Battle for Students at Imperial College

Last Monday I was invited to give a bada talk to second year computer science students at the Department of Computing at Imperial College. The idea was to provide input to students who subsequently decide to do projects based on the presentations and presented technologies.

I quite like this approach and it was exciting because several companies showed up to 'battle' for students. Among the companies were -- besides Samsung -- IBM, Yell Labs, and Google (well, actually the Google representative who was supposed to talk about Android did not show up).

First presentation was from IBM about Usability: What it is and how to do it. That was a very nice overview over various usability techniques. Some of these were techniques we actually deployed during our AiRaid bada app development such as focus groups, user tests, and questionnaires.

The second presentation was from Yell Labs and gave an overview over the latest App Innovations produced by this lab. Yell Labs really goes cross-platform and some of their mobile apps are truly interesting and useful. I like their approach to focus on one thing and do this one thing with their app really well (something which reminds me of my former professional life). One such example is the Yell for Bikes app which shows the availability of Boris Bikes across London. We are now discussing to port this app over to bada -- maybe as a student project ?! ;)

Third presentation was mine: Introduction to the bada Platform. I gave an overview over the bada ecosystem, highlighted our progress and opportunities, talked a bit about the technical architecture and namespaces, and then showed some tools and demos. In the last part, I covered collaboration opportunities for students, such as working together on extending AiRaid or our open-source SNS app BuddyFix or any other app or component idea.

I also used this event to introduce our bada app competition for UK universities, where we are working togehter with Steel Media and which we are about to launch soon (more on this in a later post). Check out our preliminary competition page here.

I would love to report about the Google talk about Android, too. But, unfortunately, the Google representative decided not to show up. Dr William Knottenbelt from Imperial College, who organised the event, then gave a brief technical overview over the Android architecture.

My verdict:
It was a great event. I had many good questions. Students showed very good interest. I am already in contact with some of them. We will provide bada-powered Waves to them. And it looks as if we could kick-off some really good projects together.

I was also approached be the guys from Felix, the Imperial College student newspaper, who will feature an article about my talk and bada. I will report about that in a separate post.
Gosh, I love this university work !

For more info about bada check developer.bada.com