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I spent the day at MobileCampSF<\/a>, A BarCamp “unconference” focused on mobile development and monetization. MobileCamp is a a loosely structured gathering open to all mobile enthusiasts. Anyone can present on any mobile related topic in whatever format they desire. MobileCamps have been held in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The first San Francisco Camp<\/a> was a great event so i was eager to attend today’s sequel. I wasn’t disappointed, MobileCamp was expertly organized by Indira, Ritwik, Andy and Alexis and sponsorship by Nokia Nseries<\/a> and Forum Nokia<\/a> made the event free for attendees. I spent the entire day at MobileCamp and attended 8 sessions.<\/p>\n
First up was Chris Price of PhoneNews.com<\/a> with Social Networking for Device Manufacturers<\/em><\/strong>. Chris, who graduated from college a few days ago, just launched a startup, MechaWorks<\/em> and released its first comercial product MobileWiki,<\/a> a Wiki based product support platform targeted at device manufacturers. The idea is that someone like Nokia or a Samsung would use PhoneWiki to enhance product support and build brand loyalty. It’s a managed wiki similar in concept to Wikipedia where users can post questions, tips and reviews on each product in a manufacturer’s lineup. Mechaworks hosts and manages the Wiki making sure content meets quality guidelines; doing things like editing posts to remove information that a vendor wouldn’t want to share or endorse like as unlock codes. Or the the software can be purchased and self hosted and manged.<\/p>\n
If you would like to see PhoneWiki in action, look at PhoneNews.coms’ Phone Encyclopedia<\/a> which is built on PhoneWiki.<\/p>\n
The morning session ended with a fun game where the participants divided up into teams of three. Each team has 15 minutes to create a mobile product concept <\/strong>including a functional design, marketing plan, revenue source, logo and tag line. The product name had to consist of two words from a random list of about 30. I teamed up with Richard Galbraith from WOMWorld<\/a> and Rudy Rullan from Chikka<\/a>. We did pretty well finishing in second place with GreenFreckles,<\/em> an SMS response and mobile web based social service to encourage recycling. GreenFreckles connects users who have items they want to get rid of with nearby individuals and organizations willing to accept them. We lost to SpaceCycling<\/em>, a GPS enabled mobile social network that organizes impromptu races for cyclists. The members of the winning team each received an N810 cortesy of Nokia.<\/p>\n
After a delicious catered lunch, Francis Li from Tinypictures<\/a>, the company behind mobile social photo sharing network Radar<\/a>, presented an introduction to Mobile Processing<\/a><\/strong>. It’s a mobile port of an Open Source development language and IDE called Processing. <\/em> Loosely based on OpenGl, Mobile Processing<\/em> is a preprocessor and lightweight runtime that sits on top on Java ME. It can run on almost any java powered phone, even old MIDP 1.0 devices. Francis quickly developed a graphic demo in less than 10 lines of code and also showed a couple of Mobile Processing applications, a weather widget with a iPhone like GUI and Yahoo Sonar<\/em>, a local search application. Mobile Processing looks like a great tool for prototyping and rapid application development and seems remarkably portable across all sorts of handsets.<\/p>\n
Matthaus Krzykowski of VentureBeat<\/a> did a through analysis of the current mobile social network landscape<\/strong>. He started by saying that there are currently over 60 mobile social networks and organized them into four groups<\/p>\n
You can read a fuller, more complete version of Matthaus’ presentation including his slides at VentureBeat<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Victor Brilon and Tapio Tolvanen from Nokia demonstrated a Maemo powered robot dog<\/strong> they built with an N800 for brains and “face” attached to and communicating (via Bluetooth) with an off the shelf robot kit. An N810 is the robot’s remote control, talking to it over WiFi. Complete plans for building your own robot can be found at garage.maemo.org\/projects\/robot<\/a><\/p>\n
Another Tnkgyl presentation closed out an exciting day. It was about tnkgrl’s experience Hacking Mobile Devices<\/em><\/strong>. She presented three hardware hacks; Converting the EVDO equiped Vulcan Flipstart<\/em> MID to HSDPA, doing the same for an OQO<\/em> MID and adding Bluetooth to the base model Asus EeePC<\/em>. tnkgrl shared tips for finding hidden USB ports and SIM interfaces on devices, sourcing cheap unlocked HSDPA modules on eBay and the hardware hacker’s best friend, Kapton Tape<\/a>. You can find lots of detail and pictures of tnkgrl’s hacks on her blog, tnkgrl.wordpress.com<\/a> where she also reviews phones and other mobile devices. She wrapped her presentation up with a bit of social engineering explaining how to use any device on your carrier’s cheapest unlimited data plan.<\/p>\n
I spent the day at MobileCampSF, A BarCamp “unconference” focused on mobile development and monetization. MobileCamp is a a loosely structured gathering open to all mobile enthusiasts. Anyone can present on any mobile related topic in whatever format they desire. MobileCamps have been held in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The first San Francisco Camp was a great event so i was eager to attend today’s sequel. I wasn’t disappointed, MobileCamp was expertly organized by Indira, Ritwik, Andy … Continue reading