Thursday I went to the Web Goes Mobile Seminar in Grimbergen at Salons de Romrée with my partner Miquël Vermeulen and a friend, Dimitri Van Heucke from MobileMinds. We were welcomed with a nice breakfast. At 9 o’clock MobileWeb.be, the host of the event, gave us a quick overview of what would turn out to be a great seminar.

The first speaker was Nanno Palte (from InSites Consulting) who showed us the results of a large survey his company had done to be able to know what is going on today from a mobile point of view. He showed us some interesting figures. Did you know that only 9% uses 3G on a regular basis? That 30% of the owners of a mobile phone buy a new one each year? He also plotted some of the key figures so we got a real good overview of the treats we, as mobile developers, need to work on and which are slowly dying. The basic applications (calendar,…) are still the most sold applications.

Next up was Peter Vandermeersch from the Corelio group, owner of De Standaard (a famous newspaper in Belgium), Het Nieuwsblad (another famous newspaper), Spotter etc. He gave us an insight on how Corelio benefits of the possibilities the mobile market holds. There was a very interesting strategy he showed us which he called the 0-1-7 strategy. Basically it means that you can feed the people with news on different times if you represent that news in a different way. The 0 stands for today, something happens today and gets posted to their mobile sites directly. This type of news is short and straightforward. The 1 stands for the news of yesterday which is being published in the newspaper or on De Standaard or Nieuwsblad websites in a more extended version, still straightforward but we get more side-information. And finally the 7 stands for the way they publish the same news in the weekend-newspaper (Passe-Partout). Where they look at the news from a different angle so people get another insight into that same news. This way the user gets informed in a really great way and is offered with the most complete vision on the facts. They also showed off their mobile sites (made by MobileWeb.be). I’m definitely going to bookmark this on my mobile phone.

After Peter’s talk we got a short coffee break and then got back to the conference room where we listened to Paul Golding, a mobile 2.0 expert who is working for Wireless Wanders at the moment and has worked for many big companies including O2, Motorola. He also writes books about the mobile evolution. Before he started with his talk he snapped a picture from the audience to send it to his kids :). Basically what he told us is that we need to understand that the mobile web isn’t the same as the web we are browsing everyday on our computers. We can’t just make a website for use on desktop computers and expect our customers to watch that same site on their mobile device, it’s not done. We have to create a separate site for our mobile viewers and focus on the user experience, which is very very important. It’s different on a mobile device than it is on a desktop computer. This means that sometimes you have to go for a simple and lightweight site instead of a nice looking but heavier site for mobile use. He was really inspiring and you could see that he loves his work and is driven to help the mobile community.

After P Golding’s motivating talk came a person from MobileWeb.be who showed us what his company exactly does and what they are doing to make the mobile web a better place :).

Last but not least was Marc Vanlerberghe (Google), who showed us some figures based on Google searches. First he showed the number of mobile phones per brand. Than the plotted toe Google searches on top of them weighted with the number of devices per brand. iPhone was on top with like 8 times more searches then the second one. It is and was clear to us that the iPhone has the best mobile browser out there. These figures don’t lie. In my point of view the iPhone has really been a catalysator in the evolution of the mobile web. Other manufacturers are trying to bring the same mobile experience to their device and this is a good thing for the mobile market. He showed us the different applications Google has made for mobile devices and that the technology they created can be used freely. He showed us WikiTude, an example of an application made which used the location-function of Google Maps to give live Wikipedia information from objects the user is watching on his mobile phone through the camera, that was STUNNING, to say the least! Check out this video about WikiTude’s travel guide mode:

Then he talked about Android, which is a good concept to me. It’s OpenSource, so you can just make your own modifications to the Android OS and publish it. They also have an Android Market where they are going to sell their mobile applications. The Android market though is limited, I mean that not everyone can post their applications on there, you have to meet with certain agreements. So in my point of view it isn’t that open. But it’s definitely more open than the Apple AppStore. But I’m looking forward to Android and I want to test it soon!

