Miscellaneous

Tagcrumbs at next09

next09

We have been selected to present Tagcrumbs at the start-up track of the next conference in Hamburg. The next conference put on by SinnerSchrader is one of the most important networking and trend conferences within the European web industry.

Share Economy is this year’s theme of next09. This term is shaped by the economy theorist Martin Weitzman. His basic idea: The more we share our success with others, the more we profit ourselves.

We think this term fits perfectly for Tagcrumbs, due the collective creation of places and our openness.

I will be in Hamburg on May 5-6th, contact me on twitter (@sashthebash) if you want to meet.

Tagcrumbs Just Launched

About 9 months ago we had the idea of a social placemarking tool. Today we lauched it, Tagcrumbs is online. We had a lot of fun developing it and hope you will have even more fun using it.

Mark places of your interest, share them, recommend them to your friends. Tagcrumbs is the delicious for places. You can leave small crumbs where you have been, just like Hansel and Gretel did it. But they are digital, persistent and easier to organize. And nobody will eat them :).

Take a look at the slides for more details and start marking places now on www.tagcrumbs.com.

Tagcrumbs is Social Placemarking

Social Placemarking

More and more people ask us what Tagcrumbs is about. We are about placemarks - personal places that you would like to remember and share.

Let’s look at two use cases to illuminate our point:

Lisa, a young professional, is doing a variety of business trips to beautiful cities like Paris, Berlin or London. She uses Tagcrumbs to remember the location and the services offered in her favorite coffee shops - the ones with a cozy atmosphere and free wifi. As she loves Thai food (it shouldn’t be too expensive though) she remembers those places and goes for a quick walk after lunch visiting a sight-seeing spot close to where she is. By following co-workers doing similar trips, Lisa sees the city through their eyes at the same time. She’s already looking forward to her next trip.

Edoardo moved to San Francisco recently and you are planning to visit him soon. You know that by then he’ll know the coolest places in town, amazing spots to take pictures (he’s a photographer), the best outdoor events (he loves rock-climbing) and the club where the crowd rocks longest. He created a collection of placemarks organized by tags and places, to share with you and his other visitors.

It’s your turn now. Get creative, think about different places you feel connected to (place of your first kiss, best hostel in the world, an amazing view at a hiking trip, … ), what they mean to you and how you would best remember and share them - and let us know about it!

So, to sum it up (for you web folks): it’s like social bookmarking (ah, del.icio.us, oh, tagging) but for places. We like to call it social placemarking - storing, organizing and sharing of personal places enriched with your memories and messages.

You can follow our progress on our startup blog.

Our Startup Blog Launched

I am still working heavily on the internet startup and the product I wrote about earlier. We are getting closer and closer to the launch.

We created a separate blog to keep you up to date. Check out our blog at:

blog.tagcrumbs.com


Why There Has Been No More New Content

It has been over a month since the last post and I have a bad conscience for not posting any news on the blog. Plenty of things have changed for me in the last months.

I quit my job at Hewlett-Packard in Germany and will leave the company end of June. Besides still being at HP in the daytime, I am working in a small but awesome team on a mobile-focused startup in my spare time. This is why there have been no frequent updates to the blog. After leaving HP I will fully concentrate on this new challenge. Be prepared for the upcoming launch of our startup this summer! Until then the amount of posts on the blog will probably stay low.

While creating our startup we encounter a lot of useful information on mobile that’s worth to check out. We will post reports, infos and general shorter thoughts in our new Public Skype Chat. Everybody is invited to join the discussion around mobility!

Facilitate Wordpress Updates By Using Subversion

Leap
Photo by Thriol

A new version of WordPress is frequently released to plug holes and to fix bugs. Due to security considerations most web applications cannot update themselves as easily as desktop applications can. I was afraid this means I have to go download each new version and move all custom files such as themes, plugins and configuration options.

Fortunately there is an easier solution! If you are having command line access to your web server and a Subversion client installed you can just checkout the latest version of WordPress from the Automattic repository in seconds. Subversion knowledge helps but is not necessarily required. Detailed instructions can be found in the Wordpress Documentation.

The leap to a new updated WordPress is shorter now and I don’t mind if new versions are released weekly!

OpenID Commenting Now Enabled

OpenID

As anticipated by TechCrunch DE for a long time already, OpenID is welcoming funkfeuer.net to the club besides other important industry players such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM and Verisign. This blog will of course not be providing OpenIDs, but from now on you can authenticate yourself at funkfeuer.net (and about 10,000 other websites) with your OpenID when writing comments.

To get OpenID authentication running I just had to download and activate a Wordpress plugin. There have been some hiccups but after disabling the Live Commenting feature of the K2 theme everything is working now. Thanks WordPress!

Top Ten Reasons Why I Am Blogging

Compared to most I am starting to blog a little late - in particular because I have already been online and interested in the Internet for such a long time. To quickly catch up with all old-established bloggers here is a super trendy “Top Ten Reasons Why I Am Blogging” list:

10. Since being a Mac user I somehow have so much more free time.

9. To practice my English and writing skills.

8. Ohh and to help me to stay longer on the Mac and shorter on the Wii.

7. To have a technology playground and platform for my projects.

6. Because I can practice marketing by evangelizing funkfeuer.net.

5. As a long-term blog reader I now want to engage myself and give back to you and the community!

4. Focus on a specific area. I know quite a good deal about many many things in the IT and computer world but now truly want to become an expert in one of the areas I enjoy most. This blog will keep me focused.

3. Build knowledge for me and others. Writing about or teaching things makes me think much more actively about them than just skipping over it.

2. Because learning by conversations with others is more effective and interesting than learning alone.

1. Get to know interesting people and get interesting people to know me.

Broadcasting Started

Radio Beacon
Photo by Thomas Hawk

Three, Two, One… funkfeuer.net is on air! Welcome to my new blog.

I will write about mobility trends and development techniques for the (mobile) Web. As I am living in Germany there will be a focus on mobility and especially mobile web trends in Germany and on how Germany is evolving compared to other countries. This blog will be about mobile services and applications and only giving attention to the latest greatest gadgets if they are enabling those services. Many other excellent blogs like Gizmondo or Engadget are writing about devices - none I found so far is covering the Mobile Web in Germany.

I am excited to get this rolling! Please come back in the future or subscribe to this blog via RSS so that I can keep you up to date on the latest mobile happenings in Germany. Posts can be expected on a weekly basis.