I want to thank all the users that contributed content and helped create a visual Zeitgeist of their favorite cities like Munich, London, Berlin, Paris, New York City and Rome.

So there I was, in the back of the car, playing around on my iPad. I had no more cash in my pocket so I asked the driver if he accepted credit cards. He showed me his huge, credit card payment system (there’s a reason they call it knuckle buster – see image). I asked him if he ever heard of Square. No. He was in his fourties, and a family father, as he later explained. So I started telling him about how it’s a payment system that doesn’t charge a minumum fee. Only a percentage of the total amount paid (2.75% at the time of writing) . Traditional card processing companies charge people  base fees, no matter how little the amount you pay is. Since a taxi driver takes a lot of small payments, that may well affect his payroll.

That caught his attention. And when I told him that Square is just an adapter you plug into you iPhone, I thought he would not like that. But the opposide was the case. He was really happy, because I just gave him a reason to finally get an iPhone without getting in trouble for wasting money. A reason his wife would ok as he told me, because it’s a business related purchase that’ll make him earn more money. I’m not sure if he actually started using Square, but it sure made me think.

Do we always really realize who’s actually making the decision for purchases? Can we increase market shares by looking at who else might be involved in the decision making process?

Info: A&Rs

Amazon recently released a free web storage called Cloud Drive. It gives you 5GB of storage to upload your media files online and is based on their Web Services Storage called S3, which is already widely used in cloud computing.

So why do they offer that?Of course they are happy to offer a service where they can charge you if you use more than 5 GB of free storage. But what’s much more interesting is that it now gives them the possibility to analyze not only what music you buy, but also which bands and DJs you and your friends store on that web storage and listen to.

Owning that (meta)data gives them an incredibly interesting signal. They can now analyze trends in local markets and subcultures. That’ll allow them to offer distribution deals to emerging artists that are still underground and no record label has ever heard of. Now that’s a competitive advantage.

Munich StartupDigest is a curated weekly newsletter of the best startup events in town. It contains events like conferences, meetups, hackathons or anything else your web or mobile startup may need. The Startup Digest is a worldwide event newsletter which more than 250.000 entrepreneurs subscribe to in cities like San Francisco, Tokio, New York, Berlin, and now … München, proud home of the original Oktoberfest.

So no matter if you’re new in town, looking for funding or a cofounder, or just want to learn about the newest technologies for startups, this is a great resource for you.

Feel free to sign up to it at startupdigest.com. It is curated by me.

If you have great events that should go into next week’s edition of the Munich StartupDigest, feel free to email them to me at mat@wiemann.name .

Here’s my little cheat sheet that acts as a quick reference during my programming sprints.

The MONGOID Cheat Sheet

Example

class User
  include Mongoid::Document
  include Mongoid::Timestamps # adds automagic fields created_at, updated_at
  references_many :posts
  embeds_one :profile, :dependent => :destroy
  field :fieldname, :type => Array / BigDecimal / Boolean / Date / DateTime
                           / Float / Hash / Integer / String / Symbol / Time

  index :fieldname
end

Relations

Embedding data in the same table:

embeds_one :profile
embeds_many :settings
embedded_in :user, :inverse_of => :settings

Referencing data in an other table:

referenced_in :user
references_one :profile, :inverse_of => user
references_many :photos, :inverse_of => user

Persistence

In order to make sure data is actually to be written to disk, you need to tell mongoid

.safely.save

Queries

.where(:amount.gt => 100, :active => true)
.any_in(:category => array)
.all_in(:category => array)
.any_of({ :shape => "round" }, { :color => "red" })
.and(:amount.gt => 100, :account_status => "active")
.excludes(:status => "blocked")
.not_in(:status => ["blocked", "unverified"])
.only(:first_name, :last_name) # only retrieve these fields
.limit(20)
.skip(100)

Order

.desc(:last_name).asc(:first_name)
.order_by(:last_name.desc, :first_name.asc, :city.desc)

Criterias

.where(:title.all => ["Sir"])
.where(:age.exists => true)
.where(:age.gt => 18)
.where(:age.gte => 18)
.where(:title.in => ["Sir", "Madam"])
.where(:age.lt => 55)
.where(:age.lte => 55)
.where(:title.ne => "Mr")
.where(:title.nin => ["Esquire"])
.where(:aliases.size => 2)
.where(:location.near => [ 22.5, -21.33 ])
.where(:location.within => { "$center" => [ [ 50, -40 ], 1 ] })

Calculations

.max(:age)
.min(:quantity)
.sum(:total)

Rake Tasks

db:create
db:create_indexes
db:drop
db:migrate
db:schema:load
db:seed
db:setup
db:test:prepare

Make sure to also check out the MONGOID docs, and the amazing MongoDB guide and the great Scaling MongoDB Book.

So after it was suggested once again I thought I’d take the chance to organize a meet up for people to get to know each other, share knowledge about photography and have some drinks and chat.

Here’s my suggestion:

• Get together in front of the Feldherrenhalle Odeonsplatz
• Walk over to the christmas market at Residenz or Wittelsbacherplatz just around the corner
• Have a Glühwein & chat in English, German or <fill with your preference>
• Do photowalks on the christmas market, Hofgarten, or wherever else you like.

Let’s meet at 2pm on Saturday, December 11th at Odeonsplatz.

Please add a comment to register. You’re more than welcome to bring friends. Ideas and suggestions are also welcome.