The seminar closed with a nice lunch (great food!) and some networking, I got in touch with some interesting people who maybe want to partner with us to create our mobile application. It was a great seminar and I’m happy to have been a part of it. Thanks to Dimitri to help me get acquainted with the good way of networking.

That’s it, see you next time

I’m getting fairly excited about the iPhone project I’m working on and I wanted to share it with you all. Me and my project partners are getting closer and closer to determining the final form of the application(s) and it’s functionalities. That is on paper of course. I’ll give out more details about the exact functionalities later on. We are currently presenting a keynote to a couple of interested individuals and companies who could be of great help in the development. But more about that later, as I said before. What I can share with you is a couple of my favourite resources.

RESOURCES (Part 1):

- As I mentioned before, I’m reading this great book by Erica Sadun called “The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, Building Applications With The iPhone SDK”. This book has been a great help to me this far. Well structured, well documented and full of useful recipes and source code. Get it at Amazon, Play.com or Bol.com.

- I found that they give iPhone Developer classes at the university of Stanford. How cool is that? Wish they had classes like that at our school Anyway, they have an online resource site where you can check out source files, class material and more. I have to say it’s quite impressive. See for yourself.

- The iCodeBlog is cool aswell to check out a random tutorial. This dude owns FreshApps.com aswell, a site where you can rate iPhone applications.

I’ll tell you more about other resources along the way.

MOBISTAR AND THE IPHONE

When I heard Mobistar was going provide the iPhone on the Belgian market I was a little pissed, their 3G-network isn’t as good as Proximus’.

When I heard Mobistar was pricing the iPhone at €525 (8GB) and €615 (16GB) I was even more pissed. These prices are far to high in comparison with other countries.

And now Mobistar is offering the iPhone at €99 + a €25 payment each month during 18 months. I’m guessing a lot of impulsive people will jump on this deal but who wants to pay €25 each month without even having some kind of data plan. This is another nasty trick by Mobistar. They’ll probably fool a lot of people. I read about this on Ronny Welter’s blog, I just wanted to post my own opinion about this.

Anyway, this has been written quite fast after my first post about this subject. I guess I’ll never be able to keep up posting at this rate. I hope some of you actually read this, give me some feedback.

Thanx

This is the first in a series of many blogposts about me getting into developing for the iPhone. The iPhone is a very appealing platform, it has a beautiful big screen and a lovely multi-touch interface. I’m not going to go into the advantages of the iPhone because we all now what those are. I was interested in developing for the iPhone as soon as the SDK came out, but why do I really want to get started right now?

The reason for that is quite easy. In school we have this subject called SBP (Small Business Project). It was created to give young people some sense of doing business. Maybe we’ll want to start our own company in a couple of years and this will surely make that process easier. So you have to choose a product of which you think would appeal to a lot of people. Then you have to make sure that your idea looks good on paper (having a good business plan, cost analysis,…). And the last step is to really go out and produce the product.

I (and some fellow students) have the idea of developing an iPhone app. I will tell you more about the functionalities later. The main idea for this application isn’t really new, but we have quite a few tricks up our sleeves to make this application attractive. My job is to create the iPhone app. My partner in crime, Miquël Vermeulen, is going to develop the Windows Mobile version of the app.

How did i get started?

• I downloaded the iPhone SDK from the Apple developer website.
  The SDK is stunning to say the least. It provides you with the all tools you need. It has a very good IDE called XCode, the iPhone Simulator, Instruments (a tool to check the performance of your app so you can quickly see where the app needs some more work) and Interface Builder.
• I bought the book “The iPhone Developer Cookbook” by Erica Sadun.
  This book is very well structured and well documented. It helps you to get started quickly. This book suggests that you have knowledge of Objective C, the main programming language used on the Macintosh platform. I don’t have that knowledge but I’m quite sure my knowledge of Java will get me somewhere.

But it’s not only the development of the app that is going to take some time. We also have to get some people interested in our idea and project because all of this costs money, money we don’t have being poor students. So far it’s been fun to get in touch with all these interesting people. I’m sure I will learn a lot through this project and from these people. This will surely be a very important period in my further career as a developer. That’s it for the first post. Check back later to keep in touch with how things are developing.

Greets

Brecht