Yesterday 100+ developers from Germany, Holland, UK and Canada attended Mobile Unconference Dusseldorf, the Vodafone developer team were also there. Here are my thoughts about the event from a fog bound Dusseldorf airport lounge.
Although situated in Dusseldorf the event encouraged developers from Rotterdam to also attend, which was a nice touch. These developers were bused to the event in style, like rock stars, unfortunately a number of traffic jams meant they had a longer journey than expected, but all arrived happy to get the day started.
The event was run in a bar camp style that also included a track of presentations from us 'the Vodafone developer team'. True to form the day kicked off with a 'warming up' session where everyone got together in small teams and much fun was had describing names of the teams and the individuals in them. The speakers then introduced themselves and the sessions they proposed to present. These sessions were spread throughout the day across four rooms.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
As part of the day Vodafone developer delivered the following sessions,
- @johnwyer delivered an overview of the Vodafone developer program and Vodafone Shop in the "What can Vodafone developer do for you" session. The session also included a demo of the developer website and the FREE Perfecto mobile service. Frank Schreier then showcased how easy it is to upload apps to the Vodafone Shop via a walk through of the application upload process for a native Android app.
- @vgholkar gave an overview of the Wholesale Application Community (WAC) highlighting use of W3C technology for app development and broad market reach.
- @tinyhippos (the Canadian contingent) presented how you can rapidly build and test widgets using their Ripple emulator
- @wolframkriesing and David Aurelio covered the cross platform development story and showed how to create native apps from web apps using their Apperat.io service.
- Thomas Kowalczyk rounded the day out by covering how to get your apps to market in Germany with Vodafone.
I will be uploading the presentations to our Vodafone developer SlideShare account where you will be able to view and download them.
Other presentations included Windows Phone 7, porting apps to QT, HTML 5 apps and UX hints / tips. The discussion around web verses native apps was very much alive at the event, this was to be expected given the mix of developers at the event. You can view what attendees had to say on Twitter via the events hash tag #mobunc.
The Mobile Unconference team wrapped up the day with an interactive session allowing everyone to give their feedback about the event. Generally the event was very well received and the level of content was just right. The only issue was that there were so many good sessions running concurrently that some of the attendees had to make a tough choice!
We really enjoyed the event and I was delighted to meet and chat with some great developers. Can't wait for the next mobile unconference!
