PavingWays

There are some great mobile related events coming up in the next months that might interest you. Have a look:

• bada Developer Day, June 18, 2010 in London, UK
• BizSparkCamp, A Technical day focused on Windows Phone 7, June 22, 2010 in London, UK
• MLOVE, June 23-25, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• DevDay for iPhone, June 25, 2010 in London, UK
• MobileBeat 2010, July 12-13, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Handheld Librarian Online Conference III, July 28-29, 2010 - ONLINE CONFERENCE
• London Mobile Payments Networking Evening, August 02, 2010 in London, UK
• Nokia N8 Launch event for developers, August 03, 2010 in London, UK
• Consumer Content Conference, August 17, 2010 in Cologne, Germany
• App Days, August 17, 2010 in Cologne, Germany
• dconstruct, Sept. 3, 2010 in Brighton, UK
• MobileTech Conference 2010, Sept. 6-8, 2010 in Mainz, Germany
• Global App Show, Sept. 7-9, 2010 in Las Vegas, NV, USA
• Over the Air, Sept. 10-11, 2010 in London, UK
• APPNATION, Sept. 12-13, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Nokia World 2010, Sept. 14-15, 2010 in London, UK
• Mobile 2.0, Sept. 20-21, 2010 in Silicon Valley, CA, USA
• IIR’s Mobile Broadband World 2010, Sept. 27-29, 2010 in London, UK
• IIR’s Mobile Payments Services conference, Sept. 27-29, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain
• iPhone/iPad DevCon, Sept. 27-30, 2010 in San Diego, CA, USA
• Blackberry Developer Conference, Sept. 27-30, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Mobilize, Sept. 30, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Web & Apps World Forum, Oct. 5, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Connected Home Global Summit 2010, Oct. 5-6, 2010 in London, UK
• Next Generation Mobile Devices 2010, Oct. 7-8, 2010 in London, UK
• 4G World 2010, Oct. 18-21, 2010 in Chicago, USA
• ITSF 2010 - Time & Sync in Telecoms, Nov. 2-4, 2010 in Dublin, Ireland
• Open Mobile Summit, Nov. 8-10, 2010 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• IIR’s Mobile 2.0, Nov. 22-24, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• Femtocell Americas 2010, Dec. 13-14, 2010 in Miami, FL, USA

Are you aware of some other events? Please let us know!

Last Friday we attended the Mobile Unconference in Rotterdam. The topics at this event were mostly game related and over 90% of the attendees were Dutch. We really liked the unconventional style. There were some presentations, some discussion slots and a lot of space to get in touch with people.

The first presentation was held by Scoreloop. They have an SDK which allows game developers to build a community around their iPhone or Android game. Developers can integrate features like leaderboards, achievements or social networks. Apple’s Game Center does not give them an headache yet.

The second presentation was about Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. The UI of the WP7 phone looked nice. Microsoft wants to make it easy for developer to develop apps (of course). On June 2, Microsoft will be organizing a free developer event called “Windows Phone Developer Hub” in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

PavingWays’ Rocco was presenting a concept about a new cross-platform e-reader for mangas and comics. The reader allows interactivity as well as community features amongst some more cool things. More about that soon right here on our blog. The session was intended to be a feedback channel for us and we did indeed receive a lot of feedback and food for thought from the attendees. Thanks to all and thanks to Arjan from MobileGamesBlog.com for mentioning it on his blog, too! (more…)

Tomorrow we will attend the Mobile Unconference in Rotterdam. We are really looking forward to the one day event. Some of the topics: Windows Phone 7 & Marketplace and mobile gaming communities - interesting stuff for us. We try to keep you updated through our blog or via Twitter (@pavingways).

There are also some other mobile related events coming up in the next weeks/months that might interest you:

• “Move Your App To The Next Level” Developer Conference, May 27, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Geeks of London VIII, May 28, 2010 in London, UK
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Hub, June 2, 2010 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Samsung bada Developer Day, June 3, 2010 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• dconstruct, September 3, 2010 in Brighton, UK
• Over the Air, September 10-11, 2010 in London, UK
• Nokia World 2010, September 14-15, 2010 in London, UK
• Mobile 2.0, September 20-21, 2010 in Silicon Valley, USA
• IIR’s Mobile Payments Services conference, September 27-29, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain
• Blackberry Developer Conference, September 27-30, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobilize, September 30, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• Mobile Web & Apps World Forum, October 5, 2010 in San Francisco, USA
• 4G World 2010, October 18-21, 2010 in Chicago, USA

Are you aware of some other events? Please let us know!

