Mobile Miscellany, 30 Jan 2013, A chance for free MWC Tickets, Next Event - Finance - in March

Continuing with a theme of start-up and SME related topics, we move from last month's product focused Demo Night to planning this month's finance focused event. Oh, and read on for more info about how to enter the draw for free tickets to MWC, kindly donated by our lovely friends over at Globo plc.

Demo Night 21 Jan

The snow could not keep the crowds away from last Monday week's demo night and once again we enjoyed hearing from an eclectic mix of start-ups through to more established companies across a wide range of product areas. Naturally the subject of HTML5 vs Native made an early appearance, though pleasingly it formed only a small part of the proceedings! 

Check out the round up from the event at http://www.mobilemonday.org.uk/2013/01/all-about-demo-night.html

Next Event March - Finance for Start Ups and SMEs

We are hoping to run a follow up to our last very popular event on growth opportunities for SMEs and Start-Ups which we ran just over a year ago 
http://www.mobilemonday.org.uk/2011/12/write-up-mobile-monday-28th-november.html. 

Once again John Spindler of Capital Enterprise has kindly agreed to take the chair - and will once again give his inimitable whistle stop tour of what funding and other options there are. We're currently putting together the panel for that and we're also interested in hearing from potential supporters for the event. 

When I say interested, what I actually mean is that we rely on the support of our generous sponsors to stage events and so please do contact us if you're in a position to help!

Free MWC Passes Kindly Donated by Globo plc

Thanks to our lovely friends at Globo plc http://www.globoplc.com we are delighted to be able to offer 10 passes to Mobile World Congress http://www.mobileworldcongress.com, 25th – 28th Feb 2013.  Here’s what you need to do: Explain why you should get a pass in no more than 100 words and send it contact@mobilemonday.org.uk. Winners will be announced 5th Feb.

If you were at Demo night you'd have seen long-standing MoMoLo member Trevor Goldberg present there, here's what they say about their GO!Enterprise product, which he presented:

Globo’s GO!Enterprise, is a  mobility platform, enabling the development, deployment and centralised management of applications running on any device, delivered in a secure containerized environment, ideally suited to the implementation of BYOD strategies, without the need for costly or complex MDM or MAM solutions. The GO!Enterprise Mobile Client can be downloaded from all mainstream app stores and demo access to the server and studio for application development can be requested http://www.goenterpriseserver.com.   

While you are at MWC, Globo plc (www.globoplc.com) will be exhibiting at MWC in Hall 8.1, D49 so pop by and say hello!

10 places available now for The Mobile Academy - April 2013

So, you may have heard us talking about The Mobile Academy, jointly run by Mobile Monday London and University College London. We now have alumni from our programme which ran at the end of last year - seems odd to say alumni, but that's what they are! We were very touched by the wonderful feedback they gave us, and encouraged by this we are delighted to announce another 36-hour evening programme for anyone keen to start or continue their journey in mobile innovation.

Focussing on the practical business, design and technological aspects of developing successful mobile products, services and experiences, this programme is delivered by industry experts – many of whom are members of our Mobile Monday London community.

The waiting list is growing every week and currently sits at just over 100. There are only 65 places available on the programme. In tune with our community ethos we very much want to offer discounted places to individuals, start-ups, those in education and so on. However, we are giving priority to those who are in a position to pay the full course fee of £3,000. You can probably use a calculator as well as I can, but you'll see that that's an absolute bargain at well under £100 per hour of tuition. I don't suppose you have any doubt about the value and quality of the course, but we're very proud of it and you can see what our alumni said about it at themobileacademy.org.uk.

So, we're giving priority to full-price tickets and applications are open now for that. Please contact Julia as soon as you can to reserve your place and/or to talk about broader Mobile Academy sponsorship opportunities. julia@themobileacademy.org.uk

Meanwhile please remember to register your interest on the wait list, we'll be opening registrations for discounted places in March.

That's all for now. Hope to catch you on the 18th.

Jo

All about Demo Night...

Demo Night proved as popular as ever, despite the weather's best attempts to keep people away!

Firstly, our thanks to our event partners ICT KTN . Huge thanks to the demoers and all of those who applied to demo, to our volunteers and to Lauren Maffeo (from AppBeat) for helping with this blog post.  We also want to thank Gerlinde Gniewosz (CEO Founder, Ko-su.com  and Simon Frost (CTO at Six3) for updating us on their progress since demoing last at last year's Demo Night event.   And of course, we thank our wonderful community, who never fail to help the demoers with both supportive and constructive observations at the event and also tweeting using our hashtag #momolo.

