What developers think about fragmentation
proshadmin | 06 February, 2010 12:03
Check this interesting survey http://tweetalink.com/go/iQIr.
You'll like to see what other devs think, love and hate about the platforms they work on.
Just an extract on the love/hate part:
"What do developers hate about their platform? Well, most of them seemed peeved with the difficulties they faced in reaching the market; a reason that is mostly relevant to the way the market is set up (or was setup – in the pre- iPhone App Store era), rather than a fault in the platform. The main inherent fault most people found was the disparity between emulator and device performance, a view shared by all platform users except Android. Android users were also pleased with the production cost of the apps, as well as the support their platform offered. Unsurprisingly, less than half of the developers found something bad to say about their platform."
Cheers,Mario
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Chau 2009, Hola 2010
proshadmin | 31 December, 2009 11:27
Este post va en castellano porque, la verdad, no estoy seguro que algun anglo esté leyendo esto. A ver, fijemosnos en Google Analytics... dice que sí, de hecho la mayoria son de paises que no hablan español, aunque no son wow cuantos.
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En fin esto va dedicado a las visitas argentinas y las españolas :p
Llega fin de año y todo el mundo hace balances, y yo me veo casi obligado a escribir este post. Medio que tengo ganas de escribir un montón de cosas pero medio también que tengo ganas de usar este tiempo en echar código para Prosciutto :).
Asique va rapido en resumen de lo mas importante que pasó este año:
1) Febrero 17-21: Mobile World Congress. La primera vez que voy. Ojalá pueda ir de nuevo y todos los años. Llevado por Nokia por el Calling All Innovators, que ganamos en nuestra categoria en la region Americas y 3ros en la global. Inolvidable experiencia, donde conocí otros 10 emprendedores / desarrolladores de todas partes del mundo.
2) Mayo 28: Palermo Valley Mobile Sessions. Presenté Prosciutto en la sesión inicial. Hasta me hice imprimir tarjetas de Prosciutto y todo, para entregar a la audiencia o a quien se acercara. En ese evento conoci al Arquitecto Bravo, con todo el respeto y admiración, un loco que está armando un proyecto integrador de tecnologías que es simplemente asombroso: estan construyendo un automóvil industria nacional, con un controlador central basado en Android OS. Me saco el sombrero. http://www.arqbravodesign.com.ar/
Conoci tambien a Rodolfo Llanos, fundador de www.soloingles.com. Un fenomeno!
3) Mayo en general: Participé de las actividades de Embajadores NSeries de Nokia, un lindisimo grupo y una idea fantástica de Orly Cristófalo (twitter: @orlycristofalo), y un producto fenomenal de Nokia: el N96. Pueden ver una nota sobre esto aqui.
4) Junio: llevamos a Prosciutto al siguiente paso, al hacerlo (casi) totalmente configurable. Te permite manejar el footprint de memoria, que tul. Articulo aqui. Tambien, integramos Prosciutto con Hecl, de manera que si hay algo que no se nos ocurrió hacer dentro de Prosciutto, lo puedas hacer con Hecl sin tener que recompilar. Comportamiento dinámico que le dicen. Aunque todavia no hice nada particularmente útil con esto, es una posibilidad super poderosa :).
5) Julio / Agosto: La lucha contra Blackberry. Finalmente lo hicimos andar, pero hubo que hacer un refactoring inmenso. Todavia tengo secuelas de esta decisión de refactoring.
Conoci a Bruno Rovagnati de Globant gracias a Rodo Llanos. Una persona de una claridad mental absoluta, humilde y con grandes conocimientos.
6) Septiembre: Agregamos Location Based Services y video a Prosciutto. Tomá mate, qué nos falta? :p
PyCon 2009. Se hace la primer conferencia de Python en español, en Buenos Aires en la Universidad de Belgrano. La calidad de las charlas fue sencillamente del más alto nivel. El esfuerzo de organización de los chicos de PyAr con Facundo Batista a la cabeza, fue descomunal. Lean este post de Facu en su blog: http://www.taniquetil.com.ar/plog/post/1/425
7) Octubre: lanzamos la serie Mobile Monday Tech Talks en Buenos Aires, junto con mi amigo Fabio Caballero y gracias a toda la estructura montada con gran esfuerzo de Antonio Peña y el capitulo tradicional de MoMo. Hicimos un primer evento con 60 personas y una charla magnífica de Maximiliano Firtman. La organización "a pulmón" es agotadora! pero el resultado se aprecia :).
