{"id":427,"date":"2007-11-04T21:47:29","date_gmt":"2007-11-05T04:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=427"},"modified":"2007-11-04T21:47:29","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T04:47:29","slug":"mobilecamp-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/427\/","title":{"rendered":"MobileCamp San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"

I attended MobileCamp San Francisco<\/a> (mobile site<\/a>) yesterday. What a great event, it was a BarCamp – a user driven un-conference with no spectators, where everyone is a participant. Although BarCamps are user generated events it takes the efforts of dedicated volunteers to pull off an event like this. Thanks Indira, Ritwik, Andy and Alexi, I know you worked your butts off to make MobileCampSF the success it was. Thanks also to Nokia, whose sponsorship provided great food and a perfect venue in the beautiful and architecturally significant Swedish American Hall. It was great to finally meet Mike<\/a> and David<\/a> and so many of my readers. I attended and participated in as many sessions as I could and here are my impressions.<\/p>\n

\"MobileCampSF\"<\/p>\n

Photos by Ritwik Dey. More MobileCampSF photos<\/a><\/p>\n

First was PlayMegaphone.com<\/a>‘s, Dan Albritton. Megaphone has a really cool series of products built around the unique concept of controlling digital signage with mobile phones using voice and\/or keypad. They have a deal with MTV to use the huge MTV video screen in New York City’s Times Square to present multi-player games that passersby are encouraged to participate in, by using their phones. We played two games at MobileCamp. The first was Shoot’em<\/em> where you steer your phone around the big screen zapping other players. The game was a lot of fun and after Dan gave the winner of the first round her choice of a Nokia N95 or N800, everyone wanted to play. The other game Noisy, Noisy Hippos<\/em> was even better. You’re are a hippopotamus and grab objects flying across the screen above you by yelling “Grab!” into your phone. It must have been hilarious to watch a roomful of techies yelling “grab, grab, grab…” although I was too busy trying to win an N95 to really notice. About 10 devices were given away to winners. I didn’t win anything but came close, oh well. MegaPhone seems to be doing really well with their idea. They have done games for various sponsors all around the world on big screens. The concept scales down to smaller screens in stores and bars. They did games at the Palm Cento promotion and Dan showed a clip of Palm CEO Ed Colligan enthusiastically playing. Dan sees the product as an alternative to SMS campaigns which he categorized as “Do something boring and we will SPAM you.” Instead Megaphone offers fun with game winners getting their prizes by SMS or a voice message. The server runs on a laptop and supports 30 users and scales to thousands of users with multiple servers using Amazon’s EC2 rent by the hour servers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Next I participated in a small group led by Nelz<\/a>, brainstorming mobile security and privacy issues. Combining social networking with mobile technology that follows us everywhere we go and has the ability to report our location with an accuracy of 50 meters raises huge privacy issues. How can we use the technology without subjecting ourselves to surveillance by government, employers, credit bureaus and individual stalkers? We generally agreed that mobile users do not currently have a good way of knowing what information will be shared and with whom. We came up with ideas including: campaigns to educate users of the danger of revealing personal information including mobile phone numbers to third parties and encouraging users to demand that information not be shared without explicit opt-in. We also came up\u00a0 ideas for new business models based on enhancing user security like anonymising mobile proxies, disposable phone and SMS numbers, and granting a “Seal of Good Privacy” to vendors that meet certain criteria for protecting user identifiable identification.<\/p>\n

Bebo<\/a>‘s Jordy Mont-Reynaud did a presentation titled “What’s The Killer App in Mobile Social Networking? ” Jordy defined 4 elements of a killer mobile social application<\/p>\n