Over the Air 24 Hours of Mobile Development

Speaker Announcement: Device Anywhere’s Leila Modarres

During this session mobile application testing leader DeviceAnywhere will unveil thought-provoking statistics from its European Mobile Metrics Report which shows the most popular and least popular mobile Operating Systems, networks and handsets that are being used today for application development across Europe.

Mobile app developers are often the “canary in the coal mine” of the mobile industry. What devices and platforms they line-up behind is often a critical predictor of which ones will turn out to be commercial successes. After all, consumers have an insatiable thirst for apps and they want the handsets and platforms that deliver best apps and the greatest quantity.

So the question is now: How are developers responding to this appetite? Are developers really lining up behind Android, and to what extent and how fast? Is the iPhone still king? Does that mean they're downgrading their interest in another OS like Blackberry? What devices are they developing for? Where do Windows Mobile and Symbian fit into the app development fray?

DeviceAnywhere's Metrics quarterly report is tracking the canaries. Unlike opinion polls and conjecture, this report shares raw data, providing an insider's view into what developers are actually doing in the real-world. The data is sure to spark conversation and conjecture long after the session ends.

Leila leads the marketing team and is responsible for developing and articulating the value of DeviceAnywhere’s solutions.

Leila began her career as an editorial assistant at the Harvard Business Review. She holds a BS in Communications from the Boston University.

Speaker Announcement: Kenton Price and Reuben Harris from Little Fluffy Toys

Cycle Hire Widget for Android has been a runaway success, with over ten times the installs of its nearest competitor, and 93% of users rating it "very good" or "excellent". Of the 100,000 apps on Android Market, it's one of only about 50 featured on the front page, and it has also been featured in the Google App Engine blog, CNET and The Guardian. Now Kenton Price and Reuben Harris from Little Fluffy Toys will present and discuss their challenges and experiences in producing it.

Whilst they had some good fortune, they got some fundamentals right, and they'll share and discuss these with you. Attendees will learn how to apply Android platform differentiators to a market opportunity for competitive advantage, and how to leverage the goodwill of our eager London community to help improve your apps. They'll dive into the code, looking at the TFL API and discuss how they worked around the critical missing parts. They'll discuss how to use Google App Engine for simple rapid cloud computing. They'll talk about challenges we've faced, and how they overcame them. And they'll discuss what happens when you take an app to Android Market, and the rapid revision deployment cycle for bugfixes and updates.

Kenton and Reuben each got the coding bug as pre-teens in the early 80s, with the ZX81, Spectrum and BBC Micro - our Android game Mole Miner was based on a rocks-and-diamonds game we wrote for the BBC Micro in 1985. Culminating in the thrill of Kenton having a game available in WHSmith aged 17 (yes it used to be the best place to buy computer games), they fell into separate careers in corporate IT, until deciding last year that Android was so exciting and the market opportunity so great that they formed a company to work on projects together, their boutique consultancy Little Fluffy Toys Ltd. They perform custom development as well as publish their own apps such as Cycle Hire Widget, Social Wallpaper and Mole Miner.

Speaker Announcement: Amazon’s Matt Wood on Cloud Computing

Amazon was an early leader in the field of Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services. Now Amazon's Matt Wood will present the latest and greatest on AWS: "Viral Survival Kit: Cloud Computing for Highly Scalable Apps."

Since 2006, Amazon Web Services have been providing on demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure to businesses of all sizes. This talk will introduce the Cloud platform offered by Amazon, and discuss how mobile developers can make use of Amazon's scale and operational experience to build highly scalable applications and games, and move to market more quickly. He'll aim to cover:

• An introduction to Amazon's cloud platform
• Content distribution and delivery
• Patterns and best practice
• Information security
• Data mining in the cloud

This talk will include real world case studies and discuss how to survive the challenges of your app going viral in a cost effective way.<

As the Technology Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Matt Wood discusses the technical and business aspects of cloud computing throughout Europe. With a background in the life sciences and a PhD in Bioinformatics, Matt is interested in helping teams of all sizes bring their ideas to life through technology. Before joining Amazon he built web-scale search engines at Cornell University, sequenced DNA in Hinxton and was responsible for the software that drove a new era of genomics in Cambridge. Matt is an advocate of open data, rapid software development and highly available systems.

