Click here or watch the embedded video below.

Fascinating morning keynotes

Android Open was jam packed with activities including a pre-conference day of workshops and then two days of main conference. Each morning of the regular conference began with a series of five to twenty minute long keynote talks and panels. You can see a complete listing of the speakers for both days in the conference schedule. You can also watch the keynote sessions via the Android Open 2011 Youtube video playlist (click here to access). I would encourage you to watch as many of the keynotes as possible; they contain a lot of interesting and inspirational material to get your Android juices flowing!

O’Reilly founder & CEO Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) kicked things off with his Day 1 opening keynote “What Android can learn from Steve Jobs“. Definitely an interesting choice of title for an Android conference! But Jobs’ passing the week before presented O’Reilly with an opportunity to discuss some of the key principles behind Apple’s success, especially the notion espoused by Jobs that a company needs to be “true to its soul”. O’Reilly examined Google’s “soul” at length, suggesting that it needs to never forget its original mission to help connect people to all the world’s information. Key takeaway for Android developers and businesses: Stay true to yourself and your mission while holding Google to its own high ideals, too.

The next keynote that caught my attention was a conversation between conference co-chair Marko Gargenta (@markogargenta) and Robert Stephens (@rstephens), CTO of Best Buy. Stephens is a pretty technical guy, even going so far as to say that Best Buy ought to get rid of their DVD section and replace it with an Arduino section! As you might imagine given the crowd, this was well received.

The thing that really stood out for me as a mobile payments developer, however, was Stephens’ discussion of the many issues with NFC deployment. He said Best Buy may bypass at least some NFC generations completely, going straight to purely cloud-based payments solutions. This joins the rising tide of anti-NFC sentiment and pragmatism that seems to be building, and echoes some of the many things PayPal has said publicly about NFC weaknesses in recent months. Takeaway: Watch major retailers such as Best Buy closely to pick up the beginnings of big shifts in mobile payments.

Day 2 saw a couple more morning keynotes that stood out for me. The first, “Android in Space” by Will Marshall (@wsm1) of NASA, dealt with building very cheap microsatellites based upon Android-based Nexus One smartphones, aka “phonesats“. “Very cheap” in this case means tens of thousands versus millions or billions of US dollars.

Marshall noted that because of the conservative nature of space flight, the CPU in phonesat Nexus Ones will actually be the fastest CPUs onboard a satellite to date when they’re launched into orbit later this year. He also asked the audience some provocative questions such as “What if we could each have personal satellites?” and “What if satellites became a software domain?”. Thing to note: Android software and off the shelf mobile phone hardware can reduce costs in some areas by two or more orders of magnitude versus traditional ways of doing things, and that could change everything in those areas.

You can read more about the phonesat project from this report from O’Reilly correspondent Alex Howard (@digiphile). Among other things, Alex links to an excellent documentary on early phonesat rocket launch testing.

The final keynote that fascinated me was “The African Laptop Killer: Android and the Developing World” by Claire Hunsaker (@chunsaker). Hunsaker discussed the tremendous rise of mobile technology in Kenya and elsewhere and how that technology is revolutionizing lives and economies. Some of the statistics quoted include:

• 99% of Internet access in Kenya is via mobile device.
• Cheap Android phones have dropped Internet access in Kenya from 31% of an average worker’s annual income to about 5%.
• Fully 20% of Kenyan GDP runs through the mobile wallet (predominantly M-PESA).
• According to Hunsaker, “Facebook will have access to most (Kenyan) users before thy can even own a mobile handset themselves” via borrowed/shared mobile handsets.

Please watch Hunsaker’s talk. It may change your perspective on the power and importance of mobile techologies.

