2010 has been a great year with a lot of personal growth.
I really learned a lot about myself and life in general, as far as life in general exists.

I want to specifically thank the following people for inspiration, love & fun, bringing me many moments of happiness and making the year a success:

Ancilla
Michiel
Marnix
Liesbeth
Oma mam
Timan
Bram
Yuri
Gijsbregt
Boris
Edo
Hanneke
Anna Rikje
Mark
Elies
My Tweeps
Burning Man
Haruki Murakami (novels)
David Mitchell (novels)
Gever Tulley (TED)
Ken Robinson (TED)

and especially Amelie, Mika and Hille for giving me a constant extra perspective on life and growth.

Thank you all for being part of my life, I’m really looking forward to 2011, more inspiration, love and fun.

x
M

Of course it was possible to send video to Moby as of february of this year, but there were not many clients which supported this.

That has changed.

At the moment you can use the following third party apps to post video to Moby (and then of course to all your social sites, including Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and your blog):

- Twittelator Pro (great app for iPhone 3GS users)
- Gravity (The S60 Twitter client)
- Twibble (client for Java enabled smartphones including Nokia, Blackberry, and SonyEricsson)
- Nokia Share Online (Moby config file)
- email (pretty much all devices)

Crackberry wrote an interesting article about it proving again that our mobile site really is giving us a competitve edge:
Blackberry quick tip: How to share videos from your blackberry to social media sites!

Within a few weeks our own native iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile Apps with Audio/Video/Photo capabilities will be launched. Stay tuned for that!

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/4896583[/vimeo]

Ghent, Belgium – July 23, 2009

Blue Crowbar Software has released Aperture2Twitter and iPhoto2Twitter 1.5, upgrades to the Twitter-plugins for Aperture and iPhoto, Apple’s photo editing and management applications. Both plugins let you send tweets and photos to Twitter without leaving your favorite Mac photo application. The new versions now add support for posting to Mobypicture, a service that makes it trivial to share photos and movies.

“After the initial release of our two plugins, many users have asked to be able to send their photos to more than one photo-sharing site”, said Steven Vandeweghe, founder of Blue Crowbar. “To establish this, we have found the perfect partner in Mobypicture.com. Besides being a great site for sharing photos and movies with your Twitter followers, Mobypicture also integrates with popular services like Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, LiveJournal, YouTube and Vimeo.”

“It is really amazing to see that our core APIs are used by developers around the world to enrich and add options to their applications. The integration with iPhoto and Aperture is a great addition and makes sharing your adventures really easy and convenient.” – Mathys van Abbe

New features in Version 1.5:
Support for photo uploads to Mobypicture.com.
Support for movie uploads to Mobypicture.com (iPhoto2Twitter only).
Through Mobypicture, support for many other services is included: Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, YouTube, Vimeo and more.

Feature Highlights:
- Sends your tweets without leaving iPhoto or Aperture.
- Lets you include a photo or movie with a tweet.
- Fast switching between different Twitter-accounts.

System Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
- iPhoto ’08 or ’09 for iPhoto2Twitter
- Aperture 2 for Aperture2Twitter

Pricing and Availability:
iPhoto2Twitter and Aperture2Twitter are available immediately. A license for one user costs 4.95 euros for each plugin. The upgrade is free for existing users. A free trial version of the software can be downloaded from http://www.bluecrowbar.com.

Blue Crowbar Software is a small independent software company, founded in 2008 by Steven Vandeweghe and is located in Ghent, Belgium. Its focus is on building Mac OS X and iPhone applications for consumers and business. The company is mostly known for TrackRecord, a Mac OS X data-importer for Polar heart rate monitors.

About Mobypicture
Mobypicture facilitates users to share adventures and tell their stories in real time with friends. In one simple action, all social Web sites are updated with text, audio, photos or video files. Mobypicture helps companies market their events and spread the content of the attendees throughout the social Web. For events, these are aggregated based on geo location. Clients use Mobypicture to send mobile digital content which is aggregated, enriched and distributed using APIs of all important social sites and services.

Pretty excited about the new service we launched today.

This is a service, directly connecting a hashtag (#at5 in this case) to a publishing destination.

This service allows us to partner with niche sites and allows our users to easily post their adventures to these sites from within the posting itself.

How does it work?

Whenever you add #at5 to the title, description or tags of your posting, we also distribute the posting to the AT5 editorial team. They can then decide if your posting is relevant to the news/activities in the city and publish this, of course using your Name and link to your Mobypicture user page as official source. They also might contact you to get your eyewitness report or more context.

Your posting can be used on the AT5 website, on TV (news or gespot items), or in the Amsterdam trams, subways and McDonalds restaurants…

More hashtagged services….

There are many more hashtag based services coming up, so stay tuned.

