Christmas time is upon us … again?? yes, so we thought we’d organise a merry evening for everyone who follows MobileMonday.

When you arrive, we’ll give you A FREE DRINK and we’ll let you loose to network like world masters (esp. if you had used Belfast-made Shhmooze before). At some stage we’ll ask a few of you to brief everybody for 90 seconds on the wonderful work in mobile you’ve done in 2011 (no slides) – hey presto, free promo!

Then we’ll mix you up with total strangers in teams of 4 for our Xmas Mobile QUIZ and after raking your brains (we’ll stop the pain after 30 min.), we’ll see who the winner is. And you’ll decide who the winner of the Best Mobile Achievement of the Year is. Presents galore!

The term quiz , first recorded in 1782, meant “an odd or eccentric person.” In English dialects, the verb quiz acquired senses relating to interrogation and questioning. This presumably occurred because quiz was associated with inquisitive, or perhaps the English dialect verb quiset, “to question”. There is no record at PRONI of any association of the word “quiz” with the expression “Mobile Monday”.

So, ready for a lump of craic to escape your PC corporate Xmas Party ?

Aye, register now and bring along those colleagues who never get out of the office.

The Deer’s Head
1-5 Lower Garfield Street
BT1 1FP Belfast, United Kingdom
Monday, 12 December 2011 from 17:00 to 22:00

See you at the Deer’s Head.

Norbert, Colm, James & Michael.

btw, we’re on the iTunes AppStore and the Android Market => search for our free app “MoMo in Ireland” and download it for free!…

Did we mention that it was free?

The Vodafone Foundation has set up the Smart Accessibility Awards to celebrate apps that help people in four key areas: Social participation, independent living, mobility and well-being.

As part of this initiative, alongside our friends at MobileMonday London, we’ve teamed up with the ICT KTN and the Vodafone Foundation Smart Accessibility Awards to bring you in Belfast a half-day workshop (start at 3pm) looking specifically at this area.

This event is free of charge, but we ask you to register (click here) since the number of seats is limited. The awards are free to enter until 15 October 2011 and there’s a prize fund of €200,000.

The goal of the workshop is to inspire and enable app developers and entrepreneurs like you to create useful tools    for people who have visual, aural, cognitive or other impairments by helping you understand and empathize what life is like for people in this situation. This empathy and understanding is created by bringing together app developers, entrepreneurs and accessibility advocates and people with impairments to exchange information, and allowing developers to experience simulations of being impaired.

App developers who have had the opportunity to experience as directly as possible, first or second-hand, what it means to live with specific impairments, and have been put in touch with the larger community around accessibility, create more effective apps to better the quality of life for everyone. The result not only helps people with major disabilities, but also people with minor or temporary impairments, for example due to ageing or illness.

The format of the workshop will be discussion-based and there will be technical people on hand to answer specific questions related to Android, but there will be different speakers and contributors to reflect the local scene. Plenty of time will be allowed for discussion and networking and refreshments will be provided.

Philip Strain from Ecliptic Labs will be introducing us to the topic and sharing some of his key insights from his research in this area.

Philip Hargrave from ICT KTN will be talking about how ICT KTN helps companies looking to capitalise on this area.

And the highlight of the sessions is that we will also have Accessibility expert, Kath Moonan from Vodafone, explaining how to tackle accessibility in your own app.

Please note that, as an exception to our MoMoBelfast privacy rule, the attendee list will this time be shared with the two supporting organisations ICTKTN and Vodafone.

Our next MoMo Belfast event will be on Monday 19 September 2011 in … Dublin!

This “Showcase Ireland MobileMonday” event is a one-off chance if you’re a professional involved in mobile from Belfast or Dublin, to network, find potential technolgoy or business partners, all for free. This event is indeed sponsored by NOKIA and all main economic development agencies Enterprise Ireland, InterTradeIreland and Invest Northern Ireland.

We’ve invited speakers from Irish tech companies that have made it big internationally in the mobile industry in different areas: Openmind Networks (messaging & beyond), Aepona (mobile cloud), Altobridge (mobile networks in remote locations), TR2 (mobile payments), and a speaker from Nokia will present their developer program and what they intend to do with Microsoft!

