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Tomorrow morning I’m off to Vegas for the CTIA Wireless. Some intense days ahead, lots of people and companies to catch up with. Monday I’ll be at the Mobile Jam Session, another fully booked event organised by Caroline and me. Check the agenda and speakers here.

I’ll be checking out the Showstoppers event to check out some new US startups, the new stuff at Nokia, a Buzzd dinner, the MM2 Roundtable discussion, a couple of other dinners and many networking cocktails…. will definately try to catch the mobile girls at the GoMo News Party. You can check a complete CTIA Party List here by Eric Chan.

Looking forward to meet with the industry collegues and friends, the start-ups, the carriers / operators and VC’s, especially in the Mobile 2.0 area. Anyone who wants to catch up with me, send me a note or send me a direct message on Twitter.

carriers, cell phonev, conference, Cool Devices, ctia, events, industry, las vegas, mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Events, Mobile Games, mobile jam session, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile marketing, mobile music, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, Mobile Search, mobile tv, mobile video, mobile web, nokia, Operators, startups, Trends, wi fi, Wimax

Here’s some thoughts and a short wrapup of the Mobile 2.0 event I helped to organize in San Francisco. It was the second time this event took place, organised last year by Mike, Daniel, Gregory and Peter. For this years’ event, they asked me to join the team and I’m really glad I took the decision to participate, I truly believe this is only the start of more interestig things to come produced by this quintet

The event was really great! Being part of the organizers committee and having a good view of events happening around the globe, this is a really exceptional event, connecting the transitioning and convergent worlds of web and mobile; exceptional because some of the best heads in mobile are spending a day together discussing and exploring the opportunities and threats of what we call the next generation mobile services. Unique since it brings together both a local (Silicon Valley) and a European crowd, something essential in todays’ global economy. Innovation is happening everywhere, the world is flat.

Understanding the potential of the mobile device as a connector of objects and people in the near future is a must and I think this event is the best I have seen in this area, covering essential topics such as Social Media, User Experience, Usability and Design, Disruption, Emerging Technologies, New Business Models brought by thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile application developers and web technologists.

I was not alone with my thoughts since Tomi T. Ahonen send us this text note during the event: “Wow, this room really holds probably more of the true influencers of the actual future of mobile than any other event I have ever attended. Impressive!”

And what about these notes from Oliver Starr, who was live blogging for Blognation during the conference:

There’s one last disruption I’d like to mention and it might be the most sublime disruption of them all. The power that will be realized by the 250 plus individuals that took that time and invested the money to spend a day deep in discussion about the next generation of mobile. The cumulative increase in knowledge realized by the attendees at this event will spread out into the world in waves. Perhaps some will be small ripples, a few rolling whitecaps, but combined, we are looking at a tidal wave of new knowledge, shared ideas, and new alliances that have the power to change the world we live in profound ways.

Knowledge is not power. Knowledge wielded effectively is power. As I look around the room as we reach the waning moments of the 2007 Mobile 2.0 Conference, I can’t help but wonder if the people in this room realize the incredible, explosive potential that each of them now has should they apply in any measure the intelligence they’ve gained in the ten hours spent here today.

I specifically like the size of the event, crowded with some 250 attendees, speakers and press yet small enough to have a chat and connect with nearly everybody present.

Here’s a set of resources from the event I could find of as of now. You can track the ongoing discussions using Google Blog Search tagged “Mobile 2.0“.
Richard MacManus has been LIVE blogging the event (incredible how fast he writes!):

• Mobile 2.0 - The 7th Mass Media & Business Opportunities
• Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1
• Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2
• Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile Search

Oliver Starr’s live posts here on blognation.

Mike Rowehl’s Mobile 2.0 wrapup.

Dennis from WAP Review has an amazing writeup covering absolutely everything top to bottom.

Russ McGuire’s review on Mobile 2.0: Mobile Internet vs. Mobility

Barbara Ballard posted about how many in the audience were using laptops.

Tony Fish pointed out the Mobile Web 2.0 list of resources setup in netvibes.

Enrique C. Ortiz quick review.

Kelly Goto has a detailed post from the fireside chat.

Carlos Domingo posted his draft panel notes here.

Atakan Cetinsoy from MyStrands blogged his impressions here.

