Afew days ago I came back from MLOVE Berlin, the “TED” of mobile conferences. A few hundred participants came together to discuss the future of mobile — in an amazingly beautiful castle, no less. The attendees come from a variety of backgrounds, but all share one important thing in common: They are impassioned leaders and trendsetters in the mobile space. This ConFestival is a place where inspiration flows freely and young visionaries discuss the potential of the mobile industry in today’s world and the future.

MLOVE has a special informal and playful atmosphere where ideas and conversations simply flow between people. The fact that it takes place in one castle with a limited number of attendees enables everyone to get to know one another on a closer basis than at your usual conference. Everyone’s very supportive of one another. I can attest that I have formed many great friendships at MLOVE with people from around the world.

While the program has great keynote speakers and panels, the conference’s highly interactive visually oriented workshops add a new element to the mix, making it one of the exceptional places for mobile minds to meet. It also makes sure to build in open spaces for participants to converse about their mobile passions and learn from each other’s experiences.

By bringing in the best and the brightest both inside and outside of the industry, MLOVE capitalizes on infusing new ideas into the mobile space. This year there were speakers from Facebook, Nike Foundation, Nokia, AT&T, Ars Electronica, HopeLab and many more.

I was asked to speak on the Brands & Mobility panel with Urvi Bhandari from AT&T, Senem Ozturk from Turkcell and Julia Von Winterfeldt from AKQA. We discussed how the future vision of mobile will change how brands communicate and how these changes will play into our daily lives.

The highlight for me was MLOVE’s European Startup Barn Competition. I sat on the judging panel with other veteran mobile influencers. Competing were a few highly promising startups that blew me away, such as Has Offers, StyleLand and SmokePhone. My favorite was SmokePhone, a service that enables users to get disposable mobile numbers.

MLOVE was, as always, unforgettable. In MLOVE tradition, we had a White Night dinner and soiree on Thursday night, a night where everyone wears white. We also experienced the amazing light show that’s featured every year on the castle itself:

I played piano with one of the first developers of the World Wide Web, and I had the most interesting conversations with some of the best minds in the industry. There is so much to be gained from the great people who participate, allowing the true inspiration of mobile to shine through. My love for MLOVE grows each year and I can’t wait to come back to Berlin next year!

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Startups show disruptive potential of mobile tech

As regular readers know, I straddle the social media marketing and tech startup worlds, and increasingly I’ve been drawn to events focused on the disruptive changes wrought by the mobile revolution.

I stopped going to DEMO events a while back, given the richness of the Launch and TechCrunch Disrupt startup conferences, but yesterday I attended DEMO Mobile and came away impressed by the fervor and tumult evident on stage and off.

Here are 27 photos I took yesterday in this Demo Mobile set on Flickr.

As always, let me begin with a disclaimer that I didn’t attend to provide a comprehensive blow-by-blow of all the speakers, all the sessions or all the entrepreneurs in the Demo room. Instead, here are a few takeaways and highlights that struck me as particularly interesting with a focus on startups and entrepreneurs — to be sure, a decidedly small slice of Demo Mobile.

Highlights and takeaways from Demo Mobile

Some great quotes from the stage:

• Famed investor Chris Dixon: “The seed stage is about the team. The VC stage is about the numbers.”

• The awe-inspiring Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures: “In our last 100 investments, we’ve never calculated a rate of return. I forbid it.” Why? Because it’s guesswork. “It’s more worth your time to go around in circles exploring where the roads may lead.”

• More Khosla: “I depart from many investors who like to have business plans, who like to have revenue plans. I like to have exploration plans. Other investors like revenue, I like more data. … It’s important not to pretend we know where things are headed.”

• Great Khosla saying: “A company becomes the people it hires.”

• Final pearl of Khosla wisdom: “Eighty percent of my focus are investments under $3 million. That’s where radical ideas happen.”

• Stanford professor, serial entrepreneur and author Steve Blank — the intellectual godfather of the Lean Startup movement — summarized these three elements of a lean startup: business model design, customer development and agile engineering.

• Some great quotes from Blank: “The startup is a search for a business model.”

• “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”

• “You have a series of untested hypotheses on day one. Outside of Stanford, we just call them effing guesses.”

• Best T-shirt pun, from Matt Brezina, founder of mobile gifting startup Sincerely: “The Fuchsia Is Now.”

• Garrett Camp, founder of StumbleUpon and now limo service Uber, says Uber is in 35 cities and will enter more markets in the coming months. “It’s a mixture of the local regulatory environment and the number of credit cards we have on file (from customers) and if we can hire people in the location.”

