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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