Marc Davis Flickr pictures ZoneTagged Mobile 2.0

On top of the reviews, some interesting discussions are heating up, starting with Rob Tiffany’s complaints why Windows Mobile was not used or not even mentioned during the event… Read Enrique C. Ortiz on spot reply to that question.

You can view my introduction to Mobile 2.0 on Slideshare; check also the Google’s move into mobile slide exchange project we just launched, together with Raimo van der Klein.

I created a Flickr group here, open to anyone. Anyone who has pictures of the event and a Flickr account, please subscribe to the group and forward them to the group from within your Flickr account.
I wanted to thank again our sponsors of the event: Nokia, Shozu, Vodafone Betavine, Taptu, Jamba, Mippin, Webwag, Rulespace and Swisscomm for the excellent wi-fi connections. Without them making this happen would not have been possible. Hope to see you all next year again!

I’ll be back with an update on conversations and posts around the event next Monday in the Carnival of the Mobilists # 96 which I’m hosting again here at mTrends.

conference, convergence, Conversations, Cool Devices, Daniel Appelquist, event, events, Experience Design, gregory gorman, innovation, iphone, lbs, location based, Mashup, Mike Rowehl, mobile, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Events, Mobile Games, Mobile Lifestyle, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, Mobile Search, mobile tv, mobile video, mobile web, mobile2, mobile20, Operators, peter vesterbacka, Read/WriteWeb, rudy de waele, sanfrancisco, sf, startups, Trends, usability, user experience, voip, web 2.0, wi fi, wrapup

I’m delighted to announce our next MobileMonday Barcelona event, on July 2: we are celebrating our first MoMoBCN anniversary at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). For this occasion we chose one of my favorite topics at the moment: Mobile Web 2.0.

I’m looking forward to finally meet Ajit Jaokar, co-author of the Mobile Web 2.0 book in a session together with Lucia Garate from Vodafone Group Research and Development - to talk about the recently launched Betavine platform; Patrick Lord from Mobiluck, and Carlos Domingo, General Director of Telefonica I+D to present and discuss their ideas on this topic. I will moderate a short panel discussion afterwards.

This next event will be held at the CCCB Auditorium and there’s a celebration drink at the wonderful “Pati de les Dones” inside the CCCB complex.

Check the MobileMonday Barcelona website for all details on place, timings and bio’s of the speakers. NOTE the new event place and timings!

3G, Ajit Jaokar, Announcements, betavine, Books, carlos domingo, convergence, events, futuretext, i+d, innovation, lbs, location based, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Events, Mobile Monday, Mobile RSS, mobile web, mobile web 2.0, mobilemonday, mobilemonday spain, Mobiluck, mtrends, opengardens, Operators, social media, startups, telefonica, Trends, Ubiquitous Devices, usability, user experience, vodafone, w3c, we media, web 2.0, wi fi

iNNOVATE!europe is one of these rare conferences bringing together talented European tech startups, analysts, business angels and VC’s. It’s the first time I attented this conference and I’m definately going to put it on my agenda for next year, not only because the conference was impeccablement organised by Chris and Cathy from the Guidewire Group but most of all, it’s an event to catch up with some of the most relevant startups active in the next generation internet and mobile technology/services and to meet lots of professionals working in the ecosystems surrounding these startup innovations.

iNNOVATE!europe’07 presentations and demo’s are presented in the charming Theatro Principal in the city of Zaragoza, who is hosting also the EXPO 2008 World’s Fair. The iNNOVATE!europe’07 Innovators can demo in the halls and mezzanine surrounding the theatre in a very relaxed and intimate athmosphere, ideally for entrepreneurs to catch up with the angels and VC’s and press to demo and explain their products/services more in detail; the food served between the breaks was excellent, so kudos to the whole organzation who did a great job creating comfort in a nice environment, ideally to stimulate business relations and conversations.

Some in-depth interviews done by Chris Shipley with Martin Varsavsky, Founder and CEO of FON; Tariq Krim, Founder & CEO of Netvibes and some interesting panel discussions on topics ranging from Open Source to Open Innovation, the importance of R&D, A New Breed of Investors, Mobile Technology at an Economic Crossroad and Building Business Playing Games.

