Live at the Fleur Cafe

The Monaco summit is over. For the finale, half a dozen teams competed in a 48-hour hackathon to show that a one-or-two person team can put together a social networking app in two days of coding using WRT. Beyond the gimmick there is a compelling story. As one speaker said, we shouldn't really be calling them widgets - these are not necessarily widgets at all, these are apps. It's a theme we'll be exploring and developing on Mobile Innovator. Meanwhile, there may never have been such hunger for your apps, or so many routes to market. Samsung has an offering there too, of course, with the Samsung Mobile App Store. But no more cafes. Back to the airport, back to my desk. -- Ben.

After the flood

The sun came out. Most interesting for me - (1) runtimes, particularly WRT and Flash. These are not silver bullets, they are technology Swiss Army knives, mix and match cleverly and they will get you to market. I think everybody gets it. Of course, it's already fragmented. That lies ahead. (2) Well - runtimes. JS as the language of the imminent future, and not so distant past. JS is not to be confused with the garbage you find embedded in many a web page (3) The device is the killer app. I've believed that since my Psion days :-) Did I mention that the sun came out? -- Ben.

Before the flood

I'm excited already:

>>A sold-out audience from nearly 40 countries has gathered in Monaco for the first-ever Nokia Developer Summit. The event includes keynote addresses by visionaries from Nokia, Symbian Foundation, MySpace, and IDC.

It's the Symbian aspect that brings Sammi here, but any gathering of mobile developers is an opportunity to meet and talk and introduce people to what we are up to.

The weather so far is a disaster (sorry - I'm English, I have to talk about the weather!). Coming in from the Italian side the rivers are overflowing, with landslips and flooding on the roads and water sluicing off the hills. Not good.

But while we wait for the fun to start, the other hot topic must be the interesting numbers on the A**** A** store phenomenon - see casualgaming.biz/news/28439/True-scale-of-iPhones-games-market-revealed-in-numbers, linked from the always excellent Guardian games blog. Casual games account for around half the downloads on the platform-we-shall-not-name.

The billion dollar question has to be, why no goldrush on S60? Developers, tell us your story!

And if you want to meet up, post comments to the blog.

-- Ben.

War is Peace

‘War is Peace’ is a central principle of the world Orwell describes in his classic novel ‘1984’.

We all know about Big Brother and DoubleThink and NewSpeak, but the parallels between the political philosophy of 1984 and today's coverging mobile Internet make for a quite interesting model: 3 super-states (device creators vs software / services providers vs operators) locked in perpetual battle over ‘The Disputed Territory’ (the Internet and content).What do you think?

Random 1984-related fact: apparently 43% of people who say they've read the book actually lie because they are embarrassed to admit they haven’t. If you haven’t read it, you should!

Anyway, check out Forum Oxford's 2009 conference

Monaco next week

Sammi will be in Monaco next week at the N***a Developer Summit. Look out for us keeping a low profile and ears to the ground... But it will be great to say hello to any of you who are there. Post a comment to this item if you want to meet up. -- Ben.

The disappearing i8910

Ok so we're a little late on this video clip but we thought it was so good we'd share it again. Can you guess how this is done? Answers in the comments section please!

The new News Scoop?

The tidings that NewsCorp is extending its relationship with MySpace users by launching 'Citizen Journalism' makes me glad I'm no longer a journalist. Or does it?

Will talented amateurs rise to the top, or will they already be gunning for media jobs? If someone posts an exclusive, how much do they get paid?

In time, this might actually redefine the meaning of 'scoop', as uReport looks like it might provide a structured way of capturing content from those MySpace community members lucky (or unlucky) enough to be able to say 'I was there'. While it will keep the News Desks at Fox pretty busy, I am sure it will be more interesting than reading a pile of press releases...

CTIA Las Vegas - postmortem

Here we go again, slot machines, cigarette smoke, bling, flamboyant cars, stretch limos - yip, we have arrived in Las Vegas. Born and bread in tranquil Sweden, Las Vegas is still a shock to the system every time I arrive at LAS (10 visits late), yet there is a certain thrill to it. This year was slightly different however, the downturn has an iron grip of the global economy and here we are in Capital of money attending one of the largest trade shows in the world, nobody knew quite what to expect, I was positively surprised.

