Let’s meet-up on SSWC

This summer I’m going to the first Social Web Camp in Sweden #SSWC09, just paid the entrance fee. Will you be there?

I guess I’ll hold a workshop on twitter-based-sensors or social reminders

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We are the news

I randomly clicked my way through to whatthetrend.com. I was looking for an explanation to a hashtag a lot of my German friends were using that day on Twitter (turned out to be a Mobile Web Camp in Germany).

Whatthetrend shows and explains why some themes are trending on Twitter. What WhatTheTrend is doing is actually describing WhatShouldBeInTheNews, what we are talking about.

Update: Robin from TechCrunch also writes about WhatTheTrend… I guess TC reads my blog? 🙂

Spotify API [finally!]

Today it happened, Spotify released an API. I’ve been waiting for this. Which apps we’ll be the first ones?

I’d like to code these two/three/four:

1. Auto-import new playlists to Facebook, dopplr-style.
2. Directly see which playlists your friends are creating.
3. See which songs your friends enjoy the most, or listen to the most in the last week.
4. Convert the Swedish Traxx-charts to a new weekly playlist.

What do you think? Which add-on services for Spotify do you need/want?

Inspired by Music and [computer]Games

Just returning form a weekend in Uppsala [another Swedish city dominated by students]. In the last year I’ve noticed that the typical “get-together and drink beer with old friends” more often than not now includes playing Rockband or Guitar Hero. Reading Jeff Howes great article in Wired about Guitar Hero and the music industry got me into thinking about the old days of Quest for Fame back in 1996: me and some friends enjoyed the game so much and were so inspired that we started our own rock band. I swapped my trombone lessons for guitar lessons, Foppa bought a bass and we started rehearsing every weekend at Tobias place (where the drums were). We never made it big, but we had a lot of fun.

I guess it worked the same way for me and computers, starting out with easy but thrilling games like Gods and Duke Nukem 3D

And the same thing happend, the desire not just to play and use but to build and create. Inspiration and creativity is important, maybe more important than business thinking

It’s all about input and output

Today I discovered (via @carlhoerberg) the great service Dial2Do. It let’s me updated me, my friends(sms/email) and twitter on the fly from the mobile without using the keypad. This is a service I’ve been wanting for a long, long time.

As a student in Sweden (yeah I’m back from my exchange year in Germany) I use my bicycle a lot, and it’s just too much of a hassle to text while biking. So, now with Dial2D0 I just call a swedish phone number and say:

-“TEXT”

-Who would you like to text?

-“CARL”

-Texting Carl

*BEEP*

-“The party starts at 5, my place”

*BEEP*

-That’s done. What would you like to do? /End of Call

This is brilliant, since the input devices (keyboard, touch screen) are too small on mobiles to achieve rapidly typing while doing other things at the same time. The next step is to disconnect the dial-up step. OK, pressing a speed-dial key is not too much effort, but calling rates vary and data rates are rapidly decreasing (converging to flat rate in Sweden).

Another hot feature is the “add to calendar” feature. Imagine your all-synced-calenders (google calander, PC-calendar, mobile phone-calendar) which you can update on the fly, and the events that you add are automatically added to the calendars of your affected friends/co-workers. Sweet!

The service still has some initial problems (like twitter posts getting mixed-up).

(Yeah, I’m back blogging! I’ll post twice a week. Additionally I post every day/second day from my mobile on posterous (rhodin.posterous.com, mostly pictures from everyday life and in Swedish), and a couple of times a day on twitter (@rhodin [sv,en,de]).

Let’s start Open Coffee Club in Linköping!

As you’ve seen, I like meeting startups and the people who make em’. One of the concepts I liked in Germany was Open Coffee Club, which I’m now “importing” to Linköping. Therefore I’m now starting Open Coffee Club here in Linköping (yeah, I’m back form the exodus in Germany) together with Tore Friskopp.

We’ll meet for the first time on sunday this week, more info on the open coffee blog

Amsterdam TechCrunch meetup

So, I made a short tourism and networking trip to Amsterdam in the beginning of the week. Van Gogh museum, Anne Frank museum and Amsterdam city museum are all very interesting, but it was nothing compared to meeting startups from all over the Netherlands. TechCrunch UK arranges such meetups all around Europe.

The nice houses in Amsterdam, picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/

Some of the ppl/startups I met:

Robert Gall from wakoopa.com they try to make software social. It’s like RescueTime but instead of aiming on productivity they focus on sharing apps with your friends. Which applications are my friends using and spending time on?

