Programme

Mobilism 2012 is done

We'll be back in 2013

Asymmetric competition

An analysis of the mobile computing market through a disruptive lens. Asymmetric competition, jobs to be done, value chain evolution, competition with non-consumption. How did a few entrants capture the industry profits from entrenched incumbents and what will happen next?

Horace Dediu

Horace Dediu is the founder and author of Asymco.com and an independent analyst and advisor on mobile platform strategy. Horace has over eight years of mobile software and platform analysis and development at Nokia, with over six years of software development management with P&L responsibility.

He is a strategic analyst with a proven track record of achieving/exceeding predictive goals and objectives. Declared “King of Apple Analysts” by Fortune Magazine, he has been a resource for Bloomberg, CNN, The Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes and has been cited over 350,000 times. Asymco.com is followed by tens of thousands of mobile industry observers. In addition, Horace hosts "The Critical Path", one of the most popular technology and business strategy podcasts on iTunes.

Horace has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Tufts University.

The mobile platform world

OK, so in mobile there are about 25 browsers, 20 operators, 15 device vendors (excluding the tiny ones), and 10 operating systems. Do you know your way around all of them?

Especially for people who come from the quiet, reclusive zone that is the desktop web, with only 5 browsers and 3 platforms, the mobile world can be a daunting place where everything happens at once, relations are much more complicated than you expect, and the sheer amount of actors is confusing.

In this session PPK will attempt to bring some order in the chaos by discussing about seven of the most important actors, their relations, and their long-term plans. After this talk you can amaze your friends by explaining why Windows Phone will never amount to much, why Android fragmentation will become only worse, in which way Apple has stolen a march on its competitors, and what Nokia is doing.

PPK

Peter-Paul Koch is a mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He concentrates on Web technologies, mobile websites, and W3C Widgets.

He specialises in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser compatibility. He has won international renown with his browser compatibility research. In 2009 he shifted from traditional desktop browsers and sites to the mobile Web, and he never looked back. He discovered that mobile devices and browsers are in even more need of description than their desktop counterparts, and set himself to the task.

On the Web he is universally known as ppk.

Facing the Future

The web deserves to be the third mobile runtime, but it isn't. What is holding it back? It faces challenges from industry, the standards process, browser implementations, and probably our own short-sightedness.

The web's unnerving ability to disrupt shouldn't be taken for granted. It wants to evolve, but we must encourage that process in order for it to become competitive again.

On a journey from device APIs to standards groups, from test suites to provocative demos, let's figure out how to move the web forward towards a brave mobile future.

James Pearce

James is Head of Mobile Developer Relations at Facebook. He's a developer and writer with a special passion for mobile and exploring its untapped potential.

James' mobile projects include confess.js, WhitherApps, tinySrc, ready.mobi, Device Atlas, and mobiForge. Previously at Sencha, dotMobi, Argogroup and Ernst & Young, he has also written books on the mobile web for Wrox & Wiley. He's easy to find at /jamesgpearce, @jamespearce or http://tripleodeon.com/

Fast Track A

Laurent Hasson — Tricks and hacks for a more native feel in a mobile browser

Most mobile Web developers come from a traditional desktop development background. As such, many are not aware of key differences between desktop browsers and mobile browsers once they are trying to build an app vs a traditional web site, even if adapted for mobile. In this introductory session aimed at desktop developers interested in making the jump to mobile, we will present the technical tricks that are needed to circumvent a mobile browser's own interface (touch and gesture management, viewport and other aspects) to deliver a web app that looks and feels like a native app. We will discuss among other things how to virtualize the browser's own event loop, block swipe and pinch/zoom gestures, pin down the viewport, and a simple trick to build a mobile touch-based app that also works on a desktop browser with mouse events.

Laurent is the Technical Director responsible for driving strategy, architecture, open source and community relationships around RIM's Web Platform. He joined RIM in the Spring 2010 and has been focused on the WebKit browser, WebWorks, Ripple, and recently, experimental projects such as AliceJS. Before that, he was at IBM for 14 years, working on enterprise Web projects such as eCommerce, Web frameworks and tooling, Search and Social Software, and participating in open source strategies in the company. Laurent has been deep in web technologies since the mid 90's and is an avid JavaScript/HTML/CSS, Java and SQL developer for both Desktop and Mobile. He codes and watches at least two movies every day, and he has funny hair.

