Mobile 2.0 Europe-Priya Prakash presents Nokia's vision on 'Beyond Free'

BARCELONA -Priya Prakash (formerly at Flirtomatic) presented Nokia's vision on what she see's as the customer's perception on what is (or should be) free on mobile. One of the insights included the fact that customers can perceive greater value from a mobile proposition purely by the fact they have to pay for it. More insights are in the presentation here.

Publish Post

Introducing Android 1.5 NDK, Release 1

Many of you have been asking for the ability to call into native code from your Android applications. I'm glad to announce that developers can now download the Android Native Development Kit from the Android developer site.

As you know, Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain kinds of applications.

The NDK provides:

• a set of tools and build files used to generate native code libraries from C and C++ sources
• a way to embed the corresponding native libraries into application packages files (.apks) that can be deployed on Android devices
• a set of native system headers and libraries that will be supported in all future releases of the Android platform, starting from Android 1.5 documentation, samples and tutorials

This release of the NDK supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set and provides stable headers for:

• libc, the standard C library
• libm, the standard math library
• the JNI interface
• libz, the common ZLib compression library
• liblog, used to send logcat messages to the kernel

Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous! Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. That said, some applications that have self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory may still benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code. Some examples are signal processing, intensive physics simulations, and some kinds of data processing.

For any questions on the NDK, please join the Android NDK forum.

Have fun.

Mobile 2.0 Europe-roundup

BARCELONA -Mobile 2.0 Europe has come and gone again this year, attracting once again some of the finest mobile minds and entrepreneurs to Barcelona.

The (now 2-day) European showcase of mobile startups and trends in mobile this year gave everyone some extra food for thought with Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability and Regine Debatty on Mobile Culture.

Tom gave a thought-provoking presentation on why most telcos are not doing enough about achieving sustainability (with some squirming in the front seat from Carlos Domingo of Telefonica but pleased faces from Vodafone, with Tom's thumbs-up of their corporate web policy on green issues).

Regine offered a visually pleasing interlude of examples of not-for-profit mobile art and culture, with examples of giant SMS mobile screen projections (SMS Guerilla Projector) on the backs of innocent pedestrians (check out www.we-make-money-not-art.com) .

The panel on 'Beyond Free' managed to top last year's after lunch panel (on the role of Mobile Operators in fostering innovation) in terms of provocative debate, fuelled by some diverging points of view between Inma Martinez (Moderator) and Ian Ginn (seasoned web/mobile entrepreneur).

The conclusion from the panel, if there was one, is that mobile startups are still seen as an (un)necessary evil by most VC's but are treated as misunderstood children because they don't fit in the VC's risk/return equations.

You can find all the links to the presentations on the official event site here. A big round of applause to Rudy,Carles and the rest of the Mobile 2.0 Committee for organising (and pulling off) yet another great mobile event in Barcelona.

I will post some of my videos of the presentations by Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless and Priya Prakash of Nokia, starting with this one below:

Call for Mobile Entrepreneurs:VentureBeat invites coolest iPhone and BlackBerry developers to submit entries

The good folks over at VentureBeat, one of the leading sites for news about Tech, Money and Innovation, are organising their annual MobileBeat event in San Francisco on the 16th July, with the theme of 'It's the Application, Stupid' (love the title).

They are now calling for submissions from mobile entrepreneurs worldwide to enter their TopStartup Award and get a chance to pitch their idea in front of over 400 leading industry experts, execs and VC's.

Last year over two hundred companies were considered for the awards, which went to firms such as AdMob and Loopt. This year the competition shifts to mobile applications and services, with 50 finalists to be determined and a final 14 to present live at MobileBeat on Thursday July 16^th.

Startups must complete and submit the following form by June 30, 2009 for consideration-so apply now if you are interested (you should be) by clicking here.

Some rules:

-Fifty finalists will be announced on July 2^nd on Venturebeat.com. Voting will then be open to the public to select the top seven companies per sector.

-Seven finalists from each category will present for five minutes each to the MobileBeat audience determined by judges as to avoid any vote manufacturing.

-Nominees must be younger than three years old. Special consideration will be given to companies that are launching for the first time.

Have a cool iPhone, Android or Blackberry app? Why not go for it-it could be your lucky break!

uLocate's WHERE launches on Palm Pre

As of today, WHERE announced that it is live on the Palm Pre and is already the 5^th most popular application in the App Catalogue.

According to Pam Deziel, vice president, Developer Marketing, Palm, Inc. "WHERE is a best-in-class application that brings together local and social information in a compelling UI, and we believe that it will prove to be very popular with Pre users.”

On the Pre, WHERE has been able to weave its local and personal content into webOS’s linked contacts, layered calendars, multitasking, notifications and of course its GPS capabilities to deliver a seamless real-world experience. For example, users can see the nearest gas stations to their location ranked by price, find local movies and insert show times into their calendar, or find the nearest Starbuck's with Wi-Fi access.

You can find a shortened version of the press release below:

"WHERE®, the premier location-based application from uLocate Communications, is available on the new Palm® Pre™ phone via the on-device beta App Catalog. Running on the new Palm webOS™ mobile platform, Pre brings together your important information from where it resides – on your phone, at your work or on the web – into one logical view.⁽¹⁾

WHERE is the ultimate local application for mobile devices. It quickly helps put the people, places and things consumers are looking for at their fingertips. Local content available through WHERE includes everything from the weather, news, and restaurant reviews, to the cheapest gas, movie show times, and the ability to connect with other users on the WHERE Wall™.

Palm Pre is designed to make users’ lives easier by bringing them the people, events and information that they need all in one place. WHERE builds on this unique personalization to provide an exceptionally strong local and social experience to consumers.

”We are thrilled to expand our availability to Palm users with this new and innovative application for the highly anticipated Pre phone”, said Walt Doyle , CEO of uLocate. “Palm has done a great job with webOS, and has allowed us to integrate the features that our consumers love about WHERE with the functions of the device such as calendar and contacts. This integration has helped us deliver a very rich user experience.”

Wireless Industry Partnership-WIP Connector

Involved in the mobile or wireless industry? Are you developing mobile applications and need to connect to like-minded people to stay abreast of developments or simply to share your experiences?

Then the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) is for you-membership is free and you get a monthly WIP Connector newsletter letting you know of upcoming events or developments from member companies.

The flagship event organised by WIP is the WIP Mobile Jam Session, now run both in the US and Europe, as a one-day event bringing developers the latest news and tools to allow them to get to market quicker and innovate more effectively. It has rapidly established itself as one of the leading developer events worldwide in terms of breadth of coverage and reputation.

You can find more details here.

Activities and Tasks Design Guidelines

For our third post in the series of Android UI, we're releasing Activity and Task Design Guidelines. This section of our guidelines aims to help you understand basic concepts of activities and tasks, how they work, and how to enrich the user experience you are creating.

We've packed a lot into this section, which is targeted at designers and developers. You'll see examples that will illustrate how to use our core principles and mechanisms, such as multitasking, activity reuse, intents, and the back stack.

Additionally, we are providing some best practices around our UI patterns such as notifications. For example, we'll show you how to design a notification so that it will take the user to the screen they expect. This behavior needs to be thought out, and doesn't necessarily just happen by default.

With helpful pointers to the API's and this documentation, we look forward to building your understanding of what it means to design and develop an Android UI.