UPDATE : Here’s the widget for the event page we’ll be updating live

Photos Of Munich Photo Meetup, Munich

So here it is:

Munich’s Photo of the day
Instructions on how to embed the widget can be found on the widget page for mesomo Munich.
mesomo retired, so this feature isn’t available anymore.

Please leave a comment if you use it on your website or blog.
The widget is still in beta, so please let me know if you run into any problems.

Viruses, Hackers

The iPad runs each application in a sandbox and does not offer a shared file system. This may very well be the best foundation for a secure operating system. Incidents like last Christmas’ hack into Google, Adobe and other tech companies, most possibly happened due to security vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat. At Google they ultimately allowed the hackers to get into the Googleplex’s servers. So security starts with with secure end users devices. The iPad may be a great contender for a secure endpoint in an IT infrastructure.

Tech Support Costs

Since applications are independent of each other and the platform is standardized, they simply work. That combined with superior usability makes the device something you can learn easily and won’t need an expensive support team in your company for.

Productivity Loss

Lots of people need a portable computer to supply them with information in the real world. They don’t need multitasking. Productivity may very well be improved with applications designed for usability rather than flexibility. Users will be a lot less frustrated if they don’t have the information overload most people are facing with IM, Skype, Twitter and Email running in the background.

What’s currently keeping companies from integrating the iPad and iPhone in their infrastructure?

Legacy applications and Vendors who are hesitant to change. SOA may have made Information Systems more transparent, but lots of Enterprises run very specific applications that were either developed in-house or bought. If the software was bought, they might ask the software vendor to create an iPad version, and offer it on the app store. But if the software was created in-house, putting it on the app store for public availability probably isn’t gonna be good for for keeping your business intelligence away from your competitors.

So what should Apple change? They should offer Enterprise App Stores which are private – only accessible by the corporation’s employees. That way companies have full control over who gets to use their Apps. Just like Apple added Exchange Support to the iPhone in order to make the Business users happy, this is the next required step.

But what if Apple doesn’t do that? With Safari’s advanced html5 features and speedy Javascript, most business applications can be implemented as web apps. Html5 even allows offline storage to be used in Web Sites / Applications. So if you disconnect from the internet because you have no wifi signal and wireless data connection, nothing is lost, you just keep working. And once the internet is up again the Website will automatically sync the data. It’s like Magic.

The iPad surely seems to be a great opportunity for consumers and business users alike. Let’s see if Apple is ready to offer Enterprises more control over their holy grail – App distribution.

I have a feeling there will be lots of innovation with Apps and Web Applications driven by the iPad.

I would love to read what you think about this topic in the comments.

The mentioned twitter clients for the desktop are really good, but not great.  They have gained more and more features over time, but not a lot of really big innovation has happened in this space. There’s still no Spam filtering, link collection or deep social graph analytics.

What can be done to foster innovation in that area? We have great desktop clients that cache our twitter data locally, but nothing really interesting is done with it. It’s like Outlook without Xobni.

Who will win the twitter desktop client war? I think it will the client that opens up to developers by offering a plugin architecture. Just like Firefox became incredibly useful overnight with the addition of plugins, that same approach will give developers a great advantage by not having to develop the basic client functionality over and over again. They can focus on great functionality without doing the plumbing. And the desktop client becomes more and more useful with every plugin, thus creating the next hotbed for innovation.

The next generation twitter client will be created by you and me.

Update 8.38pm GMT+1: Just about 4 hours after writing this post, I discovered that Seesmic for windows with plug in support (like in Firefox!) was released today. Crazy. Here’s the link.

But…

there’s one thing that could make it explode in popularity.  Let’s start with the problem.
Creating an image for cloud computing often involves installing web servers, database servers, compiling packages (which is dead simple with suse studio) and maybe load balancing, image processing, video transcoding. And of course configuring the applications. All that stuff. Very time consuming and frustrating.
Lots of blogs show people how to create a killer configuration for a certain stack (like LAMP, LNMR etc), but they always describe the painful tasks you have to go through, just to have a working server. Often a couple of days later the first version numbers for linked tars change and the whole thing doesn’t work anymore. They outdate quickly. Big mess.

This is where suse studio comes into play

Suse studio is very good at allowing you to create your custom linux distribution. Now take it a step further and allow me to share these with people. Also I want to be able to further customize shared images in suse studio. Make customization a process that happens in the community. Similar to fork on github.

The appliance could become a social object. Sharable. Cloneable. Ready for further customization. Inheritance would be great too. That would be a service I’m totally willing to pay for. Amazon EC2 already showed how people pay for good appliance images – the end product.

Make linux appliance tutorials obsolete

Why are there 87,900 hits when I search for “rails server stack tutorial”? There should be  a public appliance directory by suse so it pops up when i google, er bing my desired stack. Then add ratings, comments and change notifications. It would save thousands of developers huge amounts of time. And suse/Novell could probably make a lot of money by becoming the mother of modern linux appliances.

Education can also benefit. The teacher could share the image with the students, they modify the image, upload it to AWS and have their own server running in the cloud. From nothing to your own customized linux server  in the cloud in 60 minutes.

I don’t know about the legal issues that come into play when sharing appliances. But just think about the benefits. From my standpoint they are huge.

This is just me thinking out loud, eager to hear what you think about my vision a social suse studio.

Please post your thoughts in the comments.