Our our brave and wonderful demoers this time around were as follows:

Blue Badge Style – Fiona Jarvis & Kishan Gupta @bluebadgestyle - Guide for the Discerning Less Able
Boss Level – Nick Brown @boss_level - a massively multi-player, multi-platform HTML5 game
Connecthings – Damaris Homo @Connecthings - AdTag platform - allows cities to manage networks of contactless tags (NFC tags & QR codes)
Critical Arc – Glenn Farrant @criticalarc - SafeZone - securing and making safe large open environments
Decibel Technology – Ben Harris @DecibelTech - Mobile Analytics Software
Dennis Publishing – Paul Cooper @dmfcoops - Men's Fitness UK iPad App

Trevor Goldberg of Globo Plc

Globo Plc – Trevor Goldberg @Globoplc - GO!Enterprise - Enterprise mobility
Trademob – Adrienne Gauldie @adriennegauldie - Tech that optimises mobile app advertising for your KPIs
Vyclone – Holly Clarke @vyclone - Social Video Platform
We Choose Fun – Marc Sallent @wechoosefun - Audio Snaps - an app that allows people to take a picture and at the same time record the sound around them
Animal Systems -  Geraint Jones @animalsystems - Chirp, a new platform that lets people share content with sound

Here are a few themes that our volunteer blogger Lauren picked out to give you a flavour of the range that we saw:

1) Multi-Platform is a Must

From iOS to Kindle Fire ... Blue Badge is a good example, with their App now available in Google Play, iTunes for both iPhone and iPad and Blackberry World.  Paul Cooper of Dennis Publishing described their in-house approach to publishing titles like "Men's Health" which they describe as a C.O.P.E. method (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) - "a scalable approach to cross-platform publishing for content to reach everyone".

2) The Importance of Security

More than one app focused on security of some kind. Critical Arc’s SafeZone app addresses "security and safety in large open areas like universities," defining safe zones around areas of threat. Universities are their target market, but following a question about privacy laws, they confirmed that their whereabouts will only be tracked should they open the app. By contrast, service personnel handling time-sensitive scenarios will be consistently tracked to build real-time situational awareness and communicate with fellow responders.

Similarly, Trademob "takes on the mobile frontier,” seeking to alleviate the 22% of accidental and 18% of fraudulent clicks that yield low conversion rates for websites. Their app detects click fraud by analysing site marketing performance, then blacklisting guilty publishers. Apps are often about fun; these seek to fill market gaps by solving security concerns both on and offline.

3) “Rich Experience” Apps

Decibel take the stage

With more than 700,000 live apps available for iOS and Android, having fully original ideas is hard - perhaps there is something around richer experiences - as we saw with Vyclone, which lets users sync, co-create and edit multiple videos of a shared event.  Audio Snaps from We Choose Fun were also going along the same sort of route - they  let you capture pictures alongside sound.  Great question from the audience prompted the point further: “I’m gonna ask the obvious question - why not just use video?”  Presenter Marc Sallent replied "Video tells a story. A picture captures a moment. Add sound, and it will be richer.”  Their demo which featured stills of waterfalls and children alongside corresponding sound, was indeed captivating.

Dan Appelquist blogged about his highlights on the BlueVia blog:

"...HTML5 gaming start-up Boss Level – writing cool browser-based games.

Social mobile video start-up Vyclone live-demoed their application for capturing video from multiple sources and editing it in the cloud at near-real-time. The app is specifically aimed at festivals and events.

Animal Systems presented their innovative new app, Chirp.io, that shares data between handsets using audio – think of it as an audio version of a QR-Code.

One interesting presenter, Barcelona-based We Choose Fun presented an prototype application for combining still image photography with sound capture. Although not immediately intuitive, the result was really interesting – for instance, capturing a street scene along with the ambient noise that goes along with it, creates a new way to experience that scene. The app also apparently combines the audio and image into the same jpeg file. Could it be the next Instagram? The app isn’t live yet but I hope they put it out there because I’d love to experiment with it.

We also heard from two of the companies that presented at last year’s demo night, e-learning company KO-SU  and WAYRA UK Academy  member messaging app Six3 about their continued success. Mobile Monday Demo nights are a great example of the innovation happening in the community right now and I can’t wait for the next one..."

We agree with you Dan, neither can we!