TechCrunch is one of the most important media in the current web 2.0 landscape. The guys (with Michael Arrington as the light tower) does a great job in keeping up with an industry on ecstacy while staying sober and ironic. When TechCrunch decided to do a conference it pretty fast became one of the most talked about conferences this year. After having been covered/mentioned 4 times by TechCrunch the last 4 weeks ZYB was offered a spot in the DemoPit.

It was a great conference with both good things and bad things. The good thing was (as it always is) the people that participated. It offered a great opportunity for us to meet with some potential partners and investors and also get more people excited about ZYB. It’s great to see how people get impressed with both what we have done and what we are going to do. It really gives energy for continuing the journey despite all the obstacles. The comments we received during the conference both proofed that the very core of our service (storing your phones data) and the social networking opportunity offered by ZYB is understood and demanded. The greatest moments were when ZYB-users stopped by and thanked for a great service. That feels good.

Everyone I spoke to agreed to the statement that ”A social network is not something you create. It’s something you already have. And it’s stored on your phone.” It started a couple of interesting discussions about social network fatigue. I think the coming year will show some adjustments on how people are using online social networks. ZYB is an opinion in this development. We think that people want to connect online to the people they care about – not some stranger on the other side of the globe.

So what was the bad thing about the conference? For me there were too many demos and the quality of some presentation was simply too poor. I think they should have kept it at 20 companies presenting and then a bit more of panel discussions or keynote speakers. Mint won the competition among the 40 presenting companies. They made a good figure but wasn’t my personal favorite. In my opinion the guys from Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) should have gotten the prize. I love their product and Matt Brezina was without doubt the best presenter at the conference. Go check them out – I’m convinced they’ll do good!

There were quite some discussions about hype at the conference. Is it a proof of a hyped industry that 1,000 people paid USD 2,000 for a two day conference? I don’t think so, because the network people get out of it can justify it. Is it a proof of hype that a normal edition of New York times have 4 pages covering internet companies? I don’t thinks so, because it’s an important part of the economy and the innovation going on. The only evidence of hype was that MC Hammer was part of the expert panel at the conference. But that’s seem more like MC Hammer being hyped.

We finally got an iPhone to Denmark, and while waiting for it to be unlocked, it struck me that I wouldn’t even be able to call anyone on it, because it had no contacts. I tried syncing it through iTunes, but that way it’s only showing half of my numbers, for some reason.

We sat down and started looking at the work of the brilliant Joe Hewitt and his iUi framework. Within hours we had our first working prototype that was able to display all your ZYB-contacts on your iPhone, in a native-like interface.

Over the last couple of days we’ve been tweaking it a bit, and you are now able to see all the details of your contacts, call them directly from the interface, look them up on the integrated Google Maps and so on. Basically all that the native client supports - only this time, with all of your contact details. I basically had an old Nokia, and now I seamlessly transferred all my contacts to my iPhone, with no effort except from one sync with ZYB.

We were also missing an option to search for contacts in the native address book on the iPhone, so we threw that in there as well..

The strategy of Apple making the plugin-work happening inside the Safari-browser makes perfect sense. They educate the users to actually start using the Internet from a mobile device. A thing that will surely revolutionize the so called ‘mobile web’. Just imagine 100 million internet capable devices in the pocket of every teenager.. On top of that, they allow for rapid deployments of plugins and a very short learning period, since everyone with some web-experience will be able to work with it.

The flat-rate dataplans on the iPhone and the increasing number of wireless hotspots everywhere, take away the ‘have to be online’ barrier of using web for plugins.

When someone like Joe Hewitt then launches the iUi framework, it makes it a real breeze to make stuff look nice on the iPhone quickly. We’ll probably be spending some time tweaking the design of it, and iron out some of the kinks still in there, but it’s a great start, and I’ll be sure to submit our various changes to the project so others can benefit.

If you’re one of the lucky iPhone users, be sure to check out the new ZYB for iPhone interface at iphone.zyb.com

-Ole