Messaging, canned video chats and mini-satellites

• The most amazing startup here may be NanoSatisfi (motto: “Develop on earth. Deploy to space.”), which says on their website: “We offer affordable satellite access with an open platform for development.” How cool is that? NanoSatisfi wants to put programmable mini-satellites in space that students and citizens can control with a drop-in code. Says founder Peter Platzer: “Imagine a future where teachers say, ‘Kids, don’t turn to page 57. Turn on your satellites.’ ”

• One of the more intriguing startups was Volio, which lets any business or entrepreneur pre-record video snippets in an interactive video chat format so that the video can respond to a customer’s or user’s question. It’s an intriguing technology that uses natural language processing but is perhaps best suited to customer service departments.

• The app I’m most likely to use? Just.me, from Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch, and his team. Very soon you’ll find the app in the iOS App Store in 155 countries and 32 languages. Just.me is a combination private messaging app meets social networking app — think of a Path that lets you share photos, video, audio and text with anyone in your Address Book.

Related

• ‘Demo God’ awarded to 5 startups pushing boundaries of mobile technology (Venturebeat)

• Are you ready for the place graph? (Socialmedia.biz)

• Mobile articles and resources (Socialmedia.biz)

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I caught a fair chunk of the Where 2.0 conference yesterday in Santa Clara, Calif., plus part of Tuesday’s sessions. I think it’s fair to say this is the best annual gathering of thought leaders in the mobile space — people from the future who beam to bring us up to speed on where this whole mobile revolution is taking us.

Here’s my modest Flickr photo set of 14 images.

I got to spend some time with two of the rock stars of the mobile world: Di-Ann Eisnor, VP Community of the cool beat-traffic-jams app Waze, and DJ Patil (another initial guy), chief product officer of the hot startup Color (and former chief scientist of LinkedIn). which recently raked in $41 million in venture backing.

I’m always impressed by the visual eye candy at Where 2.0 and this gathering was no exception. Check out the 90-second clip above, Waze Presents: An LA Traffic Story (music), which visually represents a 24-hour time lapse of traffic congestion, accidents, police activity and more in Los Angeles, based on the automatic GPS tracking in the Waze app as well as reports by Waze members. Fun!

Some other highlights from Where 2.0

Alexa Andrzejewski of Foodspotting, Jyri Engestrom of Ditto, Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze.

I didn’t get to all the sessions I wanted to, but here are a few other highlights and takeaways:

• Good to meet the folks behind SeeClickFix, a site that lets people report community problems to local government, and one that I’ve admired for some time.

• My favorite new toy: the GroupMe app, a group messaging service for ad hoc groups of friends, family, co-workers, college buddies. Says co-founder Steve Martocci: “It’s like a it’s like a reply all chat room on your phone. … This is a very intimate tool that’ll buzz everyone’s pocket.” Yowza!

• 40 percent of ratings on Yelp is coming in through mobile devices. Yelp now has 50 million unique visits per month in eight countries.

• One out of every 10 Israelis (not just drivers) uses Waze.

• Localmind is a new service that allows you to send questions and receive answers about what is going on — right now — at places you care about. If it scales, this would be an awesome service.

• Loved this quote from Jyri Engeström of Ditto (just downloaded the app: “Looking to hang out? Find out what your friends are up to, have a conversation, or get a group together. Ditto makes it easy to get recommendations about restaurants, movies and things to do.”):

“A lot of the conversation that goes on at conferences like Where 2.0 is based on the assumption that we’re talking about places and buildings. But the resolution of social objects is getting higher and higher so we’re getting to the things scale and person scale, with almost everything being able to have a unique identifier associated with it — even plants and animals. Then the whole conversation changes.”

• Raffi Krikorian of Twitter: “People want to say ‘I’m in Vegas, baby!’ without giving away their exact location.” His hourlong talk about the different tiers of “local” was fascinating. I was also digging terms like “geohash.” And: “The holy grail of geo-location is to use some kind of GPS triangulation.” Follow him on Twitter at @raffi.

• Jack Abraham, Director of Local at eBay: “Any product that can be digitally distributed, will be.” He noted there were 465 million active IP addresses in 2009 and that number continues to balloon. Also: ecommerce still makes up only 5 percent of all commerce in the United States.

• Did you know that when you tweet a Foursquare check-in, Twitter fetches the url, looks at the location and adds location metadata to the tweet before it goes out, all in a split second?

• LoKast allows people to share media with nearby users, at super-fast speeds. Boris Boyatin called it a “disposable social network” — cool term!

• “Mobile is all about discovery and awareness.” – Kiran Modak, EVP, @unsocial

• Other apps that looked cool: Fwix (“What’s happening nearby?”), Foodspotting (“The best foods and where to find them”), and ToothTag (Mashable: Never Lose Your Car or Miss a Friend With ToothTag).

• Saved the best url for last. Some of the speakers posted their slides for folks to download or view: at http://where2conf.com/slides. Some amazing stuff here.

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