Mobile Camp LA 2015 review

App monetization panel, @cjbeauchamp from @crittercism presenting.

Our mothers kissed us good-by and tucked a sack lunch into our backpacks and sent us off to Mobile Camp LA  at WeWork Hollywood, January 31, 2015. We were greeted at the door by a gauntlet of sponsors including T-Mobile , Appery.io and Zukini Mobile. In the demonstration of virtual reality I was asked to sit in a chair as I placed the virtual reality goggles on my head. The contraption featured a Samsung Gallaxy positioned about 2 inches from my eyes. The contraption was switched on and I was virtually seated in the center of an empty movie theater. I turned my head to look behind and saw more empty seats. At least I wouldn’t be bothered by talkers. The Titles began to roll on the screen as the demonstrator switched my environment to a lunar surface with rocks. I wondered if he had a room with cartoon monsters. Monsters make for a great audience. The ones that don’t live in swamps anyway.

Plied with stickers and key chains we made our way into camp wework. There was a full day of speakers lined up for this “open source” event with two speaker tracks.

Ron rocks and rolls the robot photo by Jen Blatz

Ron Evans told us The robot “evolution” is here and his company has created  a number of frameworks to control them. Chief among them is Commander.io, a mobile app to control robots and connected devices. You can think of it like a “Universal remote control for the Internet of Things”. Developed using PhoneGap and Ionic Framework, it is open source software. It can communicate with any device that supports the Common Protocol for Programming Physical I/O. Cylon.js, Gobot.io and Artoo.io; all frameworks that implement an compatible API’s. His live robotic demo included a round pill shaped thing that spun around (out of view of the audience). What made it interesting was the small amount of Commander.io code he wrote to accomplish this daring feat. @deadprogram

Justin Woo is a Developer Evangelist at PayPal in Seattle. He talked about what not to do when coding a credit card form and what merchants should not do when trying to make a customer buy more stuff. He demonstrated with his e-commerce site that sold the opportunity to walk or pet his dog. Petting $75. 20 minuet walk $120. He assured us it was a really nice dog. His humor got us to laugh about a potentially dry subject. He went through customer time wasters on credit card purchase forms and showed us how to improve them. Many of the tips involved jQuery form verifiers. My favorite was the simple way of using the correct Virtual keyboard by coding <input type=”email”>. This presents the keyboard that makes it easy to enter your email. Simple. Review all of the keyboard types at www.mobileinputtypes.com. I used the code on www.chocolatefortunes.com on the check out page and they work great! Buy a football sized chocolate dipped fortune cookie on your cell phone to see it in action. My sister loved her’s at her birthday party. Although the custom message was probably too risque for grandma. @jzwoo

I missed the phonegap session in favor of Karim Varela presentation: “14 Tips for Starting a Mobile App Business (and not sucking)” His tech credits include Tinder and Coffee Meets Bagel where he was a Software Architect, you could say he did the back end at Tinder at lest for Android. He told the story of one of his early web businesses, a liquor and mixed drink delivery service in Seattle. The law shook their finger at him for selling to inebriated people late at night. Fortunately they didn’t throw the book at him.

Here are as many of the 14 as I could capture in my notes:

1. Don’t suck.
2. Make your idea matter.
3. Have a Business Plan; He recommended, when interviewing, you ask the start-up “what is your path to profits”. Include this in your decision to work there.
4. Don’t out-source your core competency. If you are getting your tech done overseas, you are not a tech company and everything is taking longer than it should.
5. Build a team. a) don’t do it alone. b) hire passion c) hire doers.
6. Make design matter.
7. All-in and passion: founders need to be totally committed.
8. Virality
9. (oops missed this one)
10. Roll out slowly.
11. Customer Service still matters.
12. Measure Everything. • cutover service (survey monkey, google forms • landing page (when developing an app, have a page people can visit on the web) • have (Google) Analytics installed and study them.

@KarimVarela

I am looking forward to next year. I am told the lake will have alligators.