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.
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.
