And we’ll start by the results of the Democamp!

Thanks a lot to all 28 participants and to our judges!

Winners:

#1 Whisk

#2 Atooma

#3 Testdroid

Special mention: Phone Wars , Screenreader

Judges:

Jason Ball Qualcomm Ventures
Rainer Horn MOBICAP
Sid Thekkepat M8 Capital
Raj Ramanandi #1Seed
Ed Lea, Julian carter EC1 Capital
Sitar Teli Connect Ventures
Michel Sabatier Crelligo
Sean Keane Springboard Mobile
Bonivento Alvise Atalante Ventures

Participants:

AppNearMe
Atooma
Blue Butterfly
Chromativity
Cooklet
Equal Eyes
ExpertMakers
Big Fat Soft-Key™
Franklin Frog
Hoverkey
Joyn
Loopme
Movellas
Palerta
Phone Wars
Qdini
Quickblox
Quit for Treats
Screenreader
Secret DJ
Starting Blocks
Stop search
Sukey
Tawkon
Testdroid
Tonepush
Touchnote
Warrantify
Whisk

The post Democamp results appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

1. Get an account on Stack Exchange dot com
2. Make sure to put UK in the location field of their Android.SE user page. (Sorry, only UK users can apply to this contest)
   
3. Post answers, ask questions, and gain points in Android.se!
4. Gain as many points as you can from October 29, 12:00am to November 2, 5:00pm (GMT)
5. The user with the highest # of points during that time frame wins! We will mail out the device to a UK address.
6. *bonus* Be sure to check out the Careers 2.0. It’s not part of the contest, but it’ll sure be worth your while.

Yes, it’s that easy, what are you waiting for?

The post Stack Exchange Challenge is Back! appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

We’ll post a lot of the presentation’s videos on line in the next few days!!

And if you liked it so much that you’d like to come back next year… here’s a discount code for you!

Just visit: http://skillsmatter.com/event/os-mobile-server/droidcon-london-2013

The post 50 tickets for 50£ for Droidcon 2013 appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

Watch the announcement here by Kieron–Scott Woodhouse and Jerry Lao.

The post ADzero Announced at droidcon London appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

But it’s also about great toys to win!!! Obviously that’s on top of the food, drinks, stickers, tee shirts that are part of  the “Droidcon package”!!! And on top of all the swag that will be “literally” flying around!

Here’s a sneak preview at our give-away stash!

The post The give-away stash stands at 48 devices appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

Droidcon London has a special place in the Testdroid story that has already now become a raving success. It was just a year ago in Droidcon London where we first announced plans for creating a cloud service focused on automating testing of Android applications on real Android devices. To demo our plans we had a case of 12 devices running hundreds of tests during the two days of Droidcon and hundreds of interested developers signed up for the invitation of our private beta. Now one year, 150 devices and thousands of users later we can safely say that we did not anticipate even in our wildest dreams how strong the demand for such service would be.

In the past year Testdroid has developed in leaps and bounds. We estimate that we now cover over 80% of the most popular Android devices. The stability and performance of the service is on very high level and we have introduced a list of more enterprise focused features such as testing on any device language, detailed performance monitoring and mock location support for location based apps. We have also introduced support for testing of HTML based apps as well as hybrid apps containing native and webview elements.

We are now focusing providing more and more value through fully automated test creation and this year we are proud to announce Testdroid App Crawler at Droidcon London.
Testdroid App Crawler is a revolutionary way to automatically test your Android application on hundreds of real Android devices without any scripting or manual interaction.
With its intelligent algorithms Testdroid App Crawler can even log in to your app, fill any text or number field with data and it works even with hybrid apps containing web views. As a result you get a graphical representation of App Crawler’s path through the application complete with sceenshots, logs and performance data. You can forget using the Monkey exerciser – Android testing will never be the same! Check out the Testdroid App Crawler demo video.

Another big announcement this year is that in the coming months Testdroid will be expanding beyond Android and the next stop on that journey is iOS. Over the past year Apple has done such a great work on introducing new mobile devices and OS versions in accelerating speed that many of our users are desperately calling for help on automating their iOS testing on real iOS devices – on all of them in one go. Having the experience and expertise from building highly scalable test automation platforms, our engineers were well positioned to crack that nut as well. We will be rolling out our iOS solution first as an in-house test server that our customers can use to automate their iOS app testing with the devices they already have and by the end of the year we aim have every iOS device on every relevant OS version available in Testdroid Cloud.

With these exciting announcements we would like to thank the whole Droidcon community for the great interest and support we have received and we can assure you that we will keep pushing the envelope for easier, faster and better testing of mobile apps. Watch this space!

Best regards,
Testdroid Team

The post Guest Blog: Special Announcement from Jouko Kaasila of Testdroid appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

“It is almost impossible for us to be on Android,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, in his recent interview with the Wall Street Journal . A highly competitive set of applications just asking to be used by the Android users as a preinstalled package on their devices was effectively unable to reach the market firmly occupied by the standard Android distribution schemes. So, we quit trying and built our own alternative application distribution system for Android smartphones and tablets, Yandex.Store. It launched a couple of weeks ago with 40,000 apps under the belt on the launch day.

Yandex.Store is the last building block in Yandex’s mobile ecosystem and an alternative store for those manufacturers who can’t or don’t want to offer Google Play on their devices. With last year’s acquisition of SPB Shell, which provided an alternative user interface for Android, Yandex completed its collection of solutions essential for any modern Android device, including the search application Yandex.Search, the email app Yandex.Mail and the cloud-based file storage service Yandex.Disk, among others.

There are already three device manufacturers – 3Q, Texet and Pocketbook – that will soon ship out their gadgets with Yandex.Store as a default app store, and one of the biggest Russian mobile carriers, MegaFon, will be using Yandex.Store as a white-label solution to launch their own app store.

For developers, Yandex.Store offers a 70/30 revenue-share model, similar to other solutions on the market, but with an added advantage of the access to millions of Android devices already sold in Russia. This number increased four times from the last year to 4.7 million, and is expected to at least double over the next year. The Yandex.Store app store is available to all developers all over the world.

“We want life for the developers using our Yandex.Store as easy as possible”, says Alexander Zverev, head of Yandex.Store. “It takes only 5 minutes to publish an app. We made it easy for developers all over the to receive payments for their apps”. The developer console is already available at developer.yandex.com. The app store for end users is about to be launched in the coming weeks.

As someone who has about 20 apps for Android successfully competing on the market, we know what it takes to build an app and maintain it in a number of app stores. Listing your app in more than one store does increase your revenue, but it still can be quite a headache. Different APIs and different billing methods increase the amount of code you need to manage.

We will love to share our experience of how we manage our numerous brilliant Yandex apps in multiple stores at the session about coping with the difficulties of building apps for multiple app stores. Our speakers will talk about and show the techniques that make publishing apps to multiple stores much easier.

And of course, we are always happy to talk about Yandex.Store at our stand.

The post Guest Blog: Meet Yandex, Russia’s leading search provider, at Droidcon London! appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

We caught up with Julian Harris from Qualcomm to find out what’s happening at Droidcon and why you need to catch up with them. 

What are you looking forward to most about Droidcon London?

The opportunity to meet the people who are actually conceiving, designing and developing applications. People who are writing the code. They’re the ones who can really take advantage of the SDKs we’re publishing.

It will be 5 years in November since Android was announced. What do you think is the most significant moment in those 5 years?

The growth of the number of apps on Google Play, and the number of Android phones in use. It’s also surprised me that consumers are talking about Android, where once they would never have referred to an operating system on a phone. There seems to be an emotional bond with the OS as well as the design.

What is your favorite Android app and why?

Not unique to Android but the home screen on my HTC OneS has amongst other apps Google Maps. The amount of time I spend visiting developers in central London I wouldn’t stand a chance of finding their offices without it. It’s next to Facebook, BBC iPlayer and Swivel Gun Deluxe, which my 4.5 year old son simply loves playing.

One of the things you are talking about at Droidcon is Augmented Reality, What is the coolest use of AR you have seen this year?

