bada – a Vast Ocean of Opportunities

February 3, 2011 – 11:53

So, bada (always with a small b, apparently) is Samsung’s new mass market platform. Samsung’s vision is that bada is the “Smartphone for Everyone” – from the techy early adopters to the user who just wants a great phone that can run a range of applications.

bada exploits the experience and knowledge gained throughout the history of Samsung’s proprietary mobile platform, which was first used in 2004. It is written in C++ on top of C/C++ middleware, and bada apps are written using C++. bada also supports maps, Flash and Web technologies, and integrates Flash and WebKit support into its native APIs allowing easy inter-operation. The bada SDKs were first launched in May 2010 with version 1.0. Recently version 2.0 was announced.

bada is configurable over various hardware configurations and kernels. For example, the first bada phone, the Wave S8500, is very high end with a 1 GHz CPU and a variety of sensors, while some of the later phones use less powerful hardware. So they are affordable and thus more appealing to the mass market.

Another noteworthy bada feature is the seamless integration of service APIs into the platform. Services include social networking, buddy lists that allow users to share real-time information with their friends, shopping and commerce APIs, maps, location and points of interest, remote content management and even weather services. This is all out-of-the box and can be integrated into third-party applications. These services use the cloud and, for instance, allow easy access to third party social network services like facebook or twitter.

You can get all the development and test tools for free and find reference information such as API documentation, sample code, training videos and blog posts on the bada developer site

Of course once you have finished developing your bada app you can publish it on the Samsung Apps store.

All of this is relevant as Samsung is pushing hard to be the top mobile phone company in the world. Remember, Samsung currently ships some 40 million phones a year in the midrange, touch-phone category. That’s a large mostly un-tapped market of users.

By mike | Posted in information | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

Applifier Making Move To Mobile?

January 27, 2011 – 11:02

Tuomas Rinta, head of R&D
from Applifier is taking part to this years Mobile Dev Camp as one of the speakers. Tuomas will join the panel discussion about monetizing mobile apps. The big question is “how ready is mobile for big business”. Last year one of the companies represented at Mobile Dev Camp was Rovio, who have shown us that they are certainly ready. Applifier has not yet publicly confirmed their plans around mobile but it’s certainly the next logical step for the network. The active involvement with Mobile Dev Camp and public recruitment plans indicate that something is cooking. iOS and Android developers should definitely take a closer look at the open positions .

Applifier is one of the sponsors of Mobile Dev Camp this year. Applifier is a Finnish startup helping Facebook game developers get more traffic and users. Applifier has more than 55 million monthly active users and they have delivered more than 10 million clicks.
Their business idea is pretty simple. Each member of the network embeds strip of advertisements to their game. Strip has 5 slots for advertisements. Every time someone clicks on the add the owner of the game gets free advertisment clicks from the network. Developers who cant earn enough clicks from network can buy clicks. That’s how Applifier makes money.

If you want to find out more, join us on 26th February

By Kai | Posted in information, update | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Have you signed up yet?

January 25, 2011 – 12:57

So with just over a month to go, have you signed up yet?

One change this year is that as a number of people spent quite a lot of time on the day getting their environment up and running, or just trying to figure out the basics of working with the environment, we thought it would be good to have a “warm-up” evening to do this instead (if you still want to hack something together on the day there is nothing stopping you doing that as well :) )

So, the nice folks at Aalto Venture Garage are going to host us on 24th of February.
Sign up on either Facebook or Linked-in

By mike | Posted in information, update | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment

Your first chance to see bada in Finland

January 24, 2011 – 18:38

Following what seems to be our tradition of getting briefings for the latest mobile platforms (last year it was Windows Phone 7), this year we have managed to get Samsung to come and tell us about bada.

bada: The Next Wave

This talk introduces bada and gives an overview over the technical platform as well as the whole ecosystem to publish, sell and promote bada apps. Important release milestones and achievements are highlighted and a pre-view to the new bada 2.0 version together with developer opportunities are presented.

This talk will be given by Manfred Bortenschlager, you can get more information about Manfred here

As Manfred’s office is in Staines, we should probably not ask him to many questions about Ali G :)

By mike | Posted in agenda, information, update | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment

The last prize is received

January 17, 2011 – 15:11

Receiving an iPad
So with Apple FINALLY releasing the iPad in Finland, Marko was able to give the prize (of an iPad for those that do not remember) to Dennis from Klooni Games

Marko is the Managing Director at MK&C, a 15 person consultancy that specialises in Cocoa Development. This back ground gave him the insight to be both a Judge and to help those that were just getting started (For example, Kristoffer Lawson’s FacePalm idea was built during the afternoon with help from Marko).