Otra cosa que "terminó de pasar" en Octubre, pero en realidad pasó durante todo 2008 y 2009: finalmente terminamos nuestra tesis de ingeniería con mis amigos Nico Gnecchi y Mariano Gasparini, y el aguante de nuestras novias, esposas e hijos. La experiencia de trabajar juntos en algo totalmente innovador ha sido gloriosa. Se extraña volver a trabajar con ellos!
8) Noviembre: hicimos una charla especial de MoMo Tech Talks orientada a Android. Con la presencia de grosos como James Yum de Google, y German Greco de Motorola. Vinieron 250 personas. Mil gracias a Guillermo Winicki y la UTN por prestarnos las instalaciones par poder hacer el evento alli. Sencillamente, estuvo espectacular, con contenido técnico y de valor para la audiencia. Cuando iniciamos la serie Tech Talks, nunca pensé que fuera posible juntar a 250 personas en un mismo lugar, con una propuesta que saliera de nosotros :)
Tambien hicimos un evento especial para el lanzamiento de Nokia Calling All Innovators regional. Muy buenas las charlas de Fernando Freytes de Nokia, que nos sacó todas las dudas a los que queremos participar :)
Mi gran amigo el Turco se fue a vivir a Esquel. Lo vamos a extrañar un montón, pero por suerte con internet, a veces se acortan un poco las distancias.
9) Diciembre: Sin dudas el héroe del año es Rodolfo Llanos con su movida 150x300 . Fundador de www.soloingles.com, les recomiendo que lean sus posts y lo sigan en Twitter (@soloenglish), es una máquina de empujar y hacer cosas, que contagia.
Que puedo decir, termina el año. La verdad que mirando para atrás, pasó de todo en 2009. Podría decir "hicimos de todo", pero me sale más "pasó de todo". Es como que algunas cosas uno las busca y otras te salen.Sin dudas algo que aprendi a valorar es la fuerza de las personas que me rodean y me empujan a seguir adelante, en especial a mi esposa que tiene una paciencia y voluntad infinitas.
Un agradecimiento especial a don Juan Matus por sus enseñanzas ;). Creo que ha sido la única literatura no técnica que me devoré este año.
Saludos a todos y un Muy Feliz Año Nuevo (asi, con mayúsculas en cada palabra)
Mario
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MOMO Tech Talks: Android as a development platform
proshadmin | 05 November, 2009 08:19
MOMO Buenos Aires presents: “Android as a development platform” Meet industry
leaders to discover the Android platform and state-of-the-art Android devices. Buenos
Aires, November 3rd, 2009.- This
event will be fully dedicated to Android,
the new operating system built by Google, with the aim to provide professionals
with the latest news and information about this exciting development platform. The
event will be attended by two outstanding speakers. James
YUM, team member of the Android
Development Program team at Moreover,
a selected group of local developers will showcase their Android-based projects. The
event is free for everyone. However, there’s limited space at the venue, so
previous registering is required. You can register by completing the
registration form at Mobile Monday Buenos Aires website (www.momobuenosaires.com)
or at http://tinyurl.com/momotechtalks This event wouldn’t be possible without the
support of Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), Facultad
Regional Main
Sponsors: Buongiorno, Gemalto, IKEN, Banco About
MobileMonday TechTalks Open
to each and every actor in the country’s mobile industry, the event series will
be highly oriented to whom are considered the major figures in innovative
mobile applicacion and services development, thus proposing both a monthly
space to share experiences with colleagues and a virtual community to
facilitate communication among them. About
MobileMonday MobileMonday
Buenos Aires (www.momobuenosaires.com)
is the argentine chapter of MobileMonday, the global community grouping
innovators, visionaries and executives from the international mobile industry. Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile
industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and
cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to
share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets. It counts with more
than 110.000 industry professionals who gather regularly in the 60 most
important cities of the world. Mobile Monday is organized by a group of
dedicated volunteers from around the world. The organization produces more than
700 events per year around the world. Each chapter has a local website, which
altogether forms the www.mobilemonday.net network. For
further press information: +54 11
4961 6172 or +54 11 4962 1856; rsvp@momobuenosaires.com;
press@momobuenosaires.com 
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MoMo Buenos Aires Tech Talks is a success
proshadmin | 31 October, 2009 22:32
The questions of the
audience, nearly 60 people with a
strong technical background, aimed at learning more of the nature of these
talks and how they will develop as compared to traditional MoMo meetings. Antonio Peña, president of MoMo Argentina, explained that a space
dedicated to technical people was a pending issue among MoMo enthusiasts. “You
are the ones who make things happen”,
he said. He also thanked the organizational effort made by Caballero and Zorz. Maximiliano Firtman, mobile developer and Director at
IT Master Institute, spoke about the importance of mobile web and widgets,
which are installable applications developed using web techonology. “As opposed
to native appliactions, widgets tend to be more multiplatform and that can be
extremely useful in the next few years” – he explained. “For some developers,
it’s easier and faster”. His presentation – ver
clear and explanative, as many of the people in the audience agreed -, was a
brief version of another one Firtman presented earlier this year at InsideMobile, in San Jose, California.
