Overview of WIPJam @ Apps World Africa
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 especially when in a rush), go cross-platform (because increasingly employees bring their own device to work, making the device pool uncontrollable) and go for packaged yet adaptable solutions (because the cost of maintaining cross-platform mobile software).
Money Mobile Money
As in many of our Jam sessions, the discussions about making money from mobile attracted a large crowd. However here it was matched by the mobile payment solutions discussion groups, following a great presentation by Rick Joubert, who's introducing paythru technology in South Africa, which spurred a lot of interest by democratizing mobile and online payment.
Tim Bishop from Prezence demonstrated the importance of content, showcasing the most downloaded South African app, a Nokia app available on ovi which was coded in a matter of hours. He also won the award for the best conference tee-shirts, with a series entitled "Angry Nirds, Dev Whore..." Pictures to come soon!
Or Mobile for Good
Finally, a big thank you to David Grier and Simon de Haan, who formed a great team around mobile for good! Simon demonstrated that building apps for dumbphones does not mean using the latest technologies and using open source (check out the code on github), and also mentioned how having a non for profit and a for profit entity was an interesting model for social entrepreneurs. David showed that it doesn't take a geek to start great tech projects it can also take a mad extreme sportsman (South Africa to Madagascar kayaking, then running across Madagascar anyone?).
If you're you looking for new frontiers and opportunities?
South Africa definitely has a hint of a Wild West to it.