KlooniGames is two people currently; Dennis Belfrage (who does the Apple stuff) and Petri Purho (founder, and main developer).
The game that Dennis built for the competition was based on some libraries and concepts that Petri had already built.

The guys explained that the idea behind KlooniGames was to explore new, experimental and interesting game ideas and interaction methods.
They aim to build a rough prototype in approximately one month, then get feed-back from some Alpha testers. If this feedback is positive, the really hard work of making the game user friendly, having good error handling etc starts. This, they said, takes much more time (up to two years!).
As such they are constantly testing new ideas, and asking for feedback. As each game is so different, there is no scientific way to tell if the reaction will be posative, so real user testing is needed.
Their current focus is on desktop/laptop systems as there are just more of those around that can run the prototypes.

One of Petri’s early games Crayon Physics Deluxe, is selling, so they are able to continue the quest to make an awesome game of their own, rather than having to work for someone else just to make a living.

By mike | Posted in update | Comments (1)

want to see the latest mobile tech in action?

October 27, 2010 – 17:39

If the answer to that question is yes, then follow the progress of Kristoffer “Travelling Salesman” Lawson, and see how he is getting on with the Windows Phone 7 Series handset he has on loan from Microsoft.
Check the itinerary to find out when Kristoffer will be near-by with the handset (at the early events the handset has been one of the talking points)

At each venue he stops at, there is also an opportunity to pitch your idea for an application you want to build as part of the Cute Qt competition. You have until the end of the trip (December 16th) to actually build something and there are some *sweet* prizes on offer from Nokia.
Oh, and don’t forget to ask Kristoffer to take your picture (or video) with the N8 he also has with him.

By mike | Posted in Other Events | Tagged | Comments (2)

Need an incentive to practice for the next great MDC competition?

October 20, 2010 – 22:24

So, it has been 6 months since you last looked at cutting some code for a mobile device in a competitive environment (this assumes it was at MDC2010 ;) )?
Feeling a bit rusty?

Check out this post where Nokia announces a new competition in association with the Travelling Salesman adventure.

It’s pretty easy. In theory it could be for any platform, but as the application needs to be built using Qt, building for non-native platforms would be adding a rather large extra chunk of work ;)
The Nokia blog post give more details and a TON of links.

P.S. if you have not already, like the project’s Facebook page, as once it goes over 512, Krisotffer will have to pitch in Icelandic!

By mike | Posted in Other Events | Tagged , | Leave a Comment

MDC heads to Mindtrek

October 5, 2010 – 21:24

So me and Kai will be heading to MindTrek at the end of this week, if you are there and see us come and say Hi, and tell us what a great job we did.

On Thursday there is a whole track dedicated to “New Mobile Ecosystem” (check the rest of the programme here).
If you are not registered yet there is still time :) , and find out how the large lady’s vocal cords are with Ari Jaaksi :)

The first couple of speakers have put at least a pencil on the papaer, and as soon as we get the ink dry will let you know.

We have started talking with Nokia again, and as they have lots of tech (Symbian, Meego, Qt, Qt Quick, QML, WRT…), we thought we would open the question up, what would you be most interested to see them talk about (and please try to resit and do not ask for things you *KNOW* they are not going to do/answer like “when are you going to Android?” etc!)

And of course if you think of other speakers, or other ideas let us know.

By mike | Posted in Other Events, update | Leave a Comment

Planing for MDC3 has started

August 18, 2010 – 16:11

We have already started to plan for MobileDevCamp3, it will be on 26th Febuary 2011.

You can already sign up on the Facebook event here.

By mike | Posted in information, update | Leave a Comment

2010 Agenda

April 19, 2010 – 16:12

In the future we will have more devices and more platforms that we have to develop mobile services for.

Cross platform development is one of the key drivers when developing mobile services in the future. With the iPhone we have seen the number of mobile applications explode. Will the future of mobile internet be inside the browser or applications?

Come listen and talk about these subjects in Mobile Dev Camp Helsinki 2010. Event for startups and technology companies, developers and business people.

