In my presentation at the XML 2006 conference in Boston I tried to show that AJAX - as a technology in part based on XML - is a useful and promising tool to create web applications on mobile devices.

To emphasize this, I updated our event finder application that we had used on this year’s Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. The application basically is a website for mobile phones that shows the currently running events of a trade show or conference. In the updated version for the XML 2006 conference I added some AJAX stuff to show and test it’s usefulness:

We went to Boston for the XML Conference 2006 from December 5-7. I got invited by Michael Smith from Opera to do a co-presentation together with him and so I prepared a talk on the Mobile Web and XML, mostly focusing on Mobile AJAX, but more on that in a separate post.

The first day of the conference featured a Vendor PechaKucha Night, which Michael had proposed to the conference committee and which he moderated together with me. I want to share some insights to this experience here.

The concept of Pecha Kucha is pretty simple - it is a special type of presentation where every speaker brings 20 slides and gets 20 seconds to present every slide. This results in 6 minutes and 40 seconds of presentation time and thus helps to keep the audience interested - add the fun the audience has when the presenter runs out of time on a slide and some free beer sponsored by JustSystems and you have an interesting and funny night.
Many of the presenters handed in their slides in the last half hour before the presentations started, there were also some last-minute changes to the order of presenters. As a result the first presentation started and ended after 10 seconds, because the presenter had handed in the wrong slides - we continued with the second presenter - it was really funny.

Additional to co-moderating the Vendor PechaKucha Night at the XML Conference in Boston I also co-presented a talk on Mobile AJAX and the Mobile Web in general at the XML 2006 conference in Boston together with Michael Smith from Opera.

This was my first presentation at a conference except a lightning demo at this year’s XTech conference about CarCulatr (price finder for used cars to demo mobile AJAX using Opera Platform) and I have to say it could not have been worse…

This post is a little late, but busy as we are I couldn’t make it earlier. Still I wanted to share some more insights and experiences we acquired while being in the Silicon Valley in November/December. So here’s a short summary of 2 interesting things we did on Nov. 29.

On Friday, November 17th, we were at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, which is a nice and impressive complex of buildings. We were at building one, the Microsoft conference center (pic below). The event started pretty early with an extensive breakfast buffet and the usual networking.
What was different though was the crowd of attendees: more formal and not as “geeky” as what we had experienced in former events. It was also harder to get in touch with other people than before, probably because everybody seemed to be really keen on talking to the VCs and the representatives from the other big companies (cf. title).

After a week busy working on “legacy” projects we were able to attend the second SF beta on Thursday. It was a quite interesting evening, because of the setting, the people we met and the way the evening was organized (by Christian Perry from Zaptix) .

SF beta took place in a club called ”Shine Lounge” on Mission Street. So there was a security guy on the door and a bar inside and everything you would expect from a club.

Last Thurdsday we attended an interesting “unconference” in San Francisco, called ”Web 2point2 - the point is still the people”. It was organized by Chris Heuer and the other folks from the Social Media Club. Taking place in the Microsoft Building on 1 Market St. the event, being an unconference, did not follow the usual scheme and it was more like a workshop than a conference.

We started with going around the room introducing ourselves one after the other. There was another German company there - interesting!
After that everybody from a startup company (about 50% of all the people there) sat on chairs arranged in a circle, everybody else in another circle around the former one. Then every couple facing each other had 5 minutes to talk about what everybody does. Although it felt a little weird at first, we soon realized that this was a good training for telling other people quickly what we are trying to do. Therefore this method of networking was a good success and we met many interesting people.

We kicked off our stay in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley with the Mobile 2.0 event organized by the folks that normally organize the Mobile Monday here in the Bay Area. There were around 300 people attending, the location was great as was the lunch and the free drinks afterwards.
So what does Mobile 2.0 stand for? As Dan Appelquist described it, the concept or the idea behind this term is: “mobile web connected apps on the mobile platform”.

The whole event, apart from the keynotes, was held in panel discussions with panelists also taking some time for presenting on their own. The most interesting topics for us obviously was everything related to the mobile web and to browser based applications of which there were not many to be seen. The highlights were the presentations and demos of:

The PavingWays team, will take part in a hot event that will take place in San Francisco on November 6, 2006. The “mobile2.0 conference” is a one-day event organized and hosted by Daniel Appelquist (Mobile Monday London), Mike Rowehl (Mobile Monday Silicon Valley) and Gregory Gorman (The Open Group).

We actually planned to be in San Francisco from the middle of November, but re-scheduled because of this event. Michael(tm) Smith form Opera will also be there - I met him at this year’s Xtech conference in Amsterdam where I presented the CarCulatr - our first mobile AJAX web application based on the Opera Platform.

We’re eager to meet as many people as possible from the mobile web industry, for example Tony Fish, since we recently purchased his book on “Mobile Web 2.0” (written with Ajit Jaokar) we purchased recently.

Please get in touch with us, if you wanna meet up during or after the conference - we’ll be in San Francisco until early December. After that we will head towards Boston where I will attend this year’s XML Conference - this time as co speaker, but more on that later on.

A little while ago Team IEMobile posted an interesting article on their blog about changes in the User-Agent string that is sent to the web server when the browser requests a document.
The browser of the Windows Mobile OS will undergo a rather radical change concerning this browser identification string that is often used by web developers to detect the browser in order to take advantage of it’s unique features. Unfortunately the schema of the User-Agent string was not clear to many website creators in the past. Even the MSN website had problems of detecting the mobile IE correctly.

The browser of current and older Windows Mobile versions sends two different User-Agent strings, depending on what platform the OS runs on:

• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)
• Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; Smartphone; 176x220)

Unfortunately the User-Agent string may or may not contain certain parts, for example the resolution information or even the “MSIE 4.01”. Therefore the only sure shot you can have at detecting the older and current Mobile Internet Explorers correctly is by detecting both ”Smartphone” or ”PPC” and ”Windows CE”.

However this will change with the new version of the browser that comes out on new devices sporting the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.
For new devices the IE Mobile User-Agent string will look like this: