Today we started with a plenary session. I missed the first presentation and arrived in the middle of the presentation by Zak Greant. I rushed in when he was talking about Open Source in general through the history of literate machines. Once again an enjoyable talk. Today the Openmind people were joined by the MindTrek people and the talk about Open Source has moved to a more general level. The tracks today are Open Source, Ubimedia, Social media, eGovernment and Games as Services. The last speaker in the plenary session was Dr. Mark Ollila from Nokia speaking about Nokia’s new approach to mobile gaming. They have noticed a bunch of severe problems in the business. The first presentation, the one I missed was about Jaiku. I have tried using that but it wasn’t any good considering the reduced battery life.
Ubimedia didn’t sound interesting, eGovernment sounded like bureaucracy, I don’t play that many games, hence I decided to go with the Open Source. The first presenter was from Sun, Thorbiorn Fritzon. He talked about the Sun’s recent change of heart to open most of its software. I hadn’t dived so deep into the details and the background was really interesting. I decided to find out what Social media is. I went in in the middle of a presentation by Bonnie Shaw from Snap-Shot-City about new ways to play. I had missed something and didn’t follow at first but it seemed that people have created several games that bring the physical surroundings into the virtual community. That sounded interesting. The next presentation was by Paavo Bäckman from Merceedes Productions. He pointed out how they had promoted a record with the budget of 80 euros and actually got it played on the radio. They used only the current small community of the existing fanbase. Never underestimate virtual communities.
After lunch I returned to the Open Source track. The first part was presented by Amy Jiang, Canonical. Surprisingly it was about Ubuntu. The presentation was spiced up a bit with information specific for the Ubuntu community in China. Currently I am listening to Toni Sormunen from Nokia talking about a smart home system that they have been able to create without falling into the seven potholes on the way. They are using an OpenWRT system and wireless devices. Unsurprisingly a S60 phone is also included in the picture. So far they have addressed the issues of power consumption and this seems to be a promising project enabled by the Open Source. Grreat propaganda! It seems though that smart office space is still a far-away dream. The next presentation is about the OLPC. I joined the cause in Facebook (which is a buzzword here) and I am going to stop blogging just to respect the cause.