Mobile Portland

Less than a month has passed since Apple unveiled the iPad and few technology products have spurred more divergent opinions and conversations than this unassuming tablet computer.

Some see the iPad as a tremendous new opportunity for businesses. Others believe the device is doomed to fail. Is it the future of computer human interaction? Or will people find the system too limiting?

To help explore the challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls associated with the iPad, we've put together a panel of experts who will tackle questions like:

• If you currently have an iPhone app, what do you need to consider when making a decision about whether to make an iPad version?
• How will the types of applications on the iPad be different than what we've seen on mobile phones? Will pricing change? Is there more or less opportunity for advertising?
• How does the different form factor change the way applications are designed?
• What does the iPad mean for publishers? Books? Magazines? Newspapers? Does this hint at a way out for the problems media has faced over the last few years?
• How do web sites need to change to support the iPad (or do they)?
• What does the iPad mean for the future of personal computing?

Come join us to learn from the panel and share your own thoughts on this next generation device.

About the Panelists

James Keller, Small Society

James Keller is a digital communications strategist and user experience evangelist at Small Society, a small agency based in Portland with a passion for the iPhone™ platform, dedicated to helping organizations bring great ideas to life. Before joining the Small Society team, James was at Wieden+Kennedy helping the Portland office align client business goals and brand experiences with emerging technologies. Leveraging her extensive knowledge of interaction design, business analysis, campaign analytics, and integrated marketing communications, she has led multiple teams in creating efficient and effective online strategies for top brands such as Coca-Cola, NIKE, Procter & Gamble, Levi’s, LAIKA Studio, Zipcar, and the MTV Networks. She can frequently be seen at conferences speaking on topics such as information architecture, social media, and convergent culture.

Jon Maroney, Handmark

Jon is the Senior Vice President of Mobile Publishing at Handmark where he helps set product direction and works with publishers bring their content to mobile devices. Jon was one of the co-founders of Freerange Communications which was acquired by Handmark in 2009. Jon spent 12 years in the software industry, running marketing and product marketing at Extensis, a maker of software for graphic professionals and publishers (Suitcase and Portfolio), and as Director of Product Marketing and Channel Sales at Dantz Development, maker of backup software Retrospect. Jon is a member of the Board of Directors of Beam Dynamics. He has a BA from Boston University.

Chris Skaggs, Code-Monkeys & Soma Games

Chris Skaggs is the CTO and CCO of both Code-Monkeys and Soma Games. With a long history in web development, Chris created Soma Games in late 2008 when the iPhone started making history and shortly afterwards reformed Code-Monkeys to focus on the suddenly booming mobile market. A graduate of George Fox University and an avid gamer, Chris looks forward to the unique applications mobile development has for the future.

Dave Shanley, CrowdCompass

For ten years and across seven countries, Dave has led development teams in creating and delivering powerful enterprise mobile solutions for large international companies including BP, GM, Vestas, and UPS. Currently, Dave is working on the next generation social mobile event platform at CrowdCompass.

Raven Zachary, Small Society

Raven Zachary is President of Small Society, working with big brands, established companies, investors, and startups on iPhone strategy and product development. Raven directed the Obama '08 for iPhone application for the Obama Campaign, and has worked with companies such as Whole Foods Market, Zipcar, CLIF BAR, and Air New Zealand on iPhone application initiatives. He is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp, a not-for-profit iPhone developer conference. Raven is also a Contributing Analyst with The 451 Group, an IT industry analyst firm and works closely with O'Reilly Media on iPhone and mobile technology related events and coverage. He is regularly quoted by the press about the iPhone market and is a frequent conference speaker on the topic.

The iPad: An Early Look at Apple's Latest Innovation

Monday, February 22nd, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

Imagine being able to use your phone to see what that IKEA couch you've been considering will look like in your living room.

A far-fetched science fiction scenario? No, IKEA has already released an application like that in Europe.

Augmented reality is an exciting and emerging technology. Augmented reality take real life information--typically the video display of a phone--and overlays it with computer information. Augmented reality is something that is completely unique to mobile.

This month at Mobile Portland, we're lucky to have two speakers who are early innovators in augmented reality. P. Mark Anderson is the platform architect for Spot Metrix which provides an augmented reality library for iPhone called 3DAR. Tim Sears created Robotvision, one of the first augmented reality applications for iPhone.

Mark and Tim will share how people are using augmented reality, their experiences using augmented reality, and what the future holds for this new technology.

About the Speakers

P. Mark Anderson

P. Mark Anderson has 13 years experience developing interactive applications.  After receiving a degree in Computer Science from University of Colorado in 1999 he started his career as a developer for Sun Microsystems.

In addition to creating several iPhone applications, Mr. Anderson moderates the Helpful iPhone Utilities open source project, as well as My Maps, an augmented reality iPhone app built on top of Google's personalized mapping system.

Mr. Anderson is platform architect for the 3DAR augmented reality SDK.  He enjoys working with both artists and developers, and occupies his spare time with watercolor painting, mountain biking, disc golf and mentoring.

