This weekend, a hundred mobile addicts gathered in the Fjord offices in London for the first mobileCampLondon, an event organised by volunteers, headed by Victor Szilagyi and Christian Lindholm. The idea behind BarCamp events is to get people together to share and learn in an open environment. Rather than listening to thinly-veiled sales pitches and being talked at, the emphasis is on collaboration, discussion and demos.

Seeing the developers, designers and creatives get together for the weekend was refreshing. We usually tend to keep the geeks locked in the server room usually, you see, but here they were let out to play, and play they did! While the balance was somewhat in the favour of geekier topics, the talks ranged from techy to social to artistic; Exploiting social network APIs, using RFID on the underground, location-based games and integrating mobile into art – the latter being easier to grasp for my simple mind!

Beyond all the talks, presentations and topics scribbled on the grids, there were random conversations, cozied up in the colourful bean bags area, and the fascinating meeting of ideas.

At the end of the day on Saturday, Terence Eden from Vodafone bravely tackled the seemingly unavoidable topic of the Novarra transcoder and user-agent masking, which has been widely criticised in recent weeks. He gave a very welcome demo and geek perspective, speaking in honest – if not blunt – terms, agreeing that Vodafone has learnt a lot from the firey discussions and experimenting. While I still feel that the user-agent masking is a big mistake, seeing the transcoded results on a much older Nokia phone allowed me to understand how the service might be useful in some conditions.

Overall, mobileCamp led to some unexpected meetings and the conviction that, everyday, more people are taking interest in creating apps, websites and all sorts of wild and wonderful things for mobiles!

[tags]mobile, phone, mobilecamplondon, mobilecamp, london, barcamp, taptu, taptology, technology[/tags]

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Community and social networks, On the Radar. 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.