Over the Air 24 Hours of Mobile Development

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.

Keynote Announcement: Aral Balkan

We're excited to announce that Aral Balkan will be delivering a Keynote talk at Over the Air on the morning of Saturday, September 11^th.

Aral will be talking about "The Art of Emotional Design: A story of pleasure, joy, and delight."

Have you ever had a bad user experience? Did it make you feel angry? Frustrated? Absolutely livid? Good. Understanding that the experiences we create can have a negative emotional impact on people's lives is a very important prerequisite to creating positive emotional experiences that engage with users to add delight and pleasure to their lives.

In this inspirational session, Aral will offer you an impassioned glimpse into his approach of authoring apps that go beyond usable. Apps that people find joyful and fun. Apps that people fall in love with.

Empathy, character, voice, beauty, and play are just some of the topics that will be covered and illustrated with examples from Aral’s decade-long experience in authoring web, Flash, desktop, and mobile apps, including his latest top-selling iPhone app, Feathers.

Aral Balkan is an interaction designer and developer with over a decade of experience. He aims to author empathetic apps that create joy and delight and to inspire and teach others to do the same. His latest iPhone app, Feathers, was featured by Apple as New and Notable, What's Hot, and a Staff Pick. It is often cited as an example of beautiful, emotional design. Aral shares his experiences, frustrations, and joys on his blog (aralbalkan.com) and in his tweets (@aral).

Speaker Announcement: Nokia’s Tim Brooke

Nokia's Tim Brooke will be delivering a session at Over the Air on "Rapid Mobile Prototyping with Flowella," a tool that makes it extremely easy for interface designers and developers to create working interactive flows that run on mobile phones. This allows for rapid iterations, improvement and better crafting of interfaces. No programming is required. It’s an entirely visual tool that fits well with current workflows.

Developers can use Flowella to rapidly create a framework for an application that can subsequently be build upon using development tools for AJAX, QML or Flash.

Because anyone can see a working prototype running on a mobile phone it’s a great tool for communication. Your idea for an app can be quickly built and demonstrated.

In this workshop, Tim will be demonstrating how to use Flowella to design and build an interactive flow, getting the flows running on mobile phones too. No need for programming just point, click and drag to create your working demo. The software is freely available from the internet: http://www.forum.nokia.com/flowella.

Tim has worked on a diverse range of projects from multiuser museum exhibits and robotic warehouses for British Airways to self-organising wireless networks in vineyards. He currently works in Nokia Design's London studio, building prototype mobile devices from anything that comes to hand – Adobe Flash, Java, bits of electronics, doubled sided sticky tape, even Post-It notes. He values "learning through building" and believes that there’s nothing like a working prototype to explain, explore and evaluate ideas.

Speaker Announcement: The Guardian’s Michael Brunton-Spall

Photo Credit: Ade Oshineye

One of our themes for this year's event will be open data and open APIs and the possibilities they provide for developers to build great things! That's why we're excited that the Guardian are coming along to present a session on the use of their APIs. Michael's talk will start with the following question: apart from the data blog with tons of free data tables, the World Government Data store telling us where to find open government data, the COINS database, and full fat RSS feeds what have the Guardian ever done for us?

Well yes obviously the content api... the content api goes without saying.

Michael Brunton-Spall is the Developer Advocate for the Guardian newspaper. An experienced developer who has scaled and built the Guardian website with the development team over the last 3 years, Michael programs in several languages, but currently is enjoying using python for most of his day to day work.

Speaker Announcement: Vladimir Levantovsky on Web Fonts

Continuing our tradition of covering the cutting edge, we're happy to announce that Vladimir Levantovsky from Monotype Imaging will be speaking on the emerging technology of fonts and typography on the Web. For many years, Web authors and mobile application developers have been limited in their creative and typographic freedom by very limited selection of resident fonts installed on a mobile device or supplied by a platform or a browser. The days when we are limited to a restrictive choice of system fonts are almost over, thanks to the recent activities at W3C WebFonts WG that developed Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and ever increasing web fonts service offerings. In this presentation, we will discuss “what the font” WOFF is, and, may be even more important, what it is not. A brief overview of the WOFF file format will be accompanied by the real-life use case examples where we’ll review the usage of WOFF extended metadata and private data blocks. The presentation will be followed by a short Q&A session where we would explore the opportunities for using web fonts (and downloadable fonts in general) in mobile applications.

Vladimir Levantovsky is a senior technology strategist at Monotype Imaging Inc. and also serves as a chair of the W3C WebFonts Working Group and a chair of the ISO SC29/WG11 ad-hoc group on font format representation. Vlad is passionate about advancing typographic capabilities on CE and mobile devices and on the Web, and has been an active contributor to the development of various technology platforms, including hardware-accelerated vector graphics (OpenVG), Java ME profiles for mobile devices (JSR-271 and JSR-287), DVB Multimedia Home Platform, OMA Rich Media Environment and core font technology standardization at ISO/IEC.

Speaker Announcement: Yiibu’s Stephanie Rieger and Bryan Rieger

We are pleased to announce Stephanie and Bryan Rieger of Yiibu will present two sessions at Over The Air this year. They will share their experience in supporting as many mobile devices as possible with one Mobile Web code-base, and discuss the Digital Divide.

Bryan is a designer, writer and reluctant developer with a background in theatre design and classical animation. Bryan has worked across various media including  print, broadcast, web and mobile, and with clients such as Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and the Symbian Foundation. Most days, Bryan can be found designing and prototyping a diverse range of experiences, and every once in a while, he can also be found organising a Mobile Design UK event in London.

Stephanie is a designer and closet anthropologist with a passion for the many ways people interact with technology. With a diverse background, Stephanie's expertise lies in marrying design, technology and business goals to craft simple, elegant experiences. A compulsive researcher, Stephanie is always keen to discover and share insights on the mobile web and mobility trends in emerging economies.