There are at least two reasons we’re smiling in the Imity camp these days. First off, we now have quite a lot of new and impressively skilled colleagues at the slightly bigger and brighter Copenhagen ZYB office. Secondly, come fall Imity gets a new home: The ZYB Phonebook version 2.

So what’s the plan? We’ll let our users keep playing with Imity until we’re all set in the new ZYB Phonebook. To keep server maintenance down and our focus clear, we’ll be closing down for new signups in a matter of hours.

Looking back at our blue office chairs and worn out test phones, we’ve had a blast experimenting and meeting a lot of people as a natural part of it all. The numbers speak for themselves, our users, and the future of this thing: 400,000 encounters among 70,000 people. Who said tech people didn’t have social lives?

But why not head over to our new home, zyb.com and try the best phonebook tool out there?

(Official press release)

Imity was mentioned on TechCrunch in a round up of mobile social networks. While we’ve been relatively quiet around the java client for a couple of months, we’ve been developing services for venues and talking to partners about pushing imity based experiences to specific locations - we have talked about this from the very beginning, adding a location specific imity service to conferences, concert halls, shopping malls - whereever there’s a public space with a flow of people we can help enjoy the space better.

But the TechCrunch post is a welcome opportunity to say, that I’ll be putting a new version of our server software up that should help make our service more hackable for uses we haven’t considered. It all has to do with a better/simpler model for virtual objects in physical spaces - but more on that in a couple of weeks, when the news is about something that’s out there.

The festival is 4 hours old, people are hiding themselves and their phones under rain gear, we’re having technical issues at some of the stages, but we’ve already seen about 2000 of the 75000-90000 thousand people at Roskilde.
Welcome to Blue Bunny - if you want to use the sms interface, go here.

Curious about which up and coming bands were hits at the Vesterbro festival last weekend? Have a look at the minute to minute popularity-meter above.

We* are busy preparing our amazing Imity-based concert suggester service for the Roskilde Festival.
With the help of the super friendly organizers of the local Vesterbro Festival here in Copenhagen, we put on a huge beta test over the last weekend.
We got a truly fascinating data set - as you can see above.
The bands are all local up and coming Copenhagen acts and apart from being able to tell which bands were hits at the festival you can also see how the build up worked during the concert: Some of the bands have high recognition and people flocked to those concerts from the very beginning (e.g. I Got You On Tape) - other less well known acts just put on a good show, so people showed up little by little but stayed at the concert (e.g. Teppop).
Thanks to those of you who signed up for the service at the festival. I know we had a couple of technical glitches along the way, but this was really a good and very useful experience for us. Hope you had fun too. And hope to see you again at Roskilde.

* We: That means Imity and a group of students at ITU - who are working with us on this as a term project.

Danish Newspaper Politiken has a story about the real life music recommendation service powered by Imity that we’re doing for the Roskilde Festival.

The project is coming together nicely and will get its first public test this friday and saturday at a local music festival here in Copenhagen.

You can catch a recording of me presenting at XTEch on ubi-day (pre conference) here.

There’s still time to sign up for XTech in Paris in May. I’ll be going myself to present on the ubiquitous web day - a full day about wearables and ubiquity and other such physical world/computing interactions on May 15 - which is the day before the conference proper. I’m looking forward to speaking - and to meeting some other early-ubi-adopters. The program for the day looks great - and it looks very forward looking which I thinks is really cool.

Hope to see you there as well, and talk about Imity and ubiquity.

We got a nice mention in the International Herald Tribune.

Hi everybody,

We’re having some server problems - have been since the O’Reilly mention, actually - that are largely due to the system running at what I would describe as experimental hardware levels. It’s not a complete blackout most of the time, but I am aware that some pages in the web app fail almost all of the time. I’m going to add hardware next week as well as do what else I can to get a faster running service.

Sorry about the mess. I’ll be back with more as the situation develops.

Thanks to Nat for pointing out that our J2ME client has been open sourced. We’re still looking at what we want to do with it - but on the short list is general cleanup and a better separation of the UI and server API components of the app.

Also in Imity news, we’re (that is: I am) going to be presenting at XTech in Paris this may. It’d be great to talk to some of you about the client, and other ubiquity hacks if you’re going. If you’re going to Reboot - which is here in Copenhagen - we’ll of course be there, and most likely also doing something with the app during the conference. I doubt we’ll be on the official program though.

If you’re interested in the open source app or in hooking up to hack imity or talk about applications of Imity leave a comment or get in touch.