We will also give the stage to early stage Irish apps companies (alpha or beta) for a 3-minute pitch session (not for investment, but for your feedback), so you’ll see what’s brewing in kitchens, garages and labs up and down the island to take on the world in 2012.

Due to the scale of the event and your need to network, it will run for a whole afternoon (2-6:30pm), and we have scheduled the agenda around the times of the Enterprise train to make it easier for you to work around the travel times.

Registration is now open, please click here to register.

Our event is in the urban cool Gibson hotel just across from the O2 venue (The Point) and we’ve negotiated a special rate if you want to stay overnight.

In true MoMo fashion, this event will be free of charge, thanks to our sponsors:

MAIN SPONSOR:

To continue our series started a year ago with Symbian and last January with BlackBerry, our June event is “The Future of Mobile App Development” featuring top speakers from the WAC and Adobe:

• Tim Haysom @ the WAC – to continue the debate on ‘HTML5 for Mobile’ => Will it really allow developers to build new kinds of features into websites so that sites behave on mobile phones like applications? Let Tim know what you think!

• Mark Doherty @ Adobe – to keep launching ‘Adobe Flash for Mobile‘ => will it give mobile app developers the possibilty to have the same code working on several platforms such as iOS, Android and Blackberry? Come challenge Mark!

Please Register in Advance Here

Monday, June 20, 2011 from 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Black Box Cafe
18-22 Hill Street
Cathedral Quarter
BT1 2LA Belfast

This month we’d like to invite you to a casual networking get-together, without topic, speakers, sponsors, formalities.

Come to the RBG Bar & Grill on Monday 23 May after work to catch up with fellow MobileMonday followers in a relaxed atmosphere.

Have a drink, or a meal, or both, and lots of face-to-face chats with real people, taking a break from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Diaspora et al. (we’re cool if you access these services from your smartphone).

We encourage you to Register Here and we will display your name on the event page, so you know in advance who will be there … unless you prefer surprises!

Every UnWired event is not sponsored: we cannot cover any of the costs involved to/from/inside the RBG Bar & Grill, but we’ll be happy to see you again!

Your MoMo Belfast Team,

Colm, James & Norbert

We have selected a panel of experts in Mobile Government, a growing trend worldwide for all government entities to become cost and time-efficient at communicating with their citizen and delivering public services. We also have a few market players based in NI so we’ve invited them too!

If you are a mobile app developer, there ARE opportunities for you, so come along too.

This event is free of charge thanks to our sponsor Invest NI, but we ask you to register (click here) since the number of seats is limited.

When?

Monday 28 March 2011, 5pm-8pm

Where?
Invest NI Headquarters, Bedford Square, Bedford Street, BT2 7ES

What?

5 min. presentation by each speaker, then 30-minute open panel discussion, it starts at 5:45pm on the dot.

Speakers

(1) Prof. Ibrahim Kushchu, Director, Mobile Government Consortium International (Brighton)

(2) Ken Eastwood, Assistant Director, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council (Barnsley) and National Lead, Public Sector Nomad Project (UK)

(3) Ciaran McClintock, Bus. Dev. Mgr., Consilium Technologies (Antrim)

(4) David Moody, VP Solutions, Kana Software (ex-Lagan) (Belfast)

(5) John Daly, Head of TDA – Technical Design Authority - NI Civil Service (DFPNI)

The £25K Entrepreneurship contest is a commercial & educational experience designed to encourage researchers and individuals to act on their talents, ideas and energy to produce tomorrow’s leading commercial opportunities. The programme helps identify, qualify, prepare and present the best knowledge-based ideas and intellectual property from the publicly funded research base in Northern Ireland with the most commercial potential. If you want to enter the contest with your Mobile Content,  go to www.nispconnect.org/25k Deadline: Friday 22 April 2011 ========================================================================== MOBILE OPPORTUNITY for the 2012 OLYMPICS You have the opportunity to submit the idea of a mobile app for the 2012 Olympics (public tender process). Please click here for more information and then on Bulletin 118 – Mobile Applications. If you need further guidance in registering with www.competefor.com contact Patrick McNally on 028 9069 8109 or e-mail patrick.mcnally@investni.com The tender will close on 28th March 2011 and will be awarded on 1st June 2011. If you are successful in being shortlisted by The London Olympic Organising Committee,  Invest NI can provide additional support for the final stages of the tender.

