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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...

Developers continue to be in hot demand as we enter 2012 with many events eager to cater to them - so many events it is becoming much harder to choose which to attend.  I see operators/carriers doing more and more to attract developers to their SDKs and APIs.  A couple of years ago, only a few were hosting developer events; now all are hosting at least one per year with many additional hackathons, seminars and workshops.

Much more emphasis will be placed on how developers can make money with their applications.  More events with this focus will be forthcoming in 2012 and beyond.  All conferences will include it as one of their conference streams if they are not dedicated the whole conference to it.  Other prominent areas include: Mobile Payments, NFC and Social Media and anything to do with Apps.

Mobile World Congress will continue to attract large numbers of mobile ecosystem members including developers.  GSMA really hit a home run with App Planet at MWC in 2010 and will...

Have you also noticed that 2011 has seen a drastic reduction in the numbers of predictions?

When this time of year is usually full of "Top 10 things that will happen next year in mobile" ... In 2011 pre-dictators (those doing predictions) seem to have disappeared or seem to be more quiet than usual!

What should we read in this?

Optimistic view
2011 has seen mobile finally booming (despite a slow economy) and people usually predicting at this time of the year are too  busy doing! (or resting from a long hard year)

Pessimistic view
2012 looks so muddy that most people do not want to venture in what could be a very very dangerous territory

Even more pessimistic view
The major mobile devices and mobile platforms (Android and Apple) have reached a stage of maturity where the rhythm of innovation inside and outside the platform is slowing down. There is no exciting future for 2012 just consolidation over existing technologies.

Realistic view
This is the end of...

There is too much going on with too many variables in the mobile industry for me to feel really confident about my predictions, but here are my 5 in no particular order.

1)   NFC finally takes off

Some quick research shows that the first NFC phone was the Nokia 6131, released back in 2006.  Fast-forward 4 years and the first Smartphone with NFC capabilities is the Android Nexus S. The only people so far who have truly taken advantage of it, are Sprint & Citi-Bank customers who can use their phone to pay where ever there are contactless pay stations. In short, not very many people at all.

With around 25 NFC phones released in 2011 and just as many confirmed for 2012, the industry is finally getting behind the idea. This in combination with more contactless payment stations are being installed in stores throughout the world and in society people are even becoming too impatient to scan a QR code.

2)   Android will continue to get simple

Apple and WP7 have done a really...