We have been planning to organize a local meetup group around the topics of HTML5 and CSS3 for a few months. These topics are necessary to get into for any serious developer in the area of web development. Also mobile developers need to know what’s up with it, especially if they are planning to develop for the iPhone, Android phones or basically any other web-based platform. On top of this talking about experiences and learning from each other is a good way to get into any topic.

Some people were contacted and this past Tuesday the first HTML5 and CSS3 meetup in Frankfurt took place. We managed to gather a small bunch and met at the Lokalbahnhof, a pretty nice restaurant / bar in Sachsenhausen. It turned out to become a very fun evening with good food and a couple of drinks.

HTML5 action was based around an introductory presentation that I was showing:

I was also showing a canvas demo intended to be used for the iPhone - after all we ended up replacing this part of the application with an old-school CSS sprite background animation for performance reasons, which was a learning on its own. Another Demo shown was a GameQuery-based shooter game that uses CSS3 animations to blow up enemy ships - amazing to look at and play - thanks for that Jesse!

There were various discussions about the two technologies. The concept of just sitting together without a real agenda, talking about a wide topic seems to work - I could learn some new things and I am sure the other attendees did too. Thanks to everyone who was there, it was a great evening!

We are now planning to do this monthly (roughly), so we are looking forward to April! If you want to come make sure you are filling out the Doodle poll so we can pick the best date!

Last week we attended the Browsergames Forum 2009 in Frankfurt. This forum/conference brought together people and companies from the browser based games area. Germany is a serious location for all browser games (BigPoint, Travian Games, Innogames …) so it wasn’t really surprising that 90% of all attendees were German as well, but we also met people from Bulgaria, Portugal and Israel.

Recently, we have been developing two mobile browser based games for UK clients (news about those soon here) and this conference was perfect for us to see what is going on in this market, what are the upcoming trends and how to make money in this area.

There were several talks, with topics ranging from programing, monetizing, financing to marketing and legal topics and they answered most of our questions above. Unlike typical web startups it seemed to me that browser game companies do not struggle with finding their business model and earning money. They make (in many cases loads of) money, especially by selling items to users.

And options for these item sales are virtually unlimited. Patrick Streppel (CEO Gamigo Games AG) talked about the possibilities. His company had replaced fantasy cars for real and licensed cars (such as BMW, Audi, …) in a game, because the users wanted that and it felt more natural to them and accordingly sales increased vastly. Another interesting story was that in the game you can buy golf clubs which can be used 100,000 times and then have to be replaced by a new one. In another game the users can buy an insurance for their sword in order to be protected against damage. “Buy one, get one free” campaigns or bundle sales are very popular too. There were also some companies offering monetisation models for free-to-play games, such as SponsorPay or fatfoogoo. With these players can basically get premium services or virtual goods/money in games by doing surveys or signing up for other services etc. (more…)

As mentioned earlier, I was invited for a panel discussion at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday. The other panelists were Suzanne Koranyi-Esser (Editorial Director of Reader’s Digest Germany, Switzerland, Austria) and Patrik Jaros (star chef, cookbook author, CEO of FOODLOOK Studio GmbH). Siobhan O`Leary (literary agent, translator and writer) was moderating this panel. Good job everyone!

The panel discussion was quite interesting and some publishers are already playing around with mobile applications. Patrik Jaros mentioned that he released a couple of cooking applications for different mobile platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android). Reader’s Digest has also an iPhone app available for download called “allrecipes.com DinnerSpinner” and it is related to RD’s online community of hobby cooks (German version). The discussion was not about mobile exclusively, but digital in general. Questions ranged from “Should the content in an application be released for free or not?”, “Is the classic cookbook dead?” to “What kind of strategy should publishers and retailers follow in the digital/mobile space?”. (more…)

Yesterday we went to the Webmontag in Frankfurt. It took off at 7 pm and was pretty well attended (>100 people). First there were some presentations about Barcamps in general, Conceptual Designers, PR & social media, Wikis for agencys and companies and why todolists fail. I really liked the twitter wall even though the filter only worked for the hashtag #Webmontag and not for #wmfra.

1.5 hours later the networking part started. Nice people, nice talks. Here are some photos from yesterday @ flickr.com.

The next Webmontag Frankfurt is scheduled for 04. December. One talk will be about Google Wave. Btw many thanks to Darren & the rest of the orga team for organizing this! See you there!

