The Computer History Museum in Mountain View was packed last week with computer relics and hundreds of RWW Mobile Summit attendees to adore them. The unconference itself began with CallFire CEO Dinesh Ravishanker introducing the keynote speaker Richard MacManus, the Founder and CEO of ReadWriteWeb. Just before he handed things off to Richard, Dinesh had all attendees reach under their seats for the CallFire giveaway - a toll free number with 1000 IVR minutes. Attendees were told "creativity is your only limit" with the ability to create surveys, a feedback line or track advertising analytics.
Because of the unconference format, attendees at the RWW Mobile Summit were able to create their own path. Not only did attendees choose the panel and topics, but they also helped lead them. This type of format is rare yet welcome in the hardcore tech community, which loves to cut out the fat of big budget conferences. CallFire team members attended panels such as Mobile Video Content, Lessons Learned from Location based Apps, and Cross-Platform App Development. TJ Thinakaran, COO at CallFire, discovered that "you can't get away from developing native apps and yet HTML5 will simplify deployment." Other notable trends were SMS being a prominent way of developing apps in the future as well as the sudden rise in augmented reality applications.
In between panels, the event sponsors had the opportunity to participate in "speed geeking", the unconference equivalent to speed dating. Essentially, companies had five minutes to demo their product - including Q&A. It gave a chance for the demoing companies to reach more eyeballs in a short amount of time. The CallFire team was able to quickly demo how to use Cloud IVR to develop inbound & outbound phone systems and create complex surveys and automate meeting reminders with text-to-speech. In the meantime, other attendees were asked to participate in a contest, deployed on CallFire's IVR platform, which tested knowledge on basic telephone trivia. The caller answering the quiz in the shortest time won an iPad.
Overall, the RWW Mobile Summit was filled with solid discussion, networking, and a myriad of application demos. To read more about geo-location, mobile commerce, cloud computing and privacy trends visit the RWW Mobile Summit Keynote Recap here.