I am in Tokyo for one week now. Everything is great so far, getting around is no problem as all the metro signs are also displayed in English. In almost all other places there is no English translation, Japanese only, and I feel like an illiterate. But this what makes any trip very interesting :).
I decided to visit a Japanese exhibition on mobile technologies called Wireless Japan yesterday that took place at Tokyo Big Sight. English was barely spoken but it was an exciting and informative event, even without understanding Japanese, as I was able to look at many new electronic gadgets and mobile services.
Challenge for next week: Try Japanese coworking.
It was never planned but a friend of mine with a corporate job at a big German car manufacturer is sent to Japan for a couple of months to improve some processes at a Japanese subsidiary.
I will take that opportunity and make a 6-week trip to visit him in Tokyo from July to middle of August. I will live with him in his paid apartment (thanks!), work on different projects during the daytime and in the evenings and on the weekends we will discover Tokyo and Japan.
It will be an awesome experience to discover Japan. Please get in contact with me if you have any tips for events happening at that time that are mobile, web or startup related.
さようなら
I was very busy while working on our former startup Tagcrumbs and almost never updated the blog. The development of the platform, the iPhone application and other work left me hardly any time. So in this post I want to provide a short wrap-up about some of the things I should have blogged about.
Mobile World Congress Barcelona
Thanks to Ewan from Mobile Industry Review and Blackberry I was able to go to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the third time as I received an invitation to attend the event without any costs. 600 Euro for a ticket would have been too much for our startup budget.
The event was – as in the previous years – very exciting. It had a hall that was completely dedicated to mobile application development on many different platforms (“App Planet”). I was able to attend many great talks on mobile development from Blackberry, Sony, Vodafone, Motorola and Google. The WIP Jam on the last day made a perfect end of the App Planet.
Besides the main event I attended many other great meetups in the evenings, such as the final of the Navteq Challenge 2010, Mobile Sunday, the Mobile Premier Awards, GoMo News Blender, Swedish Beer Party and Fring & FON’s Late Night Party.
BW Goes Mobile
The iPhone application I created for Tagcrumbs received a “Mobile Talent Award” in a competition called “BW Goes Mobile” that was held by the local government. Unfortunately I had an important meeting in Berlin so I was not able to attend the event where the winners were announced.
Deutsche Startups
Quite some industry blogs asked us to contribute guest posts on mobile development and marketing of mobile applications. I wrote a German article for a major German Blog called “Deutsche Startups”. The article covered the basics on what time, knowledge and resources are required to create an iPhone application for your own startup.
Many people rambled in the comments why I suggested to not use 3rd party tools like MonoTouch, DragonFire or Adobe Flash CS 5 to create your applications, as Apple could block them at any time. My advice seemed to be correct, just about 2 months later Apple changed its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement and prohibited the use of any such third party tools.
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
OpenID Commenting Now Enabled
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!