Greg Schechter & Eugene Goldin — Mobile Meow: Bringing YouTube Videos to a Mobile World

This is the story of the glory and struggle of bringing a high quality YouTube experience to the mobile web. Once upon a time there was a web developer who wanted to play videos on the web. So he filmed a cat and wrote a Flash and a HTML5 player. He spent many hours making it work on his favorite desktop browsers and even the one his grandfather still used. People could watch his cat video, he smiled, and the world was good. Then one day someone put a browser in a phone and soon there were many phones with many different browsers. This new set of environments were even harder to develop for and had a slew of new terrifying bugs. The web developer was miserable knowing people couldn’t watch his cat video. With much time and effort he figured out many of the secrets needed to combat the evils of the different mobile platforms. Once again people could watch his cat vid eo, he smiled, and the world was good. The end.

Greg is a fearless web warrior, fighting for browser and website progress. While training at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, he published articles with the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Subsequently, he went on to battle alongside many different web companies, including Amazon, Yahoo, and Google. His current alliance is with YouTube, where he spearheads the movement for HTML5 video capabilities.

Eugene Goldin is a javascript developer at YouTube. His interests include taking web videos where no video could go before, improving how users interact with web technologies, and long walks on the beach.

Fast Track B

Igor Faletski — Mobifying eCommerce: taking an internet business mobile with client-side adaptation

The Web is powered by countless content management, eCommerce and marketing systems. Client-side adaptation - complemented by responsive, mobile and iPad design - is a powerful technique for launching mobile and iPad web experiences for virtually any website. Using Bonobos, a leading men's retailer, Igor will discuss some of the challenges internet businesses face today and the huge growth opportunity behind extending their web capability to mobile and tablet devices.

Igor is the CEO of Mobify, a mobile platform company focusing on the vision of 'One Web', where integrity of the web is maintained across devices and for all website visitors. Mobify's HTML5 platform - implemented primarily in JavaScript - is powering 20,000+ mobile and iPad websites for customers like Starbucks, Threadless, Wired and Bonobos. Igor holds a B.Sc in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University.

Twitter: @igorskee

Kevin Whinnery — Ending the Web Versus Native Debate

The "web versus native" debate is raging among mobile developers. Build native? You're locking yourself into a (usually closed and proprietary) platform and duplicating effort. Build for the web? You're sacrificing performance and features that benefit users. Like most divisive debates, there's a lot of truth on both sides.

Titanium Mobile is set on squashing this debate by providing developers an open source, extensible platform for building real native apps and rich web apps with a unified JavaScript API.

In this presentation, we will dissect the "web versus native" problem, and see how Titanium is solving cross-platform in a way that sidesteps the underlying issues in this debate. We'll also check out a real, multi-platform Titanium codebase, and learn how to target multiple platforms without falling into the common trap of "write once, suck everywhere". Prior JavaScript knowledge is very helpful to understand the code walkthroughs, but not strictly necessary.

Kevin is an experienced web developer who has spent his entire professional life developing rich client applications and frameworks. Since joining Appcelerator in 2008, Kevin has been involved in the launch and large scale adoption of the Titanium platform by speaking at developer-focused events, providing hands-on training, and developing some of the most complex native apps ever built on the platform.

In addition to his experience with Titanium Mobile, Kevin has developed rich client apps using Adobe Flex, open web technologies in the browser (HTML 5/CSS 3/JavaScript), Silverlight, and WPF, giving him a unique perspective on rich client application development. Kevin lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with his beautiful wife and three devious children.

The Immobile Web

Device diversity is about to get an order of magnitude worse. SmartTVs are hitting the market in mass this year. Sony, LG, Vizio, and Samsung are all shipping televisions with Google TV built in.

And if the rumors that Apple will release a TV this year are true, 2012 will turn out to be the year web developers start to tackle the glass screen hanging on our walls.

Why should web developers focused on mobile learn about the web on TVs? Because TVs represent the next challenge in device proliferation. They share common characteristics with their smaller brethren. They create new challenges and opportunities we haven't encountered yet. And most importantly, learning how to build for TVs helps inform our practices of building for mobile devices.

Jason Grigsby

Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama iPhone Application and helped design the user interface for the Wall Street Journal's BlackBerry application. He is the co-author of Head First Mobile Web.

Jason is a co-founder of Cloud Four, a small start-up focused on mobile and web development and is the founder of Mobile Portland, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating, promoting and supporting the mobile technology community. He blogs at http://CloudFour.com/blog and provides frequent updates about mobile as @grigs on Twitter.

