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We're moving full speed ahead as we look forward to the Muther! of all Hackathons -- there's just one week to go! If you haven't signed up already, do it now! I just wanted to keep you up to date on the latest news as things are getting pretty exciting. The biggest bit to share is that I've done a tally of all the great prizes and giveaways we've got, and thanks to our great sponsors, we've got more than $100,000 in cash, prizes and giveaways we'll be sharing with our winners and attendees. There's a ton of great stuff they'll have a chance to win:

• cold, hard CASH
• MacBook Airs
• iPad 2s
• Android tablets from Motorola and Toshiba
• booth space at CTIA
• promotional and marketing support in app stores and advertising
• Phones, digital cameras, GPS units and other devices
• lots of gift cards
• and more!

But remember, you can't win if you don't enter. So get signed up and out to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View next week!

We've also announced...

Coming all the way from Germany, we'll have several members of the fitml.com team joining us next week at the Muther! fitml.com is a new project from Sevenval, a leading mobile web technology company, and they're having the US launch at the event. fitml.com is also the sponsor of our "Best Mobile Web App" category, and they're going to be giving out MacBook Airs to the winners, so definitely give it some thought! Sharing some info about what they've got going on is Roland Guelle, the company's CTO.

WIP: Hi, tell us a little about yourself and fitml.com.

RG: I’m Roland Guelle, CTO at Sevenval, the company behind fitml.com. Over the last couple of months, my colleagues and I have been working on the launch of fitml.com.

fitml.com is the new cloud-based development platform of Sevenval. It solves many of the pain points with mobile web development, especially the ever-growing fragmentation issue on input and output formats.

For more than 10 years, Sevenval’s software products...

We've got a few more webinars coming up from our Muther! sponsors over the next few days that are worth pointing out again. If you aren't coming to the Muther!, feel free to join us to learn about some great new platforms and tools available to you. There might even be some prizes in store from some of them... If you are coming to the Muther!, you'll want to catch these webinars to get a head start on the competition and to find the golden eggs that will give you extra points when it comes to judging.

Here's what's coming up the rest of the week and how you can get signed up -- do it now, you'll get reminders before the webinar starts you don't forget to tune in!

We're glad to have BlueVia onboard for the Muther! of all Hackathons as one of our sponsors. They're heading over from Europe to share their new revenue-generating APIs with developers in the US, and ways that they can be used to reach Telefonica's big base of customers. They're sponsoring a category of apps looking for the best app or service that integrates their APIs, and they're offering a great prize -- $5000 cash for first place and $2500 for the runner-up! In addition, winners will get marketing and promotional support from BlueVia too. Tom Curtis from BlueVia has some info on what they're doing below, and to learn more about what BlueVia is doing at the Muther! and to get a leg up on the competition in the category, join our webinar with them on Thursday, June 16, at 11am PST.

WIP: Thanks for joining us at the Muther! Can you start off by telling us a little bit about BlueVia and Telefonica, for our developers who might not yet be familiar with them?

TC: Sure. BlueVia is...

I was talking to a developer friend of mine the other day about our upcoming Muther! of all Hackathons event, and he asked me if we were going to be featuring a lot of new APIs. I said yes, and he replied, "Awesome, I love APIs, you can always build something cool on top of them." I thought that quote really captured the essence of a big part of the thinking behind the event: let's get a bunch of developers in a room with a bunch of people providing cool APIs and other tools, shake them up, and see what we come up with!

So how will you find out about all the great APIs and other things available at the Muther!? We're hosting a Tool Pitch on Friday morning, where our sponsors and Expert Table companies will give you quick overviews of what they're offering, how you can use them, and some cool stuff you could do with them, just to get your mind working. Then you can start working over some ideas of what you might want to build, or how you might want to enhance one of your existing...

