Our first booth, at Nokia Connection 2010

18 Jun 2010Career3 min read

Nokia gave us a small booth at Nokia Connection in Singapore. Our first big conference, our first time showing our work to a room like that, and KLTraffic on an N8 before it's even out.

Back from Singapore. Nokia Connection was on Monday at the Conrad Centennial, and Nokia gave us a little booth to show some of the things we’ve made. It’s the first time we’ve had a booth at a conference this big, and the first time we’ve shown our work at one.

A man in a dark suit and a conference lanyard pointing up at a wall reading Nokia Connection 2010, Your Life. Connected. — Nokia Connection 2010, Conrad Centennial Singapore.

The keynote

This is the tenth Nokia Connection, and it’s Nokia’s big event for this part of the world. Mary McDowell did the opening keynote and said Asia Pacific is an extremely important region for Nokia, and that Southeast Asia will be among the first to get their new services. They launched the X5 and the X6 8GB, and the N8 was shown in this region for the first time … it’s coming in the third quarter, and it’s the first Nokia with Qt built in.

Web apps and Qt apps

We had two screens. One was labelled Web Apps and had Headlines on it, the other was Qt Apps with Gameneus, our game news reader. Those are two of the ways Nokia wants developers building for Symbian now … web widgets with WRT, which is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or Qt if you want the whole phone. Their logos were on every backdrop, and we build in both.

A Nerd Attack team member in a suit beside the booth screen showing Headlines on an N8, under a nerd attack! sign, with a Web Apps label on the counter — Headlines, under Web Apps.

Two Nerd Attack team members in suits on either side of the booth screen showing the Gameneus app on an N8, with a Qt Apps label on the counter — Gameneus, under Qt Apps.

KLTraffic was there too, as a widget on the N8 home screen, next to Headlines and Gameneus, showing the latest #kltraffic tweets, on a phone that isn’t even in the shops yet. Detik, the Indonesian news site, wrote up the N8 from the event and mentioned the KL Traffic live widget by name.

A yellow Nokia N8 in a hand, its home screen showing two KLTraffic widgets with a traffic tweet about a bad crawl from Damansara, a MY Headlines widget, a Gameneus widget and a clock reading Mon 14/06/10 — KLTraffic on the N8 home screen, 14 June.

Two Nerd Attack founders with Pearlyn and Gary Chan from Nokia, all in conference lanyards, in front of a backdrop repeating the Qt and Nokia WRT logos — With Pearlyn and Gary Chan, our contacts at Nokia, in front of the Qt and WRT wall.

We stayed at the Conrad, and the breakfast there is outstanding … apparently it’s ranked the best in Singapore. The desk in my room was my work space for the trip. Ow also bought an iPad, Apple’s very first one, which came out in April. It’s a sight to behold … super smooth, and big. It got me thinking whether we should start building for the iPhone and the iPad.

A hotel desk at the Conrad with an open laptop showing an app design, a mouse, a desk lamp, a vase of yellow orchids and a Conrad water bottle — My work space at the Conrad.

A view over Singapore's Marina area from a hotel window: office towers, a round building, trees and apartment blocks in the distance under a blue sky — The view from the Conrad.