WIPJam @ CTIA 2010 Wrap-Up
Thanks to our nearly 300 attendees, sponsors and speakers who turned out to our Jam in Las Vegas at CTIA! The event was a great success, with our audience representing a wide array of companies, interests and viewpoints. We managed to have lots of great discussion, interaction and education, and squeezed in plenty of fun as well, including our first annual paper airplane contest. We've got a rundown below of some highlights from the day's events, or you can check out the full agenda.
We kicked off the day with something new: some "Mobile Development 101" presentations covering some high-level basics of mobile development. At our CTIA events, we often get a lot of people who are just getting started in mobile, and we wanted to provide them with some quick sessions on some of the basic info to consider when developing for mobile. So we invited Robert Virkus from Enough Software to give an overview of platforms and operating systems and Raj Singh from Skyfire to talk about browsers, widgets and runtimes, and then I (Carlo from WIP), talked about marketing your mobile app.
The attendance at the early start of the presentations was impressive, and built steadily, while the attention and questions of the attendees pointed to a lot of interest in the content -- signaling an ever-growing interest in the US in mobile development. Robert's overview of mobile platforms and cross-platform development (see his slides here) provided a solid introduction to the fragmented mobile environment, as well as some ways to deal with it. He also cited some useful stats, perhaps the most striking was a counterpoint to Moore's Law, which states that CPU doubles every 18 months: battery capacity doubles only every 7 years! This means that developers have to be careful about taking full advantage of the rapidly increasing processing power available to them on mobile devices.
Raj delivered a great look at the mobile web and widget environment (see his slides here, 2.5MB PDF), including some forthcoming capabilities in the mobile web space, such as WebKit's ability to use hardware graphics acceleration, and HTML5's ability to pre-load pages, both of which could have significant implications for web developers. My presentation (see the slides here, 850KB PDF) hit on the basics of marketing your mobile app, including some marketing lingo to impress your developer friends.
Up next was our first UnPanel, focused on taking your mobile app to market. Our unpanelists, from DreamTheme, Nimbuzz, the AT&T Developer Program, GetJar and Samsung, did a great job of sharing their viewpoints with the audience, but also responding to them and drawing them in to the discussion, assisted by the fabulous facilitation of Oren Levine from Nokia and WIP's own Caroline Lewko.
One key outcome of this UnPanel was an open letter from developers to the Wholesale Application Community. The WAC was announced at Mobile World Congress in February, and is an effort from 24 operators around the world to create a single wholesale environment for developers to submit their apps to, and then reach those operators' subscribers. It's a monumental effort that could simplify developers taking their apps to market -- but we want to make sure that developers' voices are heard and their opinions and desires taken into account while it's being established. With this in mind, we created a list of eight priorities based on the input of our audience, and are sending it along to the folks behind WAC. We've also set up a page where you can sign your support for these points, and add your comments for WAC to see.
The unpanelists also covered some great tips for developers. Tobias from Nimbuzz made the point that knowing how to effectively use app stores is a significant competitive advantage for developers, and Patrick from GetJar followed that with three key points: developers must know their users and match the platforms they use; that developers must know their data, in terms of where their app is being downloaded, and what's driving downloads; and that they must work on their "packaging," or their descriptions and listings in app stores.
We could have kept this UnPanel going all day, particularly talking about the ups and (mostly) downs developers have experienced with the various certification schemes used by different platform and hardware providers. But we had to move on, and gave our great sponsors -- AT&T, Verizon, Intel, NAVTEQ and Felica Networks -- a chance to make brief "reverse pitches" to developers, highlighting their offerings and resources. We also had a few attendees make Opportunity Pitches of their own, giving a nice in-person preview of WIP's forthcoming online Marketplace for members (stay tuned for more details on that!).
After some tasty lunch and networking, we jumped into a couple rounds of our deep-dive discussion groups, covering a number of great topics:
- - Merchandising Your Application
- - Cross Platform Development
- - Mobile Web Development
- - Social Networking! How to Really Connect with Customers
- - Use Location to Make Your Mobile Apps Stand Out
- - Getting the most out of Feature Phones and Quick Messaging Devices - Working with other devices/tablets
Many thanks to all of our discussion leaders, who did a great job of facilitating the sharing of knowledge and experiences among all the participants. We've got a full rundown of these groups in a separate blog post, detailing the main questions and insights from each group. You can also keep the discussion going through comments, so be sure to check it out!
We then jumped in to the second UnPanel, focused on mobile payments and billing, and ways for developers to get paid for their work. Once again, our UnPanelists from Bango, Boku, FeliCa and Hi-Media did an excellent job of sharing their experiences with our audience and answering their questions. We had an interesting mix of discussion here, with some topics -- like payment networks and methods more familiar to our audience and their experience than others, like in-app payments. Our unpanelists made the point that developers should look to multiple revenue streams and find the ones that best fit their users, and keep in mind that they may need to employ more than one in each app, such as blending in-app advertising with in-app purchases, and that different needs can be met by different payment methods.
An added bonus of the second UnPanel was the appearance of a tie on an attendee, which was dutifully spotted by Thibaut and pointed out for removal!
After a quick wrap-up, we then opened the networking reception (and the bar), again giving all our attendees (and anybody else in the building for CTIA) a chance to meet, mingle and catch up over a beverage. We also had some giveaways of party passes and some other items, but decided that instead of doing a simple business card drawing (as we'd done for some other giveaways during the day), we'd mix things up a bit, and have a paper airplane contest! We got people together into some different teams, had them construct their own planes, then awarded prizes for accuracy and distance. As you can see from the photos below, it went down really well and provided a fantastic end to the day.
Once again, thanks to our great sponsors and everybody who attended. The WIPJam format thrives on the participation of our attendees as well as our unpanelists and discussion group leaders, and we were fortunate to have such a great group who was keen to share their own experiences with everybody else. We look forward to seeing you all again soon, so check out the next stops on our WIPJam World Tour to see when we can connect again!