Session highlights

There were a lot of great sessions at Android Open. Here are some notes from my favorites:

• Aleksandar Gargenta (yes, Marko is his brother) presented an excellent “Securing Android” session discussing how security is enforced. He made a number of comparisons to Java ME and desktop Linux security, noting that “Anytime something is in RAM, there are ways of recovering it”. I’d recommend spending a little time reading through Aleksandar’s slides (click here).
• Eric Burke (@burke_eric) from Square gave a nice “Beautiful Android” talk. I’d been hoping for a few payments fireworks, but Burke stuck closely to how to build attractive and functional Android apps. Among the things he noted, Android clip paths don’t handle antialiasing. This leads to very ugly interfaces unless you use offscreen bitmaps.
• Nick Farina (@nfarina) spoke about the importance of using WebViews in “From iOS to Android” (also, XCode is painful).
• Sean Byrnes of Flurry knocked it out of the park with his “Android App Engagement by the Numbers” talk! In particular, he called out the importance of releasing early and quickly to your followers, as statistics show that on average, an Android developer loses 38% of their users on the day they install your app, 50% in one week.
• Jesse Vincent (@obra) talked in “Dancing App Stores” about the somewhat suprising fact that new app versions dramatically increase sales, even with minimal changes to the app itself. He also made some good suggestions on secondary and tertiary app markets besides Google’s Android Market; check out his slides for more details.

All in all, the sessions had enough code and technical details while still being able to spark ideas in a wide variety of attendees, some Android programmers, some not.

Additional coverage and news from the conference

Conference organizers made a number of other news and information sources available to attendees. You can search some of the best via these links:

• Read the round-up of news and coverage curated by O’Reilly.
• Access all of the speaker slides provided to the organizers.
• View official conference photos.

One more highly recommended resource: The online show “All About Android” (@androidshow) broadcast live from Android Open at the end of Day 1. The conference co-chairs along with several speakers including Tim O’Reilly make appearances on the show. It’s probably worth your time to watch and get their perspective on the major Android developments flowing out of the conference.

Did it blend?

I found this first ever Android Open to be a great mix of community and technology. It struck the right tone of openness and provided both developer how-to and business oriented material. If you are interested in Android and appreciate a balanced perspective of the entire ecosystem, I would recommend this conference as a good place to tap into all things Android.

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

DEVELOPER EVANGELIST

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More local data and content for all. New local ads for everyone. And better performance all around. And it’s free. Our #1 goal is to see developers of all sizes thrive in local. We help developers give their local audience a better experience and get paid to do it. The CityGrid® network APIs give developers access to premium local content including user reviews, editorial content, merchant messages & more, across 75K neighborhoods nationwide.

We are looking for a Developer Evangelist to be the spokesperson, mediator and translator between the development community and our company; and facilitate the proliferation of our APIs through code tutorials, workshops, blogging, public speaking, training, and social events like MeetUps.

Our ideal evangelist will have experience with:

• hands on development with Java, Ruby, Python or other open source languages
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• B.S. in Computer Science (M.S. or Ph.D is highly desired)
• a true passion of innovation and open source technologies
• a willingness to be the “go to person” for a development community
• ability to give technical presentations, manage MeetUp groups and online forums
• 10+ years of software engineering experience + development utilizing Big Data tools
• willingness to travel 20% – 40% of the time

If you can carry the flag for our data products to the development community, we want to hear from you today!

CityGrid Media is an equal opportunity employer.

I was recently privileged to attend both the O’Reilly Android Open and X.commerce Innovate conferences back-to-back in San Francisco. Both were mind and network expanding events, and I’d highly recommend either to developers and business colleagues considering attending next year.

I hope to write more about my key takeaways from Android Open at some point in the future. For this article, let’s focus on Innovate.

So much transpired in a few short days that it would be impossible to capture everything in one short article. I’ll do my best to give you the overall flavor and major highlights, then I’ll dive a bit deeper to discuss some of the particular technical “breakout” sessions I attended.

Ready? Let’s go!

Keynotes and major announcements

The conference began each morning with a series of general session keynotes. You can access the conference schedule to see a full list of speakers, or better still, watch the keynotes (as well as breakout sessions) from the Innovate 2011 video site (click here to access).

