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.

Betavine was one of the Bronze Sponsors of the annual WWW Conference which took place in Beijing this year. The World Wide Web Conference is a global event bringing together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies working to shape the Web. Since its inception in 1994, the WWW conference has become the annual venue for international discussions and debate on the future evolution of the Web.

The main theme of the conference was "One World, One Web". The conference explored how Web access is moving from the desktop to cell phones and TV screens, and how most users are moving from passive browsing experiences on the Internet to active participation in building Web communities.

We took part in the Personal Rich Social Media Workshop and will hopefully have some more posts for you soon.