Intohand

Last week Intohand attended and took part in Droidcon, London.

The event was a great combination of low level technical advice and also (a lot) of higher level business advice at the same time, in a two day format.

Many of the boutique appstores such as the Orange app shop and the Vodafone 360 shop were present – highlighting opportunities for further distribution of applications on Android and other platforms.

The first day combined a barcamp with a hackathon – sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent – the hackathon challenge to make use of the openapiservice for an Android application. Kieran and Elliot decided to make use of the short time to attempt to deliver a hack using Google app engine, Google C2DM, Urbanairship and the Openapiservice. The reason for choosing Urbanairship in the actual hack over C2DM in this instance was so we were not reliant on having Android 2.2 to demo. The hack itself used app engine to search mailing lists for community recycling projects and notify for keywords that the user had logged an interest in, it used push notification to the phone to save the users having to manually monitor the lists.

The standout session for us on the first day was Kevin’s candid talk on “How I do it”.

On the 2nd day Kieran was on the panel for best of UK Mobile business where everyone was agreed that now was the start of drive for Android applications

The best sessions for us of the 2nd day was Roman’s Excellence in the Android user experience

At the close of the event we found out our previous days hack had been awarded 2nd place in show, which cemented a brilliant two days. We left happy!

Detailed notes from the two days

http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/2010/10/droidcon-london-2010-day-one.html

http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/2010/10/droidcon-london-2010-day-two.html

Last week Intohand attended and presented at OpenMIC8 in Brighton. This was a lively event with a lot of debate in the morning about the relative merits of native versus mobile web applications – and the hybrids in between. Stuart gave a presentation on the topic and Kieran followed up with a seat on the Developer panel. The afternoon barcamp sessions included an opportunity to get hands on with Windows Phone 7 devices, kindly brought by Mike Ormond as well as a Samsung Galaxy Tab from Rich Spence‘s device armoury.

The debate raged on regarding the relative merits of techniques to put material on mobile, spilling over into a bar discussion and latterly a trip to the pub. Good OpenMIC once again, well done to the Bookmeister and the support of DCKTN and University of Bath – looking forward to OpenMIC9 in Oxford!