3 days out of my life and 30 off it

Time to look back on the end of last week at TheNextWeb ... three days at stress levels I've not known for a long time.

Key objective: a successful launch presentation on Friday in front of 350 avid bloggers, twitterers, video journalists, entrepreneurs, investors and clever people. We ploughed our way through all waking hours and most of the sleeping ones testing our product, improving our presentation and correcting bugs until right up to an hour before the presentation. We almost dropped the demo because TheNext was sadly separated from the Web for much of the morning, only to become miraculously available at the last minute.

It was an omen we should maybe have heeded. We connected to our WAP service in advance ready for the demonstration. Having got the room interested in our dream and motivated into action to connect to the service so we could project their profiles up on the big screen, Olivier and I launched the demo and then *bam* ... I could not continue the connection. Yours truly had two minutes left on the clock to describe our pride and joy in flowery prose invented on the spot. What happened was brought about by our request that everyone connect at once; everyone pulled out their mobiles and started connecting at the same time. The server had to face an enormous instantaneous load equivalent to 24M visitors /day; as a consequence, the server would not let me continue my session online ...

The resident 'grumpy old men' whose role it was to grill us gave us a hard time: "Looks like MobiLuck wasn't so lucky this time..." But we answered their questions well. We have a plan to attract users and use viral techniques to spread the service via IM, alerts and SMS invitations. And when asked how we defend our technology against competitors Olivier said "We have 4 patents" and they shut up. They didn't go near our secret weapon: 1/2 million users and a successful mobile application on 180 phone models in 200 countries and 21 languages around the world...

And what was really great was that everyone we met afterwards that evening said they loved what we stood for, and the demo was bad luck but it happens to everyone at some time. Peaks are always very difficult to manage because of the CPU power required in short bursts, and we're still fine tuning the service as I write.

We left TheNextWeb feeling exhausted but having made it through a tough challenge and it's just the beginning. The service is launched. Sort of stealthily. http://wap.mobiluck.com/beta ...

It's all got to be done by midnight or failing that, ASAP

Today was 'we want your pitch by midnight' day. The ASAP items have to wait until tomorrow morning. Everything has really shifted up a gear following our award of a spot on the start-up stands at TheNextWeb (see the cute Web2.0 style rosette). Tv4b want to do a video interview and want materials in advance. Quartier Numerique need stuff for their launch in Paris. We need a press release ASAP for printing tomorrow to take to Amsterdam ... because it's now official that we're launching our new service at the conference. We've got 60 seconds to announce it on stage so it's got to be slick. And Stephane and Marc are working like mad on the WAP service (still testing all the links on that stringball diagram from last week, no doubt) whilst Olivier grapples with a live development environment doing demos at Where2.0 in California: One minute you can see me in the contacts list, the next ... poof! ... no it doesn't bear thinking about ...

People and Places Close to You - if you're in Amsterdam

This week it's the run-up to TheNextWeb conference on Friday and the team is very busy improving the WAP service ready for flawless demonstrations. We've been selected for a spot on the start-up stands and we'll be setting up a laptop with wi-fi access and handing out 'mobiti' tatoos ('mobiti' is our little mascot, a green man in a flying saucer).
There are scores of little changes to make to the service, each aimed at making it that little bit more intuitive, easier to understand, quicker to navigate through, lower on data bandwidth, easier on the eye on a small screen. Meanwhile I've been populating the places database with a few tourist attractions and restaurants in Amsterdam so that when we demo the place localiser we don't get a blank screen. And I'll be geolocalising them when I arrive Thursday. What a good excuse to go checking out the hot spots in Amsterdam on work time ...

Getting ready for TheNextWeb 2007

Just got moving organising our presence at TheNextWeb 2007 conference in Amsterdam on the 31st May - 1st June this year. We'll see who gets selected for the speedpitch and stands (limited places only) but we're ready to show what we've got to everyone because the only platform we need is the mobile phones in our hands.
Olivier's battered N70 looks like it's been through the first dotcom bubble plus a sheep dip for good measure and mine looks like it's just fallen out of the box (an N95 and it keeps crashing ... must get the firmware updated). Still, WAP looks like WAP so no problem there - and our WAP looks rather nice compared to most...
So we're wondering whether to go for the coffee intro or the dinner and clearly the dinner wins hands down. Is anyone going to shake the foundations of web2.0 wisdom now that everyone knows or thinks they know what it's about? No of course not, they're going to simply make the most of the networking opportunity over dinner. That's what it's all about. Bring on the erwtensoep and the herbal cigarettes.