We are excited to announce that our next big event will take place on 2 August 2010 at Mary’s Bistro.

We have two great speakers to fill us in on the latest in mobile news.

Serge Jespers, Platform evangelist for Adobe Systems

Serge Jespers is an Adobe Platform Evangelist and longtime Flash enthusiast. For more than 10 years he has been working with Flash to develop award-winning online experiences. He became an Adobe certified freelance Flash designer/developer in 2004 and joined Adobe in 2007. Serge believes you can do virtually anything with Flash, and is eager to prove it. Born and raised in Belgium, he now lives near Antwerp when he is not traveling all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) to spread the word about AIR, Flash, and Flex.

Blog: http://sergejespers.com | Twitter: http://twitter.com/sjespers

Liran Golan from Delta Electronics

Speech title: Innovative Services- Growth in Future e-Paper Markets

Speech description: Advances in e-paper technologies are constantly being made over the years, and there is a growing demand for products which offer completed services to cater to individual customer. More and more products and services are offered as a package. Innovative services now play a key role for product differentiations and path-breaking competition.

http://www.delta.com.tw/

Come out and beat the heat on August 2nd!

Event Program

When: Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Where: Mary’s Bistro 2nd. Floor, No.89, Sec 2 Ren-Ai Rd., Taipei City

Admission: 250 NTD (includes �到飽 buffet and 2 alcoholic drinks)

Check-in: Starting 6:45 PM

Presentations & Discussion: 7:30 PM

Networking Time: 8:00 PM

Please go to http://www.mobilemonday-taipei.com or Click here to sign-up

We will be holding our next Mobile Monday Taipei event on August 2nd @ Mary’s Bistro.

We have lined up two great speakers and look forward to seeing everyone at our Summer Bash!

Speaker and sign-up info will be posted shortly.

We have just confirmed that the next Mobile Monday Taipei event will be on May 31st @ Mary’s Bistro.

We have lined up another great set of speakers and look forward to seeing everyone at the upcoming event.

Speaker and sign-up info will be posted shortly.

We are excited to announce that MoMo Taipei will be back with another great event on 12 April 2010.

We have lined up some dynamic speakers and an energizing topic, which is sure to draw your attention.

Check back for further updates, including registration, as we re-launch MobileMonday Taipei! And make sure to add us on Facebook to stay informed of the latest MoMo Taipei developments.

Looking forward to April 12!

Open-Plug would like to know about your views on Mobile Applications Development.
Take the survey for a chance to win $250 !

Take the survey now:

Are you or will you be involved in the development and deployment of mobile applications ?
Whether you are a Manager, or are into Business, Development, Technology or Content Creation, then your views are of high interest to us …

In exchange for taking a short survey about your views in Mobile Applications Development, you will have the option of participating in a drawing for US$250 in prize money. The survey should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.

The survey is anonymous and your responses will remain confidential.

All respondents who wish so will receive a summary of the survey results.

To take the survey, please click here or go to http://openplug.mobileappsdev.sgizmo.com/

Feel free to spread the word about this survey.

Thanks in advance and best regards,

The Open-Plug team

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

19th MobileMonday Taipei Event Report

19th MobileMonday Taipei: The Android Experience

Tonight at a Momo new venue, Yuma Southwestern Grill, we enjoyed presentations from two top Android developers. Spencer Riddering provided a sneak preview of his forthcoming to-do list app, überdo, and Eric Huang of jmap.cc showed off a weather application he developed in a mere 3 days. Both developers were elated with Android and its java-like environment. Strategy Analytics predicts that Android will top the market with 50 million units by 2012.

At this moment, Android is only available on the G1 unit through T-Mobile in the USA. But expect dramatic changes: the HTC Magic “G2″ is to ship next month, followed by as many as 10 models in 2009, from diverse manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: LG, Samsung, ASUS, Acer, Huawei, and Sony Ericsson, including 5 new Android models from HTC. Google has placed a dedicated team in Taiwan to work with manufacturers. Lastly, Android is anticipated on a netbook platform such as the eeePC.

Eric Huang of jmap.cc spoke in Mandarin about Android and his development experiences, supported with an extensive Power Point presentation in English. He explained the many parts of the Android platform: it is an application framework, the Dalvik virtual machine running atop a linux kernel, an integrated browser, optimized graphics, SQLite databse, media support, GSM telephony, Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi, camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer. Android Market is Googles answer to Apple’s App Store; it currently stocks about 2300 apps, both paid and free. Eric can be reached through his blog http://blog.jmap.cc

Spencer Riddering of Lean & Keen treated us to a sneak peek of their powerful to-do list application überdo. Like Eric, he entered the Google coding challenge and was ranked in the top quartile.

Clearly RIM has established a loyal base of business users, and Apple has a tremendous head start. Google has clearly come late to this market, but Google has come late to many markets only to later dominate them. Google also operates from a different business model, basically offering Android for free to handset manufacturers. I expect that the diversity of android handsets and its free OS and web services will put pricing pressure on Google’s competitors. An iPhone which costs $200 to manufacture costs the consumer $2400 over the course of a two year contract and this will not last. Lastly Google has a powerful array of cloud services that will be integrated with their handset. The interesting question is whether Google will be able to manhandle the operators as Apple has.

