Voice. An Opinion.

We were delighted to be invited to take part in the DevJam at CTIA last week. I could only attend the afternoon sessions, so I missed what was by all accounts a pretty lively morning session, during which the various Developer Programs get to present their stuff, while the actual developers in the room throw rotten vegetables at them. Just kidding of course! In fact, the session was very constructive, and a good flow of ideas moved around the room between all parties, which laid good groundwork for the afternoon session.

The afternoon sessions break in to a number of topics, and it works like this: session leaders stay in one place, with a flip chart and some chairs around them. There are six sessions running in parallel. People sit down at one of the sessions for 40 minutes or so, and the leaders stimulate debate and discussion on the topic in hand. Then people are encouraged, nay, actually prodded with big sticks to ensure they move from topic to topic after 40 minutes. This generates great circulation of ideas and contacts in the room, and by the end of it, pretty much everyone has at least spoken to or heard everyone else once. Provides a good basis for the post-DevJam beers that follow

The sessions were :

1. Mobile OS and Platforms
2. Mobile 2.0 ( I was one of the session leaders for this)
3. Testing & Certification
4. Getting to Market / Channels
5. Development – JSRs, MIDP3 and more
6. Open Source in Handsets

It’s hard to summarise an organic and dynamic process like this, but here’s a few observations, in no particular order:

• No one wanted to do Session 5 (as in - no one really wanted to attend it - so it was killed). Here’s a vivid example of what’s happening in the market, played out “in the small”. Android eschewed JSRs and J2ME. So did Apple. Is the relevance of Mobile Java draining away?
• They counted something like 15+ platforms in the Mobile OS and Platforms session. No one actually believes that the number is going down anytime soon, so the age-old problems of how to develop for multiple formats, multiple OSs will continue, providing those multi-platform tool vendors with opportunities for some time to come.
• One of the most popular sessions was “Getting to Market / Channels”. All sang the praises of this group. Maybe they could stick some outs up on the DevJam blog, as it seemed to have everyone’s attention, and the discussions seemed (from a distance) very good (when you’re leading a session, you don’t get to move, hence I don’t really know what the others covered in detail).
• As for our Mobile 2.0 session, we had the following: there’s no common definition of what it is. It ranged from mashing up Web 2.0 services with mobile features and functions, to full-on “it’s everything you do on the web, re-cast for our mobile”. It’s probably worth re-citing mtrends’ excellent presentation here as a contribution to working out the answer. My own two cents was around this: what is mobile operators thought of themselves as a social network?

They know (mostly) where you are

They know who your friends and business colleagues are (you call them the most, or they you, or you text them)

• With these two things alone, they can figure out lots of useful value-add to offer you, and your friends, if you opt-in to sharing some limited information with them. If only.

Anyway - a great day and masterfully co-ordinated and organised by Caroline Lewko and team. Top Job!