Roger Brinkley's Blog

November 2007 Archives

Last Day for M&E Developer Days Early Bird Discount

For more information see Mobile & Embedded Developer Days home page and the agenda.

Early Bird Discount for M&E Developer Days

Unfortunately, he did point out a serious flaw in the registration system where the price got incorrectly set to $225 instead of $175. If you tried to register and saw the price was $225 instead of the $175 try again. If you haven't tried to register and you want to take advantage of the early bird discount you have until November 30 and then on December 1 the price will definitely go up to $225 and all the pleading and begging in the world won't help. ;)

This is the premier Java mobile developer end of the year and something that you wont want to miss. One look at the agenda and you'll see this is a conference by developers for developers. Register by November 30 and you'll be able to attend for $175.

The Developer Days agenda is final, the Developer Days agenda is final

Crammed into 36 consecutive hours you'll find 25 sessions, 21 lightning talks, and 4 30 minute poster sessions. And if that isn't enough you can stay up part of the night at the brainstorming and bar/camp sessions.

Yeah, but it's a Sun conference! Wrong, it's a Mobile & Embedded Community conference that was developed by developers for developers. One of the things that Terrence and I did was make sure that the selection committee was made up of a lot of outsiders so this conference has a lot of outside voices, industry leaders, and forward thinking companies presenting. Of those 25 sessions only 12 are from Sun. In the conference you'll hear from Sun, Nokia, IBM, and Intel and you'll hear from a truly international cast speakers from Brazil, Sweden, Ireland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Russia, and the United States.

And the content, oh my, the content. It's like being a kid in a candy store when it comes to width and breadth of the topics. Java FX/Mobile, JavaME Security, Near Field Communication, Sun SPOTs, Pervasive Computing, SVG, new JXTA for JavaME, phoneME VM architecture, JavaDB and tear off databases, mobile augmented reality, blu-ray, interactive set top boxes and many more.

So print out the agenda now that it's 99.9% complete and stick it under your boss' nose and say "I'm going" and get him to cough up the measly $175 to register. That right I said $175 for two days. Let me put it to you this way that's $7 per technical session and I'm throwing in the 21 lightning talks and 4 poster sessions for free. ;) Ok I admit that's a little bit cheesy but still you aren't going to find this value anywhere else.

So come on. Go to the conference site and hit the register button and sign up. You know you want be there. You know you should be there. Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days is calling.

Lucky 13

Of course some people thought the 13th was a terrible day to start the community. It was the 13th after all. But I never have shied away for the number 13. I wore it on my baseball jersey in High School and it has nothing to due with fact that my front tooth was knocked out on a warm up pitch or that I got leveled at home plate more than once. And by the way each guy that leveled me was OUT!!!!

Naw 13 doesn't worry me one bit and this first year has proven it isn't a jinx at all. We now have over 80 projects in the community and more are coming in every day. The phoneME bits are being reused in a number of external projects. Some of those projects are now coming knocking on the door and asking what they have to do join the community. What I think is amazing is we're seeing both application developers and platform developers side by side in the community. That's something that is rarely seen and this community is doing a good job of it.

I've also traveled around the world sharing the news about the community with people in Asia, North and South America while my counterparts have been visiting sites in Europe and joining me in Asia. This year we might actually make it to Africa as well. The response? Pretty outstanding. One thousand in Hyderbad, India and solid 400 at two sites in Brazil.

It's taken a full year but this international community of ME devotees is growing and now they have their own agenda and you'll find speakers from Brazil, Sweden, Ireland, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the United States. I don't think any other conference has this type of coverage.

So come celebrate the community with us today by registering for the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days conference. Seating is limited and early bird registration ends November 30.

My review of Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Technical Sessions

We preselected three topics so I know Rick Hillegas' "Tear-off Databases on Phones", C. Enrique Ortiz "Near Field Communication in Mobile Commerce", and Hartti Suomela's "JavaME Security Domains and Access to APIs" are easy choices.

From there I've got a couple of other favorites that I hope make the final cut. In the embedded space David Beberman's "Real-time Java in embedded critical applications. Could Java control your pace maker?" makes my heart skip a beat. And face it, I'm sucker for Bruce Boyes and his TrackBots so that talk is high on my list.

There are a lot of game development talks as well, some of which will definately make it into the final schedule. Erik Hellman's "Combining OpenGL-ES and Mobile Sensor API for new gaming experiences" and Marlon Luz and Andreas Frank's "Mobile Augmented Reality: Bringing the World Virutal Elements to Java Phones" are really cutting edge type of presentations.

Hinkmond Wong shows us all in the how to "Developing with Project PhoneME" and then Eric Arseneau's "Project Squawk, Leveraging phoneME Feature for other types of devices" and Lorenzo Pallara with "JTVOS, a free interactive set top box middleware: introduction and architecture" illustrate how to extend phoneME.