Speaker Announcement: Anthony Hicks & Saulius Zukauskas of Paypal

Anthony and Saulius will present "In-app Payments for iPhone, iPad and Android using PayPal"

PayPal will introduce their rapidly growing suite of mobile payment libraries and tool kits available for developers integrating payments for physical goods, services and donations. The first half of the session will introduce PayPal’s current set of in-app and mobile browser based checkout solutions, including live demonstrations and implementation examples. The second half of the session will go down to the code of level of integrating in-app and mobile browser payments into iPhone, iPad and Android applications. We’ll also touch on the range of upcoming features including mobile checkout without a PayPal account, subscriptions, pre-approvals and more.

Anthony is a software developer with over fifteen years experience in mobile and web based application development encompassing a broad range of programming languages, technology vendors and techniques. Throughout his career he has worked in solution architecture and technical consulting to a variety of industry sectors, building a range of bespoke applications in the secure web, intranet, knowledge sharing, collaboration and mobile spaces. Now at PayPal, he works with strategic partners integrating PayPal’s Platform APIs. He advises companies on optimal checkout flows, order management and integrating seamless payments into all types of mobile and web applications. He has a particular interest in encouraging early monetisation of start ups through building effective usable payments into applications as part of their core, rather than attempting bolt on payments at a much later stage.

Saulius is a software engineer with more than eight years experience in various technology sectors. From engineering high-power network software and payment processing systems to secure Web based multiuser application development. Previously has worked for world's leading payment processing companies Saulius is now with PayPal where he provides technical advice and consulting for x.com developer community on monetising their web and mobile applications. He is most interested in innovation within payments industry where developers now can engineer secure applications with in-built payment options by using web services and payment libraries.

Speaker Announcement: Nokia’s Pekka Kosonen returns to Over the Air

Nokia's Pekka Kosonen is no stranger to Over the Air. We're glad to announce he'll be back at this year's event to present on the latest in Qt development. Qt is a cross-platform application framework. Using Qt, you can write applications once and deploy them across many desktop and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code. Come and hear what Qt is about and how to utilize Qt's productivity on smartphones and witness extremely cool coding demos!

Pekka Kosonen is working as Head of Technology Development in Forum Nokia and has long experience in mobile development with several technologies, before becoming enlightened by Qt he spent most of his time in the dark dungeons of other not so cool technologies like Java and Symbian C++. Pekka joined Nokia in 2006, first working in technical consultancy and later on managing Forum Nokia technical support team. Prior to joining Nokia he worked in a company called Digia providing mobile solutions for Nokia platforms. He also has several years of training experience, holds an M.Sc. in computer science and is a published author.

Speaker Announcement: Motodev’s Karan Deep Geddam on Android Localisation

Mototola's Karan Deep Geddam will be presenting on localisation on Android

Device manufacturers are delivering large numbers of new Android devices to every region and country in the world. These new devices open up exciting opportunities for developers who have the foresight to localize their applications. In this session, you'll learn how to easily add localized resources to your projects and use Android APIs to write products that will succeed in the global market.

Karan works as Developer Advocate for Motorola MOTODEV, the developer outreach division of Motorola Mobility Ltd. Works with developers aiding them to transform their ideas to applications providing all the necessary development support in form of tools, technical support, documentation etc.

Speaker Announcement: Durrell Bishop and Tom Hulbert from Luckybite

Durrell and Tom will be talking about the challenges of simple prototyping for the iPhone and will demonstrate a tool that we created called iProcessing. They will also discuss a number of other tools that might be useful for prototyping apps and hardware for the iPhone.

Durrell Bishop is an innovator in product design, physical interfaces and interactive media. He was a founder of itch Ltd, worked in the UK for IDEO and the US for Apple Computers and Interval Research. He has lectured internationally on simple hardware/software interfaces and taught for many years at the RCA in London. Durrell’s large scale work for the Science Museum Welcome Wing won a D&AD Gold award in 2001. Durrell holds an MA in both Product Design and Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art.

