Here in Tokyo, most people in the train are pre-occupied with their keitai denwa’s, mobile phones. While I am here working for [my client](http://iknow.co.jp/) I have turned into one of these people.

Apart from playing the great game of PuyoPuyo I also read the news. Unfortunatly, the English mobile news website don’t satisfy my Web Technology reading needs. Therefore I spend two hours yesterday to make a mobile RSS reader.

Now - whenever you’re in Japan - you can view your latest feeds at:

Updated hourly and I’ve made it so you can easily add your own feeds e.g. http://mobile.topoints.com/your.favourite.blog

Gotta love RubyOnRails and RSS feeds :]

I’ve just released the first version of the Confabio development center:

It displays the latest confabio activity. I would like to enhance this so it will also display more business and strategic information. Naked development and naked business!

Short term wish list:

* latest #confabio irc chatter
* date of latest production deploy
* shareholder/ownership information

Once again, we are saved by [Hyo Kwon](http://hyokwon.nl/), our designer friend.
For the front page we want to symbolize ‘plug in your camera’. All I could come up with was:

But a little Hyo time can give you:

We are using the latter one because it reminds us of [southpark](http://www.flickr.com/photos/59198954@N00/1208537608/) and because it has a low IQ threshold of understanding :]

lol, ok here it is:

In order to make development more smooth we’ve set up an IRC Channel for the development team. Last.fm also does this and I really like it. Every sunday we will have a coding session and production release:

* time: 1200 CET, every Sunday
* server: irc.darkwired.org
* port: 9999 (ssl)
* channel: #confabio

Ofcourse we want to start doing those coding sessions on Confabio once we get a nice premium version rolling. But for now, I’ve hacked [this nifty IRC bot](http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2007/01/02/a-ruby-eval-bot-for-irc-kirby/) which can monitor SVN commits. I also gave it the ability to: SSL connect and monitor production deploys (pop me an email for the sourcecode):

To make the development of Confabio as a service and business more lively I will start preparing an online boardroom of some kind. The key concept here is *Open Source Business*, that means that basically everyone who clocks hours and commits results will get a ownership according to their effort. I really like to make this open, because it will show the outside world what’s going on. More about this later.

Today’s release:

* get an XML list of users, their locations and meetings:


* or by clicking:

* Flash video bugfixes: camera will be remembered based on first motion detection, special hack for macbooks so that the proper camera is chosen.
* IE6 compatibility hacks (the old balls n chains)
* many technical detailed bugfixes

I just released a new feature for the Confabio free version.
As I’ve said before, I really want to focus on making Confabio more interconnected. One of the ways of doing this is providing an email invite functionality. As [Sil](http://blog.skill-online.nl/) noted correctly most people here in Europe without a blackberry check their email only once every few hours. So we needed a way to actually indicate the time of the meeting.

At the bottom of the screen there is a link ’set a meeting’:

After adding a meeting, all will get a notification email:

And it will show up for everyone in the conversation URL (meetings can be edited by their owners, still no need for signup!):

Half an hour after the meeting it will disappear from the conversation.

Still need to:

* make things a bit more user friendly
* better styling
* make timezones clear

The last months, one thing has been clear as day: Confabio.com is a kickass project with tremendous potential. It would be a waste to just stop at this prototype. Therefore, I intend to start spending x hours per week regularly and form a team.

So what needs to be done as soon as possible:

* Finding a Flash Video hosting company that wants to make a nice deal. (Really, we need to make sure that we can scale up the video streams) Red5 currently is a high risk.

For Confabio Free:

* Opening up Confabio: providing an API, inviting others to the conversation and setting meeting times.
* Thinking about providing some kind of widget (like ToxBox) to use on sites, blogs and facebooks etc.
* A downloadable trayicon that notifies you when people join a conversation.
* (Video) advertisements to try to sustain the bandwidth costs.

For Confabio Premium:

* Audio/video toggleable (new word!) chat.
* Settings screen to set preferences (like password).
* Some kind of signup procedure.
* A real time easy to use whiteboard.
* A proper test case with a real team:

Let me introduce you two of my friends and fellow programmers, both studying Computer Science at Hogeschool van Amsterdam:

Sil, aka skill. Will focus on the c++ coded trayicon that will make regular conversations between people painless (read: without using IM like skype). More about skill here: blog.skill-online.nl.

Aram, aka aczid. Will be responsible for bringing business value to the Premium, he’s now working on the whiteboard. More about aczid here: aczid.digigen.nl.

Welcome guys! And stay tuned, because things are about to roll!