Over the Air is a grass-roots mobile developer event that is completely unique in the mobile industry events calendar – it is free to attend, is hands-on in the style of hack-days and bar-camps, covers the cutting edge of current mobile development (as opposed to glossy future-speak or sales-pitches), and features bean bags, a big party and an overnight sleep-over.

There will also be a competition at the end of the event for the best categories of applications created during the event, with many great prizes to be won.

The event will take place at the Imperial College's South Kensington Campus -

• Registration is in the ground floor of the Sherfield Building in the 'Tower Room
• Latecomers can register at the information desk on the 2nd floor of Sherfield
• Opening ceremonies are in the Great Hall in Sherfield
• Workshops are in neighbouring Huxley

Go to the Directions page for the map.

Over the Air is a grass-roots hack-day style event that features workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves to tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs and SDKs and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases and hands-on experience. Attendees are invited to stay overnight so that they can work on ideas, apps and widgets on the fly, to be entered into various competition categories and demo’ed on the second day. It’s a great vibe of bean bags, knowledge sharing, and heads-put together around circles of laptops and devices.

The audience are usually about 80% from the UK, 15% EU and 5% North America. The mix is largely mobile developers, designers and entrepreneurs but we also attract a large number of people from the web and software worlds who are starting to branch out into mobile.

Over the Air is an important antidote to the suit-stuffed formal mobile industry events calendar, which usually requires a hefty budget to be able to attend, and rarely gets down to the actual 'how to build it' or 'how to make it happen' level of detail. We rely entirely on the generosity of our sponsors to cover the costs of running the event, and in return, we do our best to provide a great opportunity to really engage with the mobile developer community and have collaborative conversations.

There are a lot of great opportunities to have a strong presence at the event, including physical space for branded conversation corners / lounges, hands-on time with attendees on the workshop programme, the setting of a challenge and prize for one of the competition categories, and much more on top for the Premium Sponsor.

If you'd like to be a key part of making such a great event possible, please contact anyone on the organising team (Dan, Matthew, Jo, Helen, & Margaret =  @overtheair.org)

More transmissions to follow

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

Rick has been working to not only increase awareness around internet enabled applications, but he has also been driving the utilisation of standardised technologies and revenue opportunities for developers. By using initiatives such as the Joint Innovation Lab which brings together some of the largest operators in the world, it will make it easier for the ecosystem to develop, test and distribute their applications globally.

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