Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference

Listening to all the feedback we got, the second Mobile 2.0 Europe was again great with lots of interesting sessions and speakers from different area’s in the mobile ecosystem. We would like to thank everybody who participated and helped make it a success, especially our partners ESADE, Barcelona Activa, Sun Microsystems, Vodafone Betavine, Forum Nokia, Yahoo!, Smaato, Getjar, 22@ Barcelona, The Finnish Mobile Association, O2 Litmus, Shozu and Amiando for their invaluable support.

Many thanks to all participating speakers, panelists and moderators; Andrew & Claire for taking the audience questions on their Nokia N97; Elies Campo and the Sons of Wireless for the dash of fun they brought us during the preparals and for coming up with the Mobile 2.0 SIM-card Thanks also to our interns Sarah and Jason; to Steffen who brought fresh design to the venue and its screens; and last but not least the Mobile 2.0 Organization Team!

Deisi, Carles and Rudy.

Many pictures and video’s were taking during the event, just check for media tagged with #m20eu or #mobile20 and you should find at random. The Flickr set from our photographer Jordi Salinas – www.jordisalinas.com can be found here, and other sets from the conference are here, and here from the Developer Day.

Also fun to check is the Random Mobile 2.0 Europe Tweets, a selection of some great tweets sent during and around the event. The whole twitterstream can be tracked here.

You can find all speaker presentations here below:

José Luis de Vicente on Citizens as Sensors
Atau Tanaka
Régine Debatty – we-make-money-not-art.com
Context by Ted Morgan, Skyhook Wireless
Beyond Free: …what is the customer’s perception of “free”? by Priya Prakash
The Mobile Revolution at MobileActive.org
Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability
Carlos Domingo – Openness in the Telecommunication Industry

And below also a random overview of blog coverage about the Mobile 2.0 Europe event:

$6 Million For Sense Networks? Makes Sense – TechCrunch.com

“Si nos conectamos a Internet por el móvil evitaremos la adicción al ordenador” – Interview in La Vanguardia (Spanish) with Felix Petersen – co-Founder at Plazes.com / Head of Product Strategy Social Location at Nokia.

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Video Interview With GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs – TechCrunch.com

Rip off roaming: the MAXRoam response – Dennis Howlett (ZDNet.com)

Coming To Android This Summer: Kyte, Rummble and Google Books – MobileCrunch.com

Barcelona 2009 Summer events recap – Intomobile.com

Citizens as Sensors at Mobile 2.0 Europe – Smart Mobs

Mobile 2.0 Europe – Schaufeln für den Goldrausch – Gründerszene

Mobile 2.0 wrap up – Wolfram Kriesing at Uxebu JavaScript addicts

Layar’s Augmented Reality Browser: Literally More Than Meets The Eye – TechCrunch.com

Tom Hume’s Mobile 2.0 recap – Tom Hume

Apps are like Songs – Daniel Appelquist

Good times at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona #m20eu – James Coops at mjelly.com

[tce] Mobile 2.0 Europe (2009) insights – Vitor Domingos

@Mobile 2.0 Barcelona – GoMoNews.com + check all footage from Bena at both events.

Mobile 2.0 Europe Startup Demo Launch Pad – Zensify blog

Mobile 2.0 Barcelona. Misión Cumplida – Sons of Wireless

Cellity at the Mobile 2.0 Europe event – Cellity blog

Mobile 2.0 Europe, segunda edición – Ojo Móviles

Mobile 2.0 roundup – Ric Ferraro

And don’t forget to save the date for Mobile 2.0 San Francisco later this autumn on October 15-16, 2009. See you there!

Presentation from José Luis de Vicente, Cultural Researcher at Medialab Prado in Madrid.

Keynote on the ‘Play’ theme by Prof. Atau Tanaka, Chair of Digital Media, Acting Director of Culture Lab in Newcastle.

Presentation from Regine Debatty – we-make-money-not-art.com.

A couple of days before the event, and reps from more than 170 companies registered to attend Mobile 2.0 Europe event – that is more than last year! – including startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, mobile application and service providers, bloggers, press and web technologists. If you want to attend the event to connect with industry leadership, mobile influencers and broaden your C-level relationships, you can still buy tickets here.

The Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day is sold out, we just have a couple of duo-tickets left to attend both the Dev Day on Thursday, June 18 and the Event on Friday, June 19.

Here’s the list of the companies attending the MOBILE 2.0 EUROPE conference in alphabetical order:

This guest post is written by Andreas Constantinou, Research Director at VisionMobile, an analyst firm focusing on mobile software strategy and open source. Andreas has followed the mobile business from the dark ages of 2000 to the openness renaissance of today. He will be part of the panel on Openness next Friday at Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona.

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On June 19th we ‘ll be discussing ‘openness’ at Mobile 2.0. As part of the Openness panel I ‘ll be joined by  Matthaus Krzykowski (VentureBeat), Pat Phelan (MAXroam), Christian Sejersen (Mozilla), David Wood (Symbian Foundation) and Jacob Lehrbaum (Sun). Clearly a discussion to look forward to.

Openess is a much-misunderstood word; a kind of good-will moniker to which people attach an impressive variety of definitions; open source, open standards, open handsets, openness as in transparency, shared roadmaps, open APIs, open route to market.. It’s a very forgiving term as far as definitions go.

One of the industry’s favourite facets of openness is of course open source. We ‘ve been giving open source a lot of thought at VisionMobile, especially as people expect us analysts to be wearing a critical and not a tinted pair of spectacles when it comes cutting through vendor hype.

Lots of software vendors and consortia have embraced open source in some form or other; Symbian Foundation, LiMo Foundation, OHA/Android, Nokia Qt, WebKit, Funambol and Sun’s Java are the ones that have hit the limelight.

Open source licensed software carries four basic freedoms; the right to access (source code), modify, distribute and contribute to the software. These freedoms have been embodied in the key licenses – GPL, LGPL, APL, EPL, MPL, BSD and MIT – which are used in the vast majority of open source projects. The licenses in turn determine the rights and obligations that use of the source code carries. Unsurprisingly, strong copyleft licenses (read: GPL) are rarely used in mobile products, due to the OEM concerns for downstream liabilities.

But what’s often missed in open source discussions is how open source licenses tell only half the story.

Licenses typically govern control of the source code. But in mobile industry, source code and products are two very different things. For example; while you can play with Android source code to your heart’s content, are the latest code check-ins publically visible ? You can peak at Symbian Foundations’ EPL-licensed source code, but who arbitrates what changes go into the UI layers of S60? You can buy a LiMo-compliant handset, but as a LiMo member can you expect LiMo handsets to ship with your source code contributions ? You can create your own WebKit-based browser, but what are the requirements for contributing source code mods to the WebKit root ?

It turns out there’s often no official answer to these questions, and when there is, the answer is a resounding No. Indeed, there are 10s of questions you could be asking to these ‘open’ projects or products, and none of these is within the bounds of the open source software license; they are in the small print or what’s known as the governance model.

The picture that emerges is one where :
- open source licenses (the large print that covers source control) are widely used, converged and well understood, while
- governance models (the small print that governs product control) are proprietary, diverging and poorly understood

Indeed, this is one of the most understated topics in the ‘open’ mobile industry today, yet one of the most fundamental in the direction where the industry will be taking. Openness is the new closed.

Clearly an interesting debate to be held at the forthcoming openness panel on June 19th as part of the Mobile 2.0.

Would very much welcome audience feedback and questions through this blog; we can then raise and address this during the Openness panel.

Andreas
Research Director, VisionMobile

Last week we announced six startups to present at Mobile 2.0 Europe Demo Launch Pad, including Distimo (Utrecht), Layar (Amsterdam, Pikkoo (Oulu), theChanner (Barcelona) and vulevu (Berlin). appswork (Santa Clara / London) informed us they  preferred to withdrew from the Mobile 2.0 Start-up Showcase as of now which left us with one more slot.

