I uploaded my slides for the yahoo widgets presentation in Webcamp.ro in slideshare, but I seem to be unable to make a presentation that works here:
Of course, while i make this work, you can always download the PPT directly here
It was a really good event! Maybe a bit too “marketing” for my taste at the beginning, but then it went really nice. The best of all: the people of course! Starting with those who attended, that asked questions afterwards, and that sent me mail or IMs to ask questions about widgets… and ending up with my wonderfulous hosts Bobby, Bogdan, Maria and Andreea. Thanks a lot to all for making this a great experience! 
Oh! and also: last time I was in Bucharest I was in the same area my hotel was this time, but couldn’t find any decent place to go out. Turns out on top of the old building of the National Theatre, right next to where i was, there’s this AWESOME terrace, with open-air tables, benches, paintings of different artists lying on the walls… and the music was just perfect! Thanks Maria for the tip!
(now, if only i could find some photos of the place…)
got a presentation to give next week at Webcamp talking about mobile development (courtesy of YDN). They have tracks on SEO, widgets and Web 3.0 (are we on 3.0 already?), but I think the one I’m more interested in is on Romanian-specific web issues… It’s always good to hear how different countries have got their own special highs and lows in the web industry (and hopefully i can find some people to talk about mobile too, as I don’t know that much about the specific situation in Romania!)
So, if anybody is around Bucharest (you know, by chance) and wants to check it out… ping me!
wow! this week is being pretty intense: first we had BBC mashed event, today was the searchmonkey hacking evening and tomorrow is our internal Yahoo! hackday.
Lots of things to do, little time to post…
I did a Fireagle widget hack in Mashed, that I couldn’t get completely running because I started playing with the authentication (trying to make oauth work with only curl) and with Ant scripts to verify/lint/deploy both XML and PHP files (pretty sweet stuff!) Will post info as soon as I can
I was only briefly at the hack evening today, but managed to check the talk, chat with a couple of nice people from ITV and do a formula 1 monkey to extract info from eurosport pages and present it alongside search results. I think it looks nice:
anybody else going to Mashed08 this weekend? There are still tickets left!
I will drop by on Saturday and still thinking about whether to go for a hack or not… the idea of doing the nokia n95-based version of a polar pedometer (with automatic integration with mapmyrun.com) is still in the air… 
just a quick note/heads-up that Yahoo! Mobile team is interviewing for their summer internships. There are still possibilities of getting your CV in so if you’re an university student and you’re interested in working with our team to make oneSearch kick axx big time in Europe, I think it’s worth to send me your CV (check my mail in the “about” section!)
There are openings for Partner Management and Marketing departments, if you are into that kind of thing… but what I wanted to advertise is our very own opening for a Software Engineering Intern. No previous big mobile software experience required, but we value strong computer science background, initiative to learn new things (such as how to process and index big amounts of data using things like Hadoop), love for programming and good music taste (this last one is optional, I guess)
So, sounds like you? Then… where’s that CV?
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia […] represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. […] And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.
From Clay Shirky’s blog (author of “Here comes everybody”)
If you happen to be in Barcelona next week, and don’t have anything interesting to spend the Monday night with, I will be talking about mobile web development and the Yahoo Mobile platform on the 5th of May, in the Forum Nokia & MobileMonday Event in Barcelona.
There are also some interesting people to network with, so let me know if you want to come and say hi!
Cathy sent me a doc with recent coverage about OverTheAir that includes this interview with Matthew, the master of all things mobile at BBC
Very interesting read (especially if you’re looking into “aggregating mobile content”, or however they call it these days)
Interview: Matthew Postgate (via MocoNews)
This actually reminds me of some other interesting thing I bumped into when talking with a couple of operators that have integrated oneSearch in their portals. As most of you know, until not-so-long most operators had closed portals (what were usually called “walled gardens”) with syndicated content (via several of the beforementioned “mobile content aggregator” deals). However, since recently, they’re all (*ejem* almost) switching to offer open Internet access, and integrate the internet search right on their decks (via Google mobile search, Microsoft Live Mobile, Yahoo oneSearch or even other parties like Medio)
The interesting thing is that even though that trend has been going on for I’d say 1-2 years, when you look at some of these operators’ top queries, it really seems like they’re mostly for in-portal content! Poetically speaking, even though the “garden” is not “walled” anymore, people are still mostly staying in!
I guess it’s kind of good news for people whose business model is based on selling mobile content but… I guess also not so good for getting there in terms of having an “open” mobile web ecosystem as good and full of interest as the desktop web counterpart. Or maybe it’s just a question of educating the users to know what’s out there and wait for more to come?
Would love to hear your oppinions on this…
Have been playing a bit with the FireEagle API for building location based services (check some slides about FireEagle here) and the team commented that they’re preparing a FireEagle hack night some point next month, and also sent me some invites to circulate
So if any of you needs a FireEagle invite to test, feel free to shoot me an email! (info about hacknight will probably be put in upcoming.org when details are available)
P.S. by the way, if you want to check which cool things you can do with FireEagle, check out Simon’s Wikinear application here