Watch the Day 1 keynotes for yourself below (click here if the embed doesn’t work below):

Naveed Anwar, head of X.commerce community, discussed many of the key Day 1 developments in his blog post here. Some of the big ticket items for developers and merchants included:

• Launch of the “X.commerce Fabric“, a message-broker based system allowing developers to integrate and use various commerce capabilities. The Fabric ties together various components from eBay, PayPal, Magento, and other eBay companies with capabilities built by third parties, large and small. Much more on this to come.
• PayPal debuted “PayPal Access“, a new online “commerce identity” comparable to social identity, but for making commerce transactions faster and easier for the consumer. Read more about PayPal Access from the Janrain blog; I’ll also have much more to say about PayPal Access in coming months.
• Magento launched much tighter integration with eBay, allowing merchants to push products from Magento into eBay with just a few short clicks. You can read a third party take on the many and central Magento-related announcements via AuctionBytes (click here).
• Facebook announced Open Graph integration with Magento and GSI Commerce enabling, among other things, “Want” and “Own” buttons analogous to the already ubiquitous “Like” button. You can read much more about the eBay-Facebook partnership in this ZDNet article.

With the major announcements out of the way, the Day 1 afternoon and Day 2 morning keynotes could focus on inspirational higher ordered bits. These sessions were great motivation for attendees to take advantage of all of the technical tools at their disposal to make the world a better place. Whether by building corporate giving into their fundamental commercial business model, or by thinking about the effects of the current recession and the innovation that could get us out of it, or by imbuing everything we do with thoughtful design, these sessions were all meant to light the creative spark.

I particularly enjoyed seeing Steven Cooper (@developersteve), whom I featured in an interview article for the X.com site last year, receive a community award at the beginning of the day 2 morning keynotes. You can watch the awards presentation and all of the Day 2 keynotes here:

If the embed fails to load, you can alternatively click here for the Day 2 morning general session.

Other things I found striking during the second morning’s general session:

• Marshal Cohen spoke at length about the current recession and what might need doing, especially in the United States, to innovate our way out of it. One item in particular stuck with me: He pointed out that while the current recession is not the longest in US history (yet), it is the deepest by job losses. I have to agree with his conclusion that a fundamental shift is underway and many of the lost jobs aren’t coming back, so it’s more important than ever to focus on new commerce opportunities. Build your business to take advantage of inevitable innovations and the sky’s the limit.
• X.commerce developer evangelist Praveen Alavilli (@ppalavilli) showed some live X.commerce code in front of thousands. Always a gutsy move! Access his demo code yourself from GitHub here. By the way, Praveen has written a great blog post about getting started with the Fabric since Innovate completed; click here to check it out.
• Hip-hop artist Chamillionaire (@chamillionaire) stole the show discussing how he used community and tech skills to build his fan base from the streets of Houston to the Grammys and beyond. What an amazing innovator! I’d highly recommend watching at least his portion of the day 2 keynote; prepare to be impressed and inspired.

I could write several more articles about the various keynote speakers and their stories. Instead, I’ll encourage you again to watch the videos for yourself.

Partner pavilion and a free O’Reilly book for you

There was a wide range of X.commerce partners showing their wares in the Partner Pavilion during and in between sessions. Somtimes I wondered just how they were packing so many thousands of attendees in such a small space! (The secret, of course, was lots of free coffee, snacks, and soda.)

Here’s a shot I took the first day of the X.commerce booth to give you a feel for the foot traffic:

One other cool thing going on in the Partner Pavilion, in my not so humble opinion, was that O’Reilly Media was giving away printed copies of the new book “Building eCommerce Applications”. This book is a collection of some of the most interesting and varied articles written by contributors to the X.commerce DevZone.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the conference, you can still download a free e-book copy from O’Reilly (click here to get your copy).

