Nachdem ich mein Intro zu PhoneGap 1.0 mit Ausblick auf 2.0 und eine kurze XCode Demo mit dem Jo App-Framework beendet hatte, hat uns Martin Weinre und Remote Debugging gezeigt. Er hat uns außerdem die Idee zu seiner anstehenden Bachelor-Arbeit präsentiert. Dabei geht es um die Entwicklung eines PhoneGap-Polyfills um die Entwicklung von Apps im Browser zu erleichtern. Die Idee kam gut an und mögliche Parallelen zum Ripple Emulator wurden kurz besprochen. Martin hat außerdem vor, ein Meetup für Mobile-Entwickler in Mannheim zu starten.

Unser kleiner Bereich im Sternstunde war mit den 9 Teilnehmern, davon einige neue, ganz gut ausgelastet und es gab leckere arabische Tapas. Leider war es etwas lauter als erhofft, da parallel das Spiel Deutschland : Brasilien lief. Wir haben uns dennoch gut unterhalten und ich denke, es war für jeden etwas interessantes dabei.

Unser Teilnehmer Walter hat uns noch darauf hingewiesen, dass er mit @ppk im September einen Mobilism-Workshop in Frankfurt organisiert. Der geplante Termin ist der 28. und 29. September 2011. Mehr Infos dazu gibt’s auf der Mobilism Website.

Das nächste Meetup folgt in ein paar Wochen und wird natürlich auch auf unserer Meetup.com Seite bekannt gegeben – ich freue mich schon drauf!

Wir haben ein Séparée mit genug Platz und großem Fernseher für die Präsentationen. WLAN sollte es auch geben.

Außerdem kann man auch was trinken und essen (Arabische Tapas z.B.) – gute Mischung aus Präsentationen und dem Casual-Teil ist also möglich!

Anmeldung bitte über Meetup oder Xing oder Facebook!
Bis nächste Woche!

Maßgeschneiderte B2B Apps

Ausserdem können Entwickler über das Volume Purchase Program maßgeschneiderte B2B Apps anbieten und verteilen. Unternehmen können die speziell für sie entwickelten Apps über den App Store an Mitarbeiter oder Partner verteilen, ohne dass diese Apps öffentlich angeboten werden. Der Mindestpreis für diese Apps beträgt $9.99.

Allerdings steht das Volume Purchase Program bisher ausschließlich US Kunden zur Verfügung.

Auf unserem englischsprachigen Blog finden Sie einen etwas umfangreicheren Artikel zu diesem Thema. Hier geht’s zum Artikel.

The Volume Purchase Program is only available in the US. Every paid app in the App Store is available for businesses to buy in volume. Free apps are excluded.

Businesses need first to create a volume purchasing account. Once enrolled, they can purchase apps on the program’s website – they aren’t using the App Store in iTunes.

Custom B2B Apps

The Volume Purchase Program also provides businesses the opportunity to purchase custom B2B apps built by third-party developers. These apps have been developed in collaboration with third-party developers to address a unique business need. Therefore they are not available to the general public for purchase. The minimum price for a custom B2B app is $9.99.

What we think

It is interesting to see that Apple is now courting enterprises with this B2B App Store. Apple has recognized that employees are using iPhones and iPads also at work. It is much more easier now for businesses to distribute custom apps within their company or to specific partners. Companies are more flexible now to create and distribute apps for enterprise customers that have custom data and process needs.

More info:
apple.com
Volume Purchase Program – Guide (PDF)
Volume Purchase Program – FAQ

Mittlerweile haben viele Firmen damit begonnen, QR-Codes (“Quick Response Codes”) in ihre Marketingkampagnen zu integrieren. Meist werden diese auf Produktverpackungen, in Magazinen oder auf Plakaten eingesetzt. Nachdem der QR-Code eingescannt wurde, erhält der Konsument weiterführende Produktinformationen, Coupons oder auch virtuelle Güter wie Musik, Videos und Spiele.

In Japan, dem Mutterland der QR-Codes, ist man schon einen Schritt weiter und verbindet QR-Codes mit Augmented Reality Applikationen:

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

Auf unserem englischsprachigen Blog finden Sie einen etwas umfangreicheren Artikel zu diesem Thema sowie Beispiele für gelungene Printkampagnen und einigen Statistiken. Hier geht’s zum Artikel.