Below a wrapup of my impressions on the presentations and demo’s given by Fring, Mobiluck, Yoono, Plum, Wisher, Smaato, sMeet, G.ho.st, CoolIris, hiClip, IMinent, Trampoline Systems, Webwag, and many others, all mainly focused on next generation web and mobile services. No worries if you haven’t heard from these companies yet, their names are going to resonant a lot the coming months in the blogosphere. I’m not only focusing on the mobile companies who presented in Zaragosa but also on the next generation Web services since I believe the next wave of mobile ‘connected’ services will mainly come from existing web services going mobile, and the existing and new ones coming on mobile only will need to integrate and synchronize easily with web services… think one ID, one login to access all your communities and services from your mobile, I won’t be able to manage my multiple logins/passwords and services from my mobile phone as long as this process isn’t made easy.

The first presentation was done by seasoned entrepreneur Zyn Schreiber who founded G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operated SysTem), a completely new, Web-based operating system which interoperates with the Web’s leading software applications to deliver fully functional Virtual Computer with which you can make your personal computing environment accessible from any browser - single desktop, single sign-in and single file system, in one word, the desktop replacement system we all are waiting for. To me projects like G.ho.st. make a lot of sense, I’m managing I don’t know how many accounts, community services and hosted services, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all the elements one need to manage online. Some of the benefits of G.ho.st. are upload everything that is on your desktop to the g.ho.st virtual desktop and organise everything through a virtual file system, change languages in seconds - ever tried that in Windows, huh? Technology is still in alpha, public beta release soon.

VoxIQ presented a new speech recognition technology using artificial intelligence to overcome current limitations in this domain, sounds great but I think we’re pretty far away still from using efficient speech solutions in especially mobile technology - I can’t help it but I always get a vision of a civilization of people talking to their devices while the real people are walking next to them, imagine a meeting room where everyone starts to talk to his device to activate silent mode for example, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me as of now…

Berlin-Based startup sMeet had a great presentation introducing a new communications paradigm called ’social reality communications’: live communications in a kind of Second Life kind of environment, imagine real video chat and phone conversations within Second Life, connect though mobile, instant messaging, VoIP in virtual tv shows , virtual trade fairs, etc. TV 2.0 here I come! Screenagers - as Douglas Rushkoff calls them - will love this, living in virtual worlds, connecting to real people! Developed over a period of 4 years by a small team in stealth mode, several patents have been filed. I LOVE this one, sMeet guys R.O.C.K.!

“Investor of the Year” Dr. Hermann Hauser, Cofounder of Amadeus Capital, interviewed by Chris Shipley made some good points on many companies do mainly software: what about hardware innovation and investment? He believes in the future of machine-to-machine interactions and flexible displays as one of the major innovations in ICT the coming years. BTW: did you know that 60% of internet traffic coming from P2P video?

Some interesting views were explored during the panel discussion with Martin Duval from Orange, Maria Marced (!) former senior executive at Intel and Hans Van Grieken, VP at Capgemini on the role of R&D in the innovation process. Maria Marced expressed that innovation is all about excitement in the first place but also about lowering the entry part, enabling the ecosystems around your product/service, cost-efficiency, developing the right partnerships. Above all, brands need a focus, she demonstrated with the vision from ‘intel inside’ to a ‘leap ahead’: Intel thinks it really can improve people’s life through technology, a brand like Philips focused on Sense & Simplicity. Interesting view expressed by Martin Duval from Orange Next on Orange going convergent as a thread on their core business but at the same time a challenge as to improve their core business and discover new area’s; he explained what media and network convergence for a Telco is about: some partners becoming competitors, the need to build new and different partnerships, creation of new groups of innovation (satellites) in different area’s but he mentioned also that the stronger the brand is, the more difficult it gets for them to get into the participative media business culture (!)

More presentations on Rich Media getting Richer with BT’s spin-off Real Time Content explaining their patented technology called Adaptive Media, real time content intelligently customised to different profiles to fit the needs of the audience, publisher or contetn owner. Have a look at their demo at realtimecontent.com.

I twitterred the term ‘cinematic browsing‘ when CoolIris introduced their ‘Think Outside of the Browser’ mantra. Soujanya Bhumkar and his team of talented Indian developers presented PicLens, a widget/plugin/extension for the ones like Google/Firefox/Flickr to enable full screen advertising and image viewing, cinematic media discovery for the Web, quite impressive!

hiClip presented a solution to enhanced video integration for social networks of all sizes, check it out at gethiclip.com

After lunch break more demo’s focused on personalising the web, starting with IMinent, a French startup launching EMOVIDS, lets users choose their own videos as a source of self-expression, replacing smileys and winks. It’s basically a set of tools and a community of Instant Messaging users willing to expand the IM experience.

