Picture from Annejan

On january 8th we organised the biggest Android Dev Camp in the world. 250 people participated at the event. During this event we announced a Dev Challenge. Developers had 2,5 weeks time to submit their Android application. In the end we received 22 working Android applications. WHOHHOOOO! We did not expect such a big turnout. I was also a jurymember and saw all the 22 applications. The submitted apps can be categorised in 4 segments: Tools, Loc. based services, Games and Messaging.

Anyway yesterday(Feb. 29th) the winners were announced. All winners got a G1 and will be part of T-Mobile’s advertising campaign around the launch of G1.

1st Prize Metermaid:

Additional prize: Ticket to Silicon Valley

Martin Koel and Alida Roskam

Category: Tool

Usecase: Making parking at parkingmeters easier and quicker.

How does it work: It basically makes composing an SMS for your parkingservice easier by bookmarking.

Uniqueness: Makes use of all existing parkingservices. You can bookmark license plates and locations.

Gigfinder Roeland Landegent and Mark Bekkers:

Mapbased Gigfinder. Uses the GPS function in the phone. Gets gigs from Last.fm. When you find a nice Gig. You can find your way towards it with Google Maps.

Backchannel Eelco Lempsink:

This service blew me away. It uses ZeroConf to set up a wifi chatroom. You just need to enter a name and start chatting in the wifi hotspot you are in. everybody else in the hotspot that has this application open can receives your messages. Eelco just needs to figure out how to position and brand his service

Treasuremytext Paul Stringer:

Tresuremytext saves your sms messages to web automatically. Very handy if you treasure your messages. Watch out that you dont publish your messages accidently on the treasuremytext website. The whole sign-up procedure is still too complicated. Katie was happy with the price

Nukaart Sander Stefann, Arjen Haayman and Max Dammers

Nukaart shows all articles from nu.nl on a map. It has a great graphical user interface. It already an existing on the web ported to Android

Check Android Market on your G1 for the apps.

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While the mobile industry is rapidly growing, most mobiles and services still seem to appeal to, and are targeted, at men. For the market to fully mature - it is about time to reach the ‘other 50%’: female users.

And even though there are many attempts in reaching this target group, most women feel not being taken seriously when mobiles are being marketed with their 58 tech features, but also not with ‘pink phones with fake diamonds‘, let alone ‘ovulation calculators‘.

This might not be surprising if you consider that most mobile conferences and developer teams are focusing on men - and women are almost invisible in this area.

Now is the time to change this and help the market mature. SPRXmobile’s Claire Boonstra has, together with Helen Keegan (technokitten, Beepmarketing) and Maarten den Braber taken the initiatieve to to create a facilitating platform where consumer research and ‘female insights’ can be shared, and where women can explain how they would like to see and experience their mobiles and services.

The platform is created - and input delivered - by women, but is targeted at the entire mobile industry: men and women, manufacturers and service developers, bloggers and journalists, telecom operators, retailers and researchers, marketers and advertisers. And anyone else who feels attracted to this subject.

A kickoff meeting is planned February 5th in Amsterdam, more events in London to be announced soon - working towards an International Conference in Amsterdam on August 17th, 2009.

You can follow and contribute to this initiative on twitter, by subscribing to the meetup - and on the website (to be launched soon).

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If you read our blog you know we like Augmented Reality and are always looking for mobile services that have an relation with the (physical) world. The compass is one of the sensors that will create a complete new era of services. First time we saw the power of the compass is ofcourse the StreetView demo of Google. Later it was Wikitude..

Well the guys that brought us PhonePhight, LastMinute.com Labs, show us a new way how to integrate the compass in mobile services. It is called NRU. Have a look at this great application for Android (only available in the UK). A great graphical innovative and intuitive interface!!

nru (near you) is the latest innovation from lastminute.com’s labs team. Using technology provided by T-Mobile’s G1 running Google’s Android software, lastminute.com can now show you things to do near you, from bars and restaurants to cinemas and cafes.

It does this using the GPS and compass found in T-Mobile’s G1, the only phone on the market to date with these features.

So what do you think about the use of compass information? Will it be big in 2009?

