SIME presents: Filip & Fredrik

You don't have to be interested in VC:s, Ajax, gadgets or anything 2.0 to enjoy SIME 2007. Scandinavia's funniest guys are back, and they will be hosting the SIME Awards 2007.

Above is a great moment of Filip & Fredrik-humor: the duo singing hymns with the former Prime Minister Göran Persson. More of them on their MySpace profile.

Congratulations to Jaiku

Congratulations to Jyri, Petteri, and team at Jaiku for the Google acquisition. For those of you reading this blog, you know that these Finns have always been SIME-favorites. Jaiku will be working with the Google developers to expand its technology into new, and hopefully, useful services. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, Jaiku has decided to close new user sign-ups for now. Existing users can still invite new friends, though.

More about the company: Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. The service helps you stay in touch with friends and family by allowing you to post updates of what you are up to. By inviting friends you can see and comment on each others' updates and activities.

SIME is proud that Google would opt for Scandinavian Jaiku and not Twitter. More on that aspect of the deal at Mashable.

Tools for mashups

I will be reporting from the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, starting Oct 17. Today it was announced that the event will use the Popfly Mashup Aggregator to give the participants a consolidated view of what’s going on using popular internet services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Popfly, still in a private alpha, is designed to allow non-professional programmers and hobbyists to build mash-ups, gadgets, Web sites and applications using pre-built “blocks.”

The interactive design surface enables you to drag and drop these “blocks” and connect them together to build your own application. As of now, there are 40 of these Web-programming blocks from which they can choose, including Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Virtual Earth and news service blocks. Popfly users can tie together these data-source, transformation and display blocks to create their own customized mash-ups.

I like the explanation to the name “Popfly”. From the FAQ: “Left to our own devices we would have called it ‘Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition’, but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly”.

Thanks to Robert Folkesson, Developer Evangelist at Microsoft, Sweden for explaining the technical aspects of Popfly on his blog (in Swedish).

Achtung Baby!

This year we have received a great deal of interest from members of the German press. In the SIME audience there will also be several representatives from the German Internet industry, such as the entrepreneur and SIME06 speaker Nico Lumma.

I asked Ulrike Reinhard, who will be reporting from SIME07 for Süeddeutsche Zeitung to name a few of the most interesting entrepreneurs acording to her view. Here is her list:

* Boris Wasmuth, Gameduell (gaming community), Berlin.

* Till Behnke, betterplace.org, Berlin. (Enables people working to escape poverty and create a better future for themselves to connect with new opportunities.) Ulrike: "They are just about launching! Great concept and very good people.

* Axel Schmiegelow, serial entrepreneur and founder of internet agency Denkwerk Group, Cologne

* Sören Stamer, CoreMedia (social software), Hamburg. In 2005, Red Herring magazine ranked CoreMedia as one of the 100 most innovative non-listed technology companies in Europe.

* Axel Pfennigschmidt, member of the creative network Pulk, Berlin. Ulrike: "more than internet, very good"

* Dieter Rappold, Managing Director, Knallgrau New Media Solutions, Vienna, Austria.

P S Don't forget to watch out for the Swedish überkids of music sharing service SoundCloud in Berlin, Eric Wahlforss and AlexanderLjung. D S

SIME@Virtual Worlds in San Jose

Beata with Ralph Koster, CEO Areae and creator of Ultima Online.

Over 1,000 participants and 100 speakers have gathered at the Virtual Worlds event in San Jose Oct 10-11. The big discssion has been on how to blend the stickiness and ease of use of social networks, such as Facebook, with the rich user experience of a virtual world.

Many of the participants are here to further explore how to extend their product or service with a virtual environment. Lego for example announced that they are creating the Lego Universe, a proprietary world to be realeased Aug 2008.

The web is going 3D faster than anyone could have imagined. It is a bit of a cultural shock to see a speaker like Sandy Kearny, Global Director, 3D Internet, IBM (!) talk about the challenges of the conceptual age and referring to Dan Pink's "A Whole New Mind" as her new bible of creative thinking. She also admitted that "it took IBM 8 years to understand e-business, but only 8 months to get 3D Internet".

Now I am off to listen to the panel on "Kids and Teen worlds" where Mattias Miksche, CEO of the paperdoll heaven Stardoll, and Sampo Karjalainen, founder of Habbo Hotel is participating. Second Life may be at the center of attention at an event like this, but Stardoll is still three times larger! Way to go, girls!

The conference jet-setters meet at Stream

Greetings from the travelling conference jet-setters Ola, Nikolaj, Esther & Co. This weekend the brains of the Internet industry gathered at the Stream Event, which was held at Club Med in Athens. Such a hard life... Thanks to Guido van Nispen for the pix.



The conference agenda?




Grand SIME Master Ola Ahlvarsson and his conference hangarounds.



Typical conference attire?



Esther with a cool laptop.



Thomas Madsen Mygdal of 23.

SIME goes mobile

At this year’s event, the mobile media will be an integrated part of the conference experience.
Through the mobile, the visitors will be able to follow the event, read the latest SIME news and watch mobile TV from SIME. The mobile channel will also be used for practical issues such as registration, updates in the agenda and seating at the SIME Awards show.

The service is brought to you by Globalmouth, a SIME partner specializing in mobile communication for corporate clients.