PS: There are some more interesting events coming up:

1. droidcon 3./4. Nov. (Berlin, Germany)
2. BarCamp Mainz 28./29. Nov. (Mainz, Germany)
3. GTUGFRA Google Technology UserGroup Frankfurt 17. Dec. (Frankfurt/Main, Germany)

I have been invited by the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair for a panel discussion about digital and mobile solutions in the field of cooking and publishing.

For the first time, the Frankfurt Book Fair is offering over 400 qm exclusively to the world of food, wine and all things epicurean. The Gourmet Gallery (in Hall 5.0), one of the highlights at the book fair, features a show kitchen for live demonstrations by prominent chefs as well as talks, discussions, interviews etc. about everything cooking- and gourmet-related.

The topic of the panel discussion that I am participating in is “Cooking digital, digital Cooking: digital innovations and initiatives“. It is a B2B talk where we want to discuss examples for new ways for cookery books, trends, innovations and business models for chefs or publishing representatives. We will also talk about electronic culinary schools and getting recipes on your mobile.

Insights from the huge amount of mobile application stores and the emerging mobile widgets market will be things I can contribute, and findings from our research on these topics will come in handy, so I hope. In case you haven’t seen our wiki yet, it’s the place where we collect all available information about app stores and widget engines - our main area of business meanwhile.

It’s my first time at the Frankfurt Book Fair and I am really looking forward to this interesting panel. Many thanks to Heike Scholz @MobileZeitgeist for getting me in touch!

When hundreds of bean bags, big and small Daleks, The Beatles Rockband, Gears of War 2 and hundreds of geeks interested in mobile technology come together, it can only be Over The Air!

This year’s OTA in London was a great event, both in terms of the sessions held and in terms of the organization of the event. Daniel Appelquist’s team succeeded in gathering a batch of speakers who were able to cover a diverse, yet focused set of topics - thanks a lot for all this!

So what were all these experts and enthusiasts talking about? Widgets and app stores of course!

We enjoyed many interesting sessions and right from the keynotes by speakers from OMTP/BONDI, Vodafone and WIP one thing was clear: mobile widgets and application stores are what the mobile industry is all about right now.

For us at PavingWays this is not different, ever since we thought mobile widgets would make the mobile web more ubiquitous we have been looking at this area very closely.

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We are really looking forward to our next trip to London. This week is “London Digital Week” and we will be attending Over The Air - 24 hour of mobile development, a mobile developer and design event. Too bad we knew about London Digital Week too late, so we will miss some other (mobile related) events, such as Nokia Ovi Developer Open Door.

I am really happy that I am one of the speakers at Over The Air 2009. The line-up of speakers is great and the topics are impressive. There will be panels, sessions, discussions, workshops etc. - all about mobile development and design topics and there will also be an all-night hack-a-thon.

My session “Mobile Widgets - Worth the hassle?” focuses on comparing the different widget engines out there, on already existing and planned application stores and the question: is it worth to develop for one specific app store/engine or not.  I will also present an open wiki project collecting information about app stores and widget engines and invite the community to participate. Watch this space for update about this!

Due to overwhelming popular demand the organizers have released more tickets for Over the Air - register here. I think Over The Air will be THE mobile event this year packed with a lot of bleeding edge knowledge to gain and interesting people in the mobile space to meet.

If you are not able to attend, you can stay updated by following my tweets - @GeeROC - and of course there will be a summary blog post right here too.

Here is a short list about some upcoming events in the mobile (web) space:

• PhoneGap: Using Web Technology to Build Cross Platform Mobile Apps: Aug. 24, 2009, Portland (USA)
• Nokia World 09: Sept. 2-3, 2009, Stuttgart (Germany)
• dConstruct: Sept. 04, 2009, Brighton (UK)
• Summer of Widgets UK Dev Camp: Sept. 04, 2009, London (UK)
• Mobilize: Sept. 10, 2009, San Francisco (USA)
• Samsung Widget Dev Camp: Sept. 11-13, San Francisco (USA)
• 4G World: Sept. 15-18, 2009, Chicago (USA)
• Over The Air: Sept. 25-26, 2009, London (UK)
• Mobile Web Strategies: Oct. 06, 2009, San Diego (USA)
• Mobile Application Stores: Oct. 08, 2009, San Diego (USA)
• Widget Meetup, Oct. 13, 2009, London (UK)
• Mobile 2.0: Oct. 15-16, 2009, San Francisco (USA)
• DIGIDAY09: Oct. 17, 2009, Vienna (Austria)
• Mobile Social Media Unconference: Oct. 21, 2009, Palo Alto (USA)
• Web.Start 2009: Oct. 22-23, 2009, Zagreb (Croatia)
  
