So I spent yesterday at the Jam Factory in the company of about fifty geeks talking about everything mobile at Open Mobile Innovation Camp 9. These type of events are a good place to meet others of like mind and learn about emerging trends and technologies in a particular field. Sometimes the geek level is higher than others and at times one can be left behind by people far further ahead of the wave than oneself, but thankfully yesterday was very accessible and I came away with far more information than I went in with.
As is often the case at such events, the morning's schedule was filled with talks from selected luminaries of mobile development and the afternoon to "barcamp" sessions - geeks talking shop.
Google's Reto Meier couldn't make it due to the snow, so we had a talk on the future of mobile technology from IBM research's Dale Lane, a talk on the comemrce and marketing of the mobile app space from Everything Everywhere's Mark Watts-Jones, a talk on upcoming W3C mobile standards including my interest of the day, W3C widgets from Vodafone's internet evangelist Dan Appelquist and a demo of mobile app technologies from Calvium's Tom Melamed.
In the afternoon's melee I ended up caught up in a weighty discussion on identifying your mobile users and their device capabilities - important to us if we ever want to get the best experience over to our visitors - and then an examination of the evolving nature of a smartphone. Interesting, if rather geeky stuff.
All in all a worthwhile day. I came away knowing more about widgets which was my objective for the day. I'd like to think in a year's time when I'm waving a phone with a dictionary widget on it at anyone who'll listen, that the marketplace will be just about ready for them and we'll thus steal a march on all our competitors who've rushed headlong into the app stores.
I can hope, can't I.
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