Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

Despite the presence of industry heavyweights such as Nokia, Google, Yahoo, BT, Vodaphone, Sun and more, there were plenty of less well known organisations and topics, and opportunity for anybody to run their own talks or discussions during the conference. As such, it was very far removed from your run-of-the-mill corporate event, and felt much more like a grassroots creation such as BarCamp or Hack Day. The topic of my workshop was how to create programmable hardware with the Arduino. This little device lets you read from sensors and control physical devices such as motors or lights, and you can even network it to your computer to allow it to affect or respond to events on the internet or elsewhere in the digital world.

Thanks to the generous support of Tinker, participants were able to borrow an Arduino Diecimila each to use during the session, and, by the end of the workshop, they were all happily blinking LEDs controlled by programmes that they themselves had written. I also tried to stay in keeping with the mobile-focus by demoing code that allows you to control a Bluetooth Arduino directly from your mobile phone.

If you'd like to know more, the presentation part of my workshop can be found on slideshare. As for the rest of the conference, there were some great talks. I could only attend on one of the two days, but a few that I saw were:

• Mobile 2.0 A keynote by Dan Appelquist explaining the lessons that the web can teach the mobile space
• Zong A platform for billing mobile services
• Web21C A BT service to programatically control voice and SMS data
• WICD A W3C candidate to allow SVG and HTML to interact
• Google Gears A way of running web apps locally. Now available on Windows Mobile and shortly, Android
• Yahoo! Go Create your own mobile phone applications
• Qtopia Phone Edition Trolltech's toolkit for the Linux-based Greenphone
• PrimeSky An innovative mobile-and-web site developed by Future Platforms

As well as all these talks, there was ample time to mingle with the 400 other participants, especially during the Yahoo!-sponsored party on Friday night. I learned a lot, and notable mention must go to:

• Thom Hopper Top tips about accelerometers, servos, IR sensors, and for letting me use his robotic arm
• Nigel Crawley Interesting discussion about Arduinos, Processing and screeching cats
• Lee Drysbergh Agreeing about the future of electronic communication
• Robin O'Leary Talking about location-aware name badges and real-world tagging

All in all, Over the Air was a fantastic event. There was a buzz about it that made me feel very positive about the future of mobile development. The talks were wide ranging, and the participants came from diverse backgrounds. If I had to think of one take home message from the whole event, it would be this: the barriers to entry in the mobile space are getting lower, and the future is going to be wide open. Like the internet at the moment, the next generation of mobile applications are going to be created by people like me and you.

Links:

• Over the Air site
• Backnetwork
• Presentations on Slideshare
• Photos on Flickr