• The Symbian Exchange & Exposition: Oct. 27-28, 2009, London (UK)
• eComm: Oct. 28-30, 2009, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
• Blackberry Developer Conference: Nov. 09-12, 2009, San Francisco (USA)
• Under The Radar: Nov. 19, 2009, Mountain View (USA)

I am at the Brotfabrik in Frankfurt am Main right now attending the Webmontag (webmonday) listening to the first talk by Chris Heilmann and I am trying to live-blog this, so here it goes…

Chris is talking about developer evangelism and best practices in web development. He wanted to write a book called “Harry Potter and the Order of the DOM” but the title was refused by the publisher, the book came out anyways though ;)

He got to APIs and especially YQL, Yahoo’s SQL-like query language for web APIs. Interesting stuff actually, there’s a console and all…”alle ducken, hier kommt code…” - funny. Here’s a YQL example: “SELECT * FROM HTML WHERE URL=”http://faz.de” AND xpath=”//h2″ - this all sounds like a console version of Yahoo Pipes. The xpath comes in very handy indeed. YQL also makes data available that cannot be accesses via the source API directly - for example twitter posts of a user in a specific time window. It also takes care of oAuth and other authentication systems for you and provides you mechanisms to filter and distill the output data down to the necessary stuff you need. End of presentation one, here it is. (more…)

We were invited by Nokia to attend their Hackathon Widget coding contest alongside the Nokia Developer Summit in Monaco/Monte Carlo (we mentioned that earlier). It was a great chance to get to know many interesting people in the mobile development space and especially in the area of widget development based on Nokia’s Web Runtime (WRT).

The hackathon contest was all about implementing ideas of customers in a 24h period and we implemented an idea for a travel planner widget by Bruce Hopkins from Joplin, Missouri, USA. The basic idea was to create an application to collect all travel related information, such as flight numbers, times and car rental reservation info of a trip to have that handy while you are on the go so you would not have to mess around with printed paperwork. But let’s tell Bruce the whole story (and myself a bit about PavingWays and the contest):

Related to one of our new services, called Panda Route, which is a travel diary service (with a planning part), we created the Panda Route WRT widget - (more…)

On Tuesday the Nokia Developer Summit started. The conference was opened by Rob Taylor, Head of Forum Nokia. At the beginning he showed us a demo of a coming service (powered by qik) where consumers will be able to share videos live from their mobile devices.

The topic of this conference was mainly Nokia’s Ovi Store, which will launch this month. 500 people were at the event, mainly developers from all over the world, but also bloggers, press, analysts, students etc.

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Yesterday we attended the Mobile Monday in Frankfurt. The topic was Mobile Internet and Applications. Forum Nokia was one of the sponsors of this event. For us it was a good accommodation for the upcoming Nokia Developer Summit next week in Monaco.

The first presentation was held by Jarkko Tolvi from Forum Nokia. He introduced Forum Nokia, an important platform for developers of mobile services. Forum Nokia offers them a wide range of resources to help them design, build, test, certify, market, and sell or promote their applications, content, services, or Web site to mobile users. It’s the worlds biggest mobile developer community with over 4 million members.

Arnaud Caigniet from Opera was next. The topic of his talk was “What can the industry do to see ‘One Web’ everywhere?”. With statistics Arnaud showed that the mobile usage has grown and the growth still continues. The most growth in mobile usage Opera sees in Indonesia, China, Russia and India.

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We’ll be going to Monaco by the end of April to attend the Nokia Developer Summit 2009.

During this summit in Monte Carlo on 28-29 April, Nokia is holding a “N97 24-hour Hackathon” competition. I am one of 10 developers selected by Forum Nokia who is gonna hack together a Web Runtime (WRT) widget for the home screen of the new Nokia N97.

The Hackathon session will be streamed live and I will be in action 24h competing face-to-face with the other developers. At the end of this Hackathon, all widgets will be judged by a panel of experts from Nokia Forum & Nokia’s N97 team. The winning designer will get a Nokia N97 pre-loaded with the app. Also, the next to cash prizes, “[...]The winning widget will also be awarded premium spotlight status on the main page of the new Nokia Ovi Store, which is opening in May. It will be free to download in Australia, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. The apps which come second and third at the Hackathon judging panel will also get spotlight placement on the sight.[...]” (Source: Nokia).

