Today I went to MobileCampNYC3 a BarCamp centered around mobile (that's smart-person for phone) technologies. It's a "BarCamp", so as one of those "unconferences", it attempts to be organic (as well as free). People signed up for speaking slots all throughout the day by making little signs on pieces of paper and taping them to the big wall schedule in the room/time they want. I went because a.) Erin Sparling told me to, b.) I'm an Android zealot, and c.) I could use the social interaction.

The first session I went to was awesome, about the Twitter Vote Report which was actually not just a Twitter thing at all. Via SMS, calling in, Twitter, or native iPhone and Android(!) apps, you could report the quality of your voting experience on election day, even going so far as to specify a rating. In fact, they did an excellent job using hashtags on Twitter such that you could post "Had a #good time voting in #11216 no problems here #votereport" and the Vote Report project would pick up that someone had a Good experience in zip code 11216. Nathan Freitas a cool guy, and Dave Troy, the guy behind Twittervision were involved, and they have released as many visualizations and raw data as they can from it. PLUS, Nathan today released the source code to the Android app that he built in a day for it.

After that, I learned about MobileGiving which Benjamin Stein from MobileCommons successfully convinced me will become huge. That SMS you got from the Obama campaign about giving $5 to the Red Cross merely by sending a text should give you a sufficient idea of what MobileGiving will be in the business of doing.

I also learned about Fire Eagle which I remember noticing when it came out, but then I put up a strange mental block decided I wanted nothing further to do with it. I have no idea why. The aforementioned Erin Sparling and his brother Nick did a talk on a jumbletogether (I refuse to use "mashup") they did of Fire Eagle and Flickr such that by keeping your Fire Eagle location up-to-date, it could geo-tag your Flickr photos without you lifting a finger, by inferring where you were at the time the photos were taken. Their app, "FlickrEagle", is so prototype that I can't even google it to find a URL right now, but it was cool to see.

The most popular and fun talk (as far as I could see) was the talk given by the founder of Dodgeball and ITP graduate Dennis Crowley, who just whizzed through slides of about 80 different cool new/old mobile services, many location-aware, many game-centric, all at least intellectually interesting. It sparked a lot of good Q&A time afterward, which really may have been the whole point.

Lastly, I learned about MobileDead a location-aware zombie life game, available for the Blackberry, and soon to be announced for the Android (the iPhone's no-backgrounding-for-apps policy is a dealbreaker here). I took away some good Android dev tips from this talk, especially in the realm of memory management, which I'm sure my non-techie friends would just love to hear about. The gist of it, allocate all the memory you think you'll need upfront and stick to it.

So all in all, very fun, and ended with a raffle of a Zune and Windows Vista (it was in Microsoft's NYC office I should be in this picture of the raffle, I know I was there, but I can't see myself in it. I met some cool people, learned of some cool projects, and left with that sense of general inspiration that is the mark of a day well spent. I also realized that I need to pick up the pace and get serious about Android dev, because I don't yet have an app to my name and I really should.

Finally, Twittervision in 3D!