I’m biased, of course, having been heavily involved in the production of James May’s Science Stories. I’d have to say Swivel Gun Deluxe, too, because like I say my son loves playing it, but there are so many others I really couldn’t say just one. I guess that’s the most exciting thing about AR. There are so many apps out there now I can’t choose the best. There’s a great list on the Vuforia page on our QDevNet website that you should check out.

Why should developers take a look at Vuforia, your Augmented Reality SDK?

Vuforia was designed to help developers to easily incorporate augmented reality into their apps to create really exceptional experiences. Vuforia runs across OS platforms and, because it was developed by Qualcomm, provides the deep system knowledge, such as integrating GPS, high-end camera and computer vision, advanced graphics, video and audio codecs, which is really critical to success in advanced AR applications.

What is Qualcomm’s vision for the future of AR?

Qualcomm sees many uses for Augmented Reality, from gaming and graphics to brand engagement and retail. The success of brands using Vuforia, such as Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid brand “Magic Vision” AR app, has proven that AR can be profitable for developers and marketers.  Additionally, Vuforia’s new cloud-based image recognition feature, which will be available soon in the upcoming SDK 2.0 release, will enable apps to store images in databases with a capacity of more than one million images, rather than in a local database of up to 80. This will enable new, more interactive, robust mobile retail services.

You will also be talking about AllJoyn™ at Droidcon, what can developers use this for?

AllJoyn is an open source project created by Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. It is essentially a framework that enables proximity-based peer-to-peer communication between devices. For example, you could use AllJoyn to create an app that allows multiple devices within the same area to contribute collectively to a shared source. We’ve seen a lot of great use cases for apps using AllJoyn, such as games, education, networking, music sharing, etc. AllJoyn is quite easy to add to either new or existing apps. For more information or to download the AllJoyn SDK, go to the AllJoyn website.

Tell us a bit about Qualcomm DevNet, what interesting things can developers find there?

Qualcomm understands how important it is for developers to create apps that stand out from the rest. We designed QDevNet, Qualcomm’s developer network, to provide the tools and resources needed to create great apps, and to provide a forum to get their questions answered. We try to be very hands-on with our developers and really help facilitate the critical business relationships within the entire ecosystem to benefit everyone involved, from developers to device manufacturers and operators.
Lastly, why should developers come and speak to you at Droidcon, and where can they find you?

We have some fantastic development tools and SDKs available for Android developers and we’re appealing to them to create the most innovative, inventive apps to take advantage of the technology. And of course we have a $170,000 dollar competition for AllJoyn apps they might also like to enter! Developers can find me during my speaking session, “Differentiate Your App Using Software Tools,” in the Honeycomb Track, from 9:45 – 10:30am on Oct. 26th, or stop by the QDevNet booth.

Thanks very much Julian, we look forward to having you at Droidcon London!

The post Q&A: Julian Harris, Qualcomm, introduces Vuforia™ and AllJoyn™! appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

 What are you looking forward to most about Droidcon London?

Its Facebook’s first time at Droidcon London so we’re looking forward to hanging out with some of the most talented Android developers in Europe, finding out about the latest tools and techniques that Android developers are using and how Facebook can help them grow their apps worldwide. Mobile is a big deal for Facebook and Facebook’s Android app is used by tens of millions of Facebook users every single day so we have a huge interest in the ecosystem and how to move it forward. Parts of the Facebook Android app are being built at Facebook London, so our Android engineers will be at Droidcon London too.

Facebook is setting up an engineering team in London, what is it about London that is attracting great tech companies?

London has a great history as a technology centre. The startup scene is on fire right now – Its been simmering for a few years already, but investment in startups is growing, incubators like Seedcamp, Springboard and Wayra are helping new companies get started. Co-working spaces like TechHub are making it less risky to have a base and investment vehicles like Accel Partners, Index Venutres and Passion Capital are providing the fuel for ideas. The government is helping to create the right climate
through their Tech City initiative, and the presence of the City means some of Europe’s top analytical engineering talent is already in the city.

Facebook London is our first engineering base anywhere outside of the US. It’s a great fit for us for all the reasons above, and that engineers from all over Europe want to come to London to be part of a team building the future of social. The projects being worked on at Facebook London include our Android app, our developer tools, security and spam-fighting systems, as well as Platform and Open Graph.