I believe this is a really interesting take, considering there are 750 million instant messaging users on the Web - Microsoft & Yahoo together take 80% of that market share, that’s twice as much as MySpace users (!)

One of my favorite presentations came from Paris-based Webwag with their WOD (Widget On Demand). Led by Franck Poisson (ex-Google France MD), he presented how easily you can cut, drag & drop articles & sections from your webpage to your personalised web page. My notes from the demo tell = impressive! Franck and his team understood a lot about next generation web & mobile: “it’s not about browsing, it’s all about synchronisation”. Webwag was one of the only companies presenting a live demo on the mobile phone showing their Mobidget solution - still in alpha, it looked really cool and easy; choosing a wallpaper from flickr on your phone, switching between feeds, etc. this is quite a powerfull widget environment.

Criteo provides predictive tools based on users’ tastes and behaviours, also called collaborative filtering (pushing the right product to the right person), an interesting technology indeed, but to me Criteo lacked some maturity in technology, I have seen more impressive real-time personalised recommendation solutions by the team from MyStrands for example. Interesting to note here is that recommendation is all about discovery, two different types of behavioural desision are differentiated here: search using keywords (rational decision) and the discovery process through recommendations (impulsive decision).

Mixed feelings of positivism and negativism in the Power Angels panel, composed of:

* Klaus Hommels, Venture Partner, Benchmark Capital
* Oliver Jung, Investment Manager, Adinvest
* Saul Klein, Venture Partner, Index Ventures
* Simon Levene, Partner, Accel
* Mark Tluszcz, Managing Partner, Mangrove Capital Partners

Here my rough notes from that session:

- 20 relevant vc’s and 20 angels in europe
- 30 investments last year, diversification (oliver)
- a lot less opportunities in EU then elsewhere
- just less deals in EU
- too much advertising as biz model for tech startups, Oliver likes to see more real pure business models build on revenues
- 50% funded seed companies will not survive
- too many companies on to few opportunities
- more people starting companies then people joining companies
- great talent pool in europe
- great examples serve as role model
- first 50 people building a team are fundamental!
- need more people joining teams than starting companies

Conclusion: it’s all about smart entrepreneurs and passionate people

Another of my favorite demo’s came from UK-based Trampoline Systems, led by reformed anthropologist Charles Armstrong. Charles showed us some of the most impressive to come in business applications using social networks, a lot of relevance and impressive visualisation technologies. Get a peek at trampolinesystems.com

Telepark showed us their personal web application solution telepark.wiki, using ajax-based wiki’s to improve collaboration. I see a lot of this kind of collaborative knowledge stores coming to market for the entreprise and small business.

Final presentation of Day 1 came from Andrew Grill of Seeker Wireless introducing their Seeker Zone, a Fixed Mobile Substitution Solution utilising available measurements on existing, unmodified mobile handsets, coupled with a understanding of the radio environment to provide low-cost, high accurancy, mass market mobile location without GPS. One application of their technology can support location-based billing, also called HomeZone as well as location search and mobile advertising. Andrew claimed their solution to be 50 times more accurate than cell-ID location solutions (in some cases). A paragraph to read twice to understand but do ask a demo when you meet Andrew, this is definately interesting and very different of what I have seen in this area before. If you haven’t noticed: location is a complex thing and remember GPS doesn’t work inside buildings

The evening all participants were invited to a nice cocktail and dinner in the Gran Hotel, ideal for all to improve their PRM - Personal Relationship Management, always handy in the days of Open Innovation business culture.

Eduardo Sciammarella from ProtoMobl kicked off day two with Fidg’t, unifying your online identities across multiple social networks. Fidg’t then provides updates from your network of friends… a kind of social networking adress book accessible across the Web, on the desktop, and from your mobile. Eduardo’s team brings more than 15 years of combined consumer product and software experience from Sony. Another company that understood it’s not about browsing, it’s about synchronisation! The demo was very simple & stupid straightforward integrating flickr & last.fm to see friends, pictures and know what they’re listening to. A web 2.0 unified platform, integrator of mutliple web 2.0 tools like blog/calendar/flickr/myspace/amazon/music/maps/etc, everything looked very easy on the phone demo (still in beta).

