Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend yet another WebMontag session in Nürnberg this time. Somehow I’m getting a taste for it. The venue this time was not a concert hall, but a meeting room at NIK (de), an organization helping businesses and start ups (it’s more than that really). Free drinks, beamer, and a good crowd! The show started at 18:00 and people were already discussing stuff. I thought I was to late, but at 18:45 we started with a welcoming speech and going around the big table so everyone can introduce himself.
The first presentation by Tobias Lampe was about a new idea: WhatsYourPlace (de). Interesting because people can virtually buy a spot of the world through Google Maps for real money. So they become virtual owner and take care of the place online. It reminded me of the nutcase in The Netherlands selling parcels of the Moon, but this is not to become real owner thus, more a game with real money (like, poker?!?).
The project is pretty new, started November 2007, but I’m curious how it evolves. To bad it’s not open for everyone yet, only in German right now, a problem of lots of companies and startups: not thinking global while the medium, the internet, and the market is global.
Now, I forgot to ask if the backend is MySQL, weird. (It is written in PHP.)Second talk by Daniel Cieslar (de) was about Novinet’s new tool to make “nice”, funky, animated banners, on the fly, using a web application. I’m not sure if it’s really that new, but the tool behind looked pretty neat. It’s a bit like making images on the fly really. Well, I’m not for banners, but it keeps the world turning (no pun intended).
Another tool presented was Calcolo (de). A tool to make invoices, offers, kind of CRM thing. However, it’s downloadable, and consequently can run on localhost, and that makes it again interesting.
Then it was me. After folks got refreshments, I started presenting again MySQL’s history as a company and the Sun Microsystems deal. It was a bit like last week, but I left out the technical stuff, or didn’t go in detail. Instead I went on talking about MySQL Proxy which might be interesting for startups or for new projects. This was well received, but I didn’t do a very good job explaining it (partially because it was in German and the matter still a bit new). Next I picked up some discussions that went on during the other presentations. I exposed the attendees to my personal view on Web 2.0, which is “Been there, done that. Think about Web 3.0 or the next big thing too”. OK, one needs to make money and keep busy, so that’s still on going. But we can also start thinking a bit, or maybe it’s already to late? Some more discussions followed about scaling, backing up data and replication. Somehow I felt the need saying to take any data seriously. So making backups and tuning the database is very important. Not putting a bit money or energy is might make a startup a ticking time bomb.
My train-alarm was meanwhile going off on my mobile, so I had to leave when the “What’s Web 2.0 anyway?” discussion was ongoing.. But I left with a note: “Web 2.0 OK, but it’s only good when running MySQL!”. Well, I was joking, and they understood, lucky me! Well, it’s great people are choosing MySQL of course, but I’m not religious about it.
Yet another great WebMontag indeed!(And my first experience with Nürnberg the City, didn’t know it was so big!)