barcampbangkok4ever meetup, mobile platforms

Venture capitalist: “If someone wants me to invest in their hot new app, and they need a laptop to show me, I don’t even talk to them.”

Yesterday I went to the first BarcampBangkok4ever meetup, at Bug N Bee in Silom. Muriel and I decided to start a monthly meetup for Bangkok geeks after the first Barcamp, since we didn’t want to wait for the next Barcamp to have that much fun again. As a way of breaking the ice, Muriel came up with “bookmarks” as the discussion topic — everyone brings their favorite bookmark and talks about them, why they like that site, what they use it for.

My bookmark was Jan Chipchase, always one of my favorite sites:, about technology and culture in emerging markets.

“Did you know that 88% of Japanese young people access the Internet using their mobile phone instead of a PC?”, I asked, and Muriel told us about how the latest Linux kernel summit in China was all about mobile platforms — that’s all anyone is developing Linux for these days, in Asia.

We talked about the mobile phone as the platform of the future. Someone (name?) contributed the venture capitalist quote above. I suspect Asia will be at the forefront of these new developments, since mobile phone culture here is so much more developed than in other parts of the world. It will be interesting to see.