Tim Sears

Tim Sears is a software engineer who works for PR firm Waggener Edstrom by day building web applications, by night creating location-based augmented reality experiences for the iPhone. He created Robotvision, a popular augmented reality browser, for the iPhone in 2009 and currently works with clients to build out mobile geolocation experiences in augmented reality.

His work in augmented reality and social media analytics has been featured in major publications such as ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and CNET, and has won several awards, including the International Business Awards Best New Product/Service of 2009 for twendz, a real-time Twitter sentiment analysis application.

Augmented Reality

Monday, January 25th, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

Join us on for our final meeting of 2009 on a special day of the week featuring a presentation from the Minnesota-based founder of Mobile Orchard on how to run a successful iPhone business.

As developers, we bring a certain set of skills, biases and preferences to business.  These act as a double edged sword; we make great business people when we play to our strengths; we fail when we try to be something we're not.

There are sweet-spots in the iPhone market that will sustain, on a continual basis small, developer run, 1-3 person iPhone companies.

This is a talk about identifying those market opportunities.   This talk is about capitalizing on them in a way that plays to our strengths and mitigates our weaknesses.  This talk is about the choices we make when we start our own developer run iPhone businesses.  Topics include:

• Choosing the type of business: are your customers iPhone consumers, companies that need iPhone apps, or other iPhone developers?
• Data-informed app price and product-category strategy.
• Marketing from code.
• Contract wages and the $10,000 problem.

About Dan Grigsby

Dan runs Mobile Orchard, the #1 iPhone development podcast and community site.  As the rare programmer/business type guy, he's as happy running marketing hacks as he is hacking iPhone code.  He's happiest giving talks that incorporate elements of both, so speaking about developer-run iPhone businesses is pretty much the rapture.  Previously, Dan founded/ran startups, including one that was acquired by Microsoft and another that was the only-ever successful competitor to PayPal.

Dan is visiting Portland to teach a two-day Beginning iPhone Development class.

Warm, Clothed, and Fed—Developer run iPhone businesses

Thursday, November 12th, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

As demand for iPhone applications grows outside the United States, so too has the need for localization. Join us Aaron Schliem from Glyph Language Services as he maps out the successful localization of Appigo’s “Todo” application.

Get a front row seat for the whole ride — target market strategy, internationalization for iPhone OS/Objective-C, localization tools and engineering, translation strategy, and iTunes App Store Top Ten results

About Aaron Schliem

After completing degrees in international relations and molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin, Aaron Schliem set off for Chile, where he began his first language company with a focus on writing and editing scientific journal submissions for Chilean scientists and on developing unconventional language learning plans for motivated professionals.

Upon his return to the United States, all roads led to Seattle where Aaron joined two linguists and a software developer to launch Glyph Language Services in 2001. As CEO, Aaron drives Glyph’s strategic vision that is oriented toward mobile application localization, social games localization, and specialized terminology consulting and data development (MT-oriented dictionaries plus metadata).

Glyph has emerged as an industry leader in mobile localization, having most recently given a practical training on iPhone app localization at the localization industries flagship event, Localization World.

iPhone App Localization — Practical Advice for Successful Global Applications

Monday, October 26th, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

On September 25th, iPhone users will finally have access to MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) allowing users to send and receive photos, video, and audio files. What new opportunities are available now that this service is available?

When Barack Obama decided to announce his Vice-Presidential candidate via text message to his supporters, many Americans were surprised. SMS and MMS are often overlooked in the United States.

Photo by Cazimiro licensed under Creative Commons.

In 2007, SMS/MMS accounted for $100 billion in revenue worldwide. That is more than Hollywood box office receipts, dvd sales and rentals, video game industry revenue, and music industry revenue all combined. BMW Germany turned a $70k MMS campaign into $45 million in revenue.

SMS and MMS are big businesses right now and the focus on them is likely to increase now that the iPhone gains access to MMS.

How will usage of the iPhone change with this capability? How can businesses utilize SMS and MMS as part of their marketing efforts? How can developers incorporate SMS or MMS in their applications?

At Mobile Portland this month, Jonathon Karon will provide a brief introduction to the technology and explore the opportunities and challenges associated with SMS, MMS and short codes.

About Jonathon Karon

Jonathan began his long term relationship with mobile platforms in 1997 while developing location-aware mobile collaboration applications for the US government.  After a brief departure into the world of immersive video games he resurfaced to co-found Animus Rex, a web and interactive agency where he served as technical director for 6 years.

Envious of the Pacific Northwest lifestyle, he departed for Portland Oregon where he co-founded Higher Function in 2006. There he invented pioneering social networking infrastructure and developed the first SMS-based Business To Social® platform, Pincushion, which provides full lifecycle customer communication and CRM to virtually any cell phone in the world.

Jonathan currently serves as the Higher Function CEO and provides product consulting services focusing on SMS, smart phone, and web application design, user experience, and implementation.

SMS, MMS & Short Codes

Monday, September 28th, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

Join us for a special presentation from the Vancouver, B.C. based PhoneGap developers. Don't miss this opportunity to learn about building cross-platform mobile applications.

Want to build device neutral mobile web apps with HTML and JavaScript?

