We’re taking a break…
Over the Air is now 7 years old, and we’ve loved organising what many of you tell us is the best mobile developer event in the UK. The past years we’ve held the event at Bletchley Park, which for many of you (and us) has felt like the proper home for OTA – right at the birthplace of computing. But changes at The Bletchley Park Trust mean that they are changing their focus and will no longer be supporting events on the site – that means it’s time for a refresh.
Over the Air takes a heck of a lot of time and energy to organise (we spend the better part of 3 months worth of our time each, without compensation), so it’s also a good time for us to take a break while we look at some exciting new locations which we think will refresh the whole format. (Drop us a note if you’ve got suggestions of your own)
We’ll come back in 2015 stronger and full of fresh energy!
In the meantime, we are hatching plans for a one-day mini-OTA event in London during the summer, so do keep your ears open!
Here’s the round-up from OTA 2013
Thank-you to all of our wonderfully creative and inventive Participants, our inspirational and informative Speakers, and the lovely Sponsors whose generosity made it all possible!
Over the Air 2013 launched at Bletchley Park on Friday the 27th with a video address from Neelie Kroes:
It’s hard to believe that a whole week has gone by already, since the 6th edition of Over the Air at Bletchley Park, on the 27th & 28th of September. A huge cheer to all of you who attended, spoke, sponsored, donated prizes and participated in the Hack Day – YOU are the ones that make it awesome.
This year’s highlights include the launch of DevLab and their DEVICE initiative, together with UCL Decide. DEVICE is part of the new IDEALondon centre in Shoreditch, and will provide developers with hands-on access to a wide range of devices for exploring and testing from across all platform ecosystems.
The attendees of OTA13 also raised an amazing £6,000+ for the National Museum of Computing, thanks to a Justgiving Campaign by PayPal, where they matched the donations from attendees 1 for 1, which will be matched again by a benefactor of TNMOC. (The campaign is still live – so make sure you get your donation in quick!!)
The Bletchley Park Mansion was augmented this year with a 3D scanning set-up brought out by Hercules Fisherman and his Thingmaker crew, and a 3D printer brought out by Terence Eden of O2 Labs. Watch out for many freaky plastic heads showing up on TwitPic in the near future…
As always an amazing range of creativity, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing was on display – too much to mention in a week of blog posts, let alone one round-up! You can get a pretty good feel for the event at this Eventifier Round-up, as well as our own Storify Page. (ping margaret at over the air dot org if I’ve missed anything…)
Speakers Presentations
- Over the Air 2013 Coverage on Lanyrd
- Presentations tagged ‘ota13′ on Slideshare
- Filmed presentations on the Over the Air YouTube channel
- Stephanie Rieger, Designing for Diversity
- Patrick Hamann, CSS and the Critical Path
- Lyza Danger, Do as little as possible
- Natasha Rooney, Updates on Offline
- Soledad Penades, Building web apps, one Brick at a time
- Chris Sinjakli, How our mother tongue changes our code
- Francisco Jordano, Firefox OS – Beyond Webapps
The Over the Air Flickr Pool
Blog Coverage
- Julie Gould, on the Citizen Cyberlab blog: Over the Air – 36 hours of mobile development
- Caz Mockett, on her Cazphoto blog: FDT @ OTA
- Sunil Jolley, on his blog Tales from teh Interwebs: Over the Air Hack – Terf
- Simon Kisner has a series of posts on his blog Notatwork: It’s now Sunday night, and Our Hackday submission: Terf
- Sandra Dartnell, on her blog Make Design Happen: Why would a non-developer go to a developers’ hack weekend?
- Andrew Lindsay, on his blog Andy’s Life: Over the Air Hack Day Challenge
- Kjell Eldor on What I Learned Today: Over the Air and the Internet of Things
- Manfred Bortenschlager on his Mobile Apps Stuff blog: Ignite Talk at Over the Air
- Paul Tanner on his blog: “Airsome” – Protecting cyclists from pollution
PodCast Coverage
- Julie Gould of the Citizen Cyberlab, on the Pod Delusion. (54:42)
Video Coverage
Francesco Frison has put together a great clip of his experience of Over the Air 2013, including the tour of the National Museum of Computing:
