I've had a Kindle Fire for several weeks now.  In addition to being a soft southerner and an effete intellectual, I'm also a spoiled Apple user - so naturally I hate it.

Last week, I went to Let’s Get Real in Bristol – a conference organised by Culture24.

Cogapp ran a Talk Table, alongside other interesting people from the culture and digital sector (full list here), and I wanted to share some of the questions I was asked (mostly about mobile) and the answers I gave, as well as mention some of the work we’ve done with mobile devices.

Me in action

User testing sessions mark the first point of contact that our software and designs have with the people who will ultimately be using them. Showing the product to fresh pairs or eyes invariably exposes issues that were invisible to the people working on it, allowing them to be identified and fixed before the final build.

Towards the end of the last century, before the internet – or, more accurately, the web – changed my life, I was a journalist.

The Apple App Store currently holds hundreds of thousands of different apps for every category you can think of. With so many apps available it can be pretty hard to decide which ones are worth downloading and often apps can be somewhat disappointing- so without further ado, Cogapp have given a roundup of some of our favourite apps of the moment:

Last week, I chaired the “All in hand: Working with handheld devices conference”, which took place at the Royal College of Surgeon in London. It included various presentations from small- to large-scale UK museums discussing their experience with mobile interpretation.

Two years ago the proportion of the world's population living in cities eclipsed those living elsewhere for the first time in history. The trend has persisted, in fact it seems an unstoppable juggernaut with the ratio predicted to reach 3:1 by 2050. Of course, city-dwelling is nothing new, but cities that 20 million people may call home certainly are. As Justin McGuirk discusses in this article, the transformation presents some of the most profound design challenges of our era. The process of regeneration is relentless - you can't go far in New York or London without seeing immense construction work underway, or derelict buildings whose future is no doubt already a glint in the eye of some ambitious developer.

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program. Firstly, let's get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun. Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

Last week Joe and I attended Over The Air - a developer-centric conference focused on mobile phone technology and applications. It had been 18 months since the last conference, and the first thing to strike me was just how much has changed in the mobile landscape. A year and a half ago, the iPhone had only just started to impinge on mass consciousness and the Apple App Store hadn't even opened. Nowadays, every new phone launched vies with the iPhone for features, and there are over 20 different app stores - run by platform owners, mobile carriers and independents. This change becomes even more striking if you consider how little has altered in the world of desktop computing, or even web apps, in the same amount of time. In short, the mobile space feels now very like the start of the dot-com boom in the 90s: expect a lot of innovation, a lot of failed ideas, and a lot of attempted land-grabs by both incumbents and newcomers.

Keynote address in Imperial College's Great Hall

With six separate tracks, and a day-and-a-half's worth of lectures and workshops, it would be hard to list everything that went on, but here are a summary of some of the trends that I identified:

• Things are moving fast (see above)
• The rise of web techniques (Widgets, PhoneGap etc.)
• The rise of Linux (Android, Maemo, LiMo)
• Increased fragmentation (more platforms to support)
• Standardisation efforts (e.g. OMTP and BONDI)
• The rise of the App Store (see Distimo's report)
• Augmented Reality is the buzzword du jour