Before we dive into the story though, let us send a BIG THANKS to Czech Googlers! Those guys are awesome – putting together such a great and overall perfect conference with just two people is unbelievable. We still don’t understand how Martina and Filip managed to do this. And yes, we have to say this: GDD 2010 was legen…wait for it…dary!
This year’s GDD was the third one in Prague and also the third one for us. The first year we had a big presentation about Android, and the second year we had a couple of presentations and helped with some organizational aspects. This year we worked with our friends at Google on even more entertaining things for the attendees.
Everything started for us a couple of months ago – brainstorming about possible content, interesting guests, and about what Czech developers really care about. We thought about supporting program, interesting and cool things to put into relax room… and so on. A lot of thinking, lots of great ideas, and lots of excitement. But it’s a long way to go from having just an idea to it’s realisation. At the end of all brainstorms, we had reduced all ideas to a few we were able to deliver on time and in perfect quality: mobile conference app with integrated QR Hunters game, twitter-wall, Android devices showcase and of course our presentations.
Audience at Google Developer Day 2010 opening keynote.
Mobile conference app
Mobile conference app (also called mobile navigator) is a tool that can be used by every attendee during the whole of a conference – it allows one not only to review the agenda and read about speakers or sessions, but also to build a personalized schedule, follow the news throughout the day or send feedback after each session. Because we’ve decided to implement this tool as a heavily optimized mobile website (more about the technical side of it in some of the following articles), it was available to all attendees independently of a phone. Our app was optimized for all kinds of Android phones, iPhones and iPads, big desktop browsers like Firefox or Chrome, and even old phones without good JavaScript and/or CSS support.
However, this wasn’t all. We integrated one more nice feature, the 2nd edition of our QR Hunters game. Attendees were able to collect awards in the form of QR codes throughout the day. As rewards for great technical question, correct answers, or for just having a nice chat with one of the presenters. Codes were valued based on a different number of points and the only thing one had to do was add these points to his/her game account by scanning it via any QR reader app in the phone. Simple and effective. Actually, exactly 839 QR codes were scanned at the end of a whole day!
Lots of work but definitely worth it! Watching attendees actively using the app during the entire conference convinced us that our decisions were right! It was a great, warm feeling. By the way, if you’d like to have the same conference app – which is well tested and worked perfectly for an event with 1,200 attendees – let us know!
Twitter-wall (with Foursquare twist)
Twitter-wall was another fun item we really wanted for “our” conference.
To help us with the implementation of the wall, we called our friends at AppSatori who worked on the code, while we
focused on other apps and the UI of the wall. We had seen twitter-wall at a few
conferences in the past, but we wanted to make it right, unlike some other guys.
What did we need for it?
1) To have a huge screen (we had an enormous projecting screen)
2) A visually appealing and well readable UI
3) Something more than just a wall of text
The first two points are clear, but what about the third? Well, together with the guys from AppSatori and unofficial Czech Foursquare evangelist Eliska, we come up with great idea, “foursquare wall”! Why not show not only tweets, but also 4sq checkins?
The result was great – people were using twitter the whole day like crazy (of course not only because of our wall, but we believe it had a great influence). More than 1,200 tweets went across that huge screen, which lead to lot of conversations, fun and even an attempt at a reality hack :) Success!
Android showcase
Android devices showcase was a whole different challenge. Actually, most of the work was done with friends from our partner portal SvetAndroida.cz (or “the World of Android” in English – the biggest Czech Android portal). Fortunately, we were able to “practice” for this one. We had a very similar (but smaller) showcase on Google Day, a business conference a few weeks before GDD.
Showcase of Android devices.
Getting through 30 Android devices from all types of different manufacturers is much more difficult than one would expect – it’s not only about convincing these guys to lend us devices, but we also had to borrow special security stands for all phones, prepare information about every device, and finally, put all the pieces together before the event (and find the right box for each device afterwards, which was even more challenging :). But the result was more than worth all the phone-calls, e-mails and sleepless nights. Interest in our Android corner was enormous! Everyone wanted to see the large scale of different Android devices offered almost exactly 2 years after releasing the very first T-Mobile G1 phone.
Tech talks and a big Keynote
And finally, a few words about the presentations we prepared for GDD 2010. The plan was to do 2 guest talks this year – Michal about AppEngine, and Pavel about Android – two very important platforms we use for writing scalable mobile apps at Inmite. But, plans are meant to be changed – and that is exactly what happened just a few days before the conference.
Michal talking at opening keynote.
Pavel’s co-speaker changed at the last minute – instead of speaking together with Reto Meier (his friend from past GDD’s and Google I/O events), he had a session with Justin Mattson, another Android guru from Google. No big deal for these guys, all of them are skilled speakers with a lot of experience. The only downside was Pavel’s sleepless night preparing perfect slides. He made it, and was able to give an enthusiastic talk even though he had slept just 45 minutes that night. Our CTO is a crazy guy :)
BTW if you missed Android talks on GDD or would like to see even more, check out the Android conference we are preparing together with Martin for Spring 2011: Android Devcamp .
An even bigger change was waiting for Michal. Instead of having a technical talk about AppEngine with AE guru Fred Sauer, he agreed to do something much bigger – a keynote talk! Preparing for such a huge keynote was an excellent experience. When looking at it from the outside you don’t realize the many things that have to be sorted out before a live performance. Rehearsals started a day before GDD at the Google offices. Michal threw away old slides and created brand new ones with huge images instead of huge blocks of text; fine-tuned slides with Eric Tholome (Google Products Director and the main keynote speaker); did a dry-run of the presentation and had only reached the half-way point! The night before the event there was a big rehearsal on stage in the conference center (to test sound, microphones, etc.), and one more rehearsal early in the morning on the day of the event to also test the cameras, lights and fine-tune the last technical details.
As we said, there is surprisingly a lot of preparation that goes into this but it’s definitely worth it – you don’t want to flub in front of 1,200 people watching your every move! The keynote went smoothly, everyone knew when and where to be, how to operate the microphones and clickers, and what to say. And what was even better? The feedback we received from excited attendees. Perfect!
Wrap-up
This year’s GDD was a lifetime worth of experience for us at Inmite. After the many conferences we’ve attended in the past we thought we had seen everything, but this one was very special for us. It was exactly the same place where we had our first big conference experience two years ago and where we met most of our Google friends, at GDD 2008, which took place in exactly the same conference center (but was half the size of this year’s event). Lots of great memories!
Google Developer Day is a very important event for Inmite. Who knows where we would have been if we weren’t lucky enough to meet the right people at this event 2 years ago? We are really thankful for this awesome opportunity and we’re looking forward to GDD 2011 already – see you there!
All speakers and organizers of GDD 2010.
[Nice pictures were taken from official photogallery of GDD 2010 ]