• 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!

Again, less people attended than anticipated (learning there again). Luckily there were also two new attendees, thanks for coming Jens and Christoph!

The restaurant we picked was rather noisy, in part because they had all their windows open, which again also was rather unproductive air-condition wise…so maybe a restaurant is not a good place to do a tech meetup after all. That also did not help listening to Dennis from Hamburg, who joined us to present a project over Teamviewer/speakerphone.

The project was pretty interesting though: Dennis is using a Kaazing server for his Facebook-based Tic-Tac-Toe game. The game logic runs inside a JSP web application on the server and is using the Kaazing component for messaging with the clients. Clients connect either via a WebSocket connection (here’s the HTML5 part) or a fallback mechanism using Flash. The only thing to do for the developer is to include the Kaazing iframe component into the HTML of the game. Kaazing itself is a Java-based and enterprise-oriented product. WebSocket capabilities with fallback mechanisms and simple integration into web applications are underlining this.
Thanks Dennis for the demo! Unfortunately there is no version of this online, it’s all only working on a local machine. By the way Kaazing apparently runs on the AppEngine.

We also covered some other topics, SASS was one of it. Opinions about using it diverted and some attendees were reluctant to it because it is ruby-based (workarounds are there) and because it forces you to learn another non-standard CSS language - valid points I think.

Jens was kind enough hinting us towards the WebTech Conference in Mainz, taking place October 11th to 13th. Christian Heilmann is one of the speakers, so this surely becomes an interesting conference.

Finally we have been looking at some interesting HTML5-related links that I have been collecting lately. Here’s the list:

• http://happymagicfuntime.com/blog/html5_for_drunks (fun read)
• http://remysharp.com/2009/07/06/rimshot-with-html5/ (audio bookmarklets)
• http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js (IE hack to enable HTML5 tags)
• http://html5.validator.nu (using Mozilla’s HTML5 parsing Engine)
  • about:config -> html5.enable in FF 3.6+ (3x faster parsing)
  • details here
  • test page here
• http://media.chikuyonok.ru/ambilight/ (HTML5 video with Ambilight effect)
• http://www.html5laboratory.com/drag-and-drop.php (good intro)

Thanks to all attendees and until next time.

What else is new with the iPhone 4? Not much actually, except yet another screen size AND resolution we have to keep in mind when developing apps: 960 x 640 at 326 dpi.

Original: Apple has supposedly started to pull applications from the app store that implement Dashboards or interactive home screens (see here (same here, here too, at first).

These apps enable their users to put several Widgets on one screen, same as in Apple’s own Dashboard Application for Mac OSX. With these the lack of multitasking can be overcome, at least to some extend, and users get an interactive overview for different applications. MyFrame from Groundhog Software or DashPad from PXL Creations are examples for these. .

Ever since we saw the first iPhone and its non-interactive idle screen / home screen we thought it would be great to have really interactive widgets on there. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the actual weather forecast for the next 8 hours in the icon itself without having to open the actual application?

Meanwhile the Nokia N97, N900 and Android phones have this feature and I would assume Apple needs to improve in this direction as well.

So, you realize this is a question mark up there in the header, right? We just speculate, but it might well be possible that the iPhone 4G, already featuring multitasking, might also feature an interactive home screen or at least some kind of dashboard for widgets. It would be a logical step and Apple would probably do this in their own manner and most probably do it right (from a user and Apple’s perspective at least).

Still, the big question, at least for us as web technology fanatics would be if such a dashboard would be filled with web-based widgets (just like Nokia) or native applications (as in the case of Android). It’s hard to foresee, because Apple tends to go both ways from time to time, Mac OSX Dashboard widgets rely on web technology. However iPhone Applications are strictly native by design.

Let’s wait and see, within the next 3-5 hours we will probably know more.

We had been playing around with gameQuery and some CSS3 hacks back then, so we decided to use what we had and created a Space-Invaders clone as a Chrome Extension. The outcome is called “CSS3 in Space” and it can be downloaded in the Chrome extension repository. Too bad I never found the time to finalize the multiplayer part :( But the game works pretty well as it is - especially given the few days we used to hack this together.

