Over The Air mobile conference 2011

Posted on October 9th, 2011 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I had the pleasure to attend the Over The Air conference this year. It's essentially a free conference over a couple of days where there are speakers during the day who talk about things relating to mobile during the day time and a hackathon during the evening/overnight. In previous years it has been held in universities in London but thy managed to secure Bletechly Park, home of the code breakers that broke the German Enigma code in WW2.

This was my first year and I couldnt attend the beginning sessions on Friday but managed to swing by in the Friday late evening to attempt to partake in the  Hackathon. Unfortunately big fail on my part when I gave up around midnight after trying to hack around the last.fm api to create a silly app idea. Note to self, must not do a full day worth of work followed by drinks before attempting to start a Hackathon! I ended up hanging out with some cool geeks chatting away till the early hours of the morning before realising that the gates was CLOSED! Bad news for me as I had booked a B&B and everyone else was sleeping in bean bags/sofas in Bletechly Park mansion. So I jumped the gate

The Saturday  was alot more successful for me as I managed to go to some rather good talks and had a good old geek out with both developers and non-developers. Some of my highlights:

• Making of the FT Web app - interesting insight on how Andrew Betts talk about how to create a touch optimised HTML5 mobile website. Very interesting points highlighted in terms of cross browser challenges and things such as how to create animation of pages flipping to trying to master text flowing. The result is a product that has a higher number of usage then the native apps.
   
• Mobile payment types from Anthony Hicks, Paypal - There's more payment types offered then I had realised. Good overview on what was on offer.
   
• Mobile Augmented Reality from Frank Angerman, Junaio.com - A presentation on a very interesting mobile AR platform that has a REST API. Shows potential building some very cool mobile apps! It's stuff like this that blows my mind and they give it away for free!
   
• hasblue.com - An Api for sms messages from O2
   
• Twilio - A telephony API service with an api online.
   
• Hackathon - The MAJOR highlight of the day. I saw stuff from someone creating
  • An analogue payphone connected to a locked Android mobile
  • A arcade grabber that was built using lego connected to Pay Pal
  • Phone based audio guide of Bletechley Park
  • Location aware reminder service

All in all pretty damn awesome!!!

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