Paul Poutanen

I just found out I am going to be an improv panel for MobileJam in Las Vegas Mobile Jam

How does the Improv Session Work?
Based on Mobile Jam Barcelona – they work well! See the photos.

Chairs are placed in six (6) circles around the room, with each topic designated to a circle. Each group has it’s own flip chart for discussion and to mark down comments for later.
Each topic area has 2-3 discussion leaders.
Participants choose which circle to drop in to.
Every 45 minutes the discussion stops, and participants move to another circle.
Discussion leaders start each session by introducing themselves and some brief commentary on the subject based on their expertise, experience, opinions. The participants introduce themselves too! The leaders answer questions and facilitate discussion ensuring everyone gets an opportunity to participate.
Why the Improv Sessions Work?

This is a chance for developers to get up close and personal with industry leaders and experienced developers, something often difficult at big conferences.
It’s driven by developers – what they want to hear, who they want to talk to, what they want to say. It’s no secret that the industry needs the emerging companies to lead with innovation, to leverage resources and to help change the game. With the right beat, let’s get ready to listen!
It’s like a box of chocolate, each session is different based on who joins in, so you never know what’s going to happen!

IMPROV SESSIONS
1:00pm 4:30pm – (45 minutes / session – choose 3 too attend & Final Wrap Up)

1. Mobile OS and Platforms

Discussion Leaders: Mobile Distillery - Vincent Berge

2. Mobile 2.0

Discussion Leaders:

AOL- Jai Jaisimha
CellSpin – Vince Laviano
Rococo – Sean Sullivan
Idean - Santtu Toivonen

3. Testing & Certification

Discussion Leaders:

GetJar – Bill Scott
Accenture – Jeff Wang
Mob4Hire – Paul Poutanen
Device Anywhere – David Marsyla

4. Getting to Market / Channels

Discussion Leaders;

Cellmania- Peter Baldwin
AORTA- Chetan Sharma
Astraware/Handmark – John Philips

5. Development – JSRs, MIDP3 and more

Discussion Leaders:

Aplix – Stanley Kao

6. Open Source in Handsets

Discussion Leaders:

Motorola - Asokan Thiyagarajan (Ashok)
Funambol - Greg Gamp

Should be a good session.

I thought the Mobile Jam was the best event at Barcelona!

I look forward seeing you there!

While in Barcelona, I went to the Mobile Jam put on by Rudy de Waele and Caroline Lewko.

This was a great event. The mobile developer space is in a bad state.  Chaos in the industry is frustrating the developers. There was about an hour discussion on testing and the difficulties in doing this.

The developers have 4 major problems.

1. getting handsets (costly or difficult to get)
2. having to pay for subscriptions in North America or switching out of sims
3. Having to test in other countries to confirm the application will work (travel costs)
4. Tester Bias ( even an in company tester has bias and may not do as good a job testing)

I met a lot of great people at this event. Thanks to Rudy and Caroline for putting on such a great event. The event was at the Mystrands building. Betavine was a major sponsor as was Forum Nokia and Flickr

I will be attending the March 31 MobileJam at CTIA in Las Vegas. I would suggest if you are a developer you go as well.

I was in Barcelona for the 3GSM Mobile tradeshow and met Margaret Gold from www.betavine.net

“Betavine is an open community & resource website, created and managed by Vodafone Group R&D, whose mission is to support the wider development community in stimulating ideas, developing, testing and launching great new applications for mobile and Internet communications.”

Betavine is a social mobile developer website allowing developer to talk and discuss various things about the mobile space.

The mobile developer needs to be able to communicate with other developers. I like it.

There have been a couple of events recently which have showcased the Calgary hi-tech scene.

 Check out Stephen King’s blog on techvibes.

As well check out the list of Alberta startups on techvibes as well.

I pleased to announce that Mob4hire is on that list.

I am pleased to announce that NEWT won the $500 tester registration contest on Dec 15th.

Here I am on the right presenting (the real check to NEWT) to Eric Larson, Marketing director.

The next contest will be DOUBLED! Yes that is right. Sign up before March 31, 2008 as a tester at Mob4hire and you may win $1000. All testers previously entered win also be eligible.

I have been a member of Cambrian House for over a year now. If you look me up, I am fish99 and I am 6th on the leaderboard. (ie most glory points…a ranking system for doing stuff on the site)

In February, after lurking on the site for a while, I decided to add an idea.

The orginal name of the idea was “Mobile Phone Application Testing Service” (probably the most unsexy name I could think of….but it told what the idea did)

When I was at Blister Entertainment, I knew the difficulties in testing mobile applications. The cost was enormous… I estimated that each handset we tested on cost us between $1500 and $2000 depending on the cost of the handset and the data plan we needed. We needed to test in the countries, where the applications were to be launched, so we had to send testers, usually developers and technical people, to test with added cost. 

Working at Cambrian House, I loved the whole crowdsourcing concept.

In brainstorming, the ideas come out of putting two or more concepts together, to come up with a mashup. The idea of crowdsourcing and mobile sounded like a good fit, so I started thinking about it. Where were the problems in mobile and how could crowdsourcing help?

It kinda came to me slow but eventually the idea of crowd sourced mobile application testing came to mind. I found in the mobile space there were difficulties and cost with testing.

Tester bias was also a problem. If you send your developers out to test, you are going to get skewed results. If the person who wrote the application is testing, they tend to follow the same pattern in testing. For example, looking at a help screen in the middle of an application, does not happen if you wrote the code.

So the idea went up, and there were responses immediately. Some people loved it. Some hated it. There were suggestions. I did not know all of the answers right away but on thinking on responses helped me form the simple idea into a legitimate idea.

The bottom line is that the crowd helped me with fine-tuning the idea and the business model behind it.

The world of technology is changing everyday.

I see major trends in crowd-sourcing, and the mobile space.

A bit about myself.

I have been in the hi-tech area for over 20 years.

With 2 engineering degrees, I have 6 years experience as a senior management consultant with Ernst and Young.

I was at Wi-Lan (wireless communication) in the early days as director of applications and sales engineering, where we launched the largest educational wireless system in the world.

As director of tower management at Cell-Loc (location technology), we signed deals with 4 of the biggest tower companies in the USA.

At Blister Entertainment, www.blisterent.coma wholly owned subsidiary of Knowledgewhere www.knowledgewhere.com , we launched the first location based games on Mobile handsets in North America. The game Swordfish, won bast game in the Canadian New Media Awards in 2005.

As advisor to Cambrian House, www.cambrianhouse.com , it has been very interesting to be a part of a groundbreaking technology that uses the crowd to achieve their goals.

I am vice president of the Digital Media Association of Alberta.  www.digitalalberta.com

Now, as founder of Mob4Hire Inc., www.mob4hire.comwe intend to make the world easier for mobile application developers, through crowd-sourced mobile application testing.