Over the Air

Over the Air is over, and it’s time to decompress and resume life as normal (as normal as it ever was, that is).

We had an amazing two days, and hope you did as well! A big thanks go to all the competition participants, the Holodeck team, the workshop givers and presenters, our Keynote speakers, and of course all of those behind the scenes who helped make the whole event happen. You rock!

We’d love to get your suggestions for next year, so please ping us @ota09 or comment here. We’ll also be posting various informative links (slides, photos, SDKs, competition apps, etc) so please send us whatever you’ve got!

There’s a competing ota09 flikr stream of a cartoon conference, so please either use overtheair09 as your tag, or add your photos to the Over the Air Flikr Group

We are very pleased to announce that  there will be a Sega “Soul Surfer” game on site courteousy of our premium sponsor, OMTP-BONDI. Feel free throughout Friday and Saturday morning,  during breaks and the party to show your surfing skills. A great prize is available to the surfer with the highest score during the two days. While you are there make sure you spend some time finding out about BONDI and how to create a great widget.

We are excited to confirm OMTP-BONDI as the Premium Sponsor of Over the Air!

With the support of its membership and in association with Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 Litmus and Perfecto Mobile, the BONDI initiative from OMTP will be brought to life during Over the Air.

BONDI is all about providing developers with a consistent set of interfaces which allow the development of web applications and widgets which can make use of mobile features such as messaging, contacts, and calendar. BONDI is designed to work across different platforms and the current Reference Implementation for Windows Mobile enables BONDI widgets to be created with ease.

With specific competition prizes for the best BONDI widgets including the great new Android G2 phone, do you have a BONDI widget to submit?

It is thanks to the financial support of our sponsors, that we are able to make this event completely free to attend.

Find out more: http://bondi.omtp.org

We are very pleased that Dr Philip Rhodes, founder and Managing Director of fhios, the Customer Experience Research and Design agency will be presenting at Over the Air on “User experience on applications and widgets”. He will explore recent research findings into the mobile customer experience, exploring how mobile applications must not have ‘usability’, but must also be ‘engaging’ to ensure that users want to use them time and time again.

The presentation will also include a case study exploring how research throughout the design process can lead to innovations in mobile application design.

As those of you who have been watching the schedule will have noticed, we have so many great sessions to put on, that we’ve started squeezing out the formal coffee breaks to fit them all in.

But not to worry, there will be coffee and snacks available throughout the whole event, and plenty of spaces to hang out and visit or work on some code. Basically, we’re counting on you to take a break when you need to!

Hopefully you have now taken the time to peruse the fantastic schedule that has been put together by many participants, in the lovely grass-roots fashion that is at the heart of Over the Air.

What you may not realise, is that we also have a room (Huxley 344 C) set aside as a ‘Camp Room’ throughout the entire programme, where the attendees of Over the Air can spontaneously create and host any session, workshop, round-table discussion that they please!

We’ll have a wall schedule posted where you can scribble in your Camp Room bookings with a title for the session. Please use the BackNetwork to propose ideas and to post descriptions of the sessions you’ve pulled together.

If you’d like a handy way to check out the most up to date schedule, select the sessions you’re interested in for your own event schedule, or simply to read the latest tweets, set your mobile browser book marks to http://ota.bemoko.com, or use the handy QR code below:

(If you had already saved m.overtheair.org to your mobile browser bookmarks, don’t worry, it will redirect.)

A big thanks go to the team at Bemoko for creating and hosting the mobile website for us!

bemoko have turned the mobile website development market on its head, providing a framework which allows web developers to quickly and easily create mobile websites which are optimised for all devices, The framework is a revolutionary system for developing mobile sites using standard markup languages. This approach allows developers to take full advantage of the new devices coming to market without leaving behind the older devices. With easy application integration and simple to use social networking plugins, the bemoko framework is a fully featured, powerful and flexible method of getting great looking websites on mobile devices.

We are thrilled to announce that Orange is a Gold Sponsor of Over the Air!

It is thanks to the financial support of our sponsors, that we are able to make this event completely free to attend.

Orange Partner – helping you to sell your apps to Orange customers

We are proud to be a Gold sponsor of Over the air 2009

The Orange Partner programme is for existing and potential 3rd party partners, giving you the tools and support you need to create and provide compelling product and services with Orange.

The Orange Application Shop is a distribution route for mobile apps, currently live in the UK, France, Belgium and Spain, with other countries in the pipeline. The Shop can be accessed via WAP, web and/or on-device client, offering multiple ways for potentially millions of consumers to browse and buy your applications.

The app submission process is really simple – just complete a short form, giving us a few details of your downloadable mobile app. You don’t need to be a member of Orange Partner, and your app doesn’t need Industry Testing. And if we want to sell your app, we’ll do any necessary testing for you. For free.

We can offer you tools and resources including testing advice, 1:2:1 support, device specs, design guidelines, access to devices at our worldwide Orange developer centres…

Do you have an app to submit?

Find out more: http://www.orangepartner.com/applicationshop

We completely sold out of tickets over the weekend, and have been bombarded with e-mails from all of you who hadn’t had a chance to register yet…. so we’re releasing more tickets!

They are sure to go fast, so make sure that you make your reservation now – we won’t be able to release any more unless we figure out a way to feed you all!