Last saturday May the 30th I had the pleasure to be part of the MobileCamp Mexico 2009.  This is the first of this events related to mobile carried on in the country.  There were about 120 developers in the place who enjoyed the time talking about mobile technologies, exchanging experience, gadgets, and even code.  The event was carried out in unconference style, meaning that there is not arranged scheduled beforehand but everything is set the exact same day.

How the idea was born: 

Everything started a couple months ago when I went to the last Barcamp in Queretaro (two hours driving from Mexico) and I met a well recognized developer community called Tequilla Valley (which is nothing related to alcohol).  After I had my own conference about widgets and some networking and relax time we planted the seed of having a barcamp for mobile as the ones taking place in big cities.

About the place: 

One of the most interesting things of the event was the place where it was held.  Close to downtown in Mexico you can find an arqueological place called Tlatelolco.  Beside it there is a center owned by UNAM with wonderful view to the ruins.  We had a couple rooms including one big nicknamed that day as the Hall of Justice just as the Superfriends cartoon.

About the sponsors:

The whole event was possible thanks to those companies/organizations that participated by apportting their economical and human resources.  We had a total of 12 sponsors from different areas of the Mobile Industry. 

We (Forum Nokia) installed a mini experience center (basically a 5800 and N96 connected to two screens)  where developers were able to test the handsets and the different services.  As a funny note I would like to talk about my best customer ... a kid about 7 years old with his father testing all the NGage games ... I bet he went straight to the Nokia Flagship to get one.

In the same way we had stands from several sponsors like the Mexican operator Iusacel (who additionally provided the coffe & cookies), Dell, Palm and some other companies who helped to spread the voice of the event.  I would like to remark this design & Flash company called "Amigo Imaginario" that provided nice tshirts to organizers ... with our twitnames !!!  so cool.

About Tequila Valley:

This developer community composed of developers from all around the contry in all the fields (Web, OpenSource, Mobile, etc) has tought all of us a lesson about how to be in community.  They organize all kind of small and big events almost every week even in some coffe house to talk about technology, share code or in someones appartment just to code together and make good use of other people knowledge. I have also seen other countries trying to adopt the same idea of community ... congratullations to these guys.

About the Conferences:

Being an open event there was a variety of conferences that cover developer platforms in different brands like Nokia, BB, Iphone and also different platforms like SMS & Bluetooth.

What corresponds to me, I had a very active participation with three different conferences along the day: 

 I presented to the dev community how Nokia is encouraging developers to create relevant local content with strategies like CallingAllInnovators, the Open Screen Funding Project and how to market them through relevant channels like the OVI Store.  The fact of having mexican people in the final round of the two most important Forum Nokia contest in the last year is also very encouraging and brought lot of attention.

Then We had a small conference/demonstration session about how to create a widget in only 15 mins using the S60 Aptana Plugin.  Not to my surprise, the developers attending were very receptive and showed a lot of expertise on the area asking very good and deep questions.

To finalize my conferences, we had one more conference/demonstration bringing on the topic of the Qt developer platform.  This was so far one of the topics that brought most of the attention, I had different people gently inviting me to talk in several events about it and even some people from education centers telling me that wanted to put Qt as part of their education programs.  Developers see a big potencial and future with this technology and so do I... and I was even able to show them in 15 minutes how to create a native Qt app using the QT Designer and send it to the phone for on device demonstration. 

Among the other conferences we had people talking about advertising using bluetooth push technology and all the implications to bear in mind, ideas for creating a public SMS network, comments regarding Web 2.0 in mobile phones, how to create FlashLite applications using Adobe Creative Studio (I really liked that animation of a cat made with flash moving his eyes up and down), Mozilla presenting their Mobile Web Browser Fennec in a Nokia N800 tablet and off course, some conferences about creating apps for BB and Iphone.

Closing the event:

that was one of the most entusiastic moments of the day since there were a lot of gifts from the sponsors.  Among that there were caps, USB, a lot of T-shirts and 3 handsets (2 of them Nokia E71).  We decided to make the raffle in a geeky way using random.org ... believe me, it was a lot of fun.

The event was concluded and placing the foothold in this sort of mobile related events in México.  Looking forward to have the second version of it.