“Widgets are ideal for web Afterwards Bryan Tafel, director at Sensebyte Insomnia talked about today’s
challenges in mobile development. His talk was a mixture of the technical
issues that arise at the moment of writing code, with issues related to the
business as well. In the technical part he made
special emphasis on emulators and other tools for measuring the handsets’
overall performance at development time. “When you run your application on the
emulator everything is nice – he said -, but it behaves differently on the real
handset. The emulator can be used to test 75% of the app, but there is a margin
left, and there are tools to help developers minimize the remaining margin”. Regarding the business
approach, Tafel talked about what he referred to as the corporate approach, where he gained most of his experience with his
company. “There the main goal is to evangelize
– he said-. Companies
still don’t see their competitors have mobile solutions and it’s hard for them
to make the first step. The whole effort sits around explaining ROI.” He also talked about the
SaaS approach, or Software as a Service. “But here the problem is the
uncertainty we have. You have to have volume, and there are plenty of handset
models and you are forced to get the most out of them. The risk still seems too
high and therefore the kind of debates
as this one tonight are good“. In the end, Caballero announced
- for the pleasure of the audience - that the next MoMo Tech Talks meeting
could be the next November 16th, this
time at the Aula Magna at UTN,
focused on two hot issues: Google/Andoid and Motorola.
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MOMO Tech Talks
proshadmin | 19 October, 2009 22:42
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Prosciutto 2.1 released
proshadmin | 13 September, 2009 22:34
NEW!: Prosciutto 2.1 released!
This release ships with:
-Location Based Services integration (JSR 179)
-new config attributes for LBS reading timeout
-wrapper buttons memory footprint control
-softkey mapper
-BlackBerry support
-debug form
-stringfilter: use any of these tags in your buttons text, which will be replaced by
the corresponding values each time the button is rendered on screen:
@@latitude@@ @@longitude@@ @@time@@ @@date@@ @@timestamp@@ @@debug@@ @@freemem@@
-table arrangement for buttons
-usermessage for showing customized messages on the "loading..." screens
-messageinbox for customizing behavior by sending behavior messages to your UI objects
-video playing features
We are going to build several copy/paste examples to showcase all of Prosciutto's features.
Enjoy! :)
Mario
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Blackberry meets Prosciutto
proshadmin | 22 August, 2009 19:38
Finally! I got Prosciutto to run on Blackberry :)
This is a very early stage, but here's a screenshot of the BlackBerry 8120 running the HelloProsciutto demo:
Cheers,
Mario
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Mission Impossible: Blackberry
proshadmin | 03 August, 2009 21:11
As you know from my previous post, I've installed Eclipse Pulsar on my dev machine. The latest version of Eclipse is 3.5 as of this post, so I downloaded the package and pretty much to my (good) surprise everything goes quite smooth and I could write a simple hello world in a matter of minutes, it even detected the SDKs I had already installed (Nokia's and Motorola's, etc.) and I saw they have some nice features for code completion, style, and refactoring and optimisation tools, not to count the Subversion and Trac integration plugins (which I haven't tested out yet, but will soon).
