Like I said, I had to get up early since the workshops started at 8:30. Some lessons learned:

• Perhaps I should wait till after the Expo to walk an entire day around Berlin
• Having a hotel on a 20-minute walk from the venue isn’t that good after all
• Perhaps I should invest in some lighter material when it comes to laptop and camera

First topic on the agenda, and already one of the things I was looking forward to: a bootcamp in Adobe Flex/AIR technology. All the hype these days, and I never found the time to really put my teeth in it. But now I could with none other then rockstar Duane Nickull. No nonsense, everybody took there laptops, installed Flex Builder, copied the course material from a cd they distributed and started coding: me likes. Flex Builder is based on Eclipse which made me feel right at home. All in all I must say I was very impressed: working with this technology is fast and easy.

In the afternoon IBM presented a product called IBM Mashup Center. According to IBM, this tool would enable business to put up some Web 2.0 applications without much effort. But what did it come down to? The solution exists of multiple parts. You could call InfoSphere MashupHub a nicer and easier version of Yahoo! Pipes, where you can mix and modify several sources to get an enhanced output. The difference is of course that this isn’t published to the whole world, but remains inside the company and can be shared within it so others could use this as a basis for their own creation. Next to that there’s the real mashup tool, Lotus Mashups, where you can make widgets communicate with eachother. Take for instance a list of customers that contains  contact details en let the postal code in that list feed the Google Weather gadget. That way, by selecting a customer the widget will adopt.

Some thoughts:

• About the widget-mashups: the sharing aspect makes it look like it’s built for a team of widget-combo-developers (or whatever you would call them) to facilitate their daily job of creating these dashboard-like items. Question is how big of a team you’d need to gain advantage from such a tool. I don’t know the price of the solution, but it sure doesn’t look cheap. And even in a more general picture: how big is the demand for such mashups?
• I can understand the yahoo! Pipes clone from a business point of view, but again I wonder how much it will be used. Or is IBM going for some sort of ETL tool? Another one?

And there was one more thing. During the demo, they showed how you could use existing Google Widgets, the ones you can use at iGoogle (like Google Weather), in this tool. At least, that was their intention because when they wanted to run the result there was a nice message from Google on the screen telling them the gadget could only be used within iGoogle. This came as a surprise even for the people of IBM. Something to think about…
If you want to give the product a testdrive, head on over to the Lotus Greenhouse.

Scheduled as keynote was Tim O’Reilly himself, who was full of optimism and positivism. The thing I remembered most is that difficult times offer great opportunities and forces people to be creative. O’Reilly continued his keynote by sitting down with a very amusing Yossi Vardi, the man with the money behind names like ICQ and Fring.

before heading down for the opening reception a couple of startups got the chance to present themselves:

• Plista
• Amazee
• Txtr.com
• Aka’Aki
• iDesktop.tv
• SoundCloud

In the mean while Kris Hoet managed to get to Berlin and was kind enough to invite me for dinner where I got to know Nicole Simon, Tom Raftery and Ronna Porter, all very interesting and fun individuals. Add to that, that I also got the chance to meet Luis Suarez and J-F Arseneault and you can imagine what a great experience this first day had been. Except for the 20-minute walk (in the middle of the night) that lied ahead of me, of course.

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Who invaded the USA while I was asleep?

UPDATE: They fixed it quite fast (or it fixed itself), so check out the screenshot above.

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Where I work, a corporate firewall is blocking stuff like Youtube. It also deprives me of the nice Remote Desktop functionality built into Live Mesh and I can’t use FTP either. But there’s one band out there that feels my pain: AC/DC. They want me (and you) to see their vids during lunchbreak and therefor turned them into ASCII and put those into an excel file.

Pure genius.

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While I was browsing trough a (small) week’s worth of tweeting, I realize what an amazing experience this has been for me. Sure, there are areas where the Expo could use some improvement, but forgive me if I don’t focus on that part. I was like a little kid in a toy shop: a lot of interesting stuff was being told and I’ve met tons of wonderful people. I was attending a web-related conference! Abroad! Yes, that’s a big deal, at least to me it is.

I left for Berlin with the fear of not knowing what to do every evening but feel homesick. Or hang at the hotel bar on my own, getting insanely drunk (which would’ve been the case since a gin&tonic was only €4). After all, I only knew one person that would be there. But after just a few hours on day 1 it was clear I had nothing to fear. It became a week where I didn’t even find the time to write up some blogposts.

Since the expo started quite early on tuesday, I decided to head for Berlin mondaymorning. This gave me an extra day to discover the city itself. As it turned out, I could’ve used a couple of more days since I still don’t feel like I “get” the city. It has many faces and if we take a look at history, this is not surprising.

One of the places to visit is the Reichstag. The queue of people wanting to see the old seat of the German parliament was however much to long so I decided to sit down on the grass in front of the building to check the map where to go next. Appearantly, by doing that, I was blocking a Swiss artist.

A lot of people and journalists were watching Enrico Centonze as he was planting silver and gold flags in front of the Reichstag. Flags that could hold people warm since they were made of thermal blankets. Indeed, there was some kind of political/economic reasoning behind the art installation. Does it show?

You can find more pictures of my short day in Berlin on Flickr. The city left a series of impressions and it’s difficult to put a label on it. A cold city (lots of grey and concrete) with very wide streets that come to life  at night, giving a lightshow. I don’t know this city yet, I need more time. On a tourist folder I got in the hotel it says that it’s constantly changing, evolving. Perhaps I should stop trying to put my finger on it.

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I’ve had such a wonderful time and met so many interesting and wonderful people at Web 2.0 Expo Europe that I just had to start an English blog. Here it is, stay tuned because the paint is still wet.

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