In the battle, we won 2nd place in Germany and scored Ogio Neoprene Laptop Sleeves…that’ nothing compared to 1st place and Nexus Ones but better than nothing, right? Currently we are at 1443 total and around 400 weekly installs, which is not too bad. This includes a “Top Picks” placement during the first few days which was part of the winning prize, so it will go down. It is actually strange how the “weekly installs” are calculated - the Extension is available for 10 weeks now so you should really see 144 installs per week.

Still, if we manage to stay at around 100 installs per week, we will be at 5k users in a year - that’s not bad and it makes me conclude that Chrome extensions, along with other browser Extensions such as the ones for Firefox or Opera can be considered a good channel for web-based apps and widgets. Monetization is tougher than in app stores, but that’s a whole other story.

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!

Then, Ken Takagi gave some insights about the Zeemote controller and all attendees got one for free - nice :) Distimo did an interesting comparison presentation between the most important app stores. They also offer a nice (and free) analytics tool for mobile app developers.

Milq Media talked about their Confession iPhone app. The idea behind this app was that you can confess or listen to (approved) confessions anonymously. While listening users could vote if the confessing person goes to heaven or hell. After a great start and unfortunately also a lot of bad publicity, they took it off the iTunes App Store. Too bad…(for now).

The main sponsor was Samsung, they promoted their bada platform and developer day to take place in Amsterdam June 3rd.

All in all it was a great event. We met a lot of interesting people from the web, mobile and game dev scene in Rotterdam and the Netherlands in general. It was interesting to see which platforms they were targeting: mainly the iPhone/iPad and Android, all native, some even JavaME (yikes!).

Astonishingly few people knew about PhoneGap, which might be related to the agencies focus and special demands of the gaming industry as web based is still not the best way to go for many game developers (it certainly is for us).

This sort of fits well into what we experienced at Browsergames Forum 2009. There the main focus was games in the browser, mobile was not an issue at all. At the event in Rotterdam this time the main focus was on mobile and on games, but there was not a big focus on (mobile) browsers.

So it looks like for game developers currently the focus is either browsers and games, but not mobile OR mobile and games, but not browsers.

Since we at PavingWays are looking at browser-based mobile games, we see ourselves somewhere in between those two camps. However we assume the area of mobile browser games will evolve rapidly with browsers getting better and fundamental technologies like HTML5 maturing and gaining support in browsers and developers.

The organizers are thinking about having such an event in Germany too and we would be happy to help setting it up - we’ll keep you updated about that.

PS: check out mobilegamesblog.com where you can find more detailed information about this event. Looking forward to the next one!

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!

Both Andreas and myself had prepared a WebSocket demo. My demo did not work, Andreas’ did, at least halfway… There was incoming data from Twitter’s brand new streaming API to Node.js. The WebSocket connection to Chrome did not really want to work completely that evening, but we could see #fail-tagged tweets streaming in on the console :) I can not really recall the context, but there were also talking about Strophe, a JavaScript XMPP library framework well worth looking into.

I don’t have access to Andreas’ presentation (see below), but I also created one, so here’s another introduction to Node.js:

We were thinking of getting a small HTML5/CSS3 project going within the meetup group, so everybody has something to work on until the next meetup - I still think this is a good idea, now if I could just come up with something useful…The next meetup will be around the end of May, stay tuned!

UPDATE: Andreas provided Links to his slides and the project itself, it’s called tweamer and it is available on GitHub. Here are the slides:

If you want to attend the HTML5/CSS3 Meetup in Frankfurt in May, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/aVEmCm

We wish all our readers an enjoyable and a wonderful Easter time!

