On behalf of DotOpen and WIP who have partnered to bring you Mobile Jam session – thanks to all the participants, the speakers, the sponsors and Teresa Ostman for making things work smoothly.  Watch the website for upcoming opportunities to Jam On! And check out the photos on Flickr.  

Here are notes takes from the Mobile Jam Las Vegas.  Some of these were taken during the sessions, much were taken directly from the flipchart notes made during the Improv Sessions.  If you see a mistake or something taken out of context – correct it with your comments! 

The 2nd Mobile Jam Session was held the day before CTIA in Las Vegas.  We had 100 folks attend throughout the day, mostly developers from North America, but a good sprinkling of folks from Europe and Asia as well.  Thanks to our sponsors, session speakers and all the participants. The most common comment heard at the end of the day was: “I’ve run out of business cards, I didn’t think I’d meet so many people”.  Excellent – that’s what we wanted to hear! 

We started off with an UnPanel of Developer Programs featuring James Pearce of dotMobi, Claudia Backus of MotoDev, Mikael Nerde of Sony Ericsson, Thibaut Rouffineau from Symbian, Amy Bang from AT&T and Steve Glagow of Orange Partner.  They got the opportunity to ask the audience questions.   

On the question of Barriers to Development, the top issues for developers were:
- access to devices- the need for more platforms such as Flash on devices
- accessibility to good market data and use cases- certification
- lack of business models (most thought big revenue was still 5 years off).
- Lots of questions and discussion on web vs native apps and how the devices and operators are dealing with these.   

There were supposed to be 6 Improv Session in the afternoon, but really on 5 happened.  The Session on Developing drew limited interest, which as mentioned above was far different from the session in Barcelona where it was full all the time.  The session that drew the most interest were Mobile 2.0 and Go to Market and Channels.  

Session 1 Mobile OS and Platforms
We weren’t able to get notes from this discussion, so let’s encourage the leaders Vincent Berge from Mobile Distillery to share a few with us.  

Session 2 Mobile 2.0
Lively discussion led by CellSpin – Vince Laviano, Rococo – Sean O’Sullivan and Idean - Santtu Toivonen
 - Voice or Text- what are the demographics
- Service discovery still an issue , the willingness of users to download and install, and actually use social networks
- What is the definition  Mobile 2.0 
 - social networking in a broad sense
  - integrating web services and mobile 
How to attract users:- share data plans
 - viral marketing- increase awareness among users 
How to filter content
- status messages
- circles of friends
- location based Barriers
- carriers
- handsets 
Success= take the best of the Web 2.0 and respect the features of mobile (presence, location ec) 

3.  Testing & Certification was led by: GetJar – Bill Scott, Mob4Hire – Paul Poutanen and Device Anywhere – David Marsyla
Agreed there were many approaches but in general T&C offers no value added, seems to be for insurance only Variables include:
- manufacturers
- carriers
- testing solutions
- porting platforms
- browsers- certification
- user agent blocking  On Signing Apps- third parties certify, if you want to call it ‘cert’
- how to simplify
- 3^rd parties are not perfect, susceptible to human error and commercial motivation
- self certification – would like to see this taken further as an option, with 3^rd parties doing the final check
- really hard for small companies, how can this process be democratized
- concept of intermediate development layers to help
- will open OS and handsets help???? 

 4.  Channels was led by: Cellmania- Peter Baldwin, AORTA- Chetan Sharma, and Astraware/Handmark – John Philips
Direct to consumerAdvertisingPersonalizationMarketing
– evangelists and viral work best 

6  Open Source was led by:  Aplix – Stanley Kao, Motorola - Asokan Thiyagarajan (Ashok) and Funambol - Greg Gamp
Consensus was not to be on open source in the short term