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!

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.

Got back from the Wireless Connections conference in Banff and I was very glad to go.

Good to get the contacts back up and see people I had not seen for a while.

 I was called into a panel discussion when a speaker cancelled. The discussion was on the difficulties mobile application developers have getting into carriers ie becoming commerical.

I was on the panel with Robert Davies P.Eng.  Senior Scientist at TRLABS (www.trlabs.ca) and ajunct professor at the University of Calgary and James Maynard, President of Wavefront (www.wavefrontac.com).   Duane Sniezek, P.Eng. Director Operations, TRLabs Calgary and COO of NEWT (www.newt.trlabs.ca) moderated the discussion.

The discussion moved to the future mobile space.

I put out my future gazing and speculation. I see Google buying Sprint not for subscribers but for the tower agreements. Google is looking to buy the 700 MHz sprectrum and they need to deploy somehow. The FCC has mandated this should be open.

TRLabs creates innovative technologies and trains students to enhance ICT expertise and improve Canada’s global competitiveness. Five labs across the prairie provinces employ university professors, graduate students, industrial partners, and staff researchers.

Wavefront is the commercialization bridge between the wireless developer community in British Columbia and the mobile operators, government and large enterprises that are deploying new wireless products and services. In collaboration with its established partners, wavefront provides the developer community with neutral, independent test services and the market knowledge to enable rapid commercialization.

NEWT, the Network for Emerging Wireless Technologies, is a wireless development centre providing hardware and software design, implementation and test support to developers of wireless products and services. The technical staff, industry network, lab facilities and test environments reduce product development costs, shorten product development time, increase technical knowledge and gain competitive advantage through accelerated creation and adoption of wireless technology.

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.