The last time this happened to me was when I dug a bit deeper into a project called node.js or just “node” as the binary is called. In case you have not heard about this don’t worry. However, if you are a developer, especially if you are working with JavaScript, then you should be concerned and maybe check your news sources, because it is a couple of months old already and it is drawing a lot of attention lately! If you’re not a developer this might get a bit techy from here, but maybe you get something out of it after all…

Ok so what is node.js? It’s actually not too easy to explain, but basically node.js is an:

• open-source
• low-level
• evented
• non-blocking
• event loop based
• SSJS runtime environment

It is written in C and JavaScript, it contains the V8 JavaScript engine, a CommonJS module system and it helps you to implement highly concurrent web servers by handling I/O very efficiently, namely in a non-blocking way. Support for TCP, DNS and HTTP is included and many HTTP features are supported that are important for Comet-style web applications - things like hanging requests.

Node.js itself is a program that will have to be compiled and installed on your machine. Then you can use JavaScript to write programs that use the API of node.js and that are executed through the node binary as simple as this: “node yourprogram.js”.
Due to the included V8 you have the complete JavaScript API available, it’s just that you are not running your JavaScript program inside of a browser context, but as a program within the node.js environment. Node extends the JS API by several things like access to the file system and such. All of this is what server-side JavaScript is all about.

There are other implementations for this kind of stuff, but what Ryan Dahl et al do differently with node.js is to use JavaScript as the programming language and the strict paradigm of exclusively working with callbacks and non-blocking I/O. This means that basically any function you are executing in a node.js program does work in the background after calling, executing a callback function once it is done. This enables the program itself to continue and not to block any resources while it is waiting for the function to finish whatever it does.

Ok, this is a bit dry and mind-bending maybe, but it all makes a lot of sense: Think about thousands of internet users entering the URL of your website causing their web browsers to hit your web server at the same time (maybe they fire Ajax requests too). Each of these requests would cause a thread in your regular web server (= Apache) to spawn that executes a script (PHP maybe) which does DB queries and such before finally returning the response to the browser. Here we have 2 things to look at: memory usage and blocking I/O.

Each of these threads uses memory. Many threads use a lot of memory. Thousands of users would cause thousands of threads to use a lot of memory…you see where this is going…you will run out of memory soon and your page or service will not respond anymore.
Blocking I/O is the cause for that problem: each one of these threads does things like DB access which takes some time to finish. This is normal because the DB tables might be huge and queries might take long to find the result you are looking for.
Now the script on your web server would usually execute a DB query, then wait until it gets a result from the DB server and then continue. While the DB server fetches your data your whole script is blocked. It does not continue to run until the result has come back and it is using memory and other resources while waiting. If this happens several thousand times at once this blocks loads of resources and your server goes into a memory dry spell.

If it would be possible to get rid of all these threads and to put them all into a big pool this would solve some memory issues. If it on top of that would be possible to continue doing other tasks while waiting for DB queries this would surely help performance to increase - and that’s what node.js does.

A node-based server will pool all incoming connections and the underlying node framework can do things like hanging these connections to a “waiting” state while allowing the server to continue working on creating the response. The event loop and the callback paradigm in node.js is used to execute a DB query, but not wait for a response blocking a lot of resources. Rather a callback is attached to the DB result and node.js goes on with other tasks (saving CPU cycles). For the browser on the other side this results simply in a “waiting for response” situation, same as for the threaded server.

So, whenever the result from the DB comes back, node.js is executing whatever callback function was attached to the querying function and once the request is ready it will get the related connection from the pool, end its “waiting” state and return it to the browser. This is causing way less memory usage and allows for much faster response times.

This is just a tiny bit of the whole story, so make sure you get into this!

But why is this important? Well, Ajax and Comet-driven web applications are generating heavy load on web servers, especially if you look at chat applications or multiplayer browser games where there are many concurrent connections and small response times are essential. Here lays the strength of node.js.

In the past to me it felt like we had reached a time where the traditional way to implement our web servers would not fit to the demands that we had on the client-side during the last months. Comet and Ajax-Push is a big hack, HTML5 Web Sockets are knocking at our door and we want to do things like real time data streaming.

Node.js can fill this need. Sure, it takes some time of getting used to for developers that have been working with “traditional” Ajax paradigms for the past years. It also seems like we would walk into a time where regular websites and Ajax driven web applications would get their own servers. But it surely feels like we would finally have a toolkit which solves many of our newly developed needs and which brings the web as a whole a big step further. It might well be the best thing since sliced bread.