Now, remember my goal is to make Prosciutto run on BlackBerry devices. So I was eager to install the Eclipse plugin for BlackBerry, so I followed instructions there. Unfortunately I get this error from the Eclipse software updater:
Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
Software being installed: BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse 1.0.0.67 (net.rim.EclipseJDE.feature.group 1.0.0.67)
Missing requirement: BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse 1.0.0.67 (net.rim.EclipseJDE.feature.group 1.0.0.67) requires 'org.eclipse.core.resources [3.4.0,3.5.0)' but it could not be found
Ok... I have to say, after looking for anything like org.eclipse.core.resources, bundles, etc. I decided to google for it and I found this blog post from Carol Hamer (she humbly defines herself as "a software engineer living in Switzerland" but she also is a book writer from what I could see in her blog's about tab). Her post is only a month old, and she seems to have found the same issues.
Digging a little bit more, I found there's a ticket open in BlackBerry jira system (their bugtracker) which you can find here: https://www.blackberry.com/jira/browse/TOOL-14.
I urge you, the developer community, to enter such URL and please *vote for it to get fixed*.
Basically, there's still no support from Research In Motion for their plugin to work with Eclipse 3.5. :(
In the meantime, I will just download Eclipse 3.4 and set up everything I need (I don't know if Pulsar is available for Eclipse 3.4, let's see...), in order to continue these efforts.
All I can say as per now is RIM is definitely making it hard for developers to get things working, and that's the reason I think it's definitely worth to wirte about it so other's don't fall into the same problems, but also to make RIM aware what the development community has to say about it. Ultimately, we just want to make apps for their devices, so developer support should be a point in itself.
I'll keep you posted on any news
Cheers,
Mario
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Eclipse Pulsar
proshadmin | 02 August, 2009 19:31
The refactoring efforts have proven fruitful - to some extent. On one hand, I have code that is more readable and easier to understand. Also using the rapc tool from Research In Motion to produce a BlackBerry .cod file that wont' throw errors has been proven a possible path - once I separated everything into classes and kept each class under 512 words. Now I'm at a point where Prosciutto seems to run OK on the RIM platform, but, there's a minor issue: it just shows a blank screen. I know there's Prosciutto behind that blank screen because I can see the keypressed events sometime lead to what is expected (for example, blindly clicking on an Prosciutto editable button actually does show the extended TextBox lcdui class). On the other hand, I lost quite an amount of jar size savings by doing it the OO way: the Prosciutto engine itself has grown by 14% in size - and we are talking no new functionality, just refactoring for the sake of keeping class members to less than 512 words, just to workaroung BlackBerry's limitations.
That said, I needed debugging. I'm using RIM's JDE Component Package 4.5.0 for emulating the BlackBerry 8120 (also known as Pearl), and you know, there's 2 basic ways to debug your code on any emulator: either it supports some kind of debugging, such as the JDP (Java Platform Debugging Protocol) or anything else, or you can serve yourself of placing tons of System.err.println / System.out.println and find a way to read the stderr and stdout streams somehow.
Unfortunately none of these seemed easy on the Blackberry emulators. If you want to read your System.err.println statements output somewhere you need to attach the simulator to a debugger by means of the RIM's JDE JWDP module (which is basically the JDP debugger listener as implemented by RIM). So if I were to try it anyway, I say let's go for the full thing, as I'm attaching a debugger anyway.
To make a long story short, I will just say that RIM's tools just don't seem to work properly in any environment other than RIM's defined JDK or Eclipse.
As you may (or may not) know, I use a fancy text editor and just ant and antenna to do all the stuff I need in Prosciutto. This worked well with everything else, Nokia, Motorola, even Samsung and SonyEricsson emulators (both vendors base their emulators directly on Sun's Wireless Toolkit). But BlackBerry is not the case: attaching a debugger is a daunting task and it takes several minutes - a total waste of time.
So I decided to try Eclipse and the BlackBerry Eclipse plugin. That's when I came to know about Eclipse Pulsar. For a good initiative manifesto you can read this press release . This is quite interesting, and I'm happy more and more people (and vendors) are aiming at making developer's life easier.
I have just downloaded my Pulsar distribution and I'm about to test it out. I'll let you know my findings - keeping in mind my goal is to debug Prosciutto and make it run on BlackBerry.
Cheers,
Mario
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Latest stable release
proshadmin | 29 July, 2009 01:24
Dear Prosciutto enthusiasts,
I'm continuing the refactoring approach. I decided I will take it as far as I can to really see what the tradeoffs are.
