The market of iPhone applications is emerging since Steve Jobs iPhone developer kick off at the WWDC 2007. The essential decision of Apple to open up "only" the web browser Safari for third party developers is disappointing on the first view. But when you drill it down, there are many advantages and sure, some disadvantages, too:
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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

It’s hard for the traditional fixed and mobile network operators – like the Deutsche Telekom – to cope with those innovative VoIP companies like Skype or Jajah, these days.
Right now, the Deutsche Telekom bought shares of the start-up Jajah via their venture capital subsidiary T-Venture, according to Financial Times Deutschland.
The two Austrians Daniel Mattes and Roman Scharf founded Jajah in 2005. The VoIP telephony service works without the need of any client software installation. You just have to leave your personal telephone number when registering your Jajah-account. You can even use your mobile phone number. Via the Jajah-website you type in the telephone number of the person you want to call. Some Seconds later, you’ll get a phone call from Jajah and the system connects you with the desired person. The VoIP call can be triggered from every Internet-connected Computer and even with your mobile phone with integrated web browser.
According to information provided by the company the average revenue per user per Mont his 6 Euro and the margin is 40%. At the end of the year Jajah wants to increase its customer base from 3 to 10 Million. That’s a bright earnings outlook for this start-up company!

Sources: Manager Magazin, Financial Times Deutschland

On May 23, the EU parliament voted fort he EU regulation to cap the charges for using mobile phones abroad after succeeding in tough negotiations with the national EU governments. Based on the initiative of Viviane Reding, the EU parliament really acted as the representation of the EU people and fighted for lower charges. In contrary, the national EU governments did not live up to their names as "representation of people": They tried to assert the interests of the mobile operators to establish the highest maximum charges possible. More …