Innovative Technology Weblog

European event on mobile strategies and App development  - March 7 & 8, 2001

- An impression -

The 7th and 8th of March were an inspiring two days on mobile application strategies and development. The event was held on the Westergasfabriek terrain in Amsterdam. Target audience: C-level management, consultants, developers and enthusiasts. In short a very broad audience indeed. As Daniel Erasmus, the host for the keynote speeches, put it in one slide: Development + Business = Magic

Being a consultant and app-enthusiast myself I had to divide my attention between the DevCamps, entrepreneurs present and keynote speeches.

The trend is clear: Apps are hot! If the word “app” is not present in the dictionary, it should be very soon. A comparison with the first http-wave seems valid: Everyone wants an app. Apps are becoming more and more a personal thing. Where the creation of apps can now be a very costly matter (employing developers etc.), there’s a rise in platforms that let you create apps without any programming skills. Remember the Geocities website building tools? Sure, the output wasn’t always pretty, the code was messy, but it sufficed and look where we are today: anyone can do wordpress, joomla or xoops websites…

The future looks bright for the companies that build lego-like frameworks for dummy app development. It’s time for the %your-(company)name-here% -App to hit the appstore!

I was present on invitation of the IOSDevCamp organization (Dom Sagolla) to increase the magic and take part in the jury. The idea of DevCamp is to combine ideas and developers and build applications in a two-day hackathon: Help each other , Create together and Present to the jury!

The IOS developers present blew us (the jury) away with their ideas, demo’s and prototypes. A very big thanks to all involved for creating a super productive atmosphere! And congratulations to the winners in the various categories. On the risk of not giving credit to all winners, here are a few;

• Distress – for the best prototype and demo
• Ticketeer – for a tie on the best Amsterdam App
• Joris Kluivers – community prize – for organizing IOSDevCamp avant-la-lettre and building a Dutch community

A big thanks to the Municipally of Amsterdam for sponsoring this event and setting up an Amsterdam App challenge, Getronics (my employer) for sponsoring iCE Amsterdam, the people I met for the exciting ideas and inspiration (how’s that star field coming along you guys at ChainrApp?), and last but not least Herman van Bolhuis from iCE Amsterdam for organizing the event and the IOSDevCamp organization for having me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 at 10:37 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.