Tom Hulbert is a product and interaction designer. He has worked for IDEO in London and has been involved in research at Casio in the US and at the Interaction Design Institute in Italy. His work at IDEO ranged from design for products and environments to user interfaces. Tom’s interface design for an Olivetti printer helped IDEO win the IDEA Bronze Award in 2007 and the 2006 Design Week Award for Best Consumer Product. He is also a tutor on the Interaction Design course at the RCA in London. Tom holds an MA in Product Design from the Royal College of Art.

In 2005 they founded Luckybite, a product design and innovation company that specialises in creating cross-media solutions to simplify user interfaces. This often involves mixing physical products with interactive media. Luckybite spend equal amounts of time working on projects for clients and speculative development of new interface ideas.

Speaker Announcement: Pachube’s Christopher Burman

One of the key topics we're covering at Over the Air this year is "open data": how mobile developers can take advantage of data and APIs to build great stuff. That's why we're very excited to welcome back Christopher Burman, who will be presenting on Pachube, a company that works to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. Christopher's talk will be about the augmented reality stuff he's been working on at Pachube:  the 'porthole' (http://apps.pachube.com/porthole) software recently released in alpha and the challenge of creating the forthcoming mobile version. He'll also give a couple of demos of the stuff in action, talk about Pachube as a platform in more detail and explain why AR, especially mobile AR is so exciting for Pachube and why other developers should be excited too.

Christopher Burman is a designer and software developer working at Connected
Environments on Pachube and various data, energy and mobile software
projects. He has talked about pachube at the last Over the Air where he did a
demo of power management unit.

Speaker Announcement: Raj Singh

Long-time mobile industry player Raj Singh will present a session at this year's Over the Air.  Raj will be seeking to have a discussion amongst mobile peers about opportunities in emerging markets. He'll lead with a brief presentation of some of the trends he's seen but where is this going. In some ways, emerging markets are mode advanced than advanced markets and may present a larger business opportunity.

Attendees will learn:

1. What are the products in emerging markets?
2. What are the business models?
3. What opportunities exist?

Raj Singh is a mobile industry veteran having worked in all aspects of mobile over the past 11 years. Currently, Raj is the Co-Founder of YumYum Labs developing applications in mobile health. Most recently, Raj was the Vice President of Business Development for Skyfire, a mobile browser that supports full Flash rendering. Previously, Raj was consulting with Dell Mobile assisting them with their global SMS and WAP strategy. Prior to Dell, Raj co-founded venture-funded Veeker, NBC’s mobile video citizen journalism service and boot-strapped ToneThis, CNET’s top downloaded ringtone creation product.

Raj has also worked in product management, engineering, strategy and consulting roles for Kodak Mobile, Cellmania, MobiTV, PlayPhone, Tellme, Samsung, Hungama Mobile and Antenna Software. Raj’s personal projects include GameChalk, an SMS multi-player game service and Pubwalk, an LBS bar-hopping service. Raj is also a mobile advisor to numerous companies including Movoxx, Nearverse, Buzzd, Textopoly and several VCs within the valley.

Raj is a regular mobile writer and speaker including formal and guest blogging for GotoMobile, O’reilly Emerging Telephony and VisionMobile. Raj has also made contributions to a number of mobile user and expert groups including the JCP, MMA and the Bluetooth SIG. For more information, please see www.rajansingh.com.

Speaker Announcement: Diana Cheng to present OneSocialWeb

We're excited to announce that Diana Cheng will lead a session on the OneSocialWeb project.

OneSocialWeb is an open source project, sponsored by Vodafone Group R&D, that aims to create a distributed social network infrastructure on top of the XMPP protocol. OneSocialWeb has been covered in TechCrunch and Wired as one of the vanguard of projects working to open up social networking. Developers attending the session will be given access to a beta server to build prototypes against.

Diana Cheng is a software developer currently based in Vodafone R&D where she is working to revolutionize the social networking paradigm. Her background is in computer science and software engineering and she holds a Masters degree from the University of Aachen, Germany.