The big news last week was about the new Android SDK for Facebook, what have you guys been working on?

The Android ecosystem has evolved rapidly in the last two years. Evolution of the hardware and the Android software stack has transformed what developers can build today. The goal of the new Facebook SDK 3.0 (Beta) for is to make it really easy for Android developers to build things like Facebook Login and Open Graph into their apps. The new SDK does most of the heavy lifting for you – there are pre-built fragments for picking friends and places, transparent session management and basic Java objects and collections for the data returned by our API – altogether it massively reduces the amount of boilerplate code you used to have to write – for example, you no longer have to parse the Graph API’s raw JSON responses into strongly typed objects – the new SDK does it all for you.

As well as the SDK, we’ve also launched a dedicated resource centre for Android developers at http://developers.facebook.com/android – instead of leafing through our docs which are relevant to iOS or Web-stack developers, Android developers now have one place to go to for Android-focussed how-tos, examples, samples and reference docs.
Where can developers find you at Droidcon?

We’ll have Facebook engineers at both days of Droidcon. We’ll be wearing Facebook London t-shirts so we’ll be pretty easy to spot. Come and say hi.

We also have two talks on the Friday:

At 11.30am, we’ll dive deep into the new Facebook SDK for Android – looking at the new features and showing you how to get started integrating Facebook into your apps
At 3.45pm, we’ll focus specifically on growing your Android app with Facebook – using Open Graph, NewsFeed and Requests & Notifications. We’ll also look at some Android apps which have optimised their Facebook integration for growth

What is the most exciting thing happening on Android at the moment?

To date, Android has had most success on phone-type devices. But increasingly Android it taking hold in other form factors – notably tablets – but also smart TVs, and in-car. I think this will be challenging for developers, dealing with not just more devices but also form factors – but its going to be incredibly exciting having a base platform like Android available in so many contexts and use cases.

Web versus native, what do Facebook want developers to do most?

Facebook wants to be the social layer for every app on every platform, so we’ll support developers building social apps on whichever tech stack is right for them. Our focus right now is supporting developers building native iOS and Android apps as well as those building for the mobile web with HTML5.

App developers want growth. With over 600 million monthly mobile users, integrating with Facebook means stories from your app’s user will show up to that users friends, and Facebook will drive them to Google Play or the App Store – whichever platform they’re using. Facebook sent users into native app stores 174 million times in the last 30 days. Which Android developer doesn’t want some of that traffic?

In terms of platforms, the best social apps exist across many platforms. Soundcloud is integrated with Facebook on the desktop web, mobile web as well as having native iOS and Android Apps. Another example, SongPop, a social game has versions for iOS and Android as well as being playable within Facebook.com. They recently added 9.7 million users in just three months. This growth was powered by the fact that you could be playing on an Android device against a friend playing on iOS or the web. This kind of cross-platform experience can unlock huge growth potential.

Thanks Simon, we can’t wait to catch up with you at Droidcon, and we got the whole way through this without me asking if there is an Android based Facebook phone coming…

Simon Cross is an Engineer on Facebook’s Platform team. He works with companies like Spotify, The Guardian and SoundCloud help them build their social into their Android, iOS and Web apps. Before Facebook, Simon worked at the BBC building social products, BBC iD and parts of iPlayer. He also plays the drums in The Poor Souls of Pompeii

The post Q&A: Facebook’s Simon Cross talks to Droidcon London! appeared first on Droidcon London 2012.

If you’ve booked a ticket for Droidcon – and provided you filled out your email correctly on the booking form! – you will have received your Joining Instructions per email. For new bookings: we send these out in batches at the end of each day. We urge you to keep a close eye on your inboxes and check your spamfolders!

As an extra safety net, you can read your Joining Instructions right here. Please do read them carefully, as they contain very important information! The gist of it is this:

• Registration starts at 8am promptly on Thursday October 25th!
• This is where it’s all happening.
• We are a ticket-less event. Provided you’ve booked your place for Droidcon London, your ID will suffice to gain access
• You may of course print your Joining Instructions so you have all information with you.
• Upon registration, we’ll check you against our list and provide you with an all-access, NFC-enabled badge.
• You’re good to go!

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