On top of that it is now possible to write a simple web server and basically all the server side logic in JavaScript, which is great if you are working with JavaScript on the client side as well.

To close this I can just encourage anybody working with Ajax or Comet or even just JavaScript in any way to look into node.js - it helped me to understand web server issues in more detail and I will be working with this and see where it goes. As it seems some others are working with this already too and even Simon Willison was excited after Ryan Dahl gave a good introduction to node.js at last year’s JSConf:

The game is very very simple, so maybe that’s one of the factors for a speedy release…

Why did we build an app like this?

Baby Roulette is a really simple and fun game for kids (mostly) to learn animal sounds. Our main intention for building this game is to get a simple and nice looking game quickly in as many App Stores as possible starting with Apple. Our next targets will be the Ovi Store , Android Market and Vodafone 360, which is still running the “Vodafone 360 App Star Competition“.

We mainly want to gain insights about different application stores regarding users, downloads, major downloading countries, devices and of course we want to practically go through the whole process of building an application/game and releasing and actually selling it on different app stores. This will help us to enlighten our clients and of course we are also blogging about it. So here are some first facts…

What did we want to build?

Our goal was to create a game or something to play with that would employ 2 major components for any game: animation and sound. We have a spinning arrow as an animation and we are playing sounds when the arrow spins and whenever the arrow stops (plays the animal’s voice). The game concept itself has been around for ages of course, there are similar offers on the app store but it was simple enough to implement it quickly (a few days).

Another main goal was to go international - that’s the reason we left out playing the typical, but localized “The pig says…” voice acting before the (international) animal sound. There is also no text except the title - however “Baby” and “Roulette” are both terms recognizable in a lot of languages even if they use a different alphabet.

How did we build it?

Phonegap - make sure you know about this application framework! It enables developers to write their application using web technologies - namely HTML, CSS and JavaScript - and then wrap it into a native application. The cool thing is, phonegap targets not only the iPhone, but all other major platforms, such as Android or BlackBerry and it provides access to device functionalities, such as the accelerometer or GPS location by extending the JavaScript API.

Originally the plan was not to use phonegap. The plan was to build a simple UIwebView application in Objective-C, the iPhone’s native programming language. The main application would then also have been written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript. This is essential to us as we see ourselves as a mobile web development company, not as iPhone or Android developers. We strongly believe that creating native applications is just an interim solution - the web will take over as the main application platform just as it did on the desktop. It’s just a matter of time, HTML5 guys!

Unfortunately the mobile version of Safari does not play sound in the browser, but opens up the fullscreen audio player. The <audio> tag of HTML5 is also not available (yet), so no sound and we went with phonegap. This means carrying a little overhead, but also brings the advantage of simpler portability to other platforms and we are very happy with this decision.

Problems so far

One major problem occurred as we were in the early stages of developing the web app: The spinning arrow used to be a <canvas> element that loads an image and is then rotated. As this rotation was scripted and angles were dynamically calculated, movement of the arrow was very smooth and without any obvious stepping. Also there was only one image - the arrow. Unfortunately this seems to result in heavy CPU load for anything below 3GS devices, so on an iPhone 3G the frame rate dropped notably.

Our solution was to go back to good old sprite animations. So now the arrow is just a <div> with a background sprite containing 60 versions of the arrow in 6 degree steps. The script now still calculates the current angle of the arrow as it spins, but now instead of rotating the image we are sliding the background image through the div so the matching version of the arrow is visible. This works, is fast enough on a 3G and it’s a proven technology. Too bad there’s no real HTML5 in there for now.

Next steps

We’ll release Baby Roulette for as many platforms as possible trying to keep porting efforts as low as possible and we’ll surely gain many insights as we do this. We are also  already working on other games, of course. These will all be web based and cross-platform, but next time interaction and multi-player functionality will be our main topics. Maybe we will target grownups next time too :)

In the meantime we’ll keep you up-to-date on porting to and releasing on different platforms and we hope you have fun playing Baby Roulette with your kids or on your own!

