Last Wednesday evening we headed over to Fat City on 314 11th St. in San Francisco to attend the SF New Tech September Meetup. A lot of people (more than 150) did the same. It was crowded, so many had to stand at the bar or behind the seats during the presentations that started after 1/2 hour of networking.

There were about five product presentations:

• Wellnesslog
  A diary system for people with medical conditions that require keeping track of what happens, so this info can be shared with a doctor after a while.
• Conduit a platform for building online communities via toolbars
• SezWho “SezWho aims to be a distributed rating and reputation system for all user generated content.”
• us4real.com
  real estate website / google maps mashup
• CrazyMenu “Crazymenu makes eating lunches easy as pie through a set of applications and patent pending tools and technologies that connects restaurants to office workers, and enables them to make the most of the short lunch hours.”

Honestly, getting hit by product pitches for 2 hours and paying 10 bucks for that is not our favorite. Drinks (non alc.) were 2 bucks. The special part of the evening was “60-Second Soapbox”. Everybody who had something to announce (job offer, new product etc.) could grab the mic for 60 seconds and tell it to everybody…many people that are looking for developers there (as usual).

Networking after the talks was the best part (also as usual). We met some interesting people like Martin (CEO of Tangler), David (SupercoolSchool.com) and Alex (Altrupreneur Center).

After submitting a position paper, today I got my invite to the Mobile Ajax workshop in Mountain View in late September (28th). I am really looking forward to this since it is one of the rare events that focus exclusively on Ajax on mobile devices and many important and interesting people that are involved in this topic are likely to be present. It’s also the first workshop (= not conference) on this topic. So I am very excited and happy to have the chance to attend this event and meet everybody.

My position paper is about the Frost Ajax library. The only other position paper I have come accross is the one from Mark Baker of Coactus Consulting. It’s entitled ”The best mobile Ajax application is the one that’s never written”, so there’s probably gonna be some interesting discussions.

I just found an interesting article about Ajax development for Windows Mobile. It looks like the Microsoft crowd is really into Ajax on their mobile platform, which makes sense…after all makeing a platform appealing to developers is a good thing for the platform. The approach is however different from ours - Microsofties (can you call them like this?) tend to rely on their own tools, namely ASP.net, not open source based tools and libraries.

The article mentions a nice hint for debugging directly on the device: turning on the display of script errors in IE mobile. This is achieved by editing a registry entry, which can be done e.g. with the PHM Registry Editor, a freeware tool. The registry key to change should be this:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

There you need to add a DWORD value called ShowScriptErrors and set its value to 1.

The Article also describes how to enable cross-site access for XMLHttpRequest, which might be useful for development purposes, not so much for end-user apps. And there’s also a workaround for a JSON relates quirk in IE mobile, which does not allow cross-site JSON scripts to be executed if the browser is in “One Column” view mode - I decided not to think about the “why ?” in this case, probably it’s a weird bug.

So make sure you check out the article if you’re interested!

We are constantly monitoring the web for blog posts about Mobile Ajax and I came across an interesting one. I want to use this occasion to reflect on some of the points in Ben’s post on Technology Evangelist in which he discusses Ajax as a future platform for phone applications and in which he brought up 11 random points on the topic and I want to comment on some of them here (don’t want to spam his comments):

On August, 18, we attended the BarCampBlock. Although it was almost two weeks ago, I still feel like I should post about it, because it was our first BarCamp and also its anniversary (block)party. The BarCampBlock took place in Palo Alto - at the place it started. We went by bus from San Francisco to Palo Alto and it took us almost 2 hours. But it was worth it. Almost 1,000 participants attended this year. Amazing!
We met so many interesting people and of course the guys from Citizen Space :) Thanks go out to Tara, Chris, Liz, Hillary and anybody I can’t think of now, who all did a great job by organizing such a great event. The center of this whole event was the office of Socialtext, where there were an impressively huge wall with different discussion sessions. You could either open a new session yourself or join an existing one. Socialtext already hosted the first BarCamp in 2005.

At 7 pm the actual BarCampBlock Party started with free drinks and food at the Blue Chalk Cafe right after the DemoCamp which featured many interesting demos from various companies. Among many interesting people we also met Tim there, who started the Webmontag (Webmonday) in Germany.

All in all: great event, great atmosphere, many interesting people, we’re looking forward to the next one!

I found an very interesting article about mobile social networks on mashable.com. It is about a report of M:Metrics, which indicates that mobile social networks are growing worldwide and that they actually can be seen as a driver for mobile web usage in Europe as well as in the US.
By the numbers:
M:Metrics is reporting that in June 12.3 million consumers were accessing a social network via their mobile phones in the US and Western Europe. The US had the largest number of users (7.5 million mobile subscribers), followed by Italy (1.3 million), then the UK (1.1 million) and then Spain, Germany and France.
The most visited mobile social networks:
In June the most visited mobile social networks in the US and the UK were:
- MySpace (3.7 million mobile users in the US and 440,000 in the UK)
- Facebook (2 million mobile users in the US and 307,000 in the UK)
- Bebo (288,000 mobile users in the UK)
- YouTube (901,000 mobile visits in the US)

In France, Germany, Italy and Spain the most popular mobile social network was MSN’s Live Spaces, which is only available off-portal. That means users were accessing this service through their mobile web browser and not through their operator’s site.

Just a quick note to anybody who wants to reach our email addresses at PavingWays - they might be bouncing back due to a server crash earlier. We’re in the process of transferring the site to a new host and DNS and MX entries are still interfering with the old and new server settings.

So best way to reach us is by calling or sending a mail to my gmail address (if you have it ;) ).

Should be resolved during the next couple of hours though…

The last couple of days we spent some time at Borders, a great bookstore. You have a really broad selection of books there and a cozy coffee shop inside, where you can read or do your work. I also love Amazon. So, the following list contains books from both retailers :)

My list of great books that in my opinion really help starting your (web) business:

• Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start
• Guy Kawasaki: How to Drive Your Competition Crazy
• Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point
• James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds
• Mark Hughes: Buzzmarketing
• Jessica Livingston: Founders at Work
• John L. Nesheim: High Tech Start Up
• Chris Anderson: The Long Tail
• Keith Sawyer: Group Genius
• Chris Murray: The Marketing Gurus

If you have read or know another must-read book, let me know!

Last Tuesday we went to a BayCHI meeting in Palo Alto to hear Guy Kawasaki’s presentation about ”How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” (Yes, tongue in cheek here).

First of all Guy Kawasaki is a great presenter - we really enjoyed his presentation. He has the right mix between presenting and entertaining :)
So, what was this headline filled with so many buzzwords all about?
In his talk Guy introduced his new startup Truemors. Well, at the first look you may think “What’s the point of this site?”. To be honest, when I saw Truemors a couple of days before the event, I was also a bit confused and did not really see the value of this website. But after that event I changed my mind…

Last Monday we’ve been to the Mobile Monday at the AOL building in Mountain View. Too bad that we missed the Demo sessions (we arrived a bit late). But still we met some interesting (mobile oriented) people there, like Donnie Flood from AdMob or Tim Kay from Boopsie, and many more.

As expected the Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley was more casual than it is in Germany and we definitely met more mobile startups here. We liked it very much. Not too much organization (no registration in advance), pizza for everybody, good location and you could get in touch with people easily.

Still, the Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley has not as many attendees as its German counterpart (but again, the crowd is differently structured). But it seems a better place for showing around your mobile apps, even if your are not a big player in the industry. Great event! More!