Blog

Thibaut Rouffineau joins HashBang.TV to talk Hack Days, the secrets of success for start up's, and the challenges for European companies vs American. Chris and James reflect back on Blackberry DevCon, discuss FourSquare's move into NFC, and spammy apps cross posting on social networks.

One of our biggest tips for first time MWCers is to bring a pair of comfortable shoes. Regardless of whether you're rocking crocs with socks or gucci loafers, by Thursday you'll be ready to give your feet a rest and compete for some great prizes with some coding! There are 3 hackathons at WIPJam that you can attend, each with their own twist, so choose to your strength and win some great prizes!

Best AppUp App for Windows - sponsored by Intel

How to Win:

Create a new app, or port your existing application to Windows to be sold through the Intel AppUp center – your Application needs to be submitted to the Store but due to time constraints, validation is not required

Prizes:

1st place: 1.000,00€ Amazon Voucher
2nd place: 750,00€ Amazon Voucher
3rd place: 500,00€ Amazon Voucher
ASUS UX31E Ultrabook will be raffled amongst all individual developers talking part in the Intel AppUp category

Full Details:

Intel AppUp Hackathon

Best Use of the Nokia Location...

Having worked in videogames and mobile, I could not miss the first London Mobile Monday of 2012. “Mobile Games” was the hot topic of the night, discussed by a great panel of professionals and chaired by Oscar Clark of Papaya Mobile. Not that one would want to miss any of these industry gatherings, but, for me, it was also the first time on the volunteer side. In fact, they even gave me the chance to blog about the event, so here I am.

While on the tube to go to the event, I was thinking about the topic. I personally feel that video games and mobile industry are converging towards something different, and mobile games development is driving the innovation. The new mobile and tablet platform allowed games to change, thanks mainly to three new features: touchscreens, connectivity and portability. All the portable game consoles we used before the rise of the app stores lacked at least one of the three, not to speak about the powerful graphic of the new mobile screens. We now have...

With Mobile World Congress right around the corner, there's no doubt that some of you have already thought about joining a hackathon or two during your time there. While coding for the sake of coding can be fun, it's probably even more fun if you win so we reached out to Peter Lindgren, CEO of VISIARC, and recent hackathon winner at last year's Nokia World: 

First of all, tell us a little bit about VISIARC.

VISIARC is a mobile cloud company that specializes in mobile documents or more specifically email, attachments and documents. Traditionally, we focus on enterprise and productivity.

You recently took home first prize for your app 'Duudle' at Nokia World's Hackathon. Can you tell us a little bit about Duudle?

Duudle is a multiplayer, turn and skill based game. The game play is original in the sense that it hasn't really been done before, yet its' actually quite straight-forward. You get a word, then you get 30 seconds to 'duudle'. Your duudle is then pushed to all...

At the AT&T Developer Summit earlier last month, one of the free development tools they announced was the Application Resource Optimizer. While Diagostic Tools usually don't ooze of excitement, AT&T did a good job of at least creating intrigue with Zynga and Pandora both vouching that it improved their apps in power consumption and radio communications. When we spoke with AT&T, they called it "Wireshark on steroids". It works across all platforms and carriers and is broken into two main compenents, the Data Analyzer and the Data Collector and the Data Analyzer. Here is what AT&T had to say about it: 

AT&T Application Resource Optimizer (ARO) Developer Tool from WIP Connector on Vimeo.

At the very least, we think ARO is worth giving a shot - any chance you can take to save your users' battery life, you take it! Are you already using ARO or Wireshark or some other optimization tool? We'd love to hear your experience.

The new year never really sinks in until the AT&T Developer Summit and CES come along. The WIP team was in charge of FUN at the AT&T Registration Reception this year and with close to 600 in attendance, it was a great night with developers and other mobile ecosystem members choosing 3 or 4 buttons that reflected who they are to pin onto their lanyards. With equal number of each button available, the Android one was the first to run out reflecting the large number of Android developers at the Summit. Beer Drinkers, Wine Drinkers, Apple Developers, Cocktail Drinkers Buttons were not far behind. If there's any takeaways from this informal exercise, it's that developers like Android and drinking.

The Buttons allowed for identification of like minded people and provided entry to various activities based on the pins during the evening: Frequent Fliers designed and threw paper airplanes, Red Wine Drinkers received an exclusive wine at the bar, and Music Lovers used their rap skills...

As the rest of the team predicted, it's going to be a crazy year of evolution in the mobile world, especially for consumers. As I watch my parents socialize with their peers about which apps they've downloaded lately, I feel that this quote from last year rings even truer this year: "We are reaching the sweet spot as the penetration of a [mobile] technology reaches [the masses]". It's a sweet time to be in the industry for sure. Here are some specifics I see happening this year:

1. Death of the 'smartphone'
   There was a time when you had to be somebody 'important' to own a smartphone. It was a status symbol aptly named as a phone for 'smarter' people who needed to be more connected than everybody else. Those days are gone. Not only have smartphones warmed up to the masses, but we have more ways to communicate with one another than we ever have. 'Phone calling ' is now only of the many features, and its usage is on a downward trend. In so many ways, it's not just smarter...

(Guest Post by Amit Lubovsky, Co-founder and VP of Business Development and Marketing at tawkon)

Our company tawkon is focused on radiation tracking, specifically on detecting phone radiation emission on mobile devices. Especially as mobile devices are being relied on for more and more, radiation is a growing concern among consumers. When you make calls or browse the web, your phone emits radiation in various levels, depending on your circumstances and even the model of the phone. We monitor those levels and offers suggestions for lowering them before and during calls (disclaimer: while no research on this issue has proven 100% conclusive, increasing studies are pointing to clearer risks).

Since different phone models emit different amounts of radiation, cross-platform development was essential from the get-go. We adapted a critical development strategy in order to launch our application across multiple platforms but we also needed a simple, consistent, and attractive UI that...

Looking at the amount of new Apps that are published for Apple and Android each month, we can roughly estimate a new app comes out every 1-2 minutes.  Obviously, this is a lot to compete with so developers need to keep differentiation on their mind. There are many different ways to differentiate, but one of the most overlooked differentiators is haptic feedback. Haptics also happens to be one of the simplest and effective features to add to your Android application.

Integrating Haptics into an App
Tactile Haptic feedback is the vibration a phone creates, and now Immersion has recently released an Android SDK specifically to take advantage of these vibrations. At the moment it is the only haptic specific SDK to really control all aspects of an Android phones vibrate ability.

How is it different then Google Vibrate API?
Through the Android Vibrator API the only functions that can be controlled are the Google () vibrate motor on/off control.

For example, if you have an...

As it’s time for predications and reflections I always go back to my previous predictions to see how I made out.  And contrary to the belief of Strand Consulting, they are not the only ones to publish their previous years, so you can see how I made out too! 

Here are the highlights and  links to those predictions:
2011 – Year of APIs, Growth of Discovery, Less BlackBerry, Less Android, More iPhone
2010– a Thibaut/Caroline combo here.  I declared:  More Android, More BlackBerry, Less iPhone, More Innovation/More funding
2009 Tough economic times, Access the new open, Less US centric, yet more fragmentation...
2008  The Rise of Tools, M&A, and ‘Open’
2007  More fragmentation, newbie developers, Usability; and Location, Location, Location.

It was pretty right on for last year, especially the bit about API growth and where I predicated More iPhone, iPhone being the easy choice for developers as  I saw “ developers abandoning BlackBerry and Android and heading back to...