Top 10 users of mobile barcodes during May 2011:

(1)   1. United States
(2)   2. Germany
(4)   3. United Kingdom
(3)   4. Italy
(5)   5. Canada
(6)   6. Netherlands
(7)   7. France
(8)   8. Hong Kong
(9)   9. Spain
(13) 10. Australia

Position in () was in April/2011

Top 5 growing countries for May 2011:

1. Australia (74.1% Growth over April/2011)
2. Hong Kong (43.3%)
3. United States (39.0%)
4. France (32.2%)
5. United Kingdom (31.5%)

Global growth in mobile barcode usage Q4/09–Q1/11:

* see below for notes on reporting methodology

QR-Codes and Marketing

As mentioned in the report the mobile barcode usage is increasing in Germany. On mobilemarketingwelt.com I found some interesting mobile marketing campaigns using QR codes (“Quick Response Codes”). Here are some examples how companies already using QR-Codes in their advertisment.

1. Bausch + Lomb – QR-Code, SMS, Mobile Couponing

The pharmaceutical company Bausch+Lomb uses QR-Codes and SMS shortcode in his print ads. By scanning the QR code the user will be forwarded to a mobile landing page where he receives more information about Biotrue, a care product for contact lenses. He also gets a coupon there for a free product sample.
In case the user has no QR-Code reader on his mobile phone he can request a link to the mobile portal via SMS shortcode.

2. Globetrotter – QR-Codes

The equipment manufacturer Globetrotter used QR-Codes in his latest print campaign. By scanning the QR code on the advertisement the user will get to a mobile landing page where he receives more information about the reforestation project “Globetrotter VisionsWald”.

3. Universal Music – image recognition

In his latest poster advertising campaign for the new Lady Gaga Album Universal Music uses the U snap App from Wall AG, a value-added app for smartphones, on the German market. The user has to download the free U snap App for iPhone or Android smartphones from the App Store. When starting the app the user can take a picture of the print ad and gets samples from the new Lady Gaga album, can view music videos or win concert tickets, fan packages and CDs.
About 15,000 City Light Posters with the slogan “Fly to Lady Gaga with U snap” accompany the release of the new album “Born This Way”.

Our Opinion:

Many brands and retailers already started using QR-Codes in their marketing campaigns. For example McDonalds, Vichy, Aldi Süd, Tesco etc. The biggest advantage of QR-Codes is that customers get further information about a product fast and easy. They just need a mobile phone with a camera, web access and a QR-Code reader software (e.g. Kaywa Reader, QuickMark Barcode Reader, i-nigma Reader).

There are various opportunities of using QR-Codes. Companies can use them as a direct response marketing tool for print campaigns (call-to-action) or even to sell virtual goods like games, music or ringtones. I think the usage of QR Codes will be increasing in the future and we will see a wide range of usage of QR-Codes in marketing.

Sources:
i-nigma
mobilemarketingwelt.com
U snap Wall AG

* Notes on reporting methodology:

• These reports are based on the total number of QRcode, Datamatrix and UPC/EAN scans recorded by the i-nigma system during the relevant periods. Because of i‑nigma’s prominence in many markets worldwide, 3GVision believes that these numbers are likely to be indicative of global mobile barcode activity.
• The reports do not include activity in Japan, which is known to be well ahead in popularity and usage of mobile barcodes.
• For better representation of global open market trends, the reports specifically exclude the activity of i‑nigma-based solutions that are used by our vertical customers.
• Top 5 growing countries are from the top 20 countries in mobile barcodes usage during May/2011.

We will meet on Thursday (05/26) at 7 pm at

Affentor-Schänke
Neuer Wall 9
60594 Frankfurt
www.affentor-schaenke.de

—————–

Just a quick reminder: we are holding our first PhoneGap & HTML5 Meetup this Thursday in Frankfurt/Main.

Last year we already held a couple of HTML5 Meetups. This year we want to focus more on the mobile part: mobile development and PhoneGap. Nitobi, the guys from PhoneGap, will support our Meetup group and hopefully we get some cutting-edge insights from the PhoneGap project.