Main Stage

We have gone all retro and stuff and are applying the BETA label to our agenda, as there is still possibilities of changes even though we are only 7 days away from THE mobile event of the year (at least for Developers )

Agenda
10.30-11.15 Registration and Breakfast, sponsored by Ericsson
11.15-11.30 Welcome
11.30-12.15 Nokia feat. Qt – Cross-platform application and UI framework (Sami Viitanen)
12:15-12:45 Microsoft Phone 7 Series demo (Vesku Paananen)
12:45-13:00 Break
13.00-13.30 Creative Mobile app design with Python (Jürgen Scheible)
13:30-14:30 Panel: Cross platform development (Moderator: Peter Vesterbacka Panelists: Paul Houghton, Miika Virtanen, Jouni Mannonen)
14:30-15:30 Lunch, sponsored by Nokia + networking
15:30-16:00 Engineering success in the App Store (Jouni Mannonen)
16.00-16.45 Browser as first class app environment- trends and vision (HTML5, JS) (Göran AP Eriksson, Vladimir Katardiev)
16:45-17.00 Break
17.00-18.00 Panel: Is the future of mobile internet in the browser or native applications (Moderator Vesku Paananen, Panelists: Vladimir Katardiev, Teemu Kurppa, Juha Kaunisto, Lauri Piispanen)
18.00-18.30 Announce winner of Mobile Dev Challenge + sum up + Thank you!
18.30-> Party and networking

Workshop Rooms

The workshop rooms give you a chance to dig deeper into the latest mobile technologies. The rooms are manned with different platform experts ready to show you the cool things you can do.

This is also an excellent opportunity for you to connect with other developers. You can show what you, your company or your student projects is building at the moment. Honking your own horn is perfectly ok. We all want to see cool stuff.

Android

Comeks is in charge of the Android workshop room. Come and learn from Finland’s topmost Android experts how to get started on Android development. This is also the place to show your awesome Android projects or to find co-developers for your start-up. Anyone is free to do presentations.

The Android workshop room is the best place for Android competition coding as well. Whether you are just starting out or are doing advanced stuff, the Comeks guys can help you. Grab the SDK from here beforehand.

Ericsson

Ericsson Research will show You prototypes for real time push to Android browser, and extensions
allowing the web app to run even if U close the browser. We have been implementing html5-ish stuff
like Websockets and run-the-web-app in the background and are using our own web push prototype.
(have a look at https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/web-connectivity/).

We will share experiences about the work and the details about the realisation.

For those curious about such matters, You will have some Ericsson guys there with experience from
W3C and IETF work with HTML5 stuff and even operator widget runtime initiatives like BONDI and JIL.

iPhone

Grey Area and Huikea man the iPhone workshop room. Come and listen to short presentations on location based services, game coding on iPhone and user experience or do a presentation yourself. No pre-registration is required, just pick a topic you know about and do it.

If you want to learn about iPhone coding or just need a chill-out space to develop your iPhone competition application, this is the place to be. We have experts on standby during the day ready to help you get started or to assist you if you get stuck. Please download the SDK from Apple beforehand so we don’t kill the network.

Microsoft

It will be worth visiting this workshop space as Microsoft will be bringing along a whole bunch of different technology toys for everyone to play with.
First off, there will be a number of different Windows Mobile 6.5 devices that you can experiment with. Following on from the announcement at MWC of the new Windows Phone 7 Series you will be able to experiment with it on an touch enabled laptop (not quite a handset, but as close as you are likely to get for the next few months)
In addition to this, Microsoft will bring along an Xbox and a Zune hd live to allow you to play with these other parts of the Microsoft stack.

Vesku plans to run some extra competitions in the room for those visiting. Oh and he has convinced one of his friends from Samsung to help out on the day as well.

Nokia

People from Maemo Devices and Forum Nokia will be present in the Nokia workshop room during the entire event. Come around to ask questions, chat, ask for demonstrations and discuss about topics around the development environment. There won’t be a fixed schedule, but everything around your questions. Showing how to set-up the environment, small code-snippets, how to start developing for Nokia devices etc. The goal is to get the hands on Qt-development for mobile devices and have some fun. For the people who are working on applications for the competition, there will be support for all your questions.
Get the definitive low-down from the Wiki page

By mike | Posted in agenda, information | Leave a Comment
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