Nokia is going through quite some replacements on the widget and content distribution front these days: Their WRT Widgets will replace formerly well received WidSetsâ„¢ and maybe other apps too, and Nokia’s new Ovi store will replace their current offering called Mosh.

I am really looking forward to the event - not just because I can spend some exciting days in Monte Carlo :), but also because it’s a great opportunity to get in touch with many people in the mobile and mobile web area since a long time.

Sources:

Nokia Developer Summit 2009
Nokia N97 Widget Competition
Nokia N97 Data Sheet
Forum Nokia

There are some interesting events coming up:

• Mobile Monday Berlin: Operator Day: Mar. 2, 2009, Berlin (Germany)
• Le mobile 2.0: Mar. 10-11, 2009, Paris (France)
• IIR’s Mobile Internet 2009: Mar. 23-25, 2009, Vienna (Austria)
• MobilePlus Summit: Mar. 26-27, 2009, Kiev (Ukraine)
• Mobile Monday Munich: Mobile Automotive: Mar. 30, 2009, Munich (Germany)
• BRIC: Emerging Mobile Markets conference: Mar. 31, 2009, Las Vegas (USA)
• Mobile Monday Frankfurt: Mobile Internet and Applications: Apr. 20, 2009, Frankfurt (Germany)
• ForumOxford: Future Technologies Conference: Apr. 24, 2009, Oxford (UK)
• The Mobile Web 2.0 Summit: Jun. 3-4, 2009, London (UK)
• Mobile Monday Berlin: Mobile Entertainment / Mobile Games: Jun. 8, 2009, Berlin (Germany)
• Mobile Vision Congress: Jun. 23-24, 2009, Munich (Germany)
• Mobile Asia 2.0: Aug. 17, 2009, Singapore

Are there some other events coming up in the next couple of weeks? Please let us know!

Last wednesday evening we again attended the MissionFuture: Emergency Session 4 “What’s next? The crisis gives birth to tomorrow’s economy”. The speakers were

• Gabi Lück, thinknewgroup.com
• Dr. Andreas Pratz, Vice President, A.T. Kearney
• Daniel Ãœberall, Utopia.de
• Christoph Santner, thefuturekitchen.net

I really liked the presentations of Dr. Andreas Pratz and Daniel Ãœberall. Dr. Pratz talked about “Disaster Recovery: Chances in the financial market crisis”. He gave an interesting overview about how the financial market crisis developed and showed us chances in the crisis, e.g. alternative business financing. Social lending websites like smava.de have great potential in times of crisis. These web sites offer a market place for credits where consumer or entrepreneurs can invest or lend money to others without dealing with a bank. Here are some social lending web sites:

• lendingclub.com
• prosper.com
• kiva.org
• zopa.com

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Last Wednesday evening we attended the MissionFuture Emergency Session. Founded by CScout Trend Consultancy and innovation agency TheFutureKitchen the event took place in the famous Löwenbräukeller in Munich. The idea behind this initiative is bringing together people from different industries and with different backgrounds to inform, assist and help each other during this economic crisis.

The event started with short presentations from Dr. Aleksandra Weber (EUCON - European Institute for Conflict Management), Prof. Hugo Kehr (Professor of psychology at TU München), Jörg Schallehn (Vermögensakademie GmbH), George Zoche (Transnational Republics), Jan Wildeboer (Red Hat / Linux Evangelist), and Stephan Doesinger (Doesinger & Partner).

All the presentations treated the financial crisis topic really differently and from different point of views. Prof. Hugo Kehr talked about his latest study “From the monetary quarterly target to a motivating vision“. He explained why a vision is more motivating and helping you more through a crisis than setting a monetary quarterly target (e.g. vision: being an innovator in a specific branch versus target: reducing production costs by 10% in the next 3 months). His conclusion is that a vision keeps you flexible and motivated, because you can adjust your strategy when needed, while a monetary quarterly target makes you inflexible. Motivation is very important, especially during times of crisis.

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This week I attended another Mobile Monday, the venue was provided by IIR who did their Converged Messaging Summit there as well.

It probably was the Mobile Monday with the lowest number of attendees I’ve ever been to. That’s mostly because the Oktoberfest takes place and everybody has to decide between having a few (liters of) beer and listening to powerpoint presentations during the evening…I decided for the latter ;)

The presentations were interesting. Taptu went first talking about their mobile search engine, enhanced by human edited results, social interaction and sharing of results with your friends. Apparently groupile.mobi is crawled as a desktop web page, which it is not, probably a header recognition issue.

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