Webjam presented another solution of how to remix the web, the way you want, but more interesting was the interview with one of the key figures of the remixable web culture: Tariq Krim, Founder & CEO of Netvibes. I do not need to introduce you to Netvibes - if you don’t know about them, check it out yourself; below some scratches of my notes of the interview:

- needed better tool for himself - too many feeds, something to tie all gadgets together
- inspired by Rafat Ali in Wired on paidcontent.org (!)
- most popular link on del.icio.us on Day 1 of release (15.000 users)
- some days later 50.000 users, now reaching 10 million users
- netvibes created wiki through wikia to refine the product
- live translation tool, translations through communities
- work with 126 brands worldwide in 1,5 month
- everybody will need a syndication strategy for RSS feeds
- netvibes upto 10% of feedburner traffic (!)
- it’s all about personalisation
- interesting to see that google & others copy netvibes widgets, it grows the pie
- 400 million user potential, need quick and neat execution, available on every browser, keep the interface simple
- need a standard, open-source the technology
- it’s the widget economy, everybody ads value to everybody, give more sources out to the community
- spending zero on marketing 1st year, work through bloggers
- next generation of early adopters want simplicity

Tariq and Netvibes came right on time, it’s what users were waiting for, he and his team provided a simple and neat solution for a real need, a bright future ahead - chapeau!

More demo’s:

Yoono is an innovative Firefox add-on that instantly suggests similar sites, related blogs and people sharing the same interests while you are surfing - a bit similar to Stumble Upon. Facts: 700.000 people using Yoono in very short time!

Ekaabo develops social communities for special interest groups, one login to “jump” from one social community to the next with one content input module… With web 2.0 creating more then 10 “catch all” communities per day, no sincecure at all I would say. It’s called Communipedia, check it out here.

Another of my favorite presentatons and demo’s was done by Hans Peter Brondmo from Plum. Plum plans to become the way you collect and share all of the cool, interesting, and important stuff in your digital life, in a compliment of all the services you already use like Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Flickr, iTunes, etc. Very impressive marked in my notes: one click to collect and share in your plum collection, goal oriented collaboration, all about fun and self expression, exactly what I need! Still in private beta but opening soon to public, stay tuned here.

Moderated by the illuminated Thomas Crampton, another interesting panel on Mobile technology followed after the break with Scott Cooper, VP Mobility Solutions at Nokia; Augustín Núñez Castaín, Handsets & Services Innovation Director at Telefónica Móvilés España and Avi Shechter, CEO of Fring. Some notes on that panel:

- big intersection between web 2.0 conversations and being present in a network/community, this model comes now to mobility
- next generation mobile services will be monetised in different ways
- roaming call from Helsinki to NYC and back: roaming cost 2, 45 $ while through wi-fi 0,04$ (!)
- UGC (User Generated Content) is really changing the face of society
- it’s all about the value created around the ecosystem
- remember Google & Yahoo are not FREE, it’s a different way of paying, of collecting money from users
- new ways to collect money will arise, like targeted advertising, personal profiling, added-value services
- rich presence services - it’s the blend of technology and individual content creation
- right time to open up and have the right tarification plans for early adopters
- people want to pay for a good mobile service
- upload of personal content will become the next wave (personalisation, tuning of music, uploading your life with pictures, video…
- as for the operator: it’s a matter of where to put and manage the bandwith and how to garantuee a seamless integration for our users…
- sharing personal content, user-generated content
- adapted TV programs, still a need to find the right broadcast solution
- explosion of new buisness models will come, the opportunity for the operator is that it has the user’s trust
- there will be low-cost carrier and low quality but also room for high quality servcies, connectivvity, device managemenent, storage for contents, handset replacement, entreprise applications, etc…
- related to mobile 2.0 startups in need to connect to operators: operators have the experience, the support and the billing experience

And more startups in mobile!

Spanish startup Whisher provides a software application that you install on your computer and helps you get free WiFi access all around the world. Additionally it offers a range of tools and services that will take your wireless experience to a new level. AS FON, the Whisher network is powered by users sharing their WiFi. I’m a firm believer in urban wi-fi solutions just because I use my mobile phone about 80 % of my time near a wi-fi network (at home, office, friends’ places) - what needs to be done here is unifying wifi networks and create a seamless switching inbetween different networks such as 3G. I couldn’t really make out of the presentation how fast their netwok is deployed but Wisher is definately on my radar.

