Archive for Events
by Imran Ali
August 7, 2008 at 6:11 am · Filed under Events + Conferences, Events, Conferences, London
London continues to be a hotbed of mobile innovation with the announcement of Ryan Carson’s Future of Mobile conference, due to take place from 17-18th November later this year
The Carsonified crowd have quickly established themselves as running great, low cost, high value conferences in digital mobility, web, design and advertising.
The sessions are themed around openness, operating systems, launching apps, ‘ideas & tactics’ for breaking through industry barriers. It actually looks looks pretty pragmatic, rather than theorerical with a slight bias (and rightly so) towards entrepreneurs and hackers.
Early bird pricing still seems to be in effect, sodelegates can registered for as little as £145/$282. You can find out more about sessions, speakers and workshops at http://future-of-mobile.com/2008/london/
by Imran Ali
July 22, 2008 at 8:26 am · Filed under Events, Conferences
In mid-September, my friends over at Giga Omni Media will be hosting their first conference on mobile technology and culture - Mobilize.
Taking place on 18th September at the Mission Bay Conference Center, the one-day conference will be focussing on the mobile web, rather than the broader mobile industry.
Speakers include Android’s Rich Miner, formerly of Orange. Amazon’s VP of their Kindle division, Ian Freed, investors represented by iFund and the BlackBerry Partners Fund, as well as executives from Sprint, SkyDeck and Pinch Media.
The early-bird rate of $395 holds until mid-August.
UPDATE: Rich Miner’s set for a keynote as is Cisco CTO Padmassree Warrior.
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by Imran Ali
March 29, 2008 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Ethnography, Events, Conferences, Visualisation
Earlier this month I dropped into the Emerging Arts Fest at O’Reilly’s seminal ETech 2008 conference; the arts fest brought together a number of projects at the ‘intersection between art, design and technology. One of the most striking pieces on show was MIT’s New York Talk Exchange, part of the school’s Sensable City lab.
The NYTE project is mining real-time communications data from AT&T and visualising IP traffic and telephony flows between New York and the rest of the world, handily expressing the relationships between New Yorkers and the globe, even down to various ethnically biased neighbourhoods mapping directly onto countries of origin and the temporal dynamics of calls across multiple time zones.
NYTE is nothing short of a breathtaking technical and aesthetic achievement, though it’d be interested to utilise these visualisations to explore a finer level of granularity, notably where mobility and messaging intersect with more general IP and telephony traffic.
Complex data visualisations are almost always pretty, but their real profundity is as ‘revelatory media’; what can we learn, what questions can be answered that previously could not; what is serendipitously revealed?
What would NYTE look like around 9/11? We’d expect to see blackspots around Lower Manhattan, but would we see a sudden switch from voice to SMS are networks were overwhelmed? Would we see a sudden uptick of calls between Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Boston prior to the attacks?
Though not the first MIT project to explore these themes, NYTE is certainly the most polished - what can such visualisation tell us about the motivation and ethnography of communication and messaging?
by Imran Ali
March 26, 2008 at 1:16 pm · Filed under CTIA, Events
As Las Vegas gears up for CTIA next week, MM2.0 bloggers will be in town to cover the show itself, but there are a bunch of interesting ancillary events and parties shaping up too.
mTrends’ Ruby De Waele just tipped me off about the Mobile Jam Session taking place in Las Vegas on 31st March, the day before CTIA opens.
The format sounds like a lotta fun and productive too. The day begins with an hour of concept and idea pitches from developers, followed by a panel session with participants drawn from Orange, Symbian, Sony Ericsson and Motorola’s developer and partner programmes.
The latter half of the day will consist of six ‘improv’ sessions - Mobile OS & Platforms, Mobile 2.0, Testing & Certification, Getting to Market, Development, Open Source Handsets - where a moderator facilitates a group ‘jam’ or discussion.
This should be an interesting mechanism for mixing people up from various disciplines, whether business, cellco and product guys or developers, hackers and entrepreneurs…as Rudy describes it, ‘new tunes often come from unlikely associations, so…Jam On!‘
If you’re in Las Vegas for CTIA and interested in jamming with this crowd, head over to the official blog + site to request an invitation (it’s free!).
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 8:09 pm · Filed under UK, Design, Events, London, Olympics
I was recently invited to an intriguing workshop…unfortunately I can’t attend, but here’s another sign of London’s role as a global hothouse for mobile innovation.
Next Thursday, Living Labs Europe is holding a half-day creative workshop on the development of mobile urban services for the 2012 Olympics, to be hosted in London. The Flaneurs: The network is the city event will bring together around 50 participants during the afternoon of Thursday 27th March.
The group’s objective is to explore interaction, experience and service design with a view to develop applications or services that may be showcased in the period leading up to and including the 2012 Olympics; the ideas and concepts which emerge from the workshop will be circulated amongst the industry to inspire others to conceive of new opportunities.
There’ll be a bunch of speakers interspersed throughout the workshop, most notably Orange’s Neil Churcher. Though I left Orange just as Neil began his role there, we collaborated during his previous role as the Academic Director of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. The work that the IDII students prepared for us was nothing short of inspiring and astonishing, on a par with NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme or the MIT Media Lab.
For this reason alone, I can’t wait to see what Flaneurs comes up with - organiser Nico MacDonald has promised me some follow up insights following the workshop. The group looks incredible - I’m loving that fact that there are tech people, broadcasters, public transport officials, architects and designers in the same place - ace!
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Google, Nokia, Chumby, Yahoo, UK, Android, Events, London
London continues to be a hotbed of mobile hacking and innovation, with next month’s Over The Air, taking place on April 4th + 5th at Imperial College.
Organised by BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester and Vodafone’s Daniel Appelquist and backed by Nokia and Google, amongst others, Over The Air will be playing host to around 450 attendees across 48 hours of hands-on hacking and code-campery!
iPhone, Openmoko, Android sound like they’ll be strong themes, but expect to see a bunch of sessions on user experience design as well as some masterclasses from handset and software companies, including Nokia, Microsoft, Adobe and Yahoo! on day one.
Head on over to the Over The Air blog for more information on the schedule and how to register…
by Imran Ali
February 4, 2008 at 5:35 pm · Filed under Events, Conferences, Development
This year’s Orange Partner Camp has been set for 14-16th April in the Portugese coastal town of Faro.
Each year’s camp rings together application providers, platform vendors, content producers, and software houses to learn from France Telecom and Orange, how to access the business and technology platforms of their now 167m global customers.
Personally, I prefer the free-wheeling unconference style of mobileDevCamp and iPhoneDevCamp as being more productive and open environments to create and innovate. However, by all accounts, Orange partners do extract a lot of value from Orange’s camps.
Perhaps Orange and the unconference community would be well served in co-hosting and connecting their events; building bridges and conversations between the most significant elements of the industry can only enhance each other’s standing and help to solve real user problems.