Mobile Apps with JavaScript - There's More Than Web

Modern web technologies and responsive design aim at platform independent code while promising first-class experience on any mobile device. Even though purely web-based approaches can achieve stunning results, they (still) cannot compete with their native counterpart regarding platform features and integration.

In this talk, I will show you how we can use JavaScript to produce mobile apps that include features such as native UI, push notifications, sensors, and paid distribution. You can expect lots of live demos when I will compare the strengths and weaknesses of various frameworks.

Heiko Behrens

Heiko Behrens is a programmer, author, and public speaker with more than a decade of commercial software development, technical writing, and on-stage presentation experience. As an active committer at Eclipse and as an involved participant in numerous other open source projects, he has in-depth experience in a broad range of technologies. His startup BeamApp, still in stealth mode, is focussed on mobile application development, both native cross-platform and web-based.

Mobile browser panel

During this panel representatives of Google, Nokia, Opera, and RIM will discuss problems and solutions in the mobile browser world. The exact topics of the conversation will be decided during the conference itself. For an idea of the broad range of topics that could be discussed, see last year's panel.

The mobile browser panel will once more be moderated by Jeremy Keith.

Andrea Trasatti (Nokia)

Andrea is an old timer of the Web for mobile devices. He currently works for the browser team in Nokia as a Web technologies evangelist, which means he travels around the world talking to developers while drinking wine, sort of. In the past has been active in the open source world as a maintainer of WURFL for 5 years and developer of WordPress and Drupal themes for mobile devices.

Andreas Bovens (Opera)

Andreas heads up Opera Software's Developer Relations & Tools team. The team evangelizes open web standards through publications and conference presentations, helps out and interacts with the web developer community, takes care of product management of developer tools such as Opera Dragonfly, and focuses on solving compatibility issues so sites work well in all Opera products.

In a previous life, Andreas did a master in Japanese studies, researched Japanese copyright law at Meiji and Keio University, and was a product tester and web evangelist at Opera's Tokyo office. He loves espresso, and picks up his banjo from time to time.

Arnaud Weber (Google)

Arnaud Weber is currently managing Chrome for Android. Before rejoining Google in May 2010, Arnaud was a founder and CTO of Ruba, a company funded by Benchmark Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Prior to that, he was a tech lead on the Chrome browser at Google. Before joining Google, he was the Founder and CTO of Redline Software (acquired by Borland in 2002). During that time he invented and took to market the Optimizeit Suite, an award winning performance management platform for Java. Arnaud also held engineering leadership positions at NeXT, Netscape, Sun and AOL. He worked on many high visibility products including Interface Builder, Web Objects, Netscape IFC and Swing. At Netscape/AOL he ran a team of world class engineers to operate massively scalable web properties.

Eli Fidler (Research In Motion)

Eli Fidler works for Research In Motion on the Web Platform team. He is responsible for the architecture of WebKit on BlackBerry platforms.

Formerly with Torch Mobile, Eli has a strong history in the Web and Open Source communities.

Eli is based in Toronto, Canada, but can regularly be found walking the halls of RIM offices shouting "Don't break the Web!"

Moderator: Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith makes websites. He is responsible for the death of the trees used to print the books DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax and most recently, HTML5 For Web Designers. He also shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Originally from Ireland, Jeremy now lives in Brighton, England where he pretends to work with Clearleft. Peas grow there.

Beer-to-beer networking, sponsored by Intel

Did we mention free beers?

Beyond mobile, beyond web

Today's mobile phone is a combination of two aging paradigms: native applications and web browsing. Each is fine on their own but the mixture is actually taking the worst of both. The mobile web has the potential to be a transformative technology, doing so much more than just downloading a web page on a small screen. Native applications, for their part, are a siloed holdover from main frames, forcing the user to manage the discovery, installation, and removal of all functionality.

This is tolerable today because there is relatively little need to manage functionality on your phone. Installing a few apps really isn't that burdensome. However, the plummeting cost of processing and connectivity will change that creating an explosion of smart posters, devices, televisions, and more, all of which will likely require their own 'app'. It just isn't possible to install an app for every store I visit, every product I own, and and every smart thingy I pass in the street. This talk will explore a new approach, combining the best of native and mobile web to create a 'just-in-time' model of functionality.

