The opening keynote speaker today was Kai Oistamo (Executive Vice President of Devices in Nokia) who took to the stage using his mobile phone to drive a small remote-controlled truck – Fortunately his Business skills are better than his driving skills as the truck crashed into the back of stage! He was using an N92 with Bluetooth enabled, accelerators used to direct the truck in forward/reverse, left/right directions and some 3rd party software. Kai talked about how social networking is driving new communications and web behaviors. “Place, People and Time” is the context that is creating the next generation of web apps. He talked of a vision where by pointing a device at a landmark e.g., a theatre it would immediately retrieve what was showing that evening, who was selling tickets and for how much! - welcome to the world of “point and find”.

Patrick Olsson (Sony Ericsson, Head of Software Development) then took center stage to talk about Project Capuchin (announced back in Spring this year). In essence this was about taking the best bits of two languages, Java and Flash to produce a mobile-app. For example the UI could be built in Flash with all your business or application logic written up in Java and then packaged as a Java container. In fact you can mix and match but the end package must always be a Java container. It was announced earlier today that Capuchin would come to the Symbian Foundation.

These speakers were followed up by Benoit Schillings from Qt who talked about the “Code once, create more and deploy everywhere”. Benoit also announced today that new developer tools for the S60 platform would be released by the end of this year with deeper integration with the platform.

An active panel debate (who will win the runtime race?) and developer awards rounded off the session along with the announcement that Lee Williams had been appointed the executive director of the Symbian Foundation, swiftly followed up by his first public speech in this role. Check the press releases to hear about his 4 beacons or focus points for the foundation.

Did you attend the show? What were your thoughts? Good balance between business and developer subjects? Are there are any subjects that you would like to talk or hear more about?

David Wood (Executive VP Research, Symbian) opened the key note speeches with three important words "Developers, developers, developers". His theme was common through all speeches and was at the heart of most of the days sessions. Many companies are realising developers are the key to launching innovative apps. In addition, announced today, Symbian O/S will go free, estimated at around 7million lines of code!

John Ellis (Motorola) stepped up to give a very informative and very inspiring call to arms with clear statements around platform owners relinquishing control of a platform will lead to acceleration in innovation coupled with statistics like by 2012 more than half the planet will have mobiles.

Many seminars kicked off from 12:30 with developers and business topics available to all. Opera, S60 runtimes and Mobile Ajax to name a few really did a good job of capturing the audiences interest with some sessions ending all too soon - Often a good sign of a great topic with the need for further discussion.

Are you working with mobile Ajax, what best practices do you utilise? Do you think Betavine should have a Mobile Ajax zone?

Day two looks set to continue where day one finished off…

Compared to last year's event, focus shifted from what is open source (and the respective business models) towards a focus on open collaboration as the way forward for the mobile industry to address platform fragmentation and engage with the developer community to accelerate innovation. There was a very good (IMHO) keynote from John Bruggeman (Wind River) providing a reality check on the issues of fragmentation and 'why Linux will never be as good as the iPhone'. Here's a recount from Symbian's David Wood: http://www.dw2-0.com/

Web enablement layer was on everyone's lips - at last year's conference there was only myself and Azingo extolling the virtues of a Web Runtime capability; this year practically every keynote focussed on the importance of Web Runtimes, Web apps and Widgets in driving innovation - according to Motorola 41% of the World's developers are now focusing on mobile and 51% of these only know Web technologies....hence the importance of supporting these designers & developers to accelerate mobile innovation. Azingo also gave some interesting statistics; according to them, designing an Address Book with new functionality would take around 96days if developed in C/C++, only 14days if using Flash and even less (7days) if using Web technologies. Obviously the Web Runtime landscape is also fragmented but (according to Azingo and Mozilla) it's a lot closer than the diversity between other execution environments (such as Symbian, Java, .NET etc.) and therefore not too far from the Write Once Run Anywhere ideal for most Web apps. Furthermore, the 'poor performance' of the scripting approach is receiving major boosts across all engines in the desktop space (WebKit, Mozilla and Chrome) and this will also transfer to mobile. The key area then where Web Runtimes may break down is the area of device APIs as each vendor seeks to be first to market with an 'enhanced' WRT. This potential issue of fragmentation, encouragingly, was acknowledged by all at the conference and hence importantly there were a number of 'calls to action' from many keynotes for the industry to pull together and make sure the opportunity is not lost.

- OMTP BONDI - joint presentation from OAA, VF and OMTP was therefore very timely in making people across the industry aware that there is an industry initiative looking to address some of these issues

David Pollington, Terminals Research.

BarcampBrighton3 is over. Me and Sirin had a great time learning about all kinds of different technology.



For those that don't know BarCampBrighton http://barcampbrighton.org is a non-profit, free-to-attend, community-based web 'unconference' that is normally held at the University of Sussex in Brighton. The event was run by Brighton's local geek community and was a weekend of discussions, demonstrations, talks, coding and socialising where we all come together and learn from each other.

You can find out more about BarcampBrighton3, and what was presented at the backnetwork.

We don't know when or where the next Barcamp is but when we do, we'll post about it here.

Some of the Betavine team (me and Sirin) are off to BarCampBrighton this weekend. Betavine are one of the silver sponsors and are providing one of the meals.

If you're planning to attend, why not introduce yourselves? You can connect to us using the backnetwork.