Philippe Theunissen from WiseLine.com. WiseLine aggregates all your published web-items in one long Lifeline.

Richard J Fox from servepath, providing hosting-services (gogrid.com)

Jelle de Bruin from AppAppeal, which is a user generated web-based app-reviewing-site. They are looking for freelancers, so if you want to make some money reviewing webapps, this is your chance!

Jeroen Peeters, creating websites (consultancy-based)

Joop Dorresteijn from thenextweblog. We live in a small world, Joop is one of the creators of Open Coffee Club in Sweden and as I want to start OCC in Linköping, it was a great chance to discuss.

Marcel van Brienen from Gemzies. Gemzies could be one of the more interesting concepts from the meetup since it tackles a important question: Facebook and other socialnetworks are great at connecting me with people I already know, but not with the people I would like to get to know and it’s not connecting me with the interests I have. (Facebook Groups/Pages is a joke!!) On Gemzies articles like “Vincent Van Gogh” and “Porsche” shows content built by other users (text/video/img…the usual). As of today there is no long-tail effect at all (200 articles..) and I guess reading the discussion-list on the wikipedia article gives just as good or better networking-effects=) But the site is in Alpha.

The above questions is something I’m thinking more and more about; connecting to people based on interests and connecting to the people I want to know but don’t know as of today. Your thoughts?

OpenCoffee Club – Köln/Cologne #2

Recap on my first OCC in Cologne last Friday

Andreas Gerads from EASN.de coordinated the second OpenCoffee Club in Cologne. OpenCoffee is a good way to meet others interested in Startups, web/mobile/what-have-you technology. Some of the nice people I met:

• Philipp Strube from MyPeak. He’s building a platform for creating online-commercials in a snap, together with his flatmate. + They’re searching for a marketeer.
• Leonardo Dilella is building a Mobile Location Based Community. They are going to concentrate on phones with GPS and they’re building it native for all the platforms (I guess that means Symbian, Iphone, BlackBerry, Microsoft Mobile, J2ME and so on..)

All in all, it’s was a great experience and I’ll certainly show up on the next OpenCoffee in Cologne, big thanks to Andreas!

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Well, it’s Saturday so I’ll give you a good interview to listen to here

Blog blogging

I’ve just been busy doing other things:

• twitter: http://twitter.com/rhodin
• learning Python for a project which aims to improve how you read things on the Internet (RSS) together with your friends. Plan to do this on the Google App Engine.
• Designing a new type of bag. I won’t keep you updated on this one until we have the IPRs, which is going to take time.
• Travel around Europe, meet friends and relatives as well as attending nice events

And occasionally studying (Experimental physik (Physik IV), Verteilte Systeme, Mobile Multimedia, Statistik, Russisch)

The best tasting Startup just got better

Imagine meeting 12 new individuals at three different Meals in just one evening. That’s the possibility the German Startup RudiRockt gives you. It works like this: you and a friend sign-up on the site and choose an Event in your neighbourhood. You’ll be assigned a Course (Starter, Main-Dish or Dessert) which you cook together with your friend. Four other – for you until now unknown – individuals will come to your place and eat the course and after that you go on to the next course and again you meet 4 new persons. After the Dessert there is a party for all the people that was cooking during the evening

RudiRockt is the organization keeping it all together. The web-system is very able;

• to attend an Event you have to live inside of the borders of the event (usually some radius from the City-center), this is handled directly from Google Maps
• the routes for all the participants are calculated automatically and are made in such a fashion that you don’t have to travel all the way through the city between the courses
• after attending the Event the folks you dined with will appear as your “cooking friends” on the site, which is a good way to get the contact details for the interesting people you’ve met during the Event.
• No RudiRockt-Events in your town? Start your own! Everybody (in theory) could be an organizer.
• Scalable. The Events here in Aachen has been scaled to more than 1000 participants.
• Living in a Student dorm with just one kitchen and more then one team wanting to participate? No problem, the system takes care of this and assigns different courses to the teams.

Most important, it’s a very nice way to meet new people in real life – and keep contact online. A nice breed of online/offline-experience.

There are of course a lot of questions yet to be answered such as profitability and emerging out of just student events as well as scaling outside of Aachen; as far as I’ve seen the only really big events are here in Aachen. Then there is – as always with German startups – question of internationalization. So far it’s only available in German.

As I happen to know the team behind the concept I know that they’ve been working hard to get the new version of the system up and running. Take a look at it here.

Andi and Christoph demonstrates the whole thing in a video. (Auf Deutsch, of course!)