Day one at Mobile Internet, Berlin

I've heard loads of interesting and challenging stuff today at Mobile Internet in Berlin (see 'speaking at' links, left). I've met some interesting people too.

I was twittering live throughout, as I will be on April 1 and 2. That means those that follow www.twitter.com/davidcushman get to ask questions, too.
Was great to hear from Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO at GoFresh/Itsmy.com from the stage and to have a conversation with him in a round table. I'm a big fan of itsmy's focus on community first and mobile first. They have an incumbent- rocking model. As Antonio points out a new media leads to new leaders; before cars there was no BMW. Before the internet, there was no google... before mobile there was no itsmy!
I also like the itsmy ad model. Users don't get a share of the revenues they create. BUT they do get to choose if their ugc carries adverts - and if it does, what sort of adverts. The users are allowed the power to treat the ads as content (the content as ads).
Interesting itsmy stats: The first pic of the recent UK earthquake was uploaded to itsmy within 30seconds (only content created on a mobile can be uploaded to mobile). Each user looks at 60pages per visit. 42% had never used a social network before using the mobile-only itsmy!

Cyworld's Christian-Peter Heimbach revealed the South Korean MoSocialNetwork is retreating to asia after a failed european experiment. Christian himself will crop up working in Brighton soon. Brighton types - give me a shout so you can welcome him in, he's a nice chap.

The Cyworld back-track was clarified after Jonathan Macdonald (following via twitter) asked Christian, via me, what the plans for a launch in the UK were. Answer, er none just yet. It's back to rebuild the aging tech with a view to returning someday soon.

Yahoo's Alex Romero had some nice things to say about my presentation (I was on before him, and before lunch!) and talked about new products such as oneconnect, among other things. It allows you to bring together all your social networks merging all your contacts. To which www.twitter.com/stoweboyd asked if yahoo thought this was something we actually want.

I caught up with Alex later and he explained the idea is more about a user gathering their routes to networks in one place - not sharing your digital identities and each identity's connnections. Need to investigate this a little more before drawing a conclusion, I feel.

Alex was fascinated by my eeepc. A few more sales coming Asus' way. Wonder when I'll get my commission...

I was also interested in Tim Hyland's youtube stats eg: every minute of every day 10 hours of video is uploaded to youtube. youtube uses more bandwidth today than the entire internet did in 2000.

Spent some time chatting to Luke Brynley-Jones of Trutap. Aim to catch up with him some more over the next few days. Luke revealed one user had sent 1200 messages in a day. Who knew thumbs could do that? And two Finlands a month are going on to contract in India each month at the moment. Now that's a growing market!

Finally (and apologies to those I haven't mentioned here, I may have reported previously via www.twitter.com/davidcushman) Martin Duval of orange gave us an interesting insight into the orange start-up programme which has orange working with vcs to develop and help new businesses take shape. He's creating a value web in the best traditions.

More from conference tomorrow, Follow it live at twitter.com/davidcushman and look out for opportunities to ask questions.

Starts again at 8am UK time.