Scott Jenson

As frog's Creative Director, Scott Jenson was the first member of the User Interface group at Apple in the late 80s, working on System 7, the Apple Human Interface guidelines and the Newton. After that, he was a freelance design consultant for many years, then director of product design for Symbian, and finally managed the mobile UX group at Google for 6 years.

Responsive Design Workflow

In our industry, everything changes quickly, usually for the better. We have more and better tools for creating websites and applications that work across multiple platforms. Oddly enough, design workflow hasn't changed much, and what has changed is often for worse. Through the years, increasing focus on bloated client deliverables has hurt both content and design, often reducing these disciplines to fill-in-the-blank and color-by-numbers exercises, respectively. Old-school workflow is simply not effective on our multiplatform Web.

In this session, Stephen explores at a content-based approach to design workflow which is grounded in our multiplatform reality, not fixed-width Photoshop comps and overproduced wireframes. You'll learn how to avoid being surprised by the realities of multiplatform websites. You'll learn how to better manage client expectations and development requirements. You've probably heard of designing in the browser; in this session you'll learn a practical approach for actually doing it.

Stephen Hay

Stephen has been designing and developing for the web since 1995. He was formerly Creative Director of Cinnamon Interactive, one of the first web design and development firms to successfully combine professional visual design with open web standards and accessibility best practices back when table layout was the norm. He now independently consults with clients on design, multi-platform strategy and accessibility through his new company, Zero Interface.

Stephen has written for A List Apart, NaarVoren and ChangeThis. Aside from his client work, he speaks and writes on the subjects of CSS3 layout, (web) design and accessibility. He sporadically publishes his thoughts at the-haystack.com.

Mobile debugging

Mobile debugging is a bitch. Let's talk about that, and then fix it.

Remy Sharp

Remy is the founder and curator of Full Frontal, the UK based JavaScript conference. He also runs jQuery for Designers, co-authored Introducing HTML5 (adding all the JavaScripty bits) and is one of the curators of HTML5Doctor.com.

Whilst he's not writing articles or running and speaking at conferences, he runs his own development and training company in Brighton called Left Logic. Generally speaking, he's about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter!

PixelPhones

In this fun and down to earth session, Seb will demo his new project "PixelPhones", which turns all the phones into individual pixels on a large audience sized display. We'll also be looking at how we can use this network of phones to bring an audience together, experimenting with multi-player games and toys.

The project runs in a mobile phone browser on Android and iOS, and Seb will be talking through the development process, and exactly how he solved the two main challenges with this project - finding the phones and synchronising them together.

He's been working to improve this project, and we're hoping to run it on a scale that's never been attempted before! There'll be prizes for the games, so make sure your phone is fully charged before you arrive if you want a chance to win.

Seb Lee-Delisle

Seb Lee-Delisle is a creative coder, speaker and teacher, working across platforms including JavaScript, Processing and openFrameworks. He works to bring people together with large scale installations like PixelPhones, interactive firework displays or glow-stick voting systems.

His work has pushed the boundaries of what is possible both on and off the web, and won two BAFTAs with Plug-in Media, the agency he co-founded in 2004.

A sought-after speaker, his recent Creative JavaScript / HTML5 workshop series sold out within hours. He co-hosts the Creative Coding Podcast, his blog can be found at seb.ly and he tweets @seb_ly.

Device/network API panel

This panel discusses how web developers will get access to phone functionality such as the address book and the camera, as well as access to payment systems that tie in with the mobile operator. These APIs are fairly new, and they represent a new kind of functionality that simply wasn't there before, so we're expecting a lively discussion. This panel will be moderated by Jeremy Keith.

Dominique Hazael-Massieux

Dominique Hazael-Massieuxsupervises the development and standardization of Web technologies that are most relevant to mobile devices W3C, and is more particularly in charge of the W3C groups that are developing APIs to access more device capabilities from the Web (camera, addressbook, etc).

He also regularly puts in practice these technologies and guidelines as a developer of a number of sites and applications

Daniel Appelquist

Daniel Appelquist is a mobile and Web industry veteran technologist who has been bringing innovative and disruptive services to market for two decades. He was an early Internet and Web pioneer, and has been a dot-com CTO and later a dot-com refugee. While at Vodafone, he helped to launch Vodafone Live! In the UK and has been instrumental in the development of industry standards initiatives and ventures such as dotMobi, the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, and device APIs such as the W3C Geolocation browser API. He recently completed a two year term on the Technical Architecture Group, the architecture steering board for the W3C. He has been a community instigator, founding MobileMonday London as well as the Mobile 2.0 conference series in San Francisco and the Over the Air hack days in the UK. In his current role as Head of Product Management for BlueVia, Telefónica Digital's developer and network APIs platform, he is working to once again redefine the boundary between Web and Mobile.

