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.

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.

It was a fun ride with many ups and downs. In the end, the problem was that it was too hard to make a living with the service. Of course we thought about alternative ways of making money besides an ad-based revenue model. But further bootstrapping was not an option, as we were running out of money, so we decided to write a business plan based on the most promising alternative we saw in making money in the mobile LBS space that allowed us to leverage as much of our previous work as possible. We were not able to raise enough money to execute our plan. Was the plan based on a bad idea? The founders too young and inexperienced in the mind of the investors? Was it bad to try a split between consumer and business services? Were we too impatient or at the wrong place of the earth? We don’t know and we will probably never find out.

Nevertheless, it was a great experience to bootstrap a company ourselves and I learned so much in the process, that I don’t regret doing it at all. Some might consider this a “failure”, for me it was just a large experiment and a huge learning experience. I am pretty sure the day will come where I will found another company. And that next time, I will know many things already that will improve chances of financial success.

It will take some time until the next startup is due. I need to shift to a lower gear first for some time to recharge myself and my bank account. Working so hard and long on Tagcrumbs every day hurt my personal health and fitness. That’s why I will work as a freelancer for some months or maybe even years before committing to anything else. I have the startup fiver, but freelancing as a technology consultant or software engineer will be a good replacement drug, as I really value being independent. I will write more about my future plans in upcoming posts.

Finally, I want to say thank you. First of all a big thanks goes to Ben and Cornelius for founding the company with me, sharing all the ups and downs, and for the many sessions we had on all kinds of different topics. The next thank you goes to all our partners that supported us during the time. Last but not least I want to thank all of our users and other supporters.

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.