In short the final decisions aren't going to be easy but attending should be. This WILL DEFINATELY be a content rich conference. If you haven't signed up yet hurry up cause space is limited. You can sign up here.

36 hours in the life of the Mobile & Embedded Developer Days organizer

Yesterday morning at the beginning of the day there were just around 30 submissions for the conference. There were some really good talks, but still not a tremendous amount of content. I wasn't overly surprised when I got up rather sluggishly and found 5 new submissions in my inbox. What was a surprise was the number of sessions that kept pouring in all day. We must work in a industry of procrastinators because I received over 35 submissions yesterday and I'm talking rock solid presentations.

Knowing that we were going to open the site for registration today there a strong need to have a least 3 technical talks and 3 lightning talks selected by the end of the day. I sent our team of external reviewers the morning list of about 35 sessions. Problem was they kept going to the web page that was being automatically updated and say, "oh, oh, can I choose that one?"

I thought that choosing would be a pretty simple task. I figured this bright group of reviewers would make my life easy. I thought they would be the I Ching of conference selection and give me the "obvious" answer. They did for the lightning talks but my goodness they were all over the board selecting the technical sessions. I couldn't decide if the content was that strong or if I had 10 truly diverse set of engineers on my hands that made obvious choices not so obvious. In late afternoon Terrence and I made a decision, almost totally ignoring the selection's team guidance, and selected what we think are the 3 strongest and surest submissions. You can see our final list here.

After a short evening with the family, I started working on changing the conference web site. How hard can it be to add a "register here" button? It didn't take me long to realize that we need to streamline things and one thing led to another and walla we have a totally new look and ready for registrations. Ah it's 4:30 in the morning. Oh what the hey, may as well do the agenda timeline while I'm at it. The fact that I greeted my wife as she left for work at 6:30 am doesn't seem to matter.

Sleep? Never mind, I'll just go back downstairs. The timeline doesn't look right so I fix it and work on an email to my superiors. It goes something like this:

Yesterday we closed the call for papers. There have over 60 submissions: 33 Technical Sessions; 23 lightning talks; and 6 poster sessions. I'd say that over 80% of the talks are of high quality. 24 of the submission are from Sun but that's largely because the SunSpot team has decided to submit a series of 7 lightning talks instead of one large sessions. Next to Sun Nokia has submitted 4 talks. The lionshare of the talks are from the United States, but Brazil submit 6 or 7 proposals. Europe has about 2 or 3.

After the weekly medd (Mobile & Embedded Developer Days) team meeting at 8:30 I plopped into bed for a few hours of rest. It is what everyone does at 9:20 in the morning, isn't it? You know what I can't figure out is why when you work all night the phone has to ring all day? Where were you people when I was awake and somewhat coherent in the middle of night? Geez!!

At 1:30 I stumbled out of bed and started another day. Over 200 new messages in the Inbox. What do you people do work while I'm sleeping in the middle the day? The gall of it all!

We're still short a key note speaker so we're working on our number one choice. After a lot of back and forth we can now say that James Gosling is going to be the keynote speaker. Yeah...pinch myself to make sure I'm actually awake.

It's now late afternoon and the stragglers are coming begging. "Uh, I missed the deadline! Please, pretty please, I won't do it again. Gravel, gravel, gravel" Right! Three years as a JavaOne track lead. Come on I know better. I wasn't born last night I just worked the night. Everyone knows that there is a hard date for closing submissions and soft date. Besides when JXTA, Intel, Java FX/Mobile, and Netbeans developers come asking are you going to say no? So that ups us to around 65 or 70 talks now.

It's almost the end of the 36 hours. I took the family out for dinner at the local ice cream shop. The eye lids are falling and I'm really ready for the rag bag.

I know that I'm going to have a good nights sleep and dream about selling out the conference on the first day. We've got James as a keynote and the best mobile content ever assembled. So good in fact that a couple of really good talks that would make any other conference might not make it here. Combine that with an excellent format this puppy ought to sell out the limited number of of seats in a matter of hours.

Yeah I know, you think I'm dreaming. Maybe I am! Maybe I was six months ago when I pitched this idea to Terrence and we took it to management. Maybe I was when all our external advisers said do it. Maybe I was when my director finally said do it and the M&E team started October 1 creating this conference. Maybe I was when submissions came flooding in yesterday and maybe I am when I say the auditorium will be completely full January 22 at 9:00 am.

Maybe so...but I can tell you now it is going to be the hottest ticket in town for ME developer and if you miss it....well your going to miss the first and best mobile and embedded conference of the year. Don't wait, register now, register here.

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