One of the most promising VoIP and Messaging applications for the mobile is definately Fring. The ease of use - try it here - and how they integrate Skype, Google Talk, IM, Twitter and SIP other clients in one application is really cool. Since Avi sended me an invitation from his phone to download Fring straight from the wap url , I have been using it regularly and it works really well. The only problem today with VoIP apps on the phone is that you never know who’s calling you, real time presence, ok I’m all for it but I would like to know who’s calling me, I just get too many unknown calls now, if you can’t judge their origin, urgency or importancy right away, it’s still a bit of a downer… that’s where the operators will come in soon I guess. I will be writing more on Fring here, all in all, it’s without a doubt one of THE next generation services that matters on mobile today.

Another real cool service comes from Paris-based Mobiluck, seeded by Flemish Big Bang Ventures, Olivier Chouraki showed me one of the sweetest mobile web apps I have seen lately. He send me an invitation by Bluetooth to connect to their community (asking gently my permission before , I created my profile in 2 minutes and could immediately see the other 64 people in my neighborhood - which showed how easy a good application can go viral It’s a mobile messaging and social networking service that just works and will be available on mobile and PC. I’m really interested how they will develop.

Last demo I saw was from Harald Neidhardt from Smaato, presenting a mobile advertising platform for the delivery of targeted in-application mobile advertising to Smartphones, an interesting niche in the lately crowded mobile advertising space. Harald had a real good presentation and showed that a good idea just works when it’s well executed, he anounced current 1 to 10M page impressions per month. Check it out!

The last interview was with “Entrepreneur of the Year” Martin Varsavsky, Founder and CEO of FON, I covered more on this interview already here and more on his projects here… I had to travel back early and missed the last panel. Sorry if I left anyone out, must be I really didn’t notice or that I will write about more in detail soon This was a really interesting event for me, I hope my notes are usefull for my readers too. Thanks to Chris and Cathy from Guidewire and Lucie-Anne from Ballou PR for inviting me!

Here’s my complete Flickr set of the event. Gosh, I realise this is a really long post, kudos to you if you got until here, you must be an analyst

07, adaptive media, affinitiz, Analysis, angels, Announcements, Awards, business angels, cinematic browsing, cocomment, convergence, CoolIris, criteo, ekaabo, eqo, europe, events, fidgt, Fring, G.ho.st, guidewire group, hiClip, im, IMinent, innovate, innovate!europe07, innovate europe 07, innovateeurope, innovation, instant messaging, lbs, location based, messaging, mobile, mobile 2.0, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Events, mobile marketing, Mobile RSS, mobile web, Mobiluck, Operators, pageflakes, perpetual innovation, personalisation, plum, protomobl, real time content, seeker wireless, skype, Smaato, sMeet, social media, spanish startups, startups, teleparkm todeka project, Trampoline Systems, Trends, Ubiquitous Acces, ubiquitous marketing, vc, venture capital, voxiq, wavestorm, we media, web 2.0, webjam, Webwag, wi fi, Wisher, Yoono, zaragoza

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.

Anil de Mello, blyk, convergence, dopplr, Entrepreneurship, events, fon, Friends, Fun, Hans Peter Brondmo, innovation, International Herald Tribune, Ivan Communod, Jonas Birgersson, labs2, Loic Le Meur, Marko Ahtisaari, martin varsavsky, Mashup, meneame, menorca, Michael Jackson, mobuzz, netvibes, Ola Ahlvarsson, plum, Result, Ricardo Galli, Rodrigo Sepulveda, skype, social media, spanish startups, startups, Tariq Krim, techtalk, Thomas Crampton, Torrenova2007, vpod.tv, we media, web 2.0, wi fi

For people like me swamped everyday in convergence (if you might wonder, it’s still happening), I suggest to read Convergence Culture (where old and new media collide) by Henry Jenkins. You might start twinkling hearing the word ‘convergence’ over and over again but this book describes, in a very clear way, the complexity of the process of convergence in media, technology and culture surrounding us. If you might doubt, here’s what Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution writes on this book:

“Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I’ve been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins’ clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of ‘electric media’ has become immensely more complicated in today’s many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins.”

