Orange Partner Camp

I was participating to Orange Partner Camp 2006 in Sarasota, FL. The Partner Camp was arranged in famous Colony Tennis Resort and the place seemed to be very nice if You forget that it was middle of nothing. Actually it was easy to forget since Orange offered everything from good food and beverages to great artists.

I got instructions to take flight to Tampa or Sarasota airport since Orange had arranged transfer from there to the resort. When I arrived on sunday I realized that the distance from Tampa is much more that I expected and that I can't anyhow handle my scheduled return flight. I didn't want to pay any extra fees to change the ticket so I didn't have another option than take a ride in my collaques car from Sarasota to Miami.

I shared the flat with Mr. Easa Thaeri from Bibcom The name BibCom stands for Big Brother Communications. Easa has developed nice survillance application for babies, dogs etc. The idea is that user installs one application to secondary Symbian terminal and he can anytime open a session with another Symbian terminal and check how is everything in house.
The terminals are authenticated by using PIN code so there is no risk that just anyone can call to your Bib-application and see what's happening. The system works smoothly over 3g connection.

The idea of Partner Camp is to find new developers for mobile applications and give guidelines for them how to work with Orange. And that is something it really was, there was lot's of sessions about importancy of brand, quality and testing. which are the corner-stones of any succesful business.

There was also very interesting sessions from Symbian, Forum Nokia and UIQ . Each of them was promoting their own platforms and giving small work-shops.
Palm was also present but mainly in exhibition mode so they didn't have any sessions.
The new version of Palm is going to run on Linux so it's interesting platform for open-source developers, let's see if there will be similar boom in futuree with Palm as now is with Nokias internet tablet 770.

For me and the company I'm representing the Partner Camp provided some interesting contacts in content development sector, but the Symbian sessions were also very usefull since seems that we are getting more and more involved to the mobile application development as well.

Nice to see that some operators has realized that the content providers are important part of their business. I have several experiences where seems that the content providers status is just deliver the content and wait bad reports and late payments in time when operator is making big money...

I will post some images soon to my flickr account. So if You are interested to see how the Partner Camp looks like check the site often ;)