Ok to write about last night’s non-crappy part, a really good experience. I went to my first MobileMonday. For those of you who don’t know, MobileMonday is an informal gathering of people in the mobile phone industry community for connecting and sharing. It started in Helsinki and the concept has since expanded to other cities around the globe. It looks like there are currently a bit more than 50 cities in which MobileMondays are held and that number is likely to continue growing. In Vancouver I think they plan to hold them on the first Monday of every month.
Most interesting thing there for me: the Handi Mobility guys presented their new service for browser based polls answerable through SMS. Extremely quick and easy to set up and designed for public events (imagine large projection/display of the poll). I can’t find the service online yet but I think they just launched…in the meantime, you may know them from the Facebook MyBus application.
I have an interesting in finding out where the polling service ends up being used. If they are public events I want to go check them out to see how people interact with the displays: how quickly do they pull out their mobiles? what triggers them to? the display, an announcement, strangers, their friends? This is related to the QLeaves event I did at the end of August (In the Miraikan museum; people answering questionnaires with their mobile phones.)
I plan to go to the next MobileMonday.
My big plan is, well, school will finish up at the end of December and soon after I hope to join the workforce. I have a strong interest in staying in Vancouver and I have three industries that strongly interest me: mobile, gaming, and tools for creativity and sharing. Okay that last one is a bit broad but think user-generated content / social networking / editing & developing tools. It also feeds back into the first two industries. Creating and sharing through mobile devices and in games.
The thing is I’ve been out of the loop for a bit (this is dawning on me more and more lately as people are rounding my 1.5 years in Japan up to 2 years and making me think “have I been away for 2 years??!”) and I am not aware of which companies in Vancouver are headed in the directions that I am interested in. The fact that there are many and they are small makes it more difficult but, MobileMonday definitely remedies that. There were a large number of different companies represented there but it still felt like a small and friendly community of people.
That and it was held at the Granville Island Brewery. I forgot how delicious a good ale is…although I liked it, I was getting tired of always drinking light beer in Japan.