Anyone is invited to join our informal group. We are holding our next Meetup in a Ebbelwoi restaurant in a relaxed atmosphere. Demos or small presentations are welcome. The final location will be announced soon.

If you wanna join us on Thursday (May 26th), please sign up here:

Meetup.com

Xing

Facebook

Wir treffen uns am Do, den 26. Mai um 19:00 Uhr in der

Affentor-Schänke
Neuer Wall 9
60594 Frankfurt
www.affentor-schaenke.de

—————–

Dies ist eine kurze Erinnerung an das erste Treffen der PhoneGap und HTML5 Meetup Gruppe diesen Donnerstag in Frankfurt am Main.

Wir wollen die Meetup-Gruppe, die früher mal nur die HTML5 Meetup-Gruppe war, neu starten und einen großen Fokus auf PhoneGap und mobile Entwicklung legen. Wir werden bei der Organisation von Nitobi unterstützt und bekommen auf die Art hoffentlich auch ein paar top-aktuelle Insights in das PhoneGap Projekt.

Kommen kann jeder, der an den Themen interessiert ist – Präsentationen und Demos jeglicher Art sind auch immer gern gesehen. Zu Bedenken ist, dass wir das Ganze in Form eines formlosen Stammtisches durchführen und es keinen Beamer gibt ;), dafür gibt’s Bier bzw. Ebbelwoi – angepeilt wird diesmal eine Ebbelwoi-Wirtschaft (genaue Location folgt morgen).

Falls Du noch teilnehmen willst, dann Trage Dich bitte auf einer der folgenden Seiten ein:

Meetup.com

Xing.com

Facebook

There were only around 12 attendees there, although signups ranged around 20 – so shame on you if you didn’t show up! ;)

But it’s your loss, because aside from Evgenij‘s talk you missed my “little” (1hr) hands-on session showing how you can deploy the same JS-based app – build upon Unify – to several platforms, namely those:

• the browser,
• homescreen (appcache on iOS) – this is different from the browser,
• iOS (iPhone and iPad with PhoneGap),
• Android (PhoneGap too),
• BlackBerry PlayBook (WebWorks on TabletOS),
• Samsung Bada (JS-App-Package),
• WAC (sort of),
• and Samsung Internet@TV

Unify makes this easy in many regards (JS-build process, appcache context detection etc.). My goal was to show the difficulties and differences in SDKs and build/deployment tools – this became pretty clear I think, especially talking about the difficulties. The main message I wanted to bring across this evening was:

If you want people to write apps for your platform, then given them some decent development tools!

This means preferably CLI build/deploy tools (helps with automating builds) and a well working Simulator/Emulator plus simple device deployments. If you consider these points and look at the app numbers in different stores you see what I mean:

• Apple got this one right (Xcode and iOS Simulator just work, simple device deployments),
• Android is behind in this (Eclipse and especially the Emulator is unusably slow, device deployment easy),
• Blackberry is not bad (CLI tools, fast Emulator, simple deployment to devices),
• Samsung does a separate thing for different platforms and both are Eclipse-based (only Windows! WTF?, Emulators work well tho)
• WAC uses the Android Emulator (cf. above) with a Widget Runtime on it and an Eclipse-based SDK (translation: slow)

Bottom line is: Many Edit->Build->Deployment chains are just so unbearably slow and/or unusable that it takes all the fun out of coding for these platforms. If you add the Appstore(tm)-submission overhead to the calculation, pure development work becomes a much smaller part in the total effort.

Sebastian also wrote in detail about the JSUG meeting itself – thanks for that!
Looking forward to jsugfra[2]

iOS, Android, Nokia, BlackBerry, HP/Palm and even Samsung TVs will be covered. I’ll try to do this as a hands-on demo actually putting a simple JS-powered app onto some devices/emulators.

Here’s the flyer:

It’s #1 because it started with #0 I suppose…

Follow @jsugfra and #jsugfra and find all details on Xing.

WAC launches its first products

WAC has announced its commercial launch with over 69 member companies already. The goal is to build a standardized platform for mobile widgets and apps based on W3C standards. Developers can deploy an app across multiple devices and operators. That means they can publish their apps to a “warehouse” and then an operator chooses the apps it needs. The developer doesn’t have to care about delivering his apps to each operator separately, this makes WAC effectively the man in the middle.