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!

• Google’s new strategy “Mobile First”
  Google’s new strategy: “Mobile First”  The company now focuses more on smartphones than on desktops. That means giving mobile top priority and launching new products first on mobile platforms before creating PC versions.

  (Source: brighthand.com)

• 60,000 Android phone a day
  Google’s Android launched a year ago and is now available on 26 different devices in 48 countries. 60.000 Android devices running this operating systems are now being sold on a daily basis … meaning about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21 million per year. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter and 25 million in 2009. Seems like Android is gaining ground, hopefully internal fragmentation will be taken care of (if that’s possible).

  (Source: mobilegamesblog.com)

• Windows Marketplace for Mobile has been updated
  Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft’s application store, has been updated. The biggest change is there will no longer be regional limitations on where apps are sold. This is great news for non-US customers because they could only see localized apps and the selection was very limited. Now thanks to the “geo selector” users can browse and purchase applications from different geographic catalogs / countries. The price of each app will show up in the user’s local currency. Besides users can install downloaded apps onto their storage cards.

  Developers also do not have to pay a US$10 fee for submitting their apps to additional markets anymore - only the US$ 99 submission fee has to be paid. VOIP apps will now be allowed unless a carrier specifically prohibits it. Microsoft now also opens its marketplace to Russia.

  BTW Mobilegamesblog.com published some first screenshots of Windows Marketplace for the Windows Phone 7 Series devices. There is no real source named for these images, so they should be considered as a rumor: mobilegamesblog.com

  (Sources: informationweek.com, theunwired.net)

• Alcatel unveils first Android phone
  Handset maker Alcatel unveiled a number of new handsets at Mobile World Congress and interestingly its first Android-based phone OT-980. The phone will be available around June for less than 200 EUR in the UK, France, Spain and Italy. But they are still considering using other platforms, such as Windows Mobile, if prices come down.

  (Sources: ciol.com, totaltele.com)

• China Unicom and Huawei for low-cost smartphones
  China Unicom plans to launch low-cost 3G smartphones - maybe in collaboration with Huawei which has also recognized that smartphones remain too expensive. “Key to unlocking the potential usage of 3G is the need for a $150 smartphone with iPhone-like capabilities ,” said Guo Ping, CSO, Huawei Technologies and chairman of Huawei devices.

  (Source: mobilebusinessbriefing.com)

• Deutsche Telekom: Open Apps Approach
  Deutsche Telekom plans to further integrate with mobile apps and content stores. By partnering with leading applications stores Deutsche Telekom wants to offer its customers a T-Mobile dedicated channel with specific recommendations and the opportunity for mobile phone billing (instead of credit card payment).
  “Deutsche Telekom’s open mobile internet strategy implies that customers ultimately get access to a wide choice of all available applications, regardless of their mobile phone brand. As a basis we provide easy log-in, registration, and payment processes, as well as Deutsche Telekom channels in existing stores and customer oriented recommendations,” states Rainer Deutschmann, Senior Vice President Mobile Products.

  (Source: finchannel.com)

They are aiming to build an open platform for mobile apps to all mobile phone users and want to solve the massive fragmentation problem.

They try to develop a common standard for applications within the next 12 months. The WAC is supposed to be a platform NOT an app store.

Of course, the app market is still a lucrative business and growing. Analysts at Gardner predict that the number of app downloads will rise to 4.5 billion (from 2.5 billion last year), yielding almost $30bn.

So far so good. But what does that mean, especially for us developers? Is this the right approach in the “write once, run anywhere” direction?

The good thing is that the group intends to use existing open standards (JIL, BONDI, W3C) and that will make it a lot easier for developers creating apps across multiple platforms. Besides developers then have only one single gateway to access a vast potential and international customer base. It also saves a lot of time and resources. And the new alliance has access to more than three billion customers.

Well, does this sound too perfect to you? There are still a lot of questions and even doubts, right? Did they form this alliance just to beat Apple or do they really care about the developers? I mean in the end they are all competitors and every one wants a big - if not the biggest - part of the “app market cake”, right?