If you think of a website which you think would really benefit from this service, contact us or use this form to post your ideas:

Internationale eindstrijd om EUR 150.000 prijzengeld tijdens PICNIC op 25 september

Amsterdam, 22 juli 2009 – Vodafone Nederland maakt vandaag de drie Nederlandse finalisten bekend van Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2009, de tweede editie van een competitie voor mobiel internet start-ups. De drie deelnemers die als beste uit de Nederlandse voorrondes zijn gekomen, nemen het op 25 september tijdens de grand finale op PICNIC op tegen de overige drie finalisten uit Groot-Brittannië. Daar is de wedstrijd dit jaar voor het eerst gehouden. Tijdens de internationale eindstrijd op PICNIC beloont Vodafone de beste ideeën voor een mobiele site, dienst of applicatie met een totaal aan prijzengeld van EUR 150.000 bruto.

De jurysessie met de acht Nederlandse halve finalisten van Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2009 (www.vodafonemobileclicks.com) heeft plaatsgevonden op donderdagmiddag 16 juli. De beraadslaging over de volgens de jury “verrassend hoog kwalitatieve inzendingen” duurde tot vandaag. De Britse landelijke finale vindt plaats op 6 augustus. Vier dagen later, op 10 augustus, maakt de jury daar bekend wie doorgaan naar de eindstrijd op festival voor creatieve geesten PICNIC en zijn alle finalisten bekend.

De drie Nederlandse bedrijven die het tijdens de internationale finale van Vodafone Mobile Clicks op PICNIC 2009 mogen opnemen tegen elkaar en de concurrentie uit het Verenigd Koninkrijk zijn:

· MyNameIsE (http://www.mynameise.com) – een dienst die het verbinden van mensen on- en offline faciliteert door hun profielen op diverse sociale netwerken – zoals Facebook, Linkedin en Twitter – op één plek te verzamelen. Vervolgens kunnen deze in real life gedeeld worden via een mobiele telefoon of een speciaal apparaatje, The Connector.

· MobyPicture (http://www.mobypicture.com) – een dienst die het mogelijk maakt met een druk op de knop vanaf de mobiele telefoon foto’s, video’s en audio met vrienden te delen op social network sites als Hyves, Facebook, YouTube en Twitter.

· Layar (http://layar.com) – een browser die gebruikt maakt van ‘augmented reality’, waardoor gebruikers door de camera van hun mobiele telefoon kunnen zien welke bedrijven en services zich om hen heen bevinden.

Yuri van Geest, Programmamanager VMC 2009: “Dit is het tweede jaar dat Vodafone Mobile Clicks wordt georganiseerd. Het is inspirerend en geweldig om te zien hoe deze competitie is gegroeid. Niet alleen in aantal landen maar bovenal in kwaliteit, kwantiteit en bevlogenheid van de mobiel internet start-ups.”

Ook de jury is zeer enthousiast over het niveau van de finalisten. Namens deze, Marc Fonteijn, tevens voorzitter Mobile Monday Amsterdam: “Het is goed te merken dat de mobiele industrie nu echt in de spotlights staat. We hadden dit jaar een mix van heel volwassen en tegelijkertijd creatieve concepten. Helaas mochten we maar drie deelnemers naar de finale sturen. De jury is ervan overtuigd dat we nog veel gaan horen van deze finalisten. Uiteraard hopen we op een Nederlandse winnaar!”

De finalisten zelf zijn erg bij dat ze door zijn naar de internationale eindronde.

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Co-founder van Layar: ,,Wat mooi is, is dat het Layar-momentum en dat van Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2009 steeds precies gelijk lopen. Letterlijk tegelijkertijd met de eerste ronde hadden we onze software werkend en nu staan we ten tijde van de laatste nationale ronde overal in de pers. Afgelopen zondag nog hadden we een stuk in de Sunday Times. VMC houdt ons scherp: wat is nou exact onze propositie? Dat komt door de feedback en de vragen van de jury. Die zijn er duidelijk op een andere manier bij betrokken dan bijvoorbeeld een merk of ontwikkelpartij. Ze zijn er niet op uit om beter te worden van het concept, wel om het beste concept te vinden.”

Mathys van Abbe, Founder van Mobypicture: “Voor Mobypicture en haar gebruikers is het belangrijk dat de operators zich focussen op het simpel mogelijk maken van delen van avonturen en het vertellen van verhalen van mensen. Het doordringen van Moby tot de finale van deze wedstrijd onderstreept dat Vodafone dat heel goed begrijpt en geeft ons vertrouwen in onze activiteiten en toekomst.”

Renato Valdés Olmos, Founder van My Name is E: “Ik vind het te gek dat we in de finale staan. De Britse en Nederlandse deelnemers hebben voor zover ik heb gezien en gehoord een uitzonderlijke hoeveelheid kwaliteit en vooruitgang laten zien. We zullen zien wat de internationale finale in september ons brengt, maar ik weet zeker dat het in elk geval een geweldige happening gaat worden.”

