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Catching Up On WIPJam Berlin

Posted by Carlo on 07 July 2010 - 0 Comments Categories : WIPjam •

Thibaut and I were in Berlin a few weeks back for a Jam Session at the Messe there, running alongside IT-Profits and LinuxTag. Despite the sweltering heat and a greenhouse of a building, it was a day full of great discussions. We had a smaller crowd than at many of our events at major mobile-industry events, but the quality of discussion enabled by its intimate size made up for it! Big thanks to our sponsors, Intel and GetJar, and to our friends at IT-Profits for helping with logistics.

We kicked the day off with a brief recap of some of the latest news from Apple's WWDC and Google I/O. The crowd seemed less interested in the previous day's announcement of the iPhone 4, and more interested in the news from Google -- perhaps explained by the strong open-source influence of LinuxTag and the enthusiasm for open source in Germany overall. One major point that generated some discussion was the expansion of the Android platform into the Google TV set-top box, and the resultant ability for apps to run across phones, other devices, and now TVs. This opens a new set of possibilities for developers, but also creates some challenges for how they must think about user interfaces and product features.

Up next was our first UnPanel discussion of the day, featuring Jackson Bond from Xing, Bruce Jones from GetJar and Bill Pearson from Intel. The title of the UnPanel was "IT or Marketing, who drives your mobile choices?" but the conversation veered more towards an examination of how developers can go about choosing the platforms they target, and how they can best distribute their applications to users.

After some well-earned coffee, we broke into discussion groups for some deep dives into a few different topics. Thanks to all our great discussion leaders:

Mobile Enterprise (Thorben Primke, Moon Monkey Labs)
Redefining Mobility - Netbooks and Tablets (Intel)
App Store Placement Optimization (Bruce Jones, GetJar)
Making Money From Mobile Apps (Christian Geissendorfer, Yoose; Mark Herringer, Countryman Media)
Cross-Platform Development (Nikolai Onken, Uxebu and Andrew Savory, LiMo Foundation -- who gets special recognition for the detailed notes he took and passed along, on an iPad no less!)
Augmented Reality (Dan Romescu, Augmented Citizen)

We ran another set after lunch, and even had a couple of BarCamp-style breakout sessions led by attendees that were interested in particular topics (it's that open-source mentality again! :) ).We then opened things up for reverse pitches from the audience, and heard about a number of interesting projects and companies. It's always great to hear about what people are working on, and what they're looking for and how WIP and its community can help.

As the temperature rose in the building, we took on our final UnPanel, covering the mobile cloud. Our speakers represented a diverse set of interests: Thorsten Hesse from ThinPrint, which is pushing printing up into the cloud and allowing people to send documents from their mobile device (or any other) to cloud-connected printers; Peter Lindgren from Mobile Documents, which is developing a cloud-based mobile email system that delivers amazing performance over the mobile network; and Barry Downes from FeedHenry, a company that's just opened its API to developers allowing them access to its cloud services.

A big thanks to everybody who came out to the event, and again to our sponsors, speakers and discussion leaders who helped make the day such a success!