Northern Ireland is a hotbed of creativity in the mobile space, with dozens of apps and platform companies influencing innovation on a global scale. This year, 10 of them will be at the Mobile World Congress on Stand 1E63 (hall 1). Come and see how you can cooperate with them, learn from them or teach [...]

MobileMonday Belfast presents another FREE networking event for NI’s mobile software professionals. This time we focus our attentions on developing apps for the BlackBerry platform.

Book early to reserve your seat as places are limited.

When? Monday 24th January, 5:15 – 8:00pm

Where? The Presidents Club, Midtown Centre 25 Talbot Street Cathedral Quarter Belfast, BT1 2LD

Get directions on Google Maps

What? In the highly competitive smartphone market, BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIM) continues to battle with iPhone and Android in the race to take Symbian’s lead. Regardless of who wins, the opportunity for BlackBerry app developers is significant, particular in the highly lucrative business user segment. With BlackBerry App Word now available in over 70 countries and having over 2 million app downloads per day the opportunity is clear.

This MobileMonday Belfast event provides a unique chance to get the inside track from RIM’s senior technology and business development experts. We also invite local company TotalMobile to share their practical experiences of developing for the BlackBerry platform.

As part of the event we will be giving away 5 tickets for Mobile World Congress 2011, being held once more in Barcelona from the 14th to 17th February 2011. Tickets are kindly donated by RIM.

Who? Andre Fabris, Mobile Application Development Specialist, RIM Etienne De Klerk, Business Developer Manager,  UK, RIM Gareth Tolerton, CTO  Total Mobile

Agenda:
5:15 Registration & Networking
6:15 Introductions, MobileMonday Belfast Founders
6:20 “Building efficient Super Apps using BlackBerry Internet Service”
Andre Fabris, Mobile Application Development Specialist
6:35 “The opportunity for BlackBerry app developers”
Etienne De Klerk, Business Developer Manager, UK
6:45 “Local Case Study: Practical experiences of developing BlackBerry apps”
Gareth Tolerton, CTO  Total Mobile
7:00 Mobile World Congress raffle draw & closing remarks
8:00 Networking finishes

Belfast-based Shhmooze has been nominated for a place at a global APPCircus event in Barcelona next year. Pictured (L-R) is Judith Millar from Invest Northern Ireland with Michelle Galen from Shhmooze and Norbert Sagnard from MobileMonday Belfast. Full Details Here

AppCircus is a showcase which is open to developers, businesses and any organisation wishing to present their most creative and innovative apps. MobileMonday Belfast, a mobile networking community sponsored by Invest Northern Ireland, organised the event where the local winner was announced. Shhmooze is a location-based app which helps people to network effectively at events.

Invest NI’s Bill Montgomery commented: “The mobile industry is a fast paced and technologically advanced sector with significant growth potential. All of the shortlisted applicants from Northern Ireland demonstrated highly innovative mobile applications.

“Some apps are designed to entertain, inform or aid lifestyle decisions, while others aim to help people find new business or interact with local authorities. Shhmooze’s nomination is a significant opportunity for the firm to make connections and showcase its work to the global mobile industry.

“Northern Ireland has had a strong mobile technology cluster for many years. Now a vibrant mobile apps development cluster highlights the creativity, expertise and innovation available in Northern Ireland.”

Norbert Sagnard of MobileMonday Belfast commented: “I congratulate Shhmooze on its success in winning the Belfast AppCircus event and wish them good luck for the 2011 Mobile Premier Awards ceremony in Barcelona next year. We are keen to encourage more local companies to explore the opportunities in mobile applications and technology.

“The Mobile World Congress is one of the biggest conferences in the mobile industry and will offer this company a unique opportunity to network and gain new business within the global telecommunications industry. It will also highlight the sectoral expertise we have in Northern Ireland.”