I will make a major announcement soon (probably a package release); as of now revision 151 (latest stable release) has:
- table handling as in you can define a set of buttons arranged in rows of a table,
- a softkey mapper
- and LBS capabilities (yes! check the sample HelloProsciutto to see how you can read the underlaying device GPS capabilities)
among other tweaks such as thread handling optimisations (overall performance is better than older revisions).
For the latest stable release before phase 2 refactoring then, please checkout revision 151 from the SVN trunk folder.
Thanks,
Mario
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Prosciutto gets power from Hecl
proshadmin | 15 June, 2009 23:31
I'm happy to announce that Hecl, also known as "the mobile scripting language", is now integrated into Prosciutto.
Hecl is a very simple and intuitive scripting language, that can be used in order to write small and productive applications without taking care for most aspects of mobile java development.
What this means is, that now not only you need not write a single line of java code in order to build an application and test it on the handsets of your choice, but now you can also extend your application's functionality to almost anything you would like to do.
One of the most obvious features that this Prosciutto+Hecl combo offers is that you can define your menus and onscreen objects rapidly by using Prosciutto, and you can add core functionality with Hecl in a way that has never been simpler.
This major achievement could not have been done without the easiness and extensibility that Hecl offers. I'd like to personally thanks David Welton, the creator of Hecl for giving us mobile developers this amazingly useful tool.
We are delivering an already prepared Hecl.jar in the /lib folder in the trunk of Prosciutto, so you don't need care about the details of building Hecl jar each time.
In order to test out Prosciutto without delving with any java code at all, you can download the HelloProsciutto application, unjar/unzip it to the folder of your choice, and just start playing around with the model.xml file contained in it. I will write a tutorial on this as soon as possible, so more people, specially non-java developers, can start building mobile applications rapidly.
I will also soon post more examples of Prosciutto+Hecl applications to give an idea of the potential richness that can be achieved.
Stay tuned!
Cheers,
Mario
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Prosciutto gets fully configurable
proshadmin | 12 June, 2009 17:29
Things are going great for Prosciutto! I have defined a new tag in the model.xml file which allows you to define exactly which amount of objects you are expecting to use beforehand! This way there's nothing out of the xml file that cannot be configured - without writing a single line of java code.
Better yet, memory footprint has been optimised!. Let me tell you about it. I have some amazing figures for you, Prosciutto passionistas! :)
The configuration tag comes in handy for indicating *exactly* the amount of objects you are going to use in your application,
and thus want Prosciutto to reserve memory for them up-front (upon initialisation).
All attributes - including the tag itself - are optional, but we strongly recommend that you specify your own settings, as the
default values might not be the best fit for your application.
Here's how to populate the config tag. Note that the values are
actually the default values as defined inside the engine, so it
wouldn't take
any effect to declare particularly those values in a config tag. Again,
you should change the values for whatever better suits your
application.
<config form_qty="10" buttons_form="60" tpl_qty="10" buttons_tpl="8" timer_qty="8" font_qty="8" imgarray_qty="8" images_per_array="8" msg_qty="100" colordef_qty="100"/>
Actually, this is identical to the default values embedded with the engine, so commenting out this line or not declaring it all will have equal effects as to memory allocation.
<config form_qty="5" buttons_form="20" tpl_qty="5" buttons_tpl="8" timer_qty="1" font_qty="4" imgarray_qty="2" images_per_array="2" msg_qty="50" colordef_qty="10"/>
Now I have prepared a memory usage graph to illustrate how this may impact in your application performance. This following graph shows the free memory when we run HelloProsciutto on Sun's WTK emulator with 2 MB of heap memory. The running sequence comprises of the following phases:
1) initialization
2) XML reading
3) displaying the splash form
4) transition to login form upon timer expiration, and
5) load and display the login form
The graph in blue shows the free memory when using the default values
as defined in Prosciutto. In such a case we reserve memory upfront, so
it's the way that we use the most of memory so Prosciutto can work
safely throughout its lifecycle.
The graph in brown shows the free memory when we use the config tag by
indicating the very same default values as defined in Prosciutto.
In this case we gain something between 5 to 10kb of free memory,
because we only do allocation for the objects that are found in the
model.xml
as we crawl through it. While it *could* lead to more memory
fragmentation, Prosciutto takes care of that because it does memory
allocation at that time
and is cautious about asking for more memory while in execution (phases
3, 4, and 5, to phase n) or normal running lifecycle.
