Earls Court 2

Last Tuesday, I went to the first day of Apps World 2012, at Earls Court 2. I went along to see what I could find out about the latest Apps and App Technologies, plus also to do some networking.

Event photos from Apps World blog

Here’s my findings, in random order:

  • For Earls Court 2, use West Brompton tube station, which is just across the road. Earls Court tube station is about a 10-15 minute walk instead.
  • I noticed from the floorplan that the guys from BugFinders were there, so I met up with them on Day 2
  • It was the first time I’d heard of AQuA – the App Quality Alliance – which comprises some large companies including AT&T, Orange, Oracle, Samsung and Sony Mobile. They’ve also just launched their Quality App Directory. It all seems targeted at Android Apps, at least initially.
  • Compuware were at the event and on the sponsors list. I didn’t see a stand of theirs, but I did pass a meeting room which had their name on it, which was a bit unusual.
  • I attended several presentations at the Developer Zone. Some of these presentations are now available on the Apps World website, either as Audio and/or Slides downloads. The presentations I saw at the event included:
  • Tizen, which was delivered by Cheng Luo of Samsung. Tizen is a different O/S for mobile phones, using HTML5.
  • RhoMobile, delivered by Adam Blum, Product Manager of RhoMobile, now part of Motorola Solutions. A development platform to enable writing native apps for all platforms, using HTML5, Javascript and Ruby.
  • – GeoLocation Panel – This dealt with integrating location based services (LBS) into your apps. On the panel were people from Hailo, Telmap, runtastic and sensewhere.
  • Your Local M8 – User experience in your LBS mobile app. This was delivered by Shani Avnet, User Experience expert at Telmap, now part of Intel. This went over the LBS features in the M8 iOS App, also covered UI challenges and solutions when dealing with LBS in your App, plus also the potential for integration with other Apps.
  • The Appsters – for best ‘Startup App’ – this was interesting, as several Startup App developers got a few minutes to pitch their new App and try and receive votes via Twitter, for that nights The Appsters Awards. #the_appsters
  • – Among those pitch their Startup Apps were My Guide (Social Travel), Goldstar Savings Bank, Brush DJ (thanks for the free toothbrush by the way!), Soundrop (Enabling social music discovery in Spotify) and Whats This (a photo based game)
As you can see from the above list, there was a lot to see and that was just in the afternoon.