Today, I attended the Mobile Technology Summit - 2012 held in Hyderabad.
Mobile Technology Summit Overview
This is an event organized by Silicon India and Blackberry seems to be the primary sponsor.
I wanted to share a bit of my experience because I found this event quite lacking in quality.
There were two conference rooms and two parallel tracks going one for Android and another for iOS. I went to the Android track and sent a colleague to the iOS track.
There were a total of 8 sessions including 2 keynotes. One of the keynotes and one regular tech session were from blackberry guys and mostly of a promotional nature. They talked about the app world and android run-time and in general trying to entice android developers to repackage their android apps and put them on app world.
The keynote address from the Marketing manager was interesting to hear and seemed to have more technical content than the technical session on "Android run-time for BB 10/Playbook" by a couple of their Developer Evangelists.
The first android session was "Game Development on Android"
The speaker for this was a CEO of a company that seems to claim core competency in Mobile app/game development. The content of the presentation was of a pretty generic nature. The speaker also claims that he is not into gaming nor will allow his kid to play games. He also claims he will never bought and probably never will ever buy any mobile app/game. It was clear that he has no passion games, but he was talking about game development (at a very very crude level and mostly unrelated to android). I cannot even call it a business oriented session. The only saving grace was that he was a nice speaker and knows how to capture the attention of the audience even if there is not much subject in there.
Second one was "Google Cloud Messaging for Android".
Speaker was from Infosys and this could have been a decently good technical talk, but the entire format for the most part was like a kindergarten teacher trying to teach alphabets to the children.
Third one was "Android on Atom Processor"
The speaker was a former Nokia employee who worked on N900/MeeGo development and later also worked at Intel. His talk had a lot of technical depth on Android and running it on x86. Leaving the x86 part alone, the material on Android itself should be informative for a lot of people who are developing apps without understanding what the platform is. A lot of developers didn't even seem to know that Android runs on Linux kernel.
The last one was "Android for automated media streaming solutions"
I didn't really know what to make of this speaker. I sat for only the first 5 min of this talk. He started by saying that he will give a brief overview on Android and so, first he started talking about Android as if it is a device which was hard to swallow, but still alright, then he went on to talk about how people stopped using Java on desktops after windows came out and became popular. Was this guy for real? Was he seriously comparing a programming language to an Operating System and what the heck did he mean by his statement? What he thinking that Java was an OS? Even then where did the windows dethroning Java come from. My head was still spinning from the shock of the potential ramifications of his statement when he starting talking about how bad "HTC Sense OS" was before Android came into the picture. At this point I was choking and felt that I would puke if I stayed a minute longer, so I quickly filled the feedback form and came back come. This guy is supposedly an Architect for Mobile technology (no less) at his company, but it was clear that he has no knowledge of computing or mobile computing history.
Its pretty clear to me what the state of affairs in the mobile development arena in India is like. People are developing mobile apps without the least bit of knowledge on the platform that they are developing for.
Mobile Technology Summit Overview
This is an event organized by Silicon India and Blackberry seems to be the primary sponsor.
I wanted to share a bit of my experience because I found this event quite lacking in quality.
There were two conference rooms and two parallel tracks going one for Android and another for iOS. I went to the Android track and sent a colleague to the iOS track.
There were a total of 8 sessions including 2 keynotes. One of the keynotes and one regular tech session were from blackberry guys and mostly of a promotional nature. They talked about the app world and android run-time and in general trying to entice android developers to repackage their android apps and put them on app world.
The keynote address from the Marketing manager was interesting to hear and seemed to have more technical content than the technical session on "Android run-time for BB 10/Playbook" by a couple of their Developer Evangelists.
The first android session was "Game Development on Android"
The speaker for this was a CEO of a company that seems to claim core competency in Mobile app/game development. The content of the presentation was of a pretty generic nature. The speaker also claims that he is not into gaming nor will allow his kid to play games. He also claims he will never bought and probably never will ever buy any mobile app/game. It was clear that he has no passion games, but he was talking about game development (at a very very crude level and mostly unrelated to android). I cannot even call it a business oriented session. The only saving grace was that he was a nice speaker and knows how to capture the attention of the audience even if there is not much subject in there.
Second one was "Google Cloud Messaging for Android".
Speaker was from Infosys and this could have been a decently good technical talk, but the entire format for the most part was like a kindergarten teacher trying to teach alphabets to the children.
Third one was "Android on Atom Processor"
The speaker was a former Nokia employee who worked on N900/MeeGo development and later also worked at Intel. His talk had a lot of technical depth on Android and running it on x86. Leaving the x86 part alone, the material on Android itself should be informative for a lot of people who are developing apps without understanding what the platform is. A lot of developers didn't even seem to know that Android runs on Linux kernel.
The last one was "Android for automated media streaming solutions"
I didn't really know what to make of this speaker. I sat for only the first 5 min of this talk. He started by saying that he will give a brief overview on Android and so, first he started talking about Android as if it is a device which was hard to swallow, but still alright, then he went on to talk about how people stopped using Java on desktops after windows came out and became popular. Was this guy for real? Was he seriously comparing a programming language to an Operating System and what the heck did he mean by his statement? What he thinking that Java was an OS? Even then where did the windows dethroning Java come from. My head was still spinning from the shock of the potential ramifications of his statement when he starting talking about how bad "HTC Sense OS" was before Android came into the picture. At this point I was choking and felt that I would puke if I stayed a minute longer, so I quickly filled the feedback form and came back come. This guy is supposedly an Architect for Mobile technology (no less) at his company, but it was clear that he has no knowledge of computing or mobile computing history.
Its pretty clear to me what the state of affairs in the mobile development arena in India is like. People are developing mobile apps without the least bit of knowledge on the platform that they are developing for.
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