“With the commercial launch of operator storefronts, handsets and applications, all based on WAC, we can say that WAC is now officially open for business,” Peters Suh, chief executive of WAC, said in a statement.

Eight major operators, such as Vodafone, China Mobile, Orange or Verizon, have announced they are now connected to the WAC platform and started to connect their app stores to the WAC marketplace, so that developers can reach a huge number of potential customers by uploading their apps to the WAC store. Vodafone already made many of their apps WAC compatible. There are currently more than 12,000 apps available via WAC in total.

Also device manufacturers such as Huawei, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and ZTE support the WAC. Especially LG and Samsung announced that their devices, which are powerful enough will support the WAC runtime. Huawei unveiled its first WAC-enabled mobile phone and Ericsson a white-label storefront that others can customize and use as their own app store. IBM also introduced a storefront that provides access all of the currently available WAC apps – also available as white-label for operators.

So how does a WAC app look like?

WAC sticks to web standards & HTML5

WAC applications basically are local, web-technology based applications (our specialty) wrapped into a ZIP package. W3C widgets have largely been the base for the spec. The WAC standard encompasses definitions about application structure, packaging format and such.

The WAC stores and apps that already have been launched are based on WAC 1.0. This week WAC has launched the WAC 2.0 specifications, which supports HTML5. The WAC 3.0 release is scheduled for September 2011 and will contain in-app billing support and user identification.

Should you care about WAC?

The initiative shows that widgets and other apps based on web technology and web standards are becoming a real business. The WAC existence and support from many big players show that cross-platform compatibility and overcoming app store fragmentation are important topics.

For developers the WAC surely is a great service as it allows you to submit your app once and potentially have it listed in several app stores automatically.

Do you need to care about creating a WAC app?

As soon as you realize Apple’s iTunes Appstore and even the Android Market are not your only target, you should care about WAC. If you developed your application using web technology already then you should be able to port it to the WAC spec with low effort. If not it might be harder, but many native applications can be created using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript already.

In any case please talk to us – we can tell you how to do it!

Sources:
WAC Developer Site
WAC Wiki (WAC Waikiki)
WAC press release
mobilebusinessbriefing.com
zdnet.co.uk
IBM press release
heise.de

We hope you like the new page. Feedback and criticism welcome - Enjoy reading!

We wish you a happy and successful New Year!