PhoneGap makes building iPhone and Android applications a snap with regular HTML, CSS and JavaScript. XUI is a nifty JavaScript microframework designed for building mobile web applications.

If you're a developer who doesn’t want to take the time and effort to learn the Objective-C programming language to build iPhone or other mobile applications, you’ll discover how to create mobile applications with HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of native device features, like GSP, accelerometer and local storage, etc.

1. Which development options are available for building mobile apps, particularly for the iPhone.
2. How to use the open source PhoneGap framework and XUI to build mobile applications in JavaScript and HTML and deploy them to the app store.
3. How to create a single codebase that works with iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

Avoid the heresy of Objective-C or Java and return to the sanity of the open web. In this presentation, Brian LeRoux guides you through the creation of a mobile web application that is app store ready, and will discuss future platforms for PhoneGap and XUI.

About Brian

Co-creator of XUI and contributor to the open source PhoneGap project, Brian LeRoux believes that the future of the Internet is mobile and will rely on web standards, open source and developers like you. Brian works at Nitobi Software, a leader in user experience and all things JavaScript.

Phone Gap: Using Web Technology to Build Cross Platform Mobile Apps

Monday, August 24nd, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

Can an open source Linux platform deliver a unique experience for users in the mobile space? The community working on Moblin hopes to make this a reality.

In this brief introduction to Moblin, we'll cover what the software stack and underlying technologies look like, give a demo of the Netbook Beta release, talk about where some of the development is going, and how developers and users can get involved.

We would also like your feedback on the tools you need to develop applications for this platform.

If you would like to learn more about what Moblin is and how it fits within the mobile world, join us.

About the Speakers

Bob Spencer works at the Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) at Intel as a software developer. He is focused on working with the Linux Foundation developing the compliance specs for Moblin.

Mike Shaver also works at the OSTC and is focused on building out the web infrastructure and community for Moblin.

Paul Cooper is located at the London office of OSTC and manages a team of Moblin developers working on the user experience functionality.

Moblin: Open Source Software for Mobile Internet Devices and Netbooks

Monday, July 27nd, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

UPDATE: Jer (@nyquildotorg) filmed the presentation and posted it to YouTube. Embedded video after the jump.

Thanks to Di-Ann and Jason for a fascinating presentation on mobile, maps and location. It's amazing how despite all of our technology, that you "still can’t find good organic tacos, nearby, on-demand." The presentation really helped illuminate how difficult it is to answer questions like that.

For those who missed it or those who wanted to review what they saw, here are the slides:

Thanks again to Di-Ann and Jason for presenting.

What happens when everyone has devices in their pockets that know where they are and can display engaging maps? That's exactly what innovative company Platial has been exploring since 2005.

Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor and VP of Product Jason WIlson will talk about mobile mapping at Mobile Portland's June Meeting. Di-Ann's description of their topic was so good that we're quoting it verbatim:

My daughter's school has an activity called "junkbox", where you make stuff based on whatever scraps you find in a box of reused components and objects.

Because both maps and mobile are in rapid iterative development, mobile maps developers have been in a constant state of junkbox; we've gleaned scraps of location data, bits of APIs, and grasped at revenue models but there haven't been enough of the right elements to make something truly wonderful.

This helps explain why a few services like Loopt, Platial Nearby and Whhrl have seen some success but nothing on the scale of Twitter or Facebook.

On Friday, our box was endowed with a shiny new item; location-aware web browsing at least for iPhone, and with it, Map Kit and new payment models.

Now, web developers will be able to create location-based apps for iPhone, drastically increasing the number of services which can integrate location.

This, in addition to recent releases of geodata APIs and location APIs bring the vision of mobile mapping to reality almost surely leading to augmented reality, truly social maps serving a global purpose, better filtered & analyzed content.

Platial Nearby is directing all of this toward specific contextual location filters. We'll talk about this and show some examples of what we're making now.

About Di-Ann & Jason

Di-Ann Eisnor is CEO and Co-founder of Platial, The People's Atlas, a widely used social mapping platform for the web and iPhone. Di-Ann is working toward using social mapping for cultural diplomacy across the globe through community engagement.

Jason WIlson is VP Product and Co-founder of Platial. He focuses on the UI and product direction across all of the Platial properties with an emphasis on web services and iPhone.

About Platial

Platial, The People's Guide to Who and What's Nearby, is a free resource where people around the world share and discover all kinds of Places. Platial was founded to connect people globally by making everywhere more accessible.

Social mapping can illustrate a post geo-political picture of the world that allows people with shared interests to leap geographic boundaries. The network of Platial maps, including Frappr, which we acquired in 2007 is distributed on over 500,000 sites a month and on the iPhone to over 350,000 users.

Platial has contributed over 300 Million geographically referenced pieces of media including photo, video, stories, people to the Geospatial web at large. Platial is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sherpalo Ventures and KeyNote Ventures and Omidyar Network among others.

Maps and Mobile: A Rapidly Changing Landscape

Monday, June 22nd, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
RSVP | Map | Add to your Calendar

Isaac Potoczny-Jones posted his slides from last month's discussion about the Android market. You can find them at his web site.. They are also posted on slideshare and embedded below along with Isaac's Ignite Portland presentation.