When I first heard about the Nokia Developer Summit in Monaco, I was not sure if his would work out. In the current economical climate I suspected that many cmpanies wouldn't want to spend the money to come here, but I was positively surprised to see this busy event which was sold out.

It was a great event with a lot of interesting presentations, but even more important was the opportunity to connec to wit fellow developer and explore possible busines opportunities. For some things the internet isn't good enough and will certainly never be.

I hope to see all again at the next event whereever that might be.

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And the winner is …

The grand finale of Nokia Developer Summit 2009 began on Wednesday afternoon, when the fruits of round-the-clock coding from developers creating WRT widgets for use on the Nokia N97 came before the judges. "The quality, creativity, and innovation coming from all the developers competing in the Calling All Innovators Hackathon was extraordinary" noted Srikanth Raju, Head of Marketing for Forum Nokia. Of the widgets submitted for evaluation, three were selected as finalists, and one ultimately won the grand prize of 15,000 euros plus 4 weeks of premium placement in the Ovi Store.

The Social Location Widget created by Plusmo, named "Rocket" won the grand prize in the Hackathon competition. The widget originally proposed in the consumer contest presents a mini view of the locations of a user’s friends. Plusmo created that view by extracting information from user’s existing social networks or allowing them to create a new network within the widget environment. Plusmo developers took the concept further. Their application adds information about what a person’s friends are doing, allows a user to gift their friends with virtual goods, including a bouquet of flowers sent during the live demo.

Inova IT won first runner up for their Shoppy widget based on the consumer’s idea for a shopping list. The developer innovated on top of the idea by allowing the consumer to share shopping lists with friends and locating and navigating to shops offering the item for sale.

PavingWays won second runner-up for their Travel Planner. They took the basic concept of a widget that would track a person’s progress through a trip, and added a twitter feed associated with the location of the destination. During the live demo, the destination selected was Monaco, and the Twitter feed was from someone attending Nokia Developer Summit 2009.

Congratulations to the Hackathon winners, and to all the developers invited to compete in this prestigious – and tiring – 24-hour event!

See videos of the three finalists. 

Finally a form of MAP API will be available from Nokia. This is called 'Apps on Maps' and will be based on web technologies. There are not many details available yet, but it was said that it will be available sometime in the middle of this year.

There is a contest at the calling all innovators competition site where you can submit ideas for applications and as a winner you can get early access to this technology and most certainly other intersting prices.

I was looking forward to a C++ API, but I cannot wait to get my hands on that and see how it can be integrated in other applications and WRT widgets.

An event like this would be incomplete and very boring without the most important part, the party! During the two days there are some interesting presentations, but with all the videos uploaded to this webseite, you might argue that it isn't necessary to be here in person. This might have some truth for the presentations, but it doesn't replace the great networking oppotunities in the experience lounge and other areas and most certainly for the party!

As usual, the organizers from Nokia picked a great place, good music and a very delicious dinner. This is the best opportunity to talk to interesting people from all the different areas without any concrete business in mind, and, of course, have a lot of fun. Platforms like Linkedn and Xing are great tools to keep in touch but don't even come close to a party like his, even if you ignore the food, he drinks and the music (which is impossible to do ).

Do you want to be there?

It is about OVI everywhere:

And, of course, it is All About Symbian

This event is mostly about software and the people who create it. in the experienc lounge there are also some great hardware demonstration. The most amazin thing for me are the 3D glasses Cinemizer from the German company Zeiss. They can be connected directly to the phone and make it possible to watch 3D videos using the mobile phone. They have a great animated video which shows off the 3D effects quite impressively.

Beside the 3D capabilities these glasses would also be great to use on a train or a plane. This way you could view the movies with or without 3D you want and get a virtual private space in these crowded environments. 3D movies is the next great step for cinemas and home theaters, so this is the logical extension to take the upcoming 3D movies with you

During yesterday's kenote address, Tero brought to the stage Jeffrey Litvack from the Associated Press to demonstrate his widget for the N97. Two parts of the demo in particular caught my attention. First was the usability. On the N97, widgets can be placed on the home screen of a user's device and present information live, without the user needing to open the app, download data, etc. Jeffrey and his family visitied France during the week before this conference, and they left home before the Swine flu outbreak became known. The first he learned of the outbreak was from the AP widget on his device. I love it when a proto app actually works as designed. You can see his demo in the keynote video Developing for the Era of Social Location.

He also commented that developing the AP widget required only "five weeks from concept to product-quality application." I ran into Jeffrey in the hall this morning before breakfast, and we talked about the development speed. He was as impressed as I was. He told me it's the web-runtime environment that made the development cycle so short. As the general manager for mobile and emerging products at the AP, he's seen a lot of development cycles. We talked about some of the ongoing tweaks that they are handling as the N97 finishes it's beta cycle, but we agreed that if a developer doesn't see changes in the beta product they were invited to build on, they weren't invited early enough.

Here is the widget after it's opened.