• Mobile HCI 2011, Aug 30 – Sept.02, 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden
• Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley, Sept. 01, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Wireless China Industry Summit, Sept. 01-02, 2011 in Beijing, China
• Apps World Asia 2011, Sept. 01-02, 2011 in Singapore
• LTE Asia Conference, Sept. 06-07, 2011 in Singapore
• Mobilism workshops, Sept. 08-09, 2011 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• MobileTech Conference 2011, Sept. 12, 2011 in Mainz, Germany
• Mobile Future Forward, Sept. 12, 2011 in Seattle, WA, USA
• DEMO Fall 2011, Sept. 12-14, 2011 in Silicon Valley, CA, USA
• Futurecom, Sept. 12-14, 2011 in Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Enterprise Tomorrow, Sept. 13-15, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• TC3 – Carrier Connections Summit, Sept. 15, 2011 in Mountain View, CA, USA
• NFC World Congress, Sept. 19-21, 2011 in Nice, France
• Mobile Innovation Week, Sept. 19-22, 2011 in Toronto, Canada
• Cloud Mobility, Sept. 20-21, 2011 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Social Media Strategies Summit Boston, Sept. 20-22, 2011 in Boston, MA, USA
• 3rd Annual Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit 2011, Sept. 20-22, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium
• Mobile DevCon Köln, Sept. 21, 2011 in Cologne, Germany
• dmexco 2011, Sept. 21-22, 2011 in Cologne, Germany
• ad:tech 2011, Sept. 21-22, 2011 in London, UK
• Smart Event 2011, Sept. 21-23, 2011 in Nice, France
• ongamestart – HTML5 Game Conference, Sept. 22-23, 2011 in Warsaw, Poland
• Android Homecoming, Sept. 23-25, 2011 in Mountain View, CA, USA
• Österreichische Medientage, Sept. 27-29, 2011 in Vienna, Austria
• Mobilism Workshop, Sept. 28-29, 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany
• Intel AppUp Elements, Sept. 28-29, 2011 in Bellevue, WA, USA
• Over the Air 2011, Sept. 30- Oct. 01 in Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, UK
• Adobe Max, Oct. 01-05, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Conference, Oct. 03-06, 2011 in Las Vegas, NV, USA
• MMA Forum, Oct. 04-05, 2011 in London, UK
• Mobile Monday National Summit, Oct. 05, 2011 in Hamburg, Germany
• mobile business area, Oct. 05-06, 2011 in Nürnberg, Germany
• MxO Hamburg, Oct. 06-07, 2011 in Hamburg, Germany
• droidcon UK, Oct. 06-07, 2011 in London, UK
• Banff Venture Forum 2011, Oct. 06-07, 2011 in Banff, Alberta, Canada
• Web 2.0 Expo New York, Oct. 10-13, 2011 in New York, NY, USA
• CTIA Enterprise & Applications, Oct. 10-13, 2011 in San Diego, CA, USA
• Being Digital, Oct. 11-12, 2011 in London, UK
• Frankfurter Buchmesse 2011, Oct. 12-16, 2011 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany
• BlackBerry DEVCON 2011, Oct. 18-20, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• Mobile DevCon Hamburg, Oct. 19, 2011 in Hamburg, Germany
• SenchaCon 2011, Oct. 23-26, 2011 in Austin, TX, USA
• 4G World 2011, Oct. 24-27, 2011 in Chicago, IL, USA
• The Social Media Strategies Summit, Oct. 25-27, 2011 in London, UK
• Webit Expo 2011, Oct. 26-27, 2011 in Sofia, Bulgaria
• ad:tech 2011, Oct. 27-28, 2011 in Tokyo, Japan
• Planet of the Apps Australia 2011, Oct. 27-28, 2011 in Sydney, Australia
• ForumOxford: Mobile Apps and Technologies Conference 2011, Oct. 28, 2011 in Oxford, UK
• Apps World North America 2011, Nov. 01-02, 2011 in New York, NY, USA
• Sprint Open Solutions Conference, Nov. 02-04, 2011 in Santa Clara, CA, USA
• Android DevCon, Nov. 06, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA
• ad:tech 2011, Nov. 08-10, 2011 in New York, NY, USA
• FOKUS Media Web Symposium, Nov. 10-11, 2011 in Berlin, Germany
• Screens 2011, Nov. 14-15, 2011 in Toronto, Canada
• GSMA Mobile Asia Congress 2011, Nov. 16-17, 2011 in Hong Kong
• LBS2011, Nov. 21-23, 2011 in Vienna, Austria
• iPhone DevCon Köln, Nov. 29-30, 2011 in Cologne, Germany
• Apps World Europe 2011, Nov. 29-30, 2011 in London, UK
• Mobile Games Forum, Jan. 25-26, 2012 in London, UK

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

• “Congrats to all the #mobunc organization, very nice day, great location, good food, very interesting topics. All in all i’m happy I came :)” (@pedrocustodio)
• “Finally home, had an awesome time at #mobunc met lots of old mobile friends. Thanks for organising this guys!” (@mahoekst)
• “#mobunc was cool :-)” (@ilgor)
• “I have been at the Mobile Unconference Düsseldorf Edition today, a kind of BarCamp just a little bit more structured but as fun as any other I guess” (@0m4r, Blog)
• “yeah, Mobile UNconference Düsseldorf was the best ever BarCamp I’ve attended. Very well organized by an international team!” (Friedhelm, Comment)

The event started around 10 am. The breakfast took a bit longer since we had to wait for the “Geek Bus” from The Netherlands. They had internet connection, really good coffee, movies and a bar in this Microsoft-sponsored bus.

