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 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.

One of the difficulties re mobile testing is trying to determine what a handset can do.

The people at WURFL (the Wireless Universal Resource File) have compiled an amazing database of handsets from around the world. (from their main page)

The main scope of the file is to collect as much information as we can about all the existing mobile devices that access WAP pages so that developers will be able to build better applications and better services for the users.

This project is open-source and is intended for developers working with the WAP and Wireless. All the information listed here has been collected by many different people from many different countries. You are allowed to use WURFL in any of your applications, free or commercial. The only thing required is to make any modification to this file public, following the original spirit and idea of the creators of this project. This will help WURFL to grow better and better every day.

Mob4hire is a proud contributor of data to add to the database. We have already found multiple examples of new handsets that we have added to the database.

We are using the WURFL database to identify handsets and will be using the database for the beta version of Mob4Hire which will be ready soon.

I salute the people and contributers to WURFL!

If you are a mobile application developer, please check it out.