Was there less people - absolutely, was that a bad thing - absolutely not! Companies are clearly taking the global downturn serious and as a result shipped in their most senior executives to show clients and partners that they do indeed care. This presented a tremendous opportunity to talk to the right people both on and off the show floor.

If you attended you probably spotted us, Samsung Mobile Innovator and Samsung Application Store had two great pods within the beautiful Samsung booth. We met with a vast number of exciting new and established companies who attended our booth and we had a chance to discuss the opportunities that are being created through the Samsung Application Store and Samsung Mobile Innovator. We wish you all the best with the ventures and look forward to seeing and supporting all of you at innovator.samsungmobile.com.

Next stop is TechEd, the Microsoft developer conference in Los Angeles on May 11-15, we hope to see you all there!

Until then good luck with your products and services and please register and get in touch with us at Samsung Mobile Innovator and see how we can help your solution getting more exposure.

Cheers
Martin Tannerfors
Samsung Mobile Innovator

An API for Spotify

Just something we thought we would share from our friendly Guardian newspaper here in the UK: http://tinyurl.com/dacotp

Spotify on a Samsung mobile device would be brill, now we just need network coverage everywhere. Oh.

Inside view on Samsung Mobile Applications

Many thanks to CasualGaming.biz for publishing this interview with one of the Mobile Innovator team here in London. For those of you unfamilar with the Samsung Mobile Applications Store, this could be worth a read.

Yes, Sammi is on the pull...
We also noticed this comment: "Samsung mobile Innovator looks like a perfect solution to pull developers." Nice of you to say so, VJ, but we also know we have a way to go yet, so your comments on how we can improve are always welcome. Check out the DiBos on the Mobile Innovator website.

Samsung featured on O2 Litmus

Samsung Mobile Innovator had the privilege of being the first device manufacturer to be featured on O2 Litmus (you must be a member to access the link, but this only takes a couple of minutes) – O2’s developer program. The site is still in its beta phase, but already we think it’s going to add a lot of value to the mobile development community and we look forward to working with them.

In addition to the technical and business development support that you would expect from a developer program, O2 Litmus has a feature which brings developers and invited users together. Developers can load their app up on the O2 Litmus site and request feedback from ‘real’ O2 customers. From the customer perspective, the program provides a great way for mobile enthusiasts to become involved in the application development process. Find out more in the video below:

O2 Litmus Video Tour from O2 Litmus on Vimeo.

More whizzy user experience from Samsung

This is a rather nice example of the Samsung UX (TouchWIZ) appearing in a new Internet-enabled product ... something for Samsung Mobile Innovator members to consider in future. I am sure our colleagues in the WinMo team will have things to say about this from CTIA in the next few days.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - T.S Eliot

Just came across an article from a leading broadsheet newspaper in the UK about how they’re switching to using Twitter to publish their stories.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology

I suspect they might be pulling the nation's leg, but the idea itself has got us thinking.

Twitter, by its very nature, a very here-and-now media. It’s transient and it’s great for the incidental postings and I dare say there will be plenty of updates around the G20 summit in London today (hopefully on a more positive note).

I’m not so sure about anything more than incidents though. It’s certainly impressive to see the massive amount of work going into ‘twitterising’ the entire history of the planet ever by the Guardian but how many people will really look back at uber-short stories with little understanding of the complexities behind it all. Try explaining World War 2 in 140 characters. Ok you may argue that stories can be covered over a series of Twitters but that defeats the point of it. It’s great for breaking news but anything more than that requires more effort.

That said, Twitter is great and it’s interesting to note how far the world has come in embracing technology to change the way we receive our information and also are involved with it. Everyone has a story, everyone is a journalist and to say something succinctly with very limited real estate does take some skill and I admire people who can do it.

By the way, I’m not sure I completely agree with the point about any story being told in 140 characters (but then maybe I’m just old fashioned for preferring the ‘novel-esque’ 160 character limitation provided by SMS).

Of course with all of this you’ll still have people who want more detailed news from TV, the internet and (shock, horror) that papery stuff you can get from your local newsagent (or paper delivery person if you’re lucky enough). I know my mother wouldn’t have a clue about Twitter, RSS, Atom, blogging etc and even if she got past the technology aspect she’d have to then learn a new language! LOL? ROFL? GR8? I can hear the tutting of dismay right now…

I’m about to pop out to grab a coffee and enjoy the lovely sun we have in London right now. Maybe I’ll tell you all what I bought…via Twitter of course. :o)