Mobile Clicks 2009 is een initiatief van Vodafone en heeft als doel de mobiele internetsector in Nederland en het Verenigd Koninkrijk een extra impuls te geven. Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2009 wordt gerealiseerd met medewerking van Trend8, Mobile Monday Amsterdam en PICNIC 2009.

Lees ook:

Emerce
Dutchcowboys

Moby has been through a lot of changes.

In the last month the traffic to the website has been almost doubled again.

We have been focussing on:

- more scaling and performance issues

- extending the user experience and features

- making some money to take care of the growing development, mainenance and hosting costs

Scaling and performance

Because of some celebrity usage our servers had to deal with enourmous spikes in traffic. On average 1-2% of the Twitter followers of a user clicks on the Moby-link within the first few minutes it gets published. For users with more than 500k followers this means between 10.000 – 20.000 will visit our servers instantly. You can’t really scale that if gradually (firing up new Amazon instances (servers) take 2-5 minutes)

We designed a solution for this. Whenever we receive a new posting we check our database to see how many followers this user has. Based on the numbers we launch the instances and when these are up and running we post the message to Twitter. Neat ey?

Features and user experience

We added our app store for the API developers. This means if you use our API in your application or service, you will also have a possibility to promote your service on Moby.

We launched our Friend Connect. With this you can easily find out which of your friends on your social websites also use Moby and see their activity on Moby immediately as well…

We launched the Moby Activity stream. All your activity and that of your friends will be listed there.

We added the possibility to add platforms and services to groups. This will enable our users to post to specific platforms using the hashtag.

We developed a backchannel view for users and groups, and also a totally designable version for our Pro users (events and companies)

We added favorites. If you really like a posting, you can just click the heart above the posting and it gets added to your favorites list.

What’s next?

We are introducing more views. Besides the list view for postings right now there is the grid view, giving you a quick overview of what you, your friends or group has been up to.

I’m really excited about the upcoming map views, placing your postings (or trails) directly on a map.

Also on the business side a lot has happened:

- we are about to release two co-branded Moby iPhone apps for TMF and NUfoto and currently talking to a lot of other platforms.

- we supplied many events, parties and businesses with branded back channels and are still expanding the functionality

- we’re nominated and shortlisted for a Techcrunch Europe award for the best Mobile Application

And last but definitely not least, we launched Moby the Movie! The movie shows that we’ve been shooting and sharing since the beginning of time… watch it!

This is a reply to calling-bs-on-the-real-time-web

I started typing a reply to Alexander his blog post and it got pretty long, so I decide to publish it here…

My reply:

I think you’re right about the fact that there is a lot of irrelevant chatter on Twitter, Facebook or any other social network. But there is a far larger amount of irrelevant blogposts, outdated news, chatroom BS, etc. on the web.

Actually 99.9999999% of the web is irrelevant to me. The challenge lies in getting that 0,0000001% and I strongly believe that the real-time web or real-time search will be a step forward.

Why? Because formulating my search helps me define what I need. Then search algorithm will box information which should be accessable enough for me to grasp. Websites like Tweetmeme or Twitter trending topics help me filter and many more of these will come. The social and realtime web are enabling us to define trusted rings of people and opinions and that is really helpful.

Maybe we should start talking about the trusted web instead of the realtime web.But then again I don’t want to label things!

Trending topics just now were:

Happy Canada Day, Michael Jackson, Public Enemies, Firefox 3, MJ’s, Goodnight, #iranelection, Transformers 2, iPhone, National Express

Out of ten, eight of these topics are irrelevant to me, but so is 98% of all the news on cnn.com and 90% of the blogs I frequently visit.

It actually surprised me that you think real-time search is BS. Gluble is focussing on building rings of trust. Your family is usualy your first ring of trust. All your truths are based on what you’ve learned and family is at the very basis of that, or should be.

BERLIN, April 2, 2009 – At this week’s Red Herring 100 Europe 2009 conference in Berlin, Red Herring announced that Amsterdam-based Mobypicture won the Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year. We were selected from a group of 210 finalists after we presented the company products, strategies and vision to venture investors at the conference.

This was the defining moment!

You can read more about in our press Release, or here:

Nu.nl (dutch)
Emerce (dutch)
Webwereld (dutch)
Marketingfacts (dutch)
Dutchcowboys (dutch)
Dutchcowgirls (dutch)

Berlin, March 23, 2009 – Red Herring today announced that Mobypicture was named a Finalist of Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.

A lot of things have happened over the last few weeks!

• we got our 100.000th posting
• we added audio and video (see which formats)
• we added posting to Facebook
• we totally renewed the services page!
• we added basic statistics (much more to come)
• we upgraded the iPhone app
• we are integrated in Tweetie 1.3, PowerTwitter, dabr.co.uk and built in in many more
• we got Fry-ed