After the Dutch attendees arrived the kick-off session with a funny introduction round started. The talks/workshops were determined and the unconference could get started. The topics were pretty diverse, but there were a lot about about cross-platform development (“My result: It’s all about cross-plattform solutions!” @danielrieber). Here is a short overview:

• Ripple Emulator – a testing platform for developers to test their widget (from @tinyhippos)
• apparat.io – a HTML5 apps packager (from Uxebu)
• Unify – an open sourced smart phone framework, also check out Unify Training (@fastner)
• KamiJS – a cloud-enabled JavaScript platform for apps, widgets and digital homes (Raju Bitter)
• Microsoft Windows Phone 7
• WAC – Wholesale Application Community
• The Vodafone Developer Day alongside the Mobile Unconference

Here’s the whole schedule:

All talks were pretty interesting and no one longer than 30 minutes. We had lively discussions as well. The Mobile Unconference can really be seen as a big success. We had over 100 (international) attendees and an overall nice atmosphere, which was carried over to Tannenbaum after the conference.

Many thanks to all the other organizers and sponsors (Enterprise Europe Network, Microsoft, Sevenval, O’Reilly, Syntens, Mobile Games Blog, Rotterdam Media Commission, Codeglue, Zenit), all of our speakers and of course all the attendees for such a great day!

Here are some pictures:

• http://twitpic.com/photos/GeeROC
• http://ow.ly/i/5vH4
• http://yfrog.com/mr55397428j
• http://twitpic.com/372dp3
• http://twitpic.com/3743un
• http://twitpic.com/3728o0
• http://twitpic.com/372gr3

Grey thankfully also created some videos during the event. Check them out on their blog:

• Opening
• Impressions
• Review

We are definitely looking forward to the next Mobile Unconference which most likely will be held in Rotterdam again. See you there!

1. Mobile Unconference
2. Vodafone Developer Day
3. MobileMonday

This is a great opportunity to learn more about many mobile development topics and get in touch with mobile enthusiasts from all over the world. So join us for an exciting and informative day!

1. Mobile Unconference

The day starts with the Mobile Unconference. Meet other developers, entrepreneurs, startups and technology companies to discuss the latest trends in mobile software. No frills, no strings attached, no
marketing-speak, only regular folks who make the mobile world more interesting every day. This is an UNconference and it’s all about its participants – anybody can grab the microphone and talk about something interesting there!

Sign up here: http://www.mobileunconference.com

2. Vodafone Developer Day

Parallel to the Mobile Unconference and at the same location our developer friends over at Vodafone and Appseleration organize a developer day covering the following topics:

• Introduction to Vodafone developer
• Developing with JIL/WAC
• Cross Platform development and live demo
• Debugging tips and tricks with Ripple Emulator
• Testing on real devices with the Perfecto Mobile Cloud
• Bringing your apps to market

3. MobileMonday

The day ends with the Düsseldorf edition of MobileMonday. This time the topic will be Mobile Health. Learn more about the global mobile healthcare market and meet interesting people – networking till the ambulance arrives ;)

Find more details at the MobileMonday Website and please make sure you sign up there separately!

Get ready for the mobilest day this year!
We hope to see you on Monday in Düsseldorf!

PS: Please repost and retweet this!

The first presentation on the “Asia Pacific Mobile & LBS Outlook” was held by Marc Einstein from the market research company Frost & Sullivan. His presentation (PDF) gave a lot of statistical insights in different regions in Asia. Asia in general is a very competitive market especially for mobile operators. In India alone there are around 15 operators and Indonesia, also a very interesting market for mobile services, has 11 mobile operators. Indonesia is also the third largest region worldwide (after US and UK) for Facebook usage on mobile devices. Contrary to Indonesia, in Japan the biggest mobile social network is Mixi with over 21 million users and in South Korea it is Cyworld (18 million users).

Smartphones are getting more popular in the Asian Pacific region. In 2009 there were nearly 22 million smartphone devices, representing 4.5% of all devices sold in this region. Frost & Sullivan expect a robust growth in smartphone sales in the coming years.

Location based services are also big in Japan, especially when talking about maps and navigation. NTT Docomo’s most used LBS are maps/navigation too, also things like finding family members and friends. But interestingly names like Gowalla or Foursquare were missing in all the talks. So maybe it is why mobile users in Japan are more bound to their carrier portal or such services do not have the attraction than in other places. It could be a language thing too.

After Marc’s presentation Takeshi Mitsutani introduced us to deCarta, an independent LBS software platform. Opera for example uses deCarta instead of Google Maps for maps and local search. Their goal is to reach about 100 million users in this co-operation and share the revenue through advertisment with Opera.