I also think it will be really hard to manage an organization of so many well-known and big companies. There will be many time-consuming processes to make even small decisions everybody is pleased with. We can see similar things going on at the W3C already.

Another important fact is that some platforms are already “hopelessly fragmented” as giagom points out: Windows has struggled with the splintering of Windows Mobile and Google is suffering from the emergence of multiple versions of Android.

Will the WAC succeed? I guess it is too early to answer this question, but for sure it will be very very difficult to reach their ambitious goals - if not impossible. The idea is good and the app market needs standardization, but there are a lot of obstacles to overcome. Probably too many for the big companies that are involved in this organization.

Maybe this kind of organization should be built by developers, not telcos who are mainly interested in selling not building apps. Even the Chamber of Industry and Commerce consists of handicraft businesses not of retailers. What do you think?

• Symbian joins Open Screen Project
  The Symbian Foundation is joining the Open Screen Project, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe to enable the Adobe Flash Platform across a broad range of devices. This means that Symbian will be integrating Flash 10.1 in future releases of the platform.

  (Sources: allaboutsymbian.com, eon.businesswire.com)

• Ericsson launches eStore
  Today, Ericsson unveiled an application store product for mobile operators allowing them to set up their own application store. The eStore is available in 25 markets worldwide, reaching more than 1 billion subscribers throughout more than 100 operator networks. It already has 30,000 free and paid apps and games. The eStore is backed by Opera who provides the client framework for widgets and applications across multiple channels and devices.

  (Sources: mobilegamesblog.com, finchannel.com)

• Intel and Nokia release new Linux OS “MeeGo”
  Intel and Nokia have merged Moblin and Maemo into MeeGo, a Linux based software platform designed to run on any device from cars and home phones to computers and mobile phones. So MeeGo is a primary competitor to Google’s Linux-based Android as well as to Apple’s iPhone software and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
  MeeGo will ensure that third-party developers will be available to reach the wide range of product types mentioned above. Developers can create applications for MeeGo using the Qt framework and can market their apps through Nokia’s Ovi Store and Intel AppUpSM Center.
  The first version of MeeGo will be available in the second half of 2010. Nokia also said that it will continue to sell and develop its Symbian smartphone operating system alongside MeeGo.

  (Sources: eweek.com, infosyncworld.com, mobilegamesblog.com, nytimes.com)

• Samsung unveils first bada phone “Wave”
  Samsung has unveiled “Wave” (Model S8500), the first smartphone which is based on Samsung’s own mobile operating system bada and features Social Hub, a social networking/messaging platform. Samsung’s bada platform allows mobile users to download applications from Samsung Apps, an integrated application store accessible from the device and online. Already launched in the UK, France, Italy, Singapore, Germany, Brazil and China, the store will be expanded to more than 50 countries all over the world in 2010. The bada SDK will be launched in March.
  “bada will be one of our platforms,” said Dr Hosoo Lee, Executive Vice President and Head of the Media Solution Center at Samsung Electronics. “We are still working on Android, preparing for new Windows Mobile features coming this year, and also LiMo.”

  (Sources: SamsungMWC Twitter, Samsung MWC site, Wave Press Release, eweek.com, mobilebusinessbriefing.com)

• Vodafone 300,000 360 devices & 7,000 apps
  Only a few months after the launch of the Vodafone 360 devices the operator has already sold over 300,000 handsets (H1 and M1) and has more than 7,000 apps and games for those devices available for download from the Vodafone 360 Apps Shop.

  (Source: mobile-ent.biz)

• Windows Phone 7 Series
  Finally Microsoft has unveiled its newest version of Windows Mobile known as Windows Phone 7 Series and it is connected with the Xbox Live environment. The home screen consists mainly of Widgets (named Live Tiles) and the phones will also have all the functionality of the Zune HD:

At the moment you can build desktop web applications with AIR that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems, but soon it will be possible to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile apps will be able to store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phone such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps (”Packager for iPhones“). The big picture is that developer can create applications once with Adobe’s developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web.