Another great sponsor we are working with on the Muther! of all Hackathons is Immersion, which provides haptic feedback -- the shaking -- to mobile devices. They've released an Android SDK which allows developers to build this rumbling into their apps, and they're sponsoring a category in the hackathon for the "Best Interactive App that Quakes, Quivers, or Trembles". Sounds pretty exciting, and if you're interested, you can learn more before the Muther! by tuning into the webinar we're doing with Immersion at 9am PST on Tuesday, June 14.

WIP: Hi, tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Immersion.

BH: My Name is Bob Heubel.  I’ve been a Haptics technology evangelist specialized in assisting developers implement what is known as force-feedback, tactile-feedback or rumble-feedback effects.  I’ve spent more than a decade working with developers, carriers, OEMs and ODMs to design and implement these sensations aimed at improving both gaming and user interaction...

WIP has been a longstanding partner of the CTIA for many years, often hosting Jams at its events. Now, we're excited to welcome CTIA to one of our events -- the Muther! The group is sponsoring an app category in the hackathon in which it's looking for developers to create an app for its events! The winner of this category will get a lot of exposure and some great prizes, including booth space at a future CTIA show. Joining us to talk some more about CTIA and what it's looking for is Heather Lee, its Assistant VIce President of Marketing. You can learn some more about how to win this app category -- and maybe find some golden eggs to help -- during our webinar with CTIA on Tuesday, June 14 at 11am PST.

WIP: Hi, tell us a little about yourself and what you do at CTIA.

HL: My name is Heather Lee and I am the Assistant Vice President of Marketing for the CTIA events. My team’s primary goals are to promote CTIA’s 2 events: CTIA ENTERPRISE & APPLICATIONS and International CTIA...

I was out in San Diego last week for Qualcomm's Uplinq event, and like in years past, it was a good few days. While there are a good number of people there, the environment is relatively intimate, so it's a great place to network and have really rewarding meetings and conversations. A highlight for me was getting to see Nokia CEO Stephen Elop's keynote on the second day. I hadn't seen him speak in person before, and to hear him talk through the company's challenges and its strategic changes was very compelling, and gave me a lot of optimism about the future of Nokia.

One significant change from previous Uplinq events was the relative absence of news and sessions about the BREW platform. Uplinq used to be known as the Brew Developer Conference, and last year, I was a little surprised by the amount of attention it got, and the huge amount of interest that remained in it from its devoted users. One year later, and there wasn't a lot of talk about it, and the focus was largely on...

Yesterday was a big day for Apple. The company announced iOS 5 at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, and it said it had paid out $2.5 billion to developers for apps they've sold to iOS users. 

Apple's lawyers also sent WIP a letter yesterday, asking that we cease and desist from using the term "App Store" in the title of the App Store Catalog and App Store Reports we provide for developers here on our site. Apple has trademarked the term "App Store" in the US and many other countries, and the letter says our use of the term "improperly suggests to U.S. consumers that numerous companies offer an APP STORE mobile download service, when in fact the term APP STORE refers exclusively to Apple's groundbreaking download service."

Apparently Steve Jobs hasn't gotten a similar letter, since even he uses the term generically to refer to any of what the lawyers suggest we call "mobile download services" or "application download services".

We provide the App Store...

Welcome to Cape Town for our first African WIPJam!

If you think there is a slight sense of deja-vu, well, I cannot blame you, Cape Town (in winter) has got a strong resemblance to San Francisco (all year long :D), hilly streets, misty, a bit chilly and a hungry enterpreneurial population!

This WIPJam, sponsored by Nokia, was part of Apps World Africa which was hugely successful with a great crowd and a great mix of people (thanks to an awesome networking party). The whole program of the event can be found here, but here are a few of my selected highlights.

Lesson from Windows on Nokia 2 years too early

This is a bit of nostalgia I will admit, but having Dusan from Device Magic walk us through his lessons learnt from his previous experience running .NET on Symbian was great. Dusan explored the options for enterprises when it comes to mobile software and why it makes sense to go native (because employees are consumers too, and cannot live with a sub-standard experience...