Thanks to all you readers out there for having been part of a year quite interesting indeed, and nice to have you aboard and subscribed for 2008, a year that promises to be as fruitful and .. instructive as 2007. As Chregu, your usual host here, is probably still recovering not only from partying but also from dead whales and evil elephant seals, I'll try to do for you what people do at this time of the year: looking back, and looking forward. Perspective: rather personal.

Looking back

Frankly, too many things happened here to give a coherent summary. So instead of a thousand-point summary here's three points, simplistically:

  1. The Growth: A year ago (as mediagonal and bitflux ..) everybody here was working as a member of a team small enough for one single table. A single table team where asking a quick PHP question or passing on some customer inquiry was done with just a quick shout over the table. Internal Communications? Everybody just knew everything, automatically. As Liip we're 32 today – which changes things quite a bit. Without making them less cool, I think.
  2. The Projects: Is what we do. We had the award-winning ones ( local.ch, e-touch), the big and beautiful ones ( iconomix ..) and many many more – almost all of them non-standard and special. I think we like that.
  3. The Communities: Many. FluxCMS was and is being revived[ 1, 2]. BXE made huge steps towards version 2.0. moodle was continuously important, the Atlassian palette as well. And Chregu of course remained a rather active PHP guy [ 1, 2, ..].

The peer group of the local web companies also grew in importance: chatting at Webtuesday Co. the one day, competing for some project the day after, collaborating on some the next. ' Coopetion' they call that, I guess. Point 1 changed perceptions a little there, too.

Looking forward

Making boldest predictions is an established tech blogger tradition. With a little bit of imagination, quite some wishful thinking and extrapolation here are my .. truisms.

  1. The Liipers: With Lukas Smith (!), Joël Bez, Memi Beltrame and Rafael Garcia beginning in January there's a lot of experience being added to – and if we add (even more ;)) experience and our methodic investment in Scrum to what we are we're going to have good times. And Liip's going to be in the news again. Just guessing though, again.
  2. The New Office: As you might have read (and guessed from the above) we're looking for a new Zurich office. In what environment you work matters so much to how you work, so this change will be of great importance.
  3. The Intranets: will get more and more attention (again), when looking at the big picture. We see barriers hindering corporations from adopting “2.0”ish web approaches falling rapidly. Ajax interfaces, the acceptance of the web as a platform (and much of the open source stack(s) that use to power it) and funny sounding ideas like the 'Employee 2.0' [ 1, 2]
  4. The Web of Data / semantic web: the boundaries between data and metadata are blurring further, semi-structured data starts filling the gaps, and some newish companies [ 1, 2] are going to quite get a lot of attention. In connection with concepts like SOA 'semantic' approaches will make inroads into the enterprise, too. Sure. that's a prediction folks have been making for years and years now, I'm well aware of that :)
  5. The Mobile Web: The above goes along with mature mobile platforms and a transition from sites to services, where the website (see e.g ' Designing for a Web of Data') per se is losing importance. Such services go everywhere the net goes, transgressing the browsing paradigm and so making the mobile web more a much better and more useful an experience. Of course this goes along with the progress of the Geoweb[ 1, 2, ..]. Coming, slowly, to your network in 2008 :)

Lots of these things are closely related, of course, which is good.

Well, anyway .. would be nice if you stopped by when in Zürich, Fribourg or Bern this year, or OpenExpo, at Webtuesday, at Lift08 .. or, one fine day, at our new office! :)