This morning I discovered on the web magazine create or die the first announcement of what me and my developer teammate André are currently urging for: the beta version of Silverlight 2 Mobile, which is scheduled for the first quarter of 2009.

If you want to know, which additional features the mobile version will have and which of the current Silverlight 2.0 features will be cutted, you can read a detailed article about the announcement on The Register.

We will keep you up with the latest news about Silverlight Mobile.

Until then, hang in there!

Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK published a report about the Pitch Camp which took place last Monday in Berlin and of course he also mentions SnipClip (what makes us quite happy btw):

SnipClip is interesting. It takes content and turns it into a game which you can then monetise – quite a trend at the moment. Their war-cry is “Paid content is back”, for the reason being that content owners aren’t getting much money from their digital assets then again, some content owners maybe spend too much creating it. So if people won’t pay for content online, but they are getting more addicted to social gaming then that’s an opportunity for media providers to provide content in the form of a game. SnipClip turns content into “digital collectables” which users then collect as part of a game. Here’s their demo, in Silverlight, alas.

Read the full article: Startups show their wares at Web2Expo Europe

PS: Thanks again Reshma for coaching me!

“How little things can make a big difference” is the subtitle of this book. “The Tipping Point” was written by Malcom Gladwell and covers a theory about how messages, especially marketing messages, spread along a population and what are the key factors that drives the “epidemic growth”. The theory is primarily based on network theory, especially on social hubs or connectors as the author calls them.

Besides the connectors the author also identifies salesmen (charismatic persons) and mavens (information specialists) as important. He calls them the few and the general law The Law of the Few. The key message is here that you have to convince these few people to promote your product. The two additional aspects are the Stickiness Factor and the Context, i.e. a message must be memorable and they must be relevant to the given context.

The overall message is: there are many variables that affect success and a few are such important that small changes to them lets a message become mainstream or lets it disappear in the noise. The authors gives many examples of successful messages and also explains some of the success factors, however it’s not like a textbook that helps you to develop your business but more like a collection of exciting stories. So read it but do not expect too much from it. And have a good time!

Martin

“Virtual goods are real goods” states a Netherland court:

In today’s society, the virtual goods from online computer game “Runescape” or become great significance. For large numbers of online gamers these goods have value. The more a player virtual goods has, the stronger he is in the game. Moreover, the money for virtual goods bought and sold, including via the Internet or on the playground.

Of interest is that not a mortal need to be. In the case law has determined that non-material objects – such as electricity and scriptural money – as well as in criminal sense. The virtual amulet and the virtual template as defined in this case are not material goods, although they are noticeable. Having regard to the said case law is that no impediment to them as well as provided for in Article 310 of the Penal Code to brands.

Via Virtual Worlds News: Netherlands Hand Out Sentence for Virtual Goods Theft; Holds Them As “Real Goods”

This time I like you to present the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The term Wikinomics reminds of the New Economy. The principle argumentation is the same as in 2000: changes in the Internet economy will change the real economy.

The Internet started as a mass information medium, became a mass communication medium and is now turning into a mass collaboration medium. Everyone is connected to everyone and everyone can collaborate with everyone – on a global scale. This creates new opportunities for companies: crowdsourcing is just one of them. The technological foundation for this development are open web applications like Wikis that allow anyone to participate. If you apply the Wiki principle to economics you get wikinomics: companies are open structures that allow customers, partners and suppliers to participate in the development and in the innovation process thus adding value to the company.

Sounds fine in theory - in reality it will take a generation or more to become true. Most companies are closed structures and are protecting themselves against competitors and influences from politics or society. The Wikinomics works in Internet-based companies, but not necessarily in traditional companies. However if you are a Internet company this is a must-read!

And have a good time!

Today I ran into a stupid problem while working on a WCF web service. The web service has to return a special response object which includes some further complex data objects. But after assigning these objects to the response object, my web service stopped working with an unsignificant error:

System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly. [..]

So what to do now? I wasn’t able to find a helpfull hint where the error occurs or what the error releases. My client side stack trace was unusable for debugging, so I had to find a way for debugging on the server side and found a quite good solution: System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener.

To activate the trace listener on server side just append the following lines to your web.config:

<system.diagnostics>
<sources>
<source name=”System.ServiceModel”
switchValue=”Information, ActivityTracing”
propagateActivity=”true”>
<listeners>
<add name=”traceListener”
type=”System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener”
initializeData=”Trace.svclog” />
</listeners>
</source>
</sources>
</system.diagnostics>

If done, after a request you will find the file “Trace.svclog” server side which contains all information you need for debugging. You can open it with “Microsoft Service Trace Viewer” which simplifies the evaluation of service behaviour. So if you get an unsignificant error on client side be sure to find more information in trace log on server side!

P.S.: By the way, my error was a serialization error and now it works :)

Via Digital in Berlin

This Tuesday, Microsoft released what we’ve all been waiting for: the final version of Silverlight 2.

Of course we were prepared and already had migrated our Silverlight application to the Release Cancidate 0. And we were lucky: there have been no changes made to the Silverlight API, that would break our code. However the installation of the Silverlight 2 RC1 SDK brought some problems and a solution along, which I would like to share:

After the first time I installed the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the Blend 2 Service Pack 1, Visual Studio told me that the Silverlight debugger component had not been installed. So I uninstalled the Silverlight Tools (but not the Blend 2 Service Pack) and reinstalled it. My reward was another strange error thrown by Visual Studio: The Silverlight 2 SDK has not been installed. So I went on not only uninstalling the Silverlight Tools but also the Blend 2 Service Pack and only reinstalled the Silverlight Tools again. And this time it worked. I was able to compile and debug our Silverlight application successfully. Afterwards I installed the Blend 2 Service Pack again and still everything worked.

Sometimes, software can show strange behaviours. If my experiences helped you installing the Silverlight Tools on your machine, I would be glad, if you let me know this via a comment.

Hang in there and don’t let software get you down!

Last weekend I attended with a couple of friends the BarCamp in Munich. That was my first BarCamp and it was quite fun. Around 300 people came to the headquarter of Sun Microsystems, where it took place. There were a lot of interesting sessions. I learned something about the monetization of blogs, got inspired by new techniques of PowerPoint presentations, were impressed by a really crazy magic session and participated in a discussion about the financial crisis and the consequences for start-ups.

I even gave my own session! The week before the BarCamp I spend a lot of time preparing my presentation. I hope you like it (sorry folks, the presentation is in German).

Despite the presentation was a success I got a little bit frustrated: first I got no slot on Saturday and on Sunday the organizers forgot to put my session on the board. Finally I had technical problems when I wanted to start my presentation. Bad luck! I gave my session in the cafeteria. Unfortunately, not more than 15 people found the way to the cafeteria, but that did not matter. First I was a little bit nervous, but in the end I really enjoyed it. Here are some impressions of my session:

(Thanks for the photos, Tobias.)

The feedback after the session was good (thanks for that!) and I liked the discussion afterwards. I am really looking forward to present “Virtual Goods in Social Networks” still another time.

Thanks to the organizers of the BarCamp and also to the sponsors. The organization was perfect except the little mistake with my session. Next time I will definitely participate again.

Goodbye and stay tuned.