Enlightening debate at the end of the presentations provided further points for thought and discussion. For more information see MoMoMcrs site, as the presentations and info should be appearing on there soon.

This no doubt reflects the rapid growth in mobile over the last 10 years and the recent smart phone explosion. By offering high skilled graduate jobs in the UK, we are bucking the trend where the recession has left graduate jobs otherwise hard to find.

GO’11 was a great opportunity to meet candidates face to face right at the beginning of what can be a long recruitment process. It was also nice to see bright students at an undergraduate level already with some experience of mobile app development. While a good indication of the student’s motivation, this is also thanks to platform manufacturers like Apple and Google making development so accessible, enabling anyone with the ability and interest to put the work in to gain experience that is useful in the paid world of development.

With the low barriers to starting mobile development it keeps the industry on its toes, it really means the strength of any company is in the knowledge and experience of its people.

IJ

Last night was a great night at the Lancashire County Cricket Club, where Apadmi was a finalist in the ‘Young Business of the Year’ category of the MEN Business Awards.  Alistair Campbell presented the awards and gave an interesting speech, based entirely on questions from the audience written down on cards which were handed out pre-dinner.

A big thanks to the team from Apadmi, who took great joy in submitting a whole load of questions in my name!  The best of these was “If you had to choose a man to sleep with, who would it be and why?” !!  Thanks for that one Howard, and to the rest of the team for getting two more questions attributed to me read out!

Well done to Strategic North who were also finalists in our category, and to Hangar Seven who won the category.

A special mention to Tizzy and the ladies at Shaftsburyzen, for organising a great night, and to the lovely lady behind the bar who tried to charge me £29,000, instead of £29.00.

GP

As the day went on, however, it became apparent that we both face similar challenges.  Granted, I don’t usually spend my day cutting and styling hair or trying out new make-up, but beyond that the age-old business issues are all there, with firefighting, sales and profit just a few of the areas we looked at.

I do admire the “Wiggies” as they like to call themselves – they’re hardworking, passionate, clear about what they want to do and have some great shows and accolades behind them.  It was an interesting day – and I’m sure it will be equally interesting when my fellow delegate pays a return visit to Apadmi!

GP

Unfortunately, as it happened, the show was somewhat overshadowed by the unprecedented network outages affecting BlackBerry users. Plenty of column inches, blog-bytes and tweets (including “I hope the ios5 launch falls over, then we can get the headline, BlackBerry and Apple crumble”) have been devoted to discussing the problem itself, RIM’s response to it, and – as is increasingly common – potential litigation coming off the back of it. My overriding thought on the whole thing is how short people’s memories are!  RIM are far from alone in having had a network issue which has blown up in their faces. Amazon had a well-publicised outage themselves in April, and Sony’s PlayStation network not only failed, but was actually compromised for a significant period of time.

The fundamental facts of the situation are that supporting a large network is hard – and things do go wrong occasionally. The issue is always around how well you react, and how quickly you can resolve the situation and it’s fair to say that RIM engineers worked tirelessly around the clock to bring the systems back online.

In any case, the show must go on – and indeed it did. Despite some rather harried looking RIM executives, the show was, as expected, a really positive and interesting event. I presented a couple of pretty-well attended sessions talking about the X-Factor app developed by Apadmi, and it was gratifying to hear from several of the attendees that not only did they like the app and the functionality it offered, but that they could also see the opportunities presented by BBM6 for more intrinsically social applications.

Walking the floor it was great to see, in addition to the usual faces, some new and very interesting offerings including a really clever combined extended-input and ruggedisation solution from Grabba (www.grabba.com) which allows you to turn your BlackBerry into – amongst other things – a POD device for signature collections or a smart-card reader. Also a very interesting secure communications offering from Ericsson, making use of a secure token for encryption over IP conforming to government standards for security.

All in all, despite the bad-press at the time, I think RIM put on a pretty good show and really highlighted the fact that there’s life in the platform yet – and there’s some really interesting innovation going on.

AJF

For more information visit the MoMoMcr site.

As is the norm for me now, I get up each morning, woken by a device he brought to us, the iphone. I found out about his sad passing on one of his devices – my iPad. I then opened up another of his devices, my MacBook Pro to read further.

All of these devices are iconic, statements of design, and tributes to an amazing individual who will be missed from the technology industry, and my thoughts go to his family, in this difficult time for them.

GP

Tony Attard, chairman of the IoD in the North West said that he was ‘extremely impressed with the range of expertise across the region’ – and so was I! The NW and Manchester, particularly, is a great place to be at the moment and it was good to hear host Nicky Campbell so genuinely enthusiastic about his move to Salford next month.

I’m slightly worse for wear today but, at the risk of sounding corny, I still feel like a winner despite not having brought home the trophy.

Last night I was eagerly refreshing BBC News, apple.com and Google Search on my lowly iPhone 3GS.

3GS I hear you cry! Yes, I didn’t upgrade to an iPhone 4 last time because it didn’t seem to hold anything exciting enough for me to change. So I was waiting with baited breath for the new iPhone 5, with features such as NFC (contact-less technology capabilities), some really cool (and useful) integrations.

But I’m not sure I’ll be upgrading this time either. I just don’t see the pull. I think I’ll probably stick with my 3GS, my BB Torch (I will upgrade this to the new Bold), and refresh my Android phone. And I have to admit I feel more than a little disappointed…

For Apple, the negative press has started and the share price has dropped. They’ll recover, of course, but what could have been a fanfare first real outing for Tim Cook was just a little underwhelming.

GP

One of the problems with app stores, other than the Apples, is that not enough people are linking their payment information.  With iTunes, it’s done as part of the process on the pc/mac but, for the Android market place or for BlackBerry AppStore, it’s a job you have to do. Many times on Android I’ve got to the final hurdle and then not entered credit card details.  Going forward I wonder if Google Wallet will help address this for Android?

On the wallet side, this has been going on for a long time; I was involved in some work with mobile wallets as far back as 10 years ago – the big problem has always been the ability to pay in the stores as the terminals didn’t support it and the add-ons were expensive.

But with the launch of services such as Touch and Pay from Barclaycard over the last couple of years, NFC terminals are becoming more commonplace, with McDonalds, Pret, Eat, Co-Op and Subway all included on the list of places that are already set up to take NFC-based payments in the UK.  We just need more widespread Wallet devices.  Orange’s first attempt brings everything together in the UK – but the Tocco isn’t a phone I’ll be buying in exchange for my iPhone / Android / BlackBerry just for a Wallet anytime soon (or ever ).

GP