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Well, it's about time we filled everyone in on the Muther!. We're putting on our biggest event yet! The Muther! is a mobile hackathon mashed up with a DevCon. The Muther! was dreamed up to bring together mobile application developers from around the region and around the world to put their minds, energy, and creativity together to come up with (hopefully) some of the best apps you'll ever see developed in a 24 hour period. We not only want to create new apps, but also ENHANCEMENTS to existing apps. Do you already have a successful app? Maybe it's time to push it to the next level. We have a good cross-section of app categories that will be judged. From the best disaster relief app (let's get creative and really make a difference here, hey?), to the best cross-platform app  (3 or more platforms), sponsored by HP webOS, to the best branded app, the Muther promises to bring a lot of great apps into the marketplace.

At the Muther!, not only will you have the opportunity to create new...

We are excited to announce the next installment of Droidcon UK, set for October 6 and 7 at the Business Design Center in Islington, London! We're working with our friends at Skills Matter to put the event on, and we're hoping to make it bigger and better than last year's great event! To celebrate the launch, we are running a ticket special: the first 50 tickets cost just £50, down from £200! So be sure to get over to the registration site right away and sign up now!

The aim of droidcon is to bring together the Android development community in an informal environment where they can share ideas, demo new apps, talk to the experts and generally have lots of Android-related fun. We'll have more information soon, so stay tuned to our event page.

We are excited to be working with HP on some upcoming developer events: their webOS CONNECT events in Paris and Berlin next week, and our Muther! of all Hackathons in Silicon Valley in June. We sat down with Richard Kerris, HP’s VP of worldwide developer relations for webOS, to find out a little bit more about the events and what’s going on in the webOS ecosystem.

WIP: Hi Richard, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at HP?

RK: I’m the Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations, and I’ve been at HP for a little over 3 months. I’m responsible for the developer program from outreach to tech support to working with business development and marketing teams to support developers once their apps are released. I was most recently at Lucasfilm, and before that, I spent eight years at Apple doing worldwide developer relations there. I really enjoy working with developers because it’s the area where you find the most innovation. The most exciting thing is...

The May edition of the WIP App Store Report is now available. The App Store Report is a PDF version of our App Store Catalog, the most comprehensive online list of mobile app stores. It also features some additional analysis and commentary, reproduced here. This month, we take a look at HTML5 apps and some of the issues surrounding their development and distribution.

There is a growing swell of interest and support -- and hype -- behind HTML5 for mobile developers. This is largely driven by three factors:

• Technical additions to the HTML standard that increase its functionality closer to that of native applications. In particular, the ability for offline data storage and access makes it possible to create a much more “app-like” experience than previously possible.
• The relative ease of development with HTML and other web technologies vs. native app development.
• The assumption that because it’s HTML, and fragmentation isn’t a particularly nasty issue on the desktop web,...

Sean Thompson is the VP of Production for GOSUB 60, a long-time maker of mobile games, where applies his mobile gaming industry expertise to every GOSUB 60 product by implementing the company's core game design principles: superior quality, intuitive gameplay, extended replay value and a casual focus. Through his management of both the Product Development and Deployment teams, Sean supervises each project's timeline from inception to completion. Sean's also a long-time supporter of WIP, and sent over the following post about app pricing to share. Thanks Sean!

Have you checked out the list of Top Grossing apps in the Apple App Store recently? Besides some flash-in-the-pan specialty app for ornithologists, 6 of the top 7 top grossing apps are free:

For close followers of the mobile industry, that’s no surprise. In a previous post last October, I pointed out the impact that free apps were having on the App Store. The Facebook model of free apps with in-game transactions is now...

It's my pleasure for WIP to host this month's installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists. For more than five years, the Carnival has sought to bring the best of mobile blogging to the forefront in every installment, and this month, we feature a few submissions from the month of April.

First up is an entry from Antoine RJ Wright titled Mobile Apps Are A Toxic Investment, in which he argues that for consumers, buying apps is a losing proposition as they are generally locked to a particular device and can't be transferred to another piece of hardware or a different user. It's an interesting perspective which might resonate with some consumers who believe that paying for a piece of software should come with some sort of lifetime, completely transferable license. But is that viewpoint out of sync with the hundreds of millions of consumers who seem to be happy to pay for an app, use it for a while, then move on? Take up the debate in Antoine's comments section.

Peggy Anne Salz sent...