We had the plan to invite 1 or 2 more demo wildcards and set up a simple 24 hrs. voting contest on twitter. The startup that got most traction the following 24 hrs. would receive the wildcard.

beamME won easily the wildcard contest thanks to their huge fan-base. We liked Zensify most for their engagement with their community (and for a great app!), and last but not least we opted for NearYoo as the underdog with a lot less votes but focusing on pitching their idea in a 140 character tweet – try it yourself – we just go for this kind of simplicity & forward thinking spirits!

So, here they are: 3 more startups to pitch next week in Barcelona!

Based in New York City, rmbrME is best known for developing the breathtakingly simple beamME, beamME Pro, CV and Pitch for the iPhone/iPod Touch – the world’s most popular professional mobile contact exchange service.  beamME enables seamless business networking between any device without requiring special hardware, software or registration. Founders Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham’s philosophy is that Mobile Business Networking only works when it is device, carrier and social network independent and clearly focused on the needs of the professional user.

With Zensify you can view your social networks — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket, and 12seconds  — in one time line, search across your entire social graph (not just single service), track topics across all services, unearth trends, and also update both Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.

Zensify also approaches trends with a twist. Instead of simply displaying a list of trending topics on Twitter, Zensify offers up a tag cloud that is an aggregate real-time view of trending topics across all available social networks.

Nearyoo brings the “Real Time >Where” to the twittosphere. While most of the attention around the ’statusphere’ has gone to the “Real Time web” / informational aspect of it, Nearyoo allows twitter users to very easily locate themselves and multiply chances of meetups in the Real World (TM). No need for GPS, wifi triangulation or to install a new application: users just keep twittering, but use “location tags” like ‘>’ to notify where they are: “Going to the >Jamboree, Barcelona<”. You’re then located on the map, but only when you choose so !
Nearyoo also introduces its own breed of nifty tiny urls that are self-explanatory : e.g. http://near.st/in/NewYork brings up a map of located users in this given city. Follow @nearyoo, and start sharing your >location !

Mobilize your content and win!

During the Developer Day at Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference on June 18, Forum Nokia will challenge mobile Flash and Web developers to submit their best Web Runtime (WRT) widgets, Flash applications or mobilized websites for an on-the-spot competition. Developer Day Participants can present their work in any of the following areas:

• Mobilize your web service or application

- Highlight intelligent device detection and categorization
- Create a customized experience for different device groups
- Deliver ingenious website usability on mobile devices

• Super-powered mobile mashups with WRT for S60 devices

- Bundle your favorite web APIs with S60 Platform Services
- N97 live widgets in the home screen
- Submit ideas that make the most of device features and technology, such as location-based services, internal accelerometer, or personal information management (i.e., phonebook or calendar) – See programmableweb.com/nokia for references.

• Enhanced User Experience with content delivery through Flash

- Show the “wow” factor Flash can bring to your application or web service mobile
- Easy data and media pull from the web, content streaming

Developers that are planning to present WRT widgets at the competition can take advantage of the free Nokia WRT Plug-In for Aptana Studio, and use standard web technologies (such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) to easily create, edit, test, and deploy WRT widgets for Nokia S60 devices.

Developers building their app or UI in FlashLite can have access to code samples, design and UX tips, UI libraries and free packaging tools, turning the Flash file into an installable application to both Series 40 and S60. All resources above are available from Forum Nokia.

Participants will be able to do last-minute debugging and testing on-site with Forum Nokia technical experts – Petro Soininen (Web & Widgets) and Riku Salminen (Flash) – during their respective breakout sessions in the Developer Day, which will cover the topics above. The three best entries will win a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone.

If the winner selected represents a company, and/or has a product to market, ho or she will have the opportunity to join the Forum Nokia Launchpad program, designed to accelerate mobile application development and elevate developer’s business visibility in the mobile world.

Entries received in this challenge can also be submitted to Nokia’s Calling All Innovators contest, which is seeking FlashLite applications, mobile-optimized websites and WRT widgets that transform web and mobile services into real applications for Nokia devices. Contest prizes include both cash and immediate business opportunities with Nokia. Entries for Calling All Innovators will be accepted until midnight (EST) on 30 June 2009.

For more information about the competition taking place at the Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day, please contact Janaina Pilomia.