“Adobe AIR 2.0 is a great technology for developing engaging mobile applications,” said Christy Wyatt, vice president, Software Applications and Ecosystem at Motorola. “We look forward to seeing AIR come to the Android platform and developers creating applications that will delight our end-users.”

Furthermore, Adobe has joined the mobile-Linux-on-phones group (LiMo Foundation) and will work with LiMo members (LG Electronics, NEC, NTT Docomo, Orange, Samsung, SK Telecom, Vodafone etc.) to add a Flash Player API to LiMo. Adobe wants to see Flash Player on nearly all mobile platforms. Only Apple is constantly rejecting Flash, preferring to use HTML5 rather than incorporate with Adobe’s proprietary runtimes into the iPhone and iPad.

Looking at the desktop space Adobe Air surely has many advantages to offer developers, so we feel like this might be a good tool to develop apps for mobile phones too. We have added Adobe Air as a possible engine for application development to our mobile widget wiki. The crowd of mobile widget engines is still a growing one and various competitors are entering the space. Aside from more developers being attracted to mobile development, this also means increased fragmentation - unfortunately. On the other hand any tool enabling us to reach new devices and markets is always welcome.

Sources:
blog.mobilegamesblog.com
h-online.com
marketwatch.com
sfgate.com
washingtonpost.com

Worldwide sales of smart phones grew 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 53 million phones, according to researcher Strategy Analytics.

Nokia led market volumes, ahead of Research in Motion (RIM) and Apple, and shipped 20.8 million smart phones during the fourth quarter – up 38% from one year ago.

I also found  an interesting chart from ComScore about U.S. smartphone platform share, or installed base — representing both existing devices and new sales during each period, not just new sales. (Source: businessinsider.com - please check out the comments there - really interesting discussion is going on there)

Sources:
c114.net
areamobile.de

They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!

Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.

According to the website of AutoLinQ, Continental plans to work with Android developers and automakers to certify a core set of applications. An AutoLinQ SDK is scheduled to be released already by the end of the first quarter this year - probably due to its closeness to the regular Android SDK.

In the second half of 2010 Continental plans to demonstrate first applications and of course the new app store to automotive customers (yes another app store…).

Sources:
AutoLinQ
AutoLinQ (Continental Website)
computerweekly.com

At CES 2010 in Las Vegas Samsung announced the upcoming availability of of free and paid apps in Samsung’s Apps store, including apps for Televisions, Blu-Ray Players, Home Theater and Mobile Phones. The download service for TVs will be available in July 2010.

I found two interesting videos from Samsung’s press conferences:

I guess other manufacturer will enter the market pretty soon, too. It seems the web is getting more and more ubiquitous…again.

Sources:
tv.samsungapps.com
www.mirror.co.uk

BOLT already supports Ajax, Javascript and other web-based languages. But the widgets will be installed directly into the BOLT browser and thus will load and execute faster. The BOLT widgets are written in standard W3C code. Users can access their widgets from within the browser via a new widget menu.

“As many of the recent mobile and wireless trade shows have demonstrated, mobile applications are part of the mainstream mobile experience,” said Sampo Kaasila, vice president of research and development at Bitstream. “However, the vast majority of phones in use today are ‘feature phones’ not smartphones. Unfortunately for the users of these billions of feature phones, it isn’t easy to find, install and run mobile applications. By adding Web apps to BOLT, Bitstream is not only improving the usability of our mobile browser, we are also making it possible for literally billions of people to partake in the mobile apps revolution.”

According to Bitstream, more than 3.4 million BOLT accounts have been created since last year, and the browser delivers over 2.8 million pages each day.

The new version of Bolt will be launched at the Mobile World Congress on February 15, 2010, and there will be a small set of beta widgets available at launch.

Sources:
news.softpedia.com
tech2.in.com

We are in the process of changing our website design and content. The new page will contain more information about what we have been doing lately and what we will be doing soon - all in the area of games, mobile widgets and app stores.

Because of this there was not much happening here during the last few weeks, except maybe useless filler posts like this one. But it’s gonna be better soon, so please stay tuned!