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If you have attended one of our events in the past, there's a good chance you've picked up a copy of The Developer's Guide to the Galaxy, a great little book on navigating the basics of mobile development put together in conjunction with our friends over at Enough Software. The 10th (!!!) edition of the Guide has been released this week, and it's swelled to more than 200 pages covering a wide variety of topics and platforms.

We'll have hard copies this week at the WIPJam@MWC, but in the meantime, you can grab the PDF from our site. It's well worth keeping a copy around as a reference guide, particularly to give you an overview of new platforms you haven't used before, and to give you an idea of what they require and how their development environments and technologies differ.

And remember the point of the whole thing -- Don't Panic!

You're probably familiar with the Developer's Guide to the Galaxy, the community project with our friends over at Enough Software that's resulted in tens of thousands of copies of the best brief guide to mobile development being distributed all over the world. We're happy to announce that it now has a sister: The Mobile Developer's Guide to the Parallel Universe!

We were sitting around one time when Caroline said, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if there was something like the Developer's Guide, but for marketing?" She saw a lot of developers hungry for knowledge on how to market and promote their apps, and a lack of resources to help. So she got to work calling up friends and contacts, and got 15 contributors to come together to create this 100-page guide covering:

• Product planning
• Product development and lifecycle management
• Market research
• Merchandising your app
• Business Development
• Distribution
• Business Models
• Customer engagement
• Raising money
...

We're pleased to announce that our 4th Annual Developer Survival Guide is now available to download! There's a lot to cover at Mobile World Congress and we have all the best panels, events, and parties all highlighted for you!

On top of that, it's also our 5th year hosting WIPJam so we've learned a couple of tricks along the way that are also shared within the guide.

If you're more of a paper-kinda person, you will be also be able to pick up a physical copy at our sponsors' booths.

Thibaut Rouffineau joins HashBang.TV to talk Hack Days, the secrets of success for start up's, and the challenges for European companies vs American. Chris and James reflect back on Blackberry DevCon, discuss FourSquare's move into NFC, and spammy apps cross posting on social networks.

One of our biggest tips for first time MWCers is to bring a pair of comfortable shoes. Regardless of whether you're rocking crocs with socks or gucci loafers, by Thursday you'll be ready to give your feet a rest and compete for some great prizes with some coding! There are 3 hackathons at WIPJam that you can attend, each with their own twist, so choose to your strength and win some great prizes!

Best AppUp App for Windows - sponsored by Intel

How to Win:

Create a new app, or port your existing application to Windows to be sold through the Intel AppUp center – your Application needs to be submitted to the Store but due to time constraints, validation is not required

Prizes:

1st place: 1.000,00€ Amazon Voucher
2nd place: 750,00€ Amazon Voucher
3rd place: 500,00€ Amazon Voucher
ASUS UX31E Ultrabook will be raffled amongst all individual developers talking part in the Intel AppUp category

Full Details:

Intel AppUp Hackathon

Best Use of the Nokia Location...

Having worked in videogames and mobile, I could not miss the first London Mobile Monday of 2012. “Mobile Games” was the hot topic of the night, discussed by a great panel of professionals and chaired by Oscar Clark of Papaya Mobile. Not that one would want to miss any of these industry gatherings, but, for me, it was also the first time on the volunteer side. In fact, they even gave me the chance to blog about the event, so here I am.

While on the tube to go to the event, I was thinking about the topic. I personally feel that video games and mobile industry are converging towards something different, and mobile games development is driving the innovation. The new mobile and tablet platform allowed games to change, thanks mainly to three new features: touchscreens, connectivity and portability. All the portable game consoles we used before the rise of the app stores lacked at least one of the three, not to speak about the powerful graphic of the new mobile screens. We now have...

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.