Awesome Inc Mini Conference Recap

As you may have read Fuel Your Apps went to Awesome Inc over the weekend for a Mini App conference. The content was amazing and learning and sharing were the key things that participants and speakers engaged in. The conference was divided into Four Tracks where you could learn General things, iPhone Beginner, iPhone Experienced or technical. While being there they encouraged popping around from session to session to engage and take as much benefit as home as possible.

Noah Kagan – Facebook @noahkagan

The conference kicked off with a Keynote from Noah Kagan who dropped some science on the people in attendance. Even though in the US all we think about is iPhone and some BlackBerry’s thrown in there 50% of the the rest of the world is on a Symbian OS phone. So there is more mobile development out in the world besides iPhone apps. Kagan talked about how he used to work at Facebook and created the Your Pimp Name apps. Kagan talked about the new “lazy web” where a user doesn’t have to update their devices they do it automatically to show their location or status. Auto location updates have caught on the most in urban markets through devices such as Boost Mobile. Noah Kagan then talked about how in the net 5 years in mobile marketing you will start to see much more GPS based advertising and has a hunch that most everyone will have a smart phone in the next 5 years.

John Soward – University of Kentucky @jpsoward

“Choosing a development strategy for your iPhone application” is what John Soward from the University of Kentucky talked about.  There are 3 different dev platforms to explore when you publish an app: Web-app, Application or Hybrid of the two. The reasons to consider are: a Native Application will have access to the GPS as well as be able to use the wonderful SDK apple has provided. However if you design a webclip or a web-app you are not able to use all the full potential of the phone or setup payment through the appstore. There are also many pitfalls to having a webapp/clip. If the user can navigate away from the intended page in any way your app will be rated NC-17 because they could navigate to bad content. This is a challenge because if you are making a kids app for an iPod Touch and its NC-17 its not going to work.

Sam Soffes – Soff.es @samsoffes

Sam talked about his Bible app he developed that has been downloaded 1.5 Million times. Sam then talked about how pricing your app is crucial to the exposure you will get. Bible is a free app and would not have the same exposure if it was a pay app. Sam instructed everyone to keep the pricepoint as low as possible to enable you to have the most users possible. “If you’re not charging for the app and it has ads in it you better have a good reason. Which usually you don’t and you should just go ahead and sell it for .99 cents. “ Sam Soffes stressed over and over the importance of reading the Human Interface Guidelines and how that is key to making a successful application.

Slides

Sam also was kind enough to put up his slides from the presentation if you wanted to hope over and check them out.

Brendan Lim – Intridea @brendanlim

Brendan closed the conference with a talk about ubiquitous mobile. Lim mentioned how one day we may be connected to everything at every moment. Our phones could be credit cards they could store your car driving preferences. Applications and social media as we know it today could be one seamless experience. Much like if you were looking at a hotel that you just booked on your computer when you left the house it would be pushed to your mobile device and you could continue looking from there.

There were several other speakers that Fuel Your Apps was unable to see because of them speaking at the same time, other speakers included

Markus Spiering – Yahoo Blueprint @spieri

Zuv Tarsi – TuneWiki @ztarsi

Brian Slick – BriTer Ideas @BrianSlick

Jake Behrens – The Oklahoma Publishing @withfoam

Justin Raney – Apax Software @jarane2

This was an awesome event put on by the team at Awesome Inc. They have an amazing collaboration space setup for people in the community to use and share in art talks, conferences, gallery shows and work! If you are in the Lexington, KY are you should make it a point to stop by. I recommend you get your calendar out and mark next years mini conference down because this one was a huge success.

Can I Have More Info?

There are pictures and more information about the Awesome Inc. Mobile Mini-Conference (@awesome_inc) on their site. Give them a follow and a big thank you for doing so much for the app community!