invites, for the next event on December 4, some of the most interesting European players in this field, the topic promises to be a quick seat-filler; speakers include:

Felix Petersen - Plazes (Germany)
Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free. Plazes is a social location directory with more than 100,000 users that can tag locations to find other users or related places nearby. The service has gathered a lot of media attention on a global scale and is since long the darling of the super-geeks.

Alex Kummerman - Clicmobile (France) presenting areyouhere.net and yootribe.com ( with Swithmod )
Alex has been at the forefront of multimedia development. He now brings over 13 years of mobile telecommunication expertise and successful management to Clicmobile, his third start-up. Alex is also a commentator on the developing Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) industry. He continues to advise people on LBS-MoSoSo as an editor on the LBS-MOSOSO blog. Alex is now launching a platform for connected communities providing tools for both the PC and the mobile worlds. Clicmobile is a Geneva based start-up company with an operational subsidiary in Paris. Clicmobile provides the open media world with tools to build and run connected communities.

Alberto Benbunan Garzón - Moviligo (Spain/Mexico)
Alberto Benbunan Garzón, founder and Business Development Director of Mobile Dreams Factory will talk about their social networking and dating platform called Moviligo, their challenges, opportunities and future applications in this area. Moviligo is a mobile portal to search and find girls and boys worldwide. With just the mobile phone the user can send messages, flirt, chat or whatever it happens.

The sessions will be moderated by Fabien Girardin from 7.5th Floor blog who is currently finishing his Ph.D. thesis on collaboration in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments, expect some vivid discussions!

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book early to avoid being left out!

Venue: Auditorium University of Pompeu Fabra - França Building (Edifici França)
Passeig de Circumval·lació, 8 - Barcelona 08003

Location and Directions here at Google Maps

The event is sponsored by CIDEM (Centre d’Innovació i Desenvolupament Empresarial of the Generalitat de Catalunya), Agora 22@ and Barcelona Media.

Barcelona has always been pretty pioneering with new technologies… The Barcelona City Council has been experimenting for a while now with mobile services and recently launched a “Barcelona Mobile” campaign to sensibly citizens and tourists on public services to be accessed from your mobile phone. (check out the video here, it’s great fun!)

Barcelona City Council offers you a new service which allows you to have all the information about the city on your mobile:

• MERCÈ 06 City Festival program (ended last week)
• What’s On: the Grec festival, your team’s match, children’s activities, the theatre, exhibitions and concerts.
• Directory: a guide to restaurants, hotels, etc.
• Barcelona city map -> exists already online and is excellent!
• How to get there: a tool how to get somehwere in Barcelona by underground, bus or just walking.
• Usefull numbers: firse service and emergency numbers

Now I’m happy all these services are becoming available on the mobile phone, in the end that’s what we all want, however I tried some of the services and the information is very poor. For example only 7 hotels were mentioned and the places I was searching for didn’t appear… well probably more time is needed to index everything. The map thing is pretty cool and advanced, connecting this to a LBS system with services is going to be peanuts later on.
The SMS service costs only 0,30 Euro/sms which is reasonable but knowing about my mobile web browsing bills from last months, I’m not attracted to use the Barcelona mobile web service a lot.

However, walking through the city and checking for (public) available WiFi acces points in Barcelona learns me there are currently a lot of these public acces points available a bit everywhere, so… Martin, isn’t this something to connect to with FON? Also, wouldn’t all these services be quicker and easier to build and be found through tools like Plazes.com once their mobile beta goes public? With a bit of promotion and marketing the best ‘plazes‘ in Barcelona can be tagged easily and become accessible through the mobile as another valuable option.

What about other cosmopolitan citizens? How are the mobile services in your city? It would be great to map some of the coolest urban mobile services…

It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.

Apart from the fact that (finally) more people start noticing that there are nearly NO women working in mobile - just check for yourself here, there weren’t nearly NO American carriers or European operators present at 3GSM. Does this mean they will concentrate again on their core business or wasn’t there anything interesting to hype-up as mobile music did last year?

I haven’t seen any mindblowing stuff during the show, neither Yahoo or Google, but I noticed some interesting smaller projects and developments and there was some interesting news sometimes overlooked or who didn’t make it to the headlines…

Despite the enormous advertising effort of Motorola in the city (nearly no advertising boards were overlooked) not to be neglected as a mobile brand, none of their phones were mentioned in the Infosync’s Top Ten phones of the 3GSM Congress, the winner went to to the Sony Ericsson W950i, definately promising and mini-revolutionary design-wise but we’ll have to wait until Q3 of 2006 to see it on the market.

We could notice that (obviously) Microsoft is putting all its efforts to keep track with the pace of other mobile OS but to me the real leap ahead comes from Symbian. Last year still in a somehow hesitating position, it becomes clear that Symbian is the way to go to operate smart mobile devices. The anouncement of Nokia and Vodafone to work together to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform is very significant.

Next to DoCoMo’s stand, S60 stand was one of my favourites. David showed me one of the most compelling prototype demo’s I have seen during the event: Music Guru, a conceptual prototype of a next generation 3G/PC music player, developed jointly by Vodafone Group R&D, MusicStrands and Adobe, promises anything you could ever imagine of social music projects such as last.fm or Pandora going mobile.

One of my personal favourites stays Minfizz who now created their Minifizz Popp’s, a beautifully designed avatar & looks builder for teenage girls to create their own avatars (mobile) online and save it as a wallpaper on their phone; on top including the possibility to create small blog-diaries to add emotional value to their avatars. The wet dream business model for operators?

But the demo I have been expecting for months now came from Berliner connection Markus Angermeier who showed me how powerfull Plazes will be on the mobile. For the insiders, some screenshots can be found on Felix Petersen’s Flickr stream.

And then the people! Mobile Sunday was so much fun and a perfect aperitif to what was yet to come. Some pictures can be found at Martin’s blog. The Mobilists gathering was too short for me to talk to everybody I would have liked to, so I suggest next time we’ll make it a longer event There seem to be quite some pictures of the evening circulating online, if you have some please suggest your link here so we can all share them. A nice photoshoot session of the evening has been uploaded to Flickr by Josep Ganyet. Thanks to all the mobilists and invitees for coming, I had a great time, I hope you had one too. And thanks also to Kelly Goto, Lisa and the people from Gotomedia for supporting this event. Many thanks to Russell Buckley for his continuous support of the gathering idea.

And final note to the best moblogger in town: without no doubt Kosmar, just check for yourself his impressive and most original collection of his 3GSM impressions here.

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(Oliver, Markus me and Stuart)

TAGS: 3GSM gotomobile mobile sunday barcelona mobilists plazes m-trends.org