Probably the best book I read on media, culture and technology changes since Smart Mobs.

Books, convergence, Convergence Culture, culture, Henry Jenkins, iphone, iptv, media, Mobile Content, Mobile Culture, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile RSS, mobile tv, mobile video, mobile web, podcasts, social media, Ubiquitous Devices, we media, web 2.0, wi fi

I have been playing lately with the Nokia N800 and I found it a great device, initiating quite often the WOW effect around me. At first I was sceptical (ah well, another device to carry that just doesn’t do everything yet!) but since I have start using the device - had it with me the last 10 days and used it in many different places in different contexts, my opinion changed from sceptical to enthusiast, well done Nokia!

When taking it out of the box, the first thing that surprised me was the impressive quality of the high-resolution touch screen (800 x 480 pixels) with up to 65,536 colors widescreen display, checked the demo video in full screen mode and yes, haven’t seen such a great quality on a ’small’ screen yet.

Start using the device is a piece of cake, the interface is really simple and easy to understand, everything shows or explains itself, the N800 discovered my WLAN immediately to start surfing the mobile web - nuance here (!) with this device you can surf ‘normal’ web pages, no need for mobile adapted .mobi style adapted web pages, this is the real stuff - check for yourself some shots I took from my blog, going to my Flickr pages, MyBlogLog and Twitter. Watching YouTube video’s (see corner right picture - video choice by one of my daughters!) on a portable device is a reality now, you can even view the vids full screen, great quality!

The N800 OS and applications are all build with Maemo, an open source - Linux based - development platform from Nokia. Kudos to the developer teams at Maemo, the N800 OS and applications I used are very stable, I didn’t had to reboot the device yet!

The RSS Reader (image below) is again very easy to use and consult your feeds, I could even view my vpod.tv video feed. This is a real need for me when travelling to stay updated, I can use both GPRS and WiFi connections.

Then I tried to setup a VoIP/IM service to be able to chat on the road. The N800 people have thought a lot about ‘easy of use’ to setup thing, it took me 2 minutes to setup the IM client using my Google talk or Jabber accounts, then I setup my Twitter account to be used from the device with Instant Messaging, besides web and mobile (see below). Note the virtual keyboard can also be displayed full screen and you can input text using handwriting recognition.

I also downloaded & installed the Gizmo VoIP & IM client for the N800, I’m looking forward to my first internet video chat, volunteers: please get in touch. I wrote on the Internet Calling service Gizmo and how it works on the N80 at Read/WriteWeb. I also wanted to play a bit more with Google Maps but for one reason or another the maps didn’t come out as I wanted - full screen map search would be great on this device! Maemo is working on a mapper client, I’m looking forward to start using that - you can check a video demo of how it’s going to look on the device.

Another practical use, specially for business people is the PDF Viewer with presentation possibilities, ideally for any powerpoint or keynote presentation to pdf and be viewed on the device (picture right), it’s great in person to person meetings, the screen quality is just so great. Adding some more functionality here would be realy usefull for people like me. If you own or buy a N800 now there’s a 1 month free subscription offer to use the Rhapsody audio/video streaming subscription service. Nokia and Real have teamed up to release a firmware update that adds Rhapsody support to the N800. I tried it out and I must say it works fine as on online subscription service: great artists and songs collection to choose from and very easy use to create your own playlists. I created a playlist with some of my favorite Motown music in a minute (see below), the sound quality of the device is quite impressvie too. The only thing here is that using Rhapsody is a great service to use as long as you have an good connection, meanwhile I prefer the MyStrands Social Player that works with the music I have on my device, hopefully soon available for the N800 too (disclosure here)

So, the verdict? I haven’t explored all the possibilities yet but I think I will carry this device with me for a while next to my mobile phone and laptop, I hate to carry too many devices all the time but I do see a lot of advantages to use the Nokia N800 especially while travelling, as long as I can find a WiFi around this is a gO!

NOTE: Tips & Tricks on the Nokia N800 at the N800 Blog, complete techspecs can be found here, view my N800 m-trends.org Flickr set here.

Analysis, Bluetooth, chat, Cool Devices, gtalk, im, internet calling, internet tablet, iphone, maemo, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Lifestyle, Mobile RSS, mobile video, mybloglog, n800, nokia, rhapsody, social media, twitter, Ubiquitous Devices, usability, video, wi fi

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 28