And yes, yours truly does have four articles included in the book, so I am a bit biased. Still, you can’t beat free, right?

Session highlights

I attended a number of interesting sessions at the conference. Rather than try to list them all, I thought I’d focus on the key points from the most interesting and useful for me.

• Two related sessions, “Introducing the X.commerce platform” and “From Code to Capability“, showed developers how to get started with the dive deep into the new X.commerce Fabric. I’d highly recommend clicking on the session titles and watching the sessions to get up to speed asap. You should also download the X.commerce Developer Package and the X.commerce Innovate demo code so you can try it out for yourself. Fabric will be a very important piece of the commerce development puzzle in the months to come.
• We all know mobile commerce is a BIG opportunity, right? What you might or might not know is how to take advantage of the various social, local, and mobile development strategies to capitalize upon it. “Commerce goes SoLoMo: Social, Local, Mobile” discusses what’s possible, focusing on Milo and Where.com (both eBay companies) in particular. I’d also recommend watching the “Mobile face-off: HTML5 vs. native apps vs. mobile platforms” panel to get a grip on the realities of native, HTML, and hybrid mobile development. I enjoyed both sessions and took away the point that we can do almost anything with today’s mobile technologies (boy have we come a long way since WAP and J2ME!).

Things to watch in the coming year

In summary, Innovate was crammed full of technologies to watch and good information on getting started with them. I’d recommend trying out Fabric and Access as soon as possible and paying attention to both as they roll out in the months ahead. There are also some very nice Magento and Facebook commerce opportunities coming; pay attention, and profit!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the conference, the news coming out of it, and the new commerce possibilities available as a result of those announcements. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think. And happy commerce hacking!

Click here to access the full article on X.com.

Each month or so I've tried to post PayPal and payments highlights.  Here's a quick rundown of those since last summer:

July 2011 | June | May | April | March | February | January 2011-December 2010 | 2010 semiannual (July-December) | November | October | September | August | July 2010

Note the gap for August and September 2011 highlights.  There's been so much going on with the new X.commerce including recent X.com site rework, plus lots of other big news in payments and the larger development world, that I've decided to link directly to weekly highlight posts on my own site so you have all the latest.  Drill into each for the most important payments news from that week.

• Week ending 7 August 2011
• Week ending 14 August
• Week ending 21 August
• Week ending 28 August
• Week ending 4 September
• Week ending 11 September
• Week ending 18 September
• Week ending 25 September

As we head into October, all of the recent developments above point to one place:  the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco.

I've written previously about PayPal's strategy and vision which will be on full display at Innovate.  I've also pointed you to the conference site including speakers and schedule, and teased you with a report that a big Facebook related announcement may be coming at Innovate.  Now my only question to you is, will you be attending Innovate to take it all in for yourself?

I ask because I'll be there meeting people, studying the latest in payments, and covering the conference for an upcoming X.com article.  And I'd love to meet you and get your take on payments and X.commerce.  In fact, I'll also be at Android Open the two days immediately before Innovate; if you'll be attending that conference, I'd love to get a chance to chat there, too.  Please leave a comment below if you'd like to get together at either event.

And there's one more thing…

I've accepted a new position which I'll be starting soon.  Though I will still write articles for X.com from time to time, I will no longer be blogging regularly there.  So if you'd like to keep up with my ongoing thoughts on payments or get the skinny on my new digs, please follow me on Twitter (@billday) or subscribe to my personal blog (BillDay.com).

Good luck, have fun, and never stop learning!

Read the TechCrunch piece for more information on who they've spoken with to confirm the pending announcement to their satisfaction.

Once you've satisfied yourself that something's probably going to be announced (and I by no means have any insider information on this, I'm merely reading the same public scribblings that you are), it's time to start your speculation engines.  Here's what TC guessed might be coming:

A likely possibility is a Facebook partnership on the new X.Commerce platform, which is a division of eBay, Inc. and is expected to bring together elements from eBay, PayPal, Magento and GSI Commerce. According to PayPal, X.commerce will feature a “fabric” that stitches the platform together to create new experiences for retailers and their customers. A number of partners will be announced (already Adobe and Kenshoo have been revealed as partners), so Facebook could be part of this group.