Now comes the interesting part. Take a look at the yellow graph. The
yellow graph represents the amount of free memory at any phase of
Prosciutto lifecycle, when you define the config tag with proper values
chosen consciously. You can see there's a lot more free memory to play
with! This memory is working memory, so you can use it for anything
else you might need, for instance loading more images in your
application, this making it richer :).
Finally, I have also run the same test on a Nokia Series 40 emulator to get something closer to real. The emulator is set to have a 512kb heap memory, which is what most series 40 handsets out there have available.
Don't let you be disappointed by the memory slowly decreasing while
through all the phases - you can see the free memory comes back all the
way
up to almost 250 kb in the end, to the right? That's because of how the
series 40 garbage collector works. It has a lazy approach in the sense
it will
only free up as much memory as it can when it really requires to free
memory. Otherwise it just passes and continues to give control to the
application,
for obvious performance reasons.
One more, this is how the Motorola L6 SDK behaves with the
same application and the same scenarios. This is with an L6/L7
emulator, with reportedly
819200 bytes heap size (actually only near 556k are available to the
application).
Conclusion: have fun writing rich and optimized applications! :)
Cheers,
Mario
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Open Mobile Consortium launched
proshadmin | 08 June, 2009 12:46
Source: www.open-mobile.org
Press Contact: Robert Kirkpatrick, Chair - +1 650 796 5709
New York, NY – May 26, 2009 – The Open Mobile Consortium today launched its global development community to help organizations working towards social good to better collaborate and share mobile phone-based technologies. The OMC’s open source software tools help organizations to better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the “bottom billion,” the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of the world.
The Open Mobile Consortium is an unprecedented collaboration across organizations to better serve communities with open source mobile tools. Together, they are building a vibrant set of platforms for use, at no cost, with no restrictions. OMC members share a vision that by working together to drive grassroots mobile technology innovation in some of the most challenging, resource-poor environments in the world, they will create a simple, flexible, and reliable set of technology that enable to individual and organizations anywhere in the world to effect social change.
With almost 280 million subscribers in Africa alone, mobile phones are recognized as instruments of change in finance, agriculture, media and development work. Mobile technology can easily provide data on food prices to farmers, patient information to remote medical clinics, and help track supplies and logistics. It is estimated that by 2010, 1 in 3 Africans will own a mobile phone.
The Open Mobile Consortium was founded to develop and bring to scale free and open-source solutions that leverage the power and ubiquity of mobile phones.
“OMC’s approach is a radical departure from how the traditional humanitarian and development works,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Chief Technology Officer of InSTEDD and chair of OMC.
“Typically, organizations must compete for funding grants, which frequently leads to ‘silo’ mentality and hesitation to fully share key technologies. By contrast, we are agreeing to work together to share source code, standards, protocols, approaches and lessons learned. We’re even sharing development plans and testing each others’ software. As a result, we’re building a vibrant community and making very rapid progress.”
Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org and a founding member of the Open Mobile Consortium, says, “The mobile technology explosion has put more than four billion phones in use around the world. In the hands of organizations working for social good, and with easily available and accessible software, mobile phones can significantly improve the health and well-being of people in developing countries around the world. But there are technology and collaboration barriers. The Open Mobile Consortium aims to eliminate these barriers by developing interoperable, free and open source mobile platforms, and we encourage others to join us.”
"Mobile technology can make a huge difference in key areas like access to health care and education, and UNICEF helped form the Open Mobile Consortium to challenge the open-source community to play a role in this process," says Erica Kochi, co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation team.
“OMC is a forum to pool expertise and develop partnerships to empower those most in need and to use mobile technology to improve their lives." The OMC strives to enable organizations working in the field in developing countries to collaborate across disparate platforms and products, reduce redundancies, and create a mechanism for freely sharing technical tools, information and approaches.
OMC has already brought together a number of mobile technology tools for collaboration and sharing. These include, among others:
- CommCare, a mobile-phone based application that allows community health workers to provide better, more efficient care and improve coordination of community health programs;
- Mobilisr, an open source enterprise class mobile messaging platform for NGOs around the world;
- Mesh4X, a platform for seamless cross-organizational information sharing between mobile devices, databases, desktop applications, and websites;
- RapidSMS, an open source platform allowing for any mobile phone to use SMS to collect data, used in Malawi, Ethiopia and Nigeria to collect information and provide rapid feedback to field workers;
- GeoChat, a flexible open source group communications tool that enables mobile field communications and situational awareness during emergencies;
- Ushahidi, a web-based platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information.
