Buenos Dias,

Each year we visit the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is the biggest mobile congress in the world with over 100,000 visitors in four days. And everything is there: the latest handsets, the coolest content, but also vendors of UMTS antennas and RFID chips (a little less interesting )

We had an eBuddy Booth!
So for four days we were telling all mobile operators of the world how important it is to let them open up their mobile portals for us and let you use eBuddy.
It’s a corporate event, so we were in suits and unfortunately we don’t see a lot of you guys. But we did see a lot of people dropping by and showing that they had eBuddy Mobile Messenger on their phone…. and they like it . No surprise with over 1.5 million mobile users last month in each and every country of the world.

So…what was new and hot?
First of all: phones, phones and phones. For a good overview of all released phones, have a look at engadget.
As an example: Samsung was big on advertising their new U900 phone, with a virtual navigation keypad. Didn’t like it myself. I need to feel the keys.
Nokia showed a big range of new handsets including the new N96.
Other topics were Android, Location and Mobile Advertisement.

It was a good show and we’ve got a lot more insights on how to make the eBuddy Mobile Messenger and the eBuddy Lite Messenger even better.
He’re’s a short demo of the Mobile Messenger which was filmed at Mobile World. Check out how fast the message is coming in.

Last friday, Dutch students rallied against a new law enforcing a minimum of 1040 hours of study each year.

Interestingly enough, they used Instant Messaging to start the rally. The call to strike spread over the internet like wildfire, winning out over media such as mobile phones and email.

The second eBuddy Mobile User Day is a fact. Last week, we welcomed a group of enthusiastic Dutch eBuddy Mobile users to our HQ in Amsterdam.

The reason why we organize our User Days on such a regular basis is because we believe that a product needs to be shaped at your needs and not the other way around…

Our recently released Mobile Messenger and our Mobile Internet version therefore became subject to some very critical testing. I can not give you specific details about the findings, but some interesting improvements and ideas for both versions have risen and can be expected in a matter of time

After an intense afternoon of testing, we took our test-crew for a cruise around the famous Canals of Amsterdam. Luckily, the weather was great for the first time in a while and the American style pizza’s and traditional Dutch Heineken beers were well deserved!

The next user day will take place on Thursday the 2nd of August at our HQ so if you are around and would like to join please leave us a note here.

If you want to see all the pictures taken that day, visit our Flickr account here.

Yesterday we invited a group of eBuddy users to our headquarters in Amsterdam for a User Day. We organize days like these to find out more about what YOU think of our products and what features you find cool to add. The users who were there took our new Mobile Messenger for a spin and gave us some good feedback and new ideas!

We ended the afternoon with a boat trip through the Amsterdam canals. With some pizza& drinks on a boat in the sun, quite a nice ending of the day See all pics here.

More User Days will follow, so if you would like to join, please drop us an email on feedback[at]ebuddy.com!

Programmers have a hard job, they need to push out enormous amounts of code under circumstances far from ideal. The ideal situation would be to be totally isolated from any distraction whatsoever after you have a clear goal in mind. Sadly this situation is only available for a lucky few of us with home offices.

So what do you do to create an semi-ideal situation at work? I personally put on my headphones and listen to a variety of music; Iron Maiden (most of the old stuff), Metallica (The old stuff as well, Master of Puppets in particular), The Prodigy (The fat of the land), The Crystal Method (pertty much any album will do) and The Streets (Original pirate material). This is quite a variety of music styles, most of the time it relates to my state of mind. Some other favorites in the office:

• Bennie: Trance music; not too much melody and repetitiveness in a song works best
• JJK: Kruder&Dorfmeister - the K&D sessions, Gotan Project - Lunatico, Chicks on Speed - 99 cents, Air - Talkie Walkie, Chet Baker - anything, The strokes - is this it, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Chemical Brothers - Push the Button and Leftfield - Leftism
• Garbrand: Plaid, or Black Dog. Amazing music with multiple layers, tickles the brain…
• Niels: soma.fm

When you finally enter ‘The Zone’ you actually don’t hear the music anymore and you are as focused as can be and do amazing amounts of work, provided you are not interrupted anywhere during the process.

So what do you do to get into ‘The Zone’?

Every morning we all come to the office, most of us before 9am, some a little later. Caffeine is the weapon of choice to stimulate the central nervous system of many. In Amsterdam there are a few nice coffee places, however waking up to a Grande extra-caramel-extra-whip caramel macchiato is not possible due to the lack of Starbucks, so most of us just utilize the trusted Senseo machine or move to the outside alternatives of Village Bagels or the Coffee Company (being in the center of Amsterdam has its advantages).

Sipping our coffee and reading the news we chatter about what this day brings, we fire up our trusted editors (Eclipse, Netbeans, Emacs or Photoshop) and write code, draw pictures, maintain machines and other interesting stuff. When it is time for lunch we all rush to our lunch table, this is necessary because the table is actually too small to hold all of us and being in the second shift makes you miss all the good stuff. Our lunch is quite typical dutch, we have fresh bread and toppings (a variety of meat, cheese and fruits/veggies) delivered to the office daily and we make our own sandwiches. The lunch favorite of many is the ‘Tosti’. Get in line!

Lunch is generally ended with a nice game of foosball where we have a couple of friendly (or less friendly) matches. When all the dishes are cleared and the goals have been scored, we go back to writing code and talking about our projects.

When we commute home largely depends on deadlines, but most of us finish up some things in the trains or in the evening hours, to start the entire cycle again the next day.