Nokia holds global events for developers and partners each year, such as the S60 Summit, Nokia Games Summit, and Nokia World. These are complimented by tech days and code camps run by Forum Nokia in its various regions, as well as online events. To underscore the importance of third- party developers and partners to Nokia and to the mobile eco-system, the Nokia Developer Summit has been created as the marquee Spring event.
“In this, our inaugural Nokia developer event, developers will hear about what Nokia is doing for the global developer community,” says Srikanth. “It is not just about Forum Nokia — although Forum Nokia plays an important role. The event is about showcasing runtimes, devices, and services from across the entire Nokia organisation. Developers know us well for runtimes and devices, but with the emerging story around Ovi services and Ovi Store, we want to demonstrate to developers the opportunities this creates. We also want to show developers how to realise these opportunities and bring compelling products and services for consumers and enterprises to market.”
As such the Nokia Developer Summit acts as a compliment to Nokia World, which is taking place this September in Stuttgart. Nokia World is, according to Srikanth, very much customer focused to showcase products and services that Nokia’s partners can take to their consumers. In comparison, the Nokia Developer Summit is about facilitating the creation of those products and services.
To achieve these goals the summit offers both business and technical tracks. On the technical side there are technical sessions, hands on labs, meet the experts forums, and a Calling All Innovator hackathon. While on the business side there are matchmaking sessions with Nokia and its partners providing access to the most relevant stakeholders, executives, and other key players, with a particular focus on opportunities to present applications and services for Ovi Store. “Where possible I would strongly recommend companies send both a technical and business representative, to get the most out of the summit,” says Srikanth.
The summit will also afford the opportunity for developers (and business people for that matter) to exchange ideas from the different domains Nokia supports: Symbian, Maemo, Flash, Java, and the web. Given this mix of disciplines it is not surprising that, according to Srikanth, cross-platform development will be a strong focus for the event.
Another important focus for Nokia is next generation internet services, as the consumption of these services on mobile platform are creating significant opportunities for internet content creators and mobile developers alike. This will be the focus of a hackathon being run over the two days, with the goal of creating new internet services.
Working from the top ten winning ideas from the Nseries Widget Design Competition groups of developers will attempt to create working solutions. The results of their labours will then be showcased to Nokia stakeholders at a senior level. The best implementations will have a shot at the €25,000 of prizes up for grabs, as well as the possibility for premium placement in Ovi Store and an introduction to preload opportunities.
“We feel that the summit should be an opportunity to learn and network with decision makers within Nokia and the key players in the ecosystem. It also provides a forum in which to reward developer’s creativity and innovation and that is what we hope to do in the hackathon,” says Srikanth. “And it does not stop there. Flash developers will be able to find out more about the Adobe and Nokia Open Screen Project, Qt developers about how they can take their desktop applications mobile, and internet service developers gain an understand of how they can partner with Nokia services to offer compelling consumer solutions. Ultimately, it does not matter which runtime (or internet cloud) the developer works with, whether they are small, medium or large, there will be something for everyone at the summit.”
With regard to holding the event in Monaco, Srikanth says “We have negotiated deals on hotels that are very reasonable and similar to those of many other global venues. Once developers are in Monaco it’s so compact the hotels are only minutes from the venue so there are no more transport costs, which can often add significantly to the cost of many events. However, the real cost may come from not attending and losing the opportunity to leverage Nokia’s global reach and innovative services to access millions of consumers.”
Third-party applications and services have been important to Nokia since the introduction of its first Java enabled phones. With the introduction of open platforms, third-party developers became central to those platforms’ success. Software and services are becoming the key differentiators for mobile devices, and while Ovi addresses part of this challenge, Nokia needs third-party developers to ensure it can offer powerful solutions to consumers around Ovi services, Nokia devices and third-party innovations. Nokia’s competitors also have their eyes on mobile developers: Nokia Developers Summit aims to convince developers that Nokia remains the best opportunity in the industry.
Nokia Developer Summit 2009 runs 28 and 29 April at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco. For more details visit the www.developersummit2009.com.
Rafe will be attending the Nokia Developer Summit, so look out for reports from the event at the end of the month.