Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 2, 2008 – 7:54 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
While strolling around in Nepal, I was suddenly confronted with a problem of years ago. My sister is shooting a documentary here and stays for a few months. Thus she bought a Nepalese phone. A ultra-light plastic device with a SMS memory of around fifteen messages. The latter forces her to only save her most precious text messages - just like eight years ago.
I remember carefully selecting the messages from my flirts or the funniest texts from friends. Unlike now - I save them all - I really looked at my text collection as some sort of lifeline. Sometimes I had to throw a message away - with pain in my heart. If I had only known a service like Mobyko in those days.
Text messages archive in the cloud
This London-based start-up offers mobile phone users a backup service with which you can manage and share your mobile life from a secure online account. This also includes text messages. You can easily forward them to “the cloud” and read them back whenever you want. Such an archive would have been a mobile dream come true.
Don’t lose anything
The Mobyko back-up services of course go further than just SMS messages. That makes the service also relevant for these days. You can sync your contacts and calendar, plus there’s the option of saving, streaming and sharing all your photos and videos (i.e. via a Facebook app). Julian Saunders founded Mobyko in 2006, after losing his mobile phone so that he would never lose his important business contacts and valuable family snaps again.
Compatibility as an USP
Google, Apple, Plaxo, Soocial, and many more offer similar services - yet Mobyko has one major advantage over them. The British service already supports cloud syncing for over 500 mobile phone models. They’re striving to add new models every day, ’cause, their fact sheet says:
10,0000 mobile phones are left in London cabs every month – Credent Technologies
Mobyko is a freemium service while its premium service costs £25 (€29,50) per annum.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on November 24, 2008 – 8:47 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might have noticed, I wrote a post last week about my three-week stay in Kathmandu, Nepal. After describing the beautiful country and its not so beautiful political problems, I invited every reader to drop me a line if he or she knew somebody in Kathmandu. Two people did.
Kathmandu Koding
One of them was Mark Townsend. He introduced me to Ayush Bajracharya, a 26-year old PHP developer from Patan, a gorgeous satellite city of Kathmandu. Ayush works for Samma Ajiva Limited, a company involved in several outsourcing projects. When I told Ayush about my Dutch nationality, he told me he functions as a cupid in my country since he developed a dating site called Zullenwij.nl.
Alternative to India and China
After spending a week here I got to know a lot of people like Ayush who are working on outsourcing projects. So while Tim Ferriss advises you to give your developer work a spin in India and Chinese companies desperately try to catch up with the outsourcing giant - Nepal might be an interesting alternative. One minor side note, it seems like the best way of finding a developer is actually visiting the country (which is no punishment at all).
Meeting locals through blogging
If outsourcing doesn’t concern you, then please learn one thing from this post. Traveling and blogging is one fine combination. When I went to Berlin earlier this year, I met up with some great music 2.0 fellows thanks to a post on this blog. And now it turns out that this strategy also works in more exotic places like Nepal. I realized this when drinking tea with Ayush and his younger brother Raz in a house that doesn’t even look a bit like mine. Our languages, habits, and religious beliefs are all different, but it was blogging that connected us. Pretty cool, eh?
[Photo credit: Sacha Post]
Written on November 20, 2008 – 6:44 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Traffic in Kathmandu
A squirrel watches me while I’m typing this article in a walled garden. Not an online one, like AOL, but a psychical space called “The Garden of Dreams”. It’s a place of silence, peace, and westerners in the heart of Kathmandu. There’s a hefty uproar going on outside. Two students were (probably) killed by Maoists last month and the anger about that incident heated up yesterday. My favorite wifi bar is closed, since the windows of nearby buildings have been smashed by bricks. I had to pay a small entrance fee to find a suitable workplace with wifi. It’s a totally different place than my normal working space, a fun office in downtown Amsterdam.
“What is this?! A travel blog?” - you might ask by now. Yeah, sorry for that, I just want to give you an insight in the daily life of your blogger. I’ll keep on writing about European tech news. But not without the hope to cover some web- and tech related news here as well.
Voltage stabilizer
If you know someone in this city, please drop me a line. I’d be glad to interview him or her about their online activities.
My online activities find place by the mercy of my Macbook battery and the availability of wifi. There’s no power here during the days, only at night. So I’m charging my laptop at night, while a stabilizer (see picture) makes sure it doesn’t set on fire.
So much for my travel update, back to the tech blogging now. RSS reader, where are thou?
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