As one of the first initiatives from Ovi towards developers, we have kicked off a competition as part of Forum Nokia's Calling All Innovators contest. The Apps on Maps category was opened last week at Monaco, at the first Nokia Developer Summit. We have already seen some very interesting ideas.

We are keen to hear what type of content would you like to see on Maps. Also, working with you to implement those ideas. As much as we want to work with all of you, to ensure good quality maps applications, we will work with top 10 ideas for a start. These top 10 developers will get the tools to work with us to develop their ideas further. The completed apps will get premium placement at Ovi Store for distribution. The best 3 apps will win cash prizes and get showcased in a Nokia Global event later this year.

For the remaining ideas, you will hear from us later on how to continue to develop your ideas for distribution at Ovi Store to reach millions of Nokia consumers. This is a good opportunity for you to start thinking about building a cool Maps Applications or add context aware features to your existing web content.

So, let us hear your big idea at www.callingallinnovators.com/appsonmaps

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In this Nokia Developer Summit podcast, Forum Nokia's Kevin Sharp speaks with Michael Halbherr, Vice President of Social Location at Nokia, and gets his thoughts about the future of Social Location.

Halbherr also discusses the new "Apps on Maps" category of the Calling All Innovators contest.

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In this Nokia Developer Summit podcast, Forum Nokia's Kevin Sharp talks with Bill Perry, Senior Services Marketing Manager with Forum Nokia to discuss Ovi Store, as well as additional information for Ovi Publishers.

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Finalmente estou tendo tempo para escrever sobre a nossa aventura no Nokia Developer Summit 2009 e participação no Hackathon, uma maratona de programação, que este ano aconteceu no principado de Monaco. Tudo aconteceu muito rápido, a i2tecnologia estava de mudança para um novo escritório em Boa Viagem, e alguns projetos estavam requerendo uma atenção extra.

Eu e o Luciano, meu sócio na i2, tivemos alguns problemas com a compra da passagem para Nice na França, por alguns momentos cogitamos em não participar do evento. Desistir era uma possibilidade que logo foi deixada de lado mediante a dimensão do evento produzido pela Nokia.

Eu não conseguiria resumir o evento nem em mil palavras, foi a minha primeira experiência fora do Brasil e com certeza inesquecível, centenas de grandes desenvolvedores e entusiastas de vários países estavam lá. O Mark Wilcox, autor de vários livros sobre desenvolvimento Symbian e um dos autores dos artigos de programação multi-linguagem que escrevi para a fundação Symbian, o Faisal Iqbal (mais conhecido como Chall3ng3r) autor do software de empacotamento de SWF (SWF2GO), o próprio Daniel Rocha da Nokia, um líder nato e grande companheiro dos Brasileiros, Juarez Junior, Forum Nokia Champion que nos acompanhou nas nossas idas e vindas a Cannes e se tornou um grande amigo, e vários outros desenvolvedores.

Infelizmente não tive tempo suficiente para bater papo com todos eles, nosso software de busca de postos de gasolina mais próximos precisava ser desenvolvido para julgamento na quarta-feira por um comissão de 4 jurados, eu realmente queria fazer o melhor dentro da nossa capacidade.

Eu e Luciano passamos quase 72 horas sem dormir para melhor representar nossa empresa e o nosso país, naquele momento o dinheiro nada valia, e o nosso coração batia forte quando os minutos se aproximavam do fim do evento.

Encontramos alguns problemas durante o desenvolvimento do nosso WRT Widget, nossa ferramenta de SVN simplesmente parou de funcionar, nosso widget também parou de funcionar, nessa hora bateu o desespero total, passamos quase 3 horas procurando o erro, alguns caracteres foram inseridos durante o "commit" dos arquivos. Ufa, conseguimos resolver a tempo.

Para nossa felicidade tudo deu certo e conseguimos entregar o software dentro do prazo. Agora que estamos de volta ao Brasil, o que resta é saudade dos amigos que ficaram por lá, das aventuras no trem e no ônibus onde quase embarcamos sem os bilhetes, da beleza indescritível de Monaco, Cannes e Nice, que um dia creio que voltarei lá!

I previously introduced a reinterpretation of the geo-wand concept we called Point’n’Seek along with its ability to create directional photographs to enable a mobile user generated streetview. The video that follows shows a version we were asked to demo for potentially supporting the Fire Service at an incident to locate things such as fire hydrants. As the video shows in other respects it has the same Flashlight search as previous using the magnetometer (digital compass) for direction and the accelerometer for distance to allow a physical pointing control.

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.

i

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.