Until June 27th the startup duduku.de is auctioning itself at eBay – including domains, trademark, web 2.0 application, design and company.
Until now, dukudu.de is running the beta of their twitter-like friend information service. You can inform your different circles of friends via a Web- and SMS-based interface: What you are actually doing … or what is going on right now.
The project team did not manage to get the needed capital for a nationwide rollout and the team also separates for private reasons. It’s a great pity!
Some interesting facts for developers: dukudu.de was realized in PHP, based on the CakePHP-framework, and MySQL. They use inbound-SMS numbers from mobilant.de in Germany … at least in beta mode.

Sources: basicthinking.de, Auction: ebay.de

Update:
The German internet company allesklar.com AG bought dukudu for 36,309.24 Euro (without VAT). Not bad.

Yesterday, the WorldWideDeveloperConference (WWDC) started in San Francisco. Steve Jobs kicked off the event with his traditional keynote. After announcing Safari for Windows he came up with one last thing: How to write iPhone applications. And it’s easy: If your app runs in Safari, it will run on an iPhone, too. As a developer, you can access with your web 2.0 AJAX applications also iPhone functionalities like "making a phone call" or "sending an email". We’ll see what Apple will make accessible in detail.

Source: Apple press release, Steve Jobs keynote

The RailsConf 2007 attracted 1,600 attendees in Portland from May 17th-20th. And if you read David’s loud thinking blog the conference was a great success in spite of more than huge number of participants. But after the conference is before the conference … so the conference marathon continues this year:

June 22nd 2007: Rails-Konferenz.de, Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.rails-konferenz.de/
Language: German

June 22nd – 23rd 2007: Ostrava on Rails, Ostrava, Czech Republic
http://ostrava.rails.cz/en/
Language: English

September 17th-19th 2007: RailsConf Europe, Berlin, Germany
http://www.railsconfeurope.com/
Organized by O’Reilly – Language: English

November 2007: Rails Hispana Conferencia, Madrid, Spain
http://www.conferenciarails.org/
Language: Spanish

Certainly there are more Rails conferences out there … so just drop a comment

The PDF-book of Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson has just been updated to Version 2007-5-6. It now covers the newest developments within the Rails development community. Especially the "observer" and "sessions" sections have been updated.
Although I can recommend the paper-version of the book … it’s really great for reading in the park … Dave and David really show with their PDF-version how to make innovative use of electronic books.
All standard e-books I bought before always made me angry afterwards: The rigid Acrobat-DRM treated my like a potential criminal. And the e-books had no extra features compared with the paper version – only the disadvantages of an e-book.
Dave and David used another approach with their second edition of "Agile Web Development with Rails": Mehr …

It really get’s hot within the Rails developer community. Joyent, the creator of Rails-web-based collaboration applications from California, is developing Slingshot: By using Slingshot you can deploy Rails applications as stand-alone apps on Mac OS X or Windows. The Rails apps can be used without the browser and in an offline environment. Back online the stand-alone Slingshot application and the online server based app can be synchronized.
The project is in an early stage – although it proves again that the Ruby-on-Rails community is pure innovation in these days. Slingshot is another argument for elegant coding with Ruby-on-Rails.
By the way, also Adobe is trying to merge the Web online and the Desktop offline world with their Apollo project. However they do not use Ruby-on-Rails but their Flash programming environment Flex.

Sources & Picture: joyent.com, joyent-com/developers/slingshot, labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/