Mobile Portland

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

NOTE: Moved to Tuesday because of Memorial Day

Everyone has heard the stories about the iPhone's App Store and the success some developers are finding selling iPhone applications. What people know less about is Google's Android Market which started allowing people to sell applications in February.

Learn about the similarities and difference between the Android Market and the iPhone App Store. Take a look at what's selling and the opportunities that will come as more Android-based handsets reach the market.

Isaac Potoczny-Jones will share his experience trying to sell applications on the Marketplace, the challenges involved, and where the opportunities lie.

About Isaac

Isaac is a Haskell hacker, cyclist, Android hacker, and employee of Galois, Inc in Portland, OR. He has a few apps on the Android Market and is involved in the OpenIntents project.

The Android Market -- Google's App Store Alternative

Tuesday, May 26th, 6 pm
AboutUs offices
107 SE Washington St., Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214
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Here are the slides and video from last month's Mobile Portland presentation by Elia Freedman. The video is actually from Elia's repeat performance of his presentation the following week at the OTBC. Thanks again to Elia for a great presentation.