About the Open Mobile Consortium
The Open Mobile Consortium is a thriving community of mobile technologists and practitioners working to drive open source mobile solutions for more effective and efficient humanitarian relief and global social development. Founding member organizations include Millennium Villages Project, Cell Life, Dimagi, D-Tree, InSTEDD, MobileActive, TextToChange, UNICEF and Ushahidi. We are at http://www.open-mobile.org.
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Life after Palermo Valley Mobile Sessions
proshadmin | 04 June, 2009 16:09
I can't say it literally changed my life ;), but it was very good. I got good contacts from many places.
You can read here the article by Movilsur they have also taken some pictures of me! I appear on 2 out of 4 pictures of the event! (lol). I'm the guy wearing a leather jacket if you were wondering.
I've met Arq. Miguel Angel Bravo, CEO at ArgBravo who is implementing some quite interesting stuff: a purely national automobile goverened by a portable computer which is also a detachable GPS recevier and GSM/CDMA smartphone! (www.nach-one.com.ar).
Also Martin Molinari, CEO at Digital Bricks, who showed special interest on Prosciutto and with whom I'm looking forward to collaborate in the near future as well.
You can take a look at the presentation I gave at this URL, and also I've translated it to english and published here. It will also be available in the Prosciutto Project homepage for a while.
Of course all of this could not have been possible without the cooperation and organization of Palermo Valley and Fabio Caballero, PV's mobile strategist.
Stay tuned!
Cheers
Mario
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Seven days in sunny June
proshadmin | 01 June, 2009 09:42
I usually tend to think on a day-by-day basis, with broad goals that are chased during months maybe, and are only achieved after years (lol). From time to time, I look back and I realize what I have done, and this gives me strength to keep on looking forward and planning things to make it on to the next step. Most people do this every New Year's Eve, trying to remember what happened in a year's time, what they have done, what their goals were and what they did in order to make things happen.
My own checkpoint is usually set somewhere near holidays. After many years, I've come to the conclusion that my holidays have this specific function in my life: act as a separator for years, so I can tell which year is which.
During the year, I either take my working projects as "milestones in life" and also use seasons to get a timeframe for my actions and plans.
Looking back only for the last seven days, last week has been one of those weeks in which a lot of things happen.
Monday May 25th: Dia de la Patria. Argentinean May's Revolution Day.
Tuesday May 26th: Networking actually works. I was recommended to a person whom I never met before. We met and I'm sure big things are coming.
Wednesday May 27h: A newborn in the family! Little Julieta. Happiness literally everywhere! :)
Thursday May 28th: I gave a talk about Prosciutto at Palermo Valley Mobile Sessions series, in the opening!. It was just GREAT. I will post the presentation soon (already available at Slideshare). It was really a good experience and a true acknowledgment that things can be pulled together in order to make something relevant to others. Not only people got interested but also 2 of the attendants want to get involved. Happy! :)
Friday May 29th: The Nokia NSeries Experience took me into meeting Mario Pergolini, a great tv and radio showman at the radio. I've been listening to his radio shows since I was 7 years old only. Meeting his radio set and also while widely known punk rock band Attaque 77 was playing some good music made me feel like I was 16 again!. A really refreshing experience. I enjoyed it a lot :)
Saturday May 30th: The Embajadores Nokia experience ends today. We engaged in some kind of treasure hunt in Tigre (next to the delta on the Lujan river, near Buenos Aires), where we needed to photo shoot things around, use our GPS to track down places, and find trails and leads to find and complete all the assignemnts while using all the help of our Nokia N96 handsets. I had a great time with the rest of the ambassadors (Irina, Gerar, Agustin, Mechi, Leo, Vir, and also the Nokia/JWT team headed by Orly Cristofalo and Fer Gonzalez), even if it was rainy and the temperature was near to zero celcius degrees.
Sunday May 31st: Took a rest for the whole day ;)
Now June starts, and I thought it was a good idea to plan things out in terms of weeks. I do handle several projects at the same time, so it's difficult for me to keep up the pace and always keep things under control. I will start applying some agile development techniques which are usually used in 1 day (day by day) like scrum meetings and such, for an entire week as a timeframe unit. Let's see what happens! Maybe the unit time frame that best works for me is 7 days!
Cheers,
Mario
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