Brian LeRoux

Brian LeRoux a free/open source software developer at Adobe, formerly of Nitobi, working on PhoneGap, XUI, Lawnchair and WTFJS.

Application Cache: Douchebag

The Application Cache is one of the cool bits of HTML5, allowing sites to work without a network connection brings us much closer to native app-like behaviour. However, from HTML5 roundup articles and talks you may be left with the impression that it's a magic-bullet fix, unfortunately it isn't, the Application Cache is a douchebag.

I don't mean 'incompetent' or 'difficult', definitely 'douchebag'. The Application Cache has skills we need, but if you asked him to paint your bathroom he'd somehow manage to flood your kitchen and break your TV in the process, and he wouldn't care.

We'll look at how to use the features of Application Cache without the horrible side effects, comparing techniques you'd use for a simple clientside app and a large content-driven site. We'll explore the many gotchas left out of most AppCache articles and how you can build your site to survive them.

Jake Archibald

Jake Archibald is a developer at Lanyrd specialising in client-side stuff, although dabbles in a bit of Django. He built their mobile web app which went for ambitious device support rather than "Webkit only thank-you-please". He's keen on web performance, developing Sprite Cow to help ease the pain of sprite sheets, and started a blog way after blogs stopped being cool.

Outside of the web, he likes the taste of beer, watches Formula One, and likes taking photos of things. He has ambitions to be a fashion designer.

For a Future-Friendly Web

As the digital landscape continues to become more complex, it's essential for us to start thinking beyond the desktop and embrace the unpredictability of the future. Mobile is forcing us to rethink the content we create and the context in which people interact with our products and services. This session will cover how to change our thinking and start acting differently in order to create more future-friendly experiences.

Brad Frost

Brad Frost is a mobile web strategist and front-end designer at R/GA in New York City. He is the creator of Mobile Web Best Practices, a resource site aimed at helping people create great mobile and responsive web experiences. He is also the curator of WTF Mobile Web, which teaches by example what not to do when working with the mobile web. He is passionate about mobile likes to tweet, blog, and speak about it.

Cutting through the crap: The essence of content on the future web

You've likely heard about content a lot lately—content is king, content should flow like water, "Content First!". But what IS content in its basest form? Is it HTML? XML? JSON? Is it human-readable plaintext? And once we have our content, how do we transform it to look wonderful on mobile devices, televisions, regular old computers, refrigerators? Where does content end and platform-specific representation begin? The mobile revolution has shown us that our content management and web publishing technologies are entangled and flawed. The web will continue to be consumed by more and more clients, many of which haven't even occurred to us yet. But by thinking deeply and re-examining the essence of our content, we can help to architect a flexible future for the web.

Lyza Danger Gardner

Lyza Danger Gardner is a dev. She has spent the last 15 years building and breaking web sites in all sorts of capacities, mixing inspirations from sometimes incongruous-seeming disciplines. Since co-founding Portland, Ore.-based mobile web start-up Cloud Four in 2007, Lyza has tortured and thrilled herself with the intricate ins and outs of the myriad devices and browsers now accessing the web globally. She lives and breathes the web.

The new frontier of web development is complex. Lyza seeks ways to make it easier, more fun, and, with hope, future friendly. In partnership with fellow Cloud Four co-founder Jason Grigsby, Lyza is currently nearing the completion(!) of Head First Mobile Web for O'Reilly Publishing.

Resonance: A Mobile Design Ethos

For over 10 years Brian Fling has been designing for mobile apps and devices. In that time he has discovered a variety of techniques and methods not to just create a beautiful visual language, but to create meaningful products that have the power to change people's lives.

In this session, Brian uses the design principles of Dieter Rams, Mies van der Rohe, and Steve Jobs -- as well as his own insights and experience -- to create a simple framework you can use for creating amazing mobile designs.

Brian Fling

Brian Fling is the Founder and Executive Creative Director of pinch/zoom, a mobile design firm based in Seattle. Brian is the author of O'Reilly's Mobile Design and Development and an authority in the field of in mobile user experience. He has recently worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, like The New York Times, HSBC, ADP, BBC, Best Buy, PayPal, Delta and eHarmony, to design and build amazing mobile experiences.