Nick Mullen

Feels like I’m on a bungee cord at the moment with all my to-ing and fro-ing across the atlantic, this is my 3rd trip in 2 months. A slightly different line up in personnel this time (am here with James Parton, Chris Book and Jose Valles this time) and we’re over on the west coast to spread the message about our APIs and to talk to as many developers as we can over the next few days.

Last night we were at Mobile Monday’s event in San Francisco and we had an absolutely fantastic turnout. We had sold out on tickets and people were standing at the back of the room. James Parton did the main BlueVia presentation, and we were joined onstage by our partners from Amobee, Boku and Microsoft.

We had just announced the launch of our new payments API with Boku and already we’re seeing a lot of interest in how we can facilitate in-app payments direct to the consumer’s mobile bill. There’s lots of introductory stuff, videos etc that you can pick up on the official BlueVia blog (http://blog.bluevia.com/) but the long and the short is that the API is there and live – please let us know what you think!

I’ve had a few of my pre-conceptions altered over the past couple of months – I’ve always imagined that the market here in the US was a fairly insular one and that developers were almost exclusively looking at the US market. However, at least here in California I can confidently say that isn’t the case – there was a very healthy show of hands when we asked who were targetting the consumers in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico (and soon Brazil). We’re definitely of interest to the audience there!

We’re heading up to Seattle later today to speak to the Mobile Monday (tuesday) event tonight – and then Thursday we are at the Mobile 2.0 event all day. Would love to see you there – registrations are still open at http://mobile2event.com/

I’ve have the great pleasure this week to be in California, the primary reason for the trip being to attend the Wireless Industry Partners “Muther! of all Hackathons” in Mountain View.

For BlueVia, this was something of a leap into the unknown – Telefónica doesn’t have a US consumer presence so would the developer audience here embrace us?  Would we be able to convince them that we had the tools to help them create something wonderful?  Would they appreciate that there is a huge untapped market on their doorstep in the shape of Latin and South America?

So Friday morning – 6:00am the merry band of myself, Tom and Andres set off from the hotel in San Francisco and jumped onto the train for Mountain View.  We were running a masterclass at 9:00am and unfortunately one of our speaking partners from Microsoft had been forced to cancel, so there was some last minute rearrangement of slides on the train.

We arrived at the venue, the Computer History Museum, and got ourselves set up. The registration desk was piled high with name badges – 450 people had registered to attend so we were looking forward to some good engagement.  The format of the event was fairly simple – the first part of the day consisted of a number of masterclasses given by the various sponsors and then there was a “tool-pitch” where in one room all the vendors gave a quick “why you should use our stuff” and laid out the various prizes that were on offer.  After that – time to hack!  24 hours of coding to create something wonderful – then a 2 hour session during which each project would get 3 minutes to present / demo their creations to the panels of judges.

9am day 1 - the first BlueVia masterclass

I was pleasantly surprised by the engagement we received – as I said, we don’t really work in the US but even so, we had 7 projects use our APIs over the weekend. Andres and I were kept busy running between the teams, helping them get the SDKs set up, explaining the more arcane elements of the oAuth process and getting them through to the stage where they can get started.  Was immensely tiring – but good fun at the same time.  As the evening rolled on, it actually seemed more people arrived (those that hadn’t managed to take the Friday off work) so even at midnight we were getting new people coming and talking to us. Luckily a healthy (!) supply of tacos and beer was there to provide fuel.

We hadn’t really intended to stay so late, we had imagined that most people would have homes to go to, but we were busy enough to easily miss our last train back to SF and so were committed! By 1:30am though things had quietened down a little for us, and the combination of jetlag, an early wake-up and a full-on day was taking it’s toll so we found a local hotel and grabbed 4 precious hours sleep.

Morning, RedBull, back in action!

Breakfast, day 2

The teams were still hard at work, a good number had pulled all nighters – kudos to them!  Andres and myself were doing some last minute debugging with people whilst Tom got himself ready for the judging. 1:00 came around and everyone gathered together for the presentations.

Gathering up for the pitches

Now 3 mins isn’t exactly a long time to pitch your work, and it’s true that the best hackers aren’t always the best presenters, but when there are 60 projects to get through there really isn’t much alternative, but there had been some assistance in masterclasses and barcamps on “how (not) to make a great pitch” consisting of several VCs. You could tell the ones that had taken note.  Simplicity is definitely the key – don’t try and describe 30 features, describe 2 or 3.  The audience was incredibly patient though, and gave the same attention to the last pitch as it did to the first.  There were some really interesting ideas – some used our stuff, others didn’t, some had been targeting specific competitions and prizes, some had been written for the pure joy of it.

In the end though, we had to award our prizes:

Alert4U – produced by the Code Blue team was our clear winner. In it’s conception very simple, in it’s execution quite elegant and with an immediately obvious business model. It also used our SMS and Location APIs in a neat fashion.  We’re looking forward to working with Ash and the team on helping bring that app to market!

HelpMe – by Amir and Bess was a good runner-up, it used several of our APIs in order to get attention in the event of an emergency. The “big red button” idea isn’t exactly new – but the guys had tried out a number of potential input mechanisms and then used those along with location API to try and get help to those that needed it.  To bring this to market, the team possibly need to aim at a more general scenario – earthquakes and tsunamis aren’t exactly commonplace in *most* of our territories, but the potential applications were clear enough that we were happy to award a prize.

Tap Shake Client – by Yosun Chang by was possibly a surprise choice on our part, but the concept was so innovative that Tom in particular was a big fan of this app. The concept was very simple – for visually impared users provide a simple tap-interface on the screen, using long and short taps to do a braile-style input. The “shake” bit came from shaking the handset to clear – just like and etch-a-sketch of old!

And then that was that!  40 hours later, Tom and I are back at the hotel – Andres is at the airport getting ready to head off to another conference in Bogotar, Colombia and the only thing on anyones’ mind is SLEEP!

Great event though, and we were happy to take part. There is no substitute for working directly with developers to learn what’s good about your product, and where you have some room for improvement – and the emails are already flying around to try and make our next release even better.

Can be yours for free!   http://www.visionmobile.com/devecon.php

BlueVia has sponsored the report which was produced by Vision Mobile.   Here’s the summary:

Developer Economics 2011 is the quintessential mobile developer research report. In this second annual report, we explore both what drives developer mindshare, and how brands are fast-forwarding into the world of mobile.

Developer Economics 2011 takes the reader across the entire developer journey, from the shift of mindshare and why “users can buy you love,” to how money is made in mobile. It covers the hottest issues, from app design and promotion to monetisation and user support.

As always – love to hear feedback.

So today we launched an update to BlueVia.com which contains some good stuff!

Germany and Spain join the party, meaning we’re now live in 7 countries (with more to come!) and in the UK we launched the Location API, allowing you to do free (yes, FREE) location lookups.

Much to do still, and yours truly will be working on some tutorial videos over the next few weeks – which has been an entertaining process so far (and much harder than I imagined).  It’s funny, as you think you know a topic backwards – then under the pressure of a camera you suddenly find that “Um” and “Err” preface every sentence.  So, next week – more of a script and less improv!

This is all part of me taking on a slightly larger role and getting more involved in the marketing side, which is something I’ve been keen to do for a while.   To reflect this, I’ve even been granted my own BlueVia mail account, so nick@bluevia.com is now the best place to reach me for any BlueVia / developer related messages.

Here’s the updated table of the APIs we’re now supporting in release 1.3 – ply me with drinks and I might be persuaded to let slip that version 1.4 is only a few weeks away…

BlueVia 1.3