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Adformatie is a magazine mostly for the old world of marketing and advertising on dead trees (coincidentally I built their first website in 1995). They did an Interview with the Voedingscentrum. An organization for ‘beter and healthy eating’ here in Holland.

We helped realize a QR-code campaign for them together with Breed Creative Communications. It was a cool campaign because the Voedingscentrum is the first semi-governmental organization which choose to use QR codes in the national campaign. Click on the image for the whole article.

Too bad they got my name wrong. Its Lens-FitzGerald, not Lens-FritzGerald.

Go scan and do the QR code thing to check out the campaign:

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Every startup needs its swag. What do you think of this design for us when we go out and pitch Zcapes?

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Over at Mobile Industry Review you can find our first pitch of Zcapes. It’s out there. So good to see a dream move toward reality.

They also do a digg style pitch context.

Please vote us on top. You need to Register first.

Thanks Ewan

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Our core business is innovation. Doing new things that we see as promising. Things like Context Services and Augmented Reality that we envision as adding to the world in the future. And making that happen now. Wikitude does that now.

While forging these new paths you get used spearheading them. To be the first in one way or the other. Its part of the kick. But once in a while you see someone way ahead of you. Off in the distance on the same path and with a clearer view. Jyri did that. Verner and Joe too.

This weekend we saw Robert Rice of Neogence in this post.

At Ugotrade, Tish Shute posted an AR overview and an interview with Robert Rice. Go to the source and read it. Print it. Share it. Its long and worth it. It will help you shape your opinion and understand Augmented Reality and Virtual Worlds like SL. You will get a sense of the state of Augmented Reality.

For us this post is great because it is so ahead yet on the same path we are on with Zcapes. Zcapes is at the foothold of Augmented Reality. Zcapes will be a base of content to build your augmented real world. Its a start of something very big. And that big thing is what Robert Rice seems to be building at Neogence: An immersive mobile augmented reality platform with tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus applications. Looking forward to that.

image from Ugotrade

Tip of the hat to Tim Oreilly’s tweet.

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Robert Scoble did an Interview with Sumit Agarwal, product manager for mobile at Google. It provides a good overview of the mobile search services Google provides in the US via Voice or SMS. The simplicity of the services is cool. As well as the integration with the more complicated services.

Hmmmm, maybe SPRXmobile should build a voice interface in a new version of the omroep application so you can find and listen to your shows hands free… You know, for when you are driving… Or am I the only one that listens to video’s on the road?

Seriously, voice interfacing is not being used enough yet and is important on mobile just as mobile games which you can play with just your thumb.

The video is best in the first 15 minutes.

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Well.. This is a big moment for us. We are sharing what zcapes is in detail. The team, the vision behind it and ofcourse the service itself..

The last month we tried to find our words and jargon to explain this completely new mobile service.

Check out the slideshare presentation and let us know what you think.

BEST VIEWED IN FULLSCREEN

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From EFF’s Tim Jones:

Last night, Lawrence Lessig, a close ally and former board member of EFF, chatted with Stephen Colbert about Lessig’s new book Remix, and how America’s broken copyright laws are criminalizing our kids:

Colbert: You say our copyright laws are turning our kids into criminals, because they’re keeping kids from doing all the remixing they want of pre-existing art and copywritten material, right?

Isn’t that like saying that arson laws are turning our kids into pyromaniacs?? They’re breaking the law! You can’t just throw the law out the window!

Lessig: “Totally failed war.” Is that familiar to you?

Colbert: No. No. You’re saying we need a surge?

Lessig: We tried the surge. For ten years we’ve been waging this war. Artists have not gotten any more money, businesses have not gotten any more profit, and our kids have been turned into criminals.

The whole thing is great - watch it!

Colbert also makes his personal stance on remix culture clear:

Colbert: Nobody should take my work and do anything with it that is not approved! Ever ever never ever take anything of mine and remix it! For instance, I will be very angry and possibly litigious if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixes it with some great dance beat. And it starts showing up in clubs across America.

Lessig: Actually, we’re joint copyright owners. I’m ok with that. You can totally remix this. I’m fine with that.

And Mobile will help break this old copyright system. By recording, sharing and remixing everything you want… You will add value.

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