Come back in a year and lets see what kind of numbers can be put up by a dozen different gPhones from diverse manufacturers and carriers, at a lower cost than their competitors, and leveraging the power of a free, open-source, open-standard OS backed by industry leading cloud services.

links:
HTC to unveil new Android phone in Q2
HTC workforce up 46% as Android mobiles defy slump
Google betting on mobile Internet
Android Developer program
Taiwan Android Developers Group
Endagaget Taiwan Android Developer Forum
Android Market
Spencer Riddering
Lean & Keen
Eric Huang

Last month, we invited iPhone apps developers to share with us their application and their experience to join the iPhone developer program and how they put their product onto Apple’s app store, it is very interesting to know what developers had to go through and the impacts for them. This month, we are going to talk about another mobile operating system, google’s android.

Even though today there is only one device available in the market, and only in the US market, already generate a huge interest among developers all over the world. With more and more android devices in development, and not just mobile phone also MID and “netbook�, it seems android is going to open a huge opportunity for developers. But is it really the case? Or is there any hidden trap behind the android market? For this month’s event, we invite android developers who had made it to top 25% during the android challenges to share their application and experience with us.

Please CLICK HERE to sign up!!

Event program:

Time: 7PM, Monday, Mar. 16th, 2009
Place: NEW LOCATION Yuma SouthWestern Grill Lane 216, Alley 11, # 21 ZhongXiao East Rd., Section 4, Taipei City.

Check-in: 7 PM

Presentation from android developers: 7:30 PM

Networking Time: 8:00 PM

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

18th MobileMonday Taipei Event Report

The 18th Mobile Monday Taipei featured presentations from 3 iPhone developers. In its first month, December, the iPhone surged to a 2% market share in Taiwan, the 6th most popular handset and rising, and we’re not even counting fake clones from the mainland.

Lukhnos D. Liu of Lithoglyph Inc. kicked things off by presenting TapExpense: from Sketch to App Store Launch. Tap Expense is a no-nonsense expense tracking system for the iPhone, featuring Personal/Business categories, multiple currency support, and support for Excel. The app was conceived during Apple’s WWDC conference in June 2008, and they were able to ship version 1.0 as part of the app store launch 1 month later!. Version 2.0 was a complete rewrite, released in February 2009. Check it out on their website and buy it on the AppStore, where there is a fully featured trial version. Mr. Liu will be presenting at the Open Source Developers Conference Taiwan this April.

Yung-Luen Lan shared his experiences developing Free KanaQuiz, currently the #1 Free App in the Education Category at the Apple’s Taiwan AppStore, including sales figure for its first six weeks. These figures jumped rapidly when his app was featured on http://www.iphonetw.net

Ching-Lan “digdog” Huang then flowcharted for us the exact procedure by which you can become an iPhone developer. Which he learned early on in the process of creating his FrostyPlace RSS reader. While you can start playing with the iPhone SDK immediately, the $99 registration for Apple’s iPhone Developer Program confers several benefits. Non-members can only write apps and test them on the simulator. Membership lets you test your code on real handsets, distribute your app on the iTunes App Store, and make money. Digdog’s blog contains his entire presentation and flowchart.

The developers cited several key advantages to Apple’s system, particularly useful to individuals and small businesses. There is one simple central location for all worldwide customers. The localization and payment system is handled for you, and the customer feels secure buying from Apple. And some security is provided by the closed architecture of the iPhone. In exchange for this Apple charges a 30% fee.

Apple has strongly galvanized the market for developers with their AppStore. I wonder if they will extend the market to software for OS X software or music for garage bands? I suspect they are wary of upsetting incumbents in those markets.

Other companies are now trying to replicate the success of the AppStore. At this months GSM conference in Barcelona, Microsoft and Nokia declared their intention to set up similar stores, joining similar announcements by Research in Motion, and Samsung. Google’s Android Market is already online Clearly however, Apple’s success is based on a complex ecosystem, and it will take time and skill to succeed at replicating it, its not just a matter of jumping up and down on stage shouting “Developers!”.

I asked the panelists about the gPhone. They were skeptical about developing in the gPhone’s chosen java instead of the iPhone’s Objective C language, and concerned that Google gave free software first crack at the store and invading their turf. To get rich is glorious! The gPhone should be available in Taiwan this April.

Resources

Get yourself into iPhone Dev Program and iTunes App Store
Yung-Luen Lan
Lithoglyph
Apple iPhone Developer Program
iPhone tw
Open Source Developers’ Conference Taiwan
iPhone Not Popular in Japan
Japanese “hate” for iPhone all a big mistake
Competing App Stores
Report: iPhone “miles ahead” of competing app stores
Taiwan Top Handset Vendors
Android Market

Dear Mobile People in Taipei,

MoMo Tpe chapter would like to wish everyone happy new year! and also would like to inform you that we will be taking a short break for January, and continue to host our event in February, please stay tuned for our further notice. Thank you very much for your support!!