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 Roger Brinkley's BlogCommunity: Mobile & Embedded ArchivesMobile & Embedded Community Governance Board Nomations OpenPosted by brinkley on June 30, 2008 at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)The Mobile & Embedded Community Governances Board has called for nominations for the two open Governances Board positions effective immediately. Any java.net member can nominate an active member in the Mobile & Embedded Community to serve as a Governance Board Member. All nominations will be reviewed by the current Mobile & Embedded Community Governance to verify that the nominee is interested in the position and complies with current Governance Board Member requirements. Elections will be held July 14 through July 28 though a mechanism still yet to be determined. All java.net members will be able to vote in the election.
Nominations should be sent to gbnominations-at-mobileandembedded.dev.java.net. Full details on the Mobile & Embedded Governances Board can be found at here.
MEDD - Registration is still openPosted by brinkley on January 19, 2008 at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)You woke up Saturday morning and realized that the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days, the conference with 26 intermediate to advanced technical sessions, 14 lightning talks and 12 poster session that you wanted to attend since it was announced, closed it registration on Friday at midnight and you forgot to register. Ok don't give up and don't despair, we changed our minds and have decided to keep registration open a while longer. We still have a few seats open and don't want anyone that wants to be there to miss it. That said you could help us out just a bit by actually registering sooner than later.
Register now at the conference home page. This is a great conference by developers, for developers and you don't want to miss it.
MEDD - SPOTs AwayPosted by brinkley on January 18, 2008 at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
In WWII the bombardier would yell, "bombs away" as the bombs left the airplane. Attendees at the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days will have an opportunity to win one of four SunSPOTs Java Developer Kit.
The SunSPOTs development team will then select a maximum of 8 projects. Those selected will be given 1 minute to present to the conference there proposal and then the conference attendees will vote on each proposal. The four sessions with most number of votes will be declared the winners. In the event of a tie, the person among the tied Entries with the highest score in innovation will be declared the winner.
I'm happy to say that we have achieved both goals. We will be doing a live broadcast world wide using ustream.tv. If you haven't had any prior experience with this tool you are in for a real treat. In addition the live broadcast, ustream.tv has a wide range of features including chat, an applause meter, polls and comments. We'll be using all of these features when we go live at 8:30 PST on January 23.
We are still toying with idea of requiring an account to be able to chat so you might want to set up and account on ustream.tv in advance of event on next Wednesday.
But it won't be the same as being there. No matter how hard we try it just is not the same as being there in person. We won't be able to cover the poster sessions. We won't cover lunch. Trust me I've watched my colleagues eat before and it is not worth covering. And of course we will not be covering the social event or the bar camp.
An former co-worker of mine once told me that the most important aspect of any conference isn't the content that you hear but the people that you meet. As we said once before the emphasis on the conference is an intimate conference where application developers get to rub elbows with other application developers along with the operators, manufactures, and platform developers. Relationships initiated here will be beneficial over the next year and beyond. Combine that with some other activities specific to attendees and you got some pretty strong reasons to attend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just to give you a taste for what has been submitted below are two technical sessions and three lightning talks that I think are keepers.
With content like the one's above it would be easy to resign yourself to attending only. DO NOT DO THAT There is still one days left and believe me, being a JavaOne track lead for the last few years I know that many a good submission has arrived on the last day.
So get those grey cells active and those fingers moving and submit a technical session, lightning talk or poster session for what will be the best Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days ever (ok it's the first but it's better than anything else you'll attend)
Paulo Rubens Francez and Emerson Giannini started the company just six months ago but they have already established themselves as a desirable employeer in the Sao Paulo area. Paulo is a former employee of MacDonalds in Brazil. Working in the IT group he created an ME application for customers to order from MacDonalds for home delivery.
Not the kinda of MacDonalds that I grew up with. In Brazil, MacDonalds is a highly desirable job and it treats it's employees quite well. With his management training in MacDonalds Paulo wanted to create an application development company that truly supported his work force.
Knowing that moving and living in Sao Paulo can be difficult for some new to the city, even difficult for someone who already lives in the city, Paulo and Emerson have obtained an apartment for his employees. Right now four of his employees live in the company furnished apartment. Paulo thought is to provide new employees a stable living environment until they can afford their own. The net effect is that the employees live, breath, and sleep Java ME. One employee said he even was dreaming JavaME.
I see what your thinking sounds like a sweat shop, right? Wrong, quite the opposite. In fact the employees are encourage to spent some portion of their time each week working on what ever they want. Pure research. So what are they working on? Java ME games, multilayer games in particular. Paulo and Emerson figure that this research might actually turn into something that the company can potentially market. Worse case scenario the employees will have an in depth understanding of a different set of APIs than is commonly used in the company's standard set of applications. Greater technical expertise which will in time create better applications.
Not enough? Paulo and Emerson paid for about half of the employees to come to ME days and Sun Tech days. "Yawn, so what ", you say. Maybe if you live in the US or in Europe but in Brazil it is very common for employees to have to take the day off without pay and pay for the event as well, but not at e-DEPLOY. At the end of the day, Emerson turned to me and said, "I think the price of ME Days was worth it. In fact I know it was."
e-DEPLOY creates great Java ME programs communicating with the Java EE servers, but I think the strength of the company is not the applications but the way it treats their engineers. It's a fun place to work.
On final note: During the evening E-ming asked one of the employees what they do on the weekend. "I don't know", he said,"I have only worked here four days."
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