Delegates got an update about the Ovi store from Eric John, Director, Head of Product Marketing, Media. The store is accepting content for distribution and will launch the consumer experience in May. Eric noted the store will "allow developers to leverage what they know" while building a next generation consumer experience that is:

• Global: for smartphones and feature phone (Series 40) users
• Location-aware, allowing apps and the app discovery process to be relevant to the immediate surroundings fo the consumer.
• Viral - forward to a friend via SMS, with contacts integration to come.
• Content intake for media brands and application developers via publish to Ovi.

For full details, check out Eric's full presentation

The Nokia N97 SDK Beta was released to the full Forum Nokia community during the Nokia Developer Summit 2009. The new SDK allows developers to explore the new features and APIs offered by the Nokia N97 device. Using the SDK developers can create applications that take advantage of the new home screen publishing, memory management, and compass APIs. The emulator, which has full Nokia N97 device look-and-feel, enables the testing of these new application capabilities as well as home screen widgets.

The all-in-one S60 SDKs for Symbian OS enable application development for devices based on the S60 platform using C++, Open C/C++, Java technology, Web technology and Python (using the Python for S60 SDK plug-in).

I am having the pleasure of attending the first ever Nokia Developer Summit taking place in Monaco this year. Besides that, I am also trying to help Nokia promote the event and the important hapennings and announcements here so that fellow developers who could not join us this time can follow what Nokia is showing us here. So without further ado let us talk about what Nokia and Symbian told us today.

Today was the day of WRT, the Web Run-Time and Symbian Foundation.

Regarding WRT, if you do not know what I am talking about, I can assure you it is one of the most amazing and exciting runtimes I have ever used in my career as a developer. Being a Forum Nokia Champion I was lucky enough to know it first hand during the Nokia Developer Day in London back in late 2007.

So believe me, I advise you to check this short yet informative paper by Forum Nokia called Introducing Web Run-Time.

I will talk more about WRT and its evolution in another post.

Also, they talked about the Symbian Foundation and the way it is impacting and will change the market as we know it today.

The guest keynote called Evolution of Open Mobile Platforms was a great presentation by Lee Williams, Executive Director, Symbian Foundation, and one of his most provocative and brilliant remarks was "An API is open or it is obsolete", one that everybody was talking about after his presentation.

Besides, some great takeaways were the ones showing the advantages of a move such as the one that originated the Symbian Foundation: openness, open platforms (QT, Python), abstraction layers and preservation of investments. He emphasized that in this technology age where competition is fierce "the shortest path to consume wins" and "mobile is the killer application itself", so every business today must take mobilizing its business processes or product offerings into consideration.

At last, it was clear that Symbian Foundation will be independent of any one company.

If you are a developer I advise you to follow the official symbian foundation developer hub on Twitter.

Delegates at the first day of the Nokia Developer Summit gained insight into key drivers of the mobile services market. See the full videos of their presentations.

The Era of Social Location will allow developers to build applications for devices such as the Nokia N97 that intuitively understand where they are, explained Tero Ojanperä, Executive Vice President, Services, Nokia, in his opening keynote. With integrated A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass, the Nokia N97 makes it easy to update social networks automatically with real-time information, giving approved friends the ability to update their status and share their social location as well as related pictures or videos

An API is open or it is obsolete, declared Lee Williams, Executive Director, Symbian Foundationin his address The Evolution of Open Mobile Platforms. Without truly open platforms, the number of steps and the time to market alone will kill the best ideas.

John Faith, Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Operations, MySpace, noted their consumers want to  have narratives around the functionality that is uniquely mobile, and that means leveraging location, presence, and persistence.

Good news for developers coming out of the Nokia Developer Summit today - well, loads of good news, really, but let's take one thing at a time.

Nokia and Aptana announced the latest version of the Nokia WRT Plugin for Aptana Studio, which "lets web developers easily create, package and deploy a whole new range of mobile applications (widgets!) that integrate with the underlying systems and software on a mobile device."

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WRT widgets can easily be installed, and they make use of things like the device's contact list and calendar data, determine the device's location, find landmarks within an area, send and get SMS messages, receive information from a device sensor, such as an accelerometer and more on Nokia S60 5th edition devices including the forthcoming Nokia N97.

eWeek has a good report about the new release online today. More about today's announcements @Nokia Developer Summit available from Nokia Conversations.

Read more about mobilising websites. 

Opening the Nokia Developer Summit 2009, Rob Taylor, Head of Forum Nokia, showed a live demo of a coming service where consumers will be able share video live from their mobile devices. This service is powered by qik, one of the demonstrators in the Experience Lounge. He then shared insight into the technology direction Nokia is taking, and what devices make the most sense to target.

The first five winners of funding from the Open Screen Project were announced in the opening keynote at Nokia Developer Summit 2009 by Tero Ojanperä, Executive Vice President, Services, Nokia. Funds are awared based on specific application ideas. And the idea winners are ...

You could be among the next recipients!

In the Symbian Foundation presentation Lee Williams, said in his presentation that an API in Symbian is either open or it is obsolete. This simple statement in one of the best news at the summit for me. This will open up a lot of new opportunities to ceate more innovative and exciting applications.

As a Forum Nokia Champion I know that the Champios are very important for Forum Nokia but here in Monaco we felt even more welcomed than before.