Samsung also integrated deCarta’s data into Bada to provide developer a location API. deCarta wants to reach up to 50 million users by 2011 there. Their model: revenue share of paid apps and advertisement revenue share on free apps.

The company also provides its navigation application to Medion and T-Mobile in Germany.

The third presentation was held by Hiroaki Kando from ZENRIN DataCom. They aim to be a leading service provider for location data and map content and they offer an easy-to-use real-time interface (so they claim). Their location based services “itsmo” is preinstalled on NTT Docomo’s phones for providing users with train or alternative route information, e.g. underground routes for when it is raining or if you want to take a shopping detour. The service is also available on the iPhone and was the best selling app in Japan in 2009.

The final presentation was from the US company Skyhook, a Wi-Fi Positioning System. The Core Engine SDK is available for Android, Symbian as well as Windows Mobile and is already integrated by apps like Layar or Kayak. Skyhook wants to look into the future by predicting human behavior through analyzing previously collected data. They also want to make this available to application developers – your privacy alert should have turned on by now ;)

Then the networking part started. The crowd was pretty mixed: American, German, English, Danish, French, Chinese even some Japanese and probably some more nationalities mixed up to talk mobile – quite an experience and again quite different from our previous MobileMonday experiences in the US and Germany.

This time 3 out of the 7 total attendees were there for the first time, so we might actually grow this meetup one day. But it was good as it was and we had some quite interesting topics. I just want to mention them here quickly (as far as I can remember):

• Book: HTML5 for Web Designers
• HbbTV and why it might be interesting for web developers
• Google Web Fonts (thanks to Sven!)
• Amazon Kindle product presentation ;)
• Zepto.js – a minimalist JavaScript framework for mobile WebKit browsers
• Jo – HTML5 Mobile App Framework
• vapor.js – very fast and fun JavaScript tool
• Unify – JavaScript mobile application framework
• CSS3 vs. Canvas animations (CSS3 wins)
• Dextrose AG acquisition by Zynga (both win, they’re hiring)
• (function(){}()) vs. (function(){})() (thanks Björn)

It was a fun evening at Cafe Brücke (their food is much better than their website). It was surprisingly full between 20:00 to 22:00, but quieter than our previous locations.

Thank you all for coming and see you next time!

Webinos

The consortium is led by the Frauenhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems and has already 22 partners including W3C, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Telefonica, docomo, Deutsche Telekom, BMW and the University of Oxford. It has received a €10m funding from the EU and will run over three years.

Will webinos solve the fragmentation problem?

As many developers know there are a lot of different application platforms out there already (Android, iPhone, Symbian, Web … you name it). Fragmentation and porting applications are huge issues for developers and expensive in regards to development cost and time.

The new consortium wants to solve this problem by creating an open source, web-based platform that would allow the same application to run across a very wide variety of device types. The platform can be used on any handset regardless of the OEM or carrier. Basically a universal OS or runtime environment to write once, run anywhere.

A very ambitious goal! Especially considering that maximum compatibility usually comes in a least common denominator package.

For us this project first and foremost raises some questions:

• How do other projects like JIL/the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) fit into the picture? They also aim to create open platforms for mobile apps and solve the fragmentation problem.
• Is this gonna be a corporate-driven PhoneGap?
• Comparable to other approaches like Mobile OpenLaszlo?
• Will HTML5 have a big part in this? (probably it will)
• How small will the least common denominator really be?
• No matter how web-based you are you need to deal with browser issues and fragmentation – how is this solved?
• Are there too many cooks in the kitchen?
• Where do Google, Apple and Nokia (and many others) fit into this?
• Where are the developers? It is a tough task to convince developers to develop for your platform, no matter how great it might be. Other companies are already spending millions on this (some more successful than others).
• Is someone of webinos going to present the project at the Mobile Unconference in November?

What we think:

A well funded project with a noble goal. Lots of players involved, many obstacles to take, many people to convince. The goal is very, very ambitious and the resulting platform will depend on making compromises. The Web is the platform of the future – this is another proof.

Sources and References:

webinos.org
wholesaleappcommunity.com
geek.com
heise.de