If I were a gambling man, I'd have to say the above strategic announcement is a no-brainer.  Such announcements are easy to do and get both sides some cache while giving each time to figure out exactly what they want to cooperate on with the other.

But what if Facebook and PayPal wanted to get more specific and tactical?  TechCrunch went on to say:

PayPal could also announce a deal similar to the one American Express formed with Facebook, which links your credit card account with Facebook to offer users special exclusive deals. If you buy the deal item with your AmEx card, you will be credited the deal amount. The deals you see are influenced by what you and your friends “like” on the Web using the Facebook like button. PayPal already offers deals but a deeper integration with the social network would help close the redemption loop.

I'm fascinated by the possibilities with this second one.  Square's been coming after other payments players with localized coupons and loyalty programs in their Card Case, and I'd love to see a response from PayPal that takes the game back to them, upping the ante by utilizing the power of Facebook's social graph.

What other opportunities do you see in a possible Facebook-X.commerce partnership?  Please leave a comment on the complete X.com post with your thoughts.

The conference schedule is available online (click here to access).  The main conference runs October 12th and 13th.  There is also a special developers-only "X dev camp" slated for October 14th; if interested, you need to apply for it when you register to attend the conference.

You can also access information on all of the speakers including the session speakers as well as keynoters.  For my money, the sessions are "where it's at", so I'm studying the session speaker pages carefully to figure out whose sessions I might want to attend.

Perhaps the best way currently available to navigate and plan your conference is to look at the speakers broken out by track (click here), then click on each of those speakers to learn more.  It would be even better if there were links from the speaker pages to detailed session information, but as of now that information appears to be MIA.

Honestly, I find myself wishing that Innovate had a conference attendee session planner akin to the one that O'Reilly uses for their conferences.  For example, see the "Customize Your Own Schedule" feature in their Android Open conference schedule page to see what I mean.  (Yes, I'll be attending Android Open the same week as Innovate, so both of their scheduling features are front-of-mind for me right now.)

Will you be attending Innovate?  What speakers look interesting to you if so?

Click here to read and leave comments on the complete post on X.com.

As PayPal President Scott Thompson noted in his blog post:

PayPal is re-imagining money and making it work better for merchants and consumers – whatever device you’re on, wherever you are in the world, and however you prefer to pay (whether that’s cash, credit, or installments).

He went on to say:

We’re rolling out a one-stop shop for merchants to engage their customers directly during every part of the shopping lifecycle –  generating demand from consumers through location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device (not just from the mobile phone), and offering more flexibility to customers even after they’ve checked out.

The blog announcement also included this teaser image:

but honestly I think this video from the preview event shows PayPal's new innovations better than any static image could:

You can read more about the sneak peek via this coverage from GigaOm (click here to read).

Click here to read the complete post on X.com including Bill’s plans for Innovate.

Google went out of their way in the announcement to note:

This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.

If you were Samsung, HTC, or another of Googerola’s Android hardware partners, would that make you feel any better about trusting Google’s Android intentions?  Sure there were the usual quotes trotted out from said partners, but don’t they sound a bit like each partner simply echoing back the official “line”?  To wit:

“We welcome today’s news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners, and the ecosystem.”  – J.K. Shin, President, Samsung, Mobile Communications Division

“I welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners.” – Bert Nordberg, President & CEO, Sony Ericsson

“We welcome the news of today‘s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.” – Peter Chou, CEO, HTC Corp.

Click here to read all the quotes provided by Google.

Most importantly for X.com community members, what will this purchase mean for Android app development?  It’s a bit early to say, although I would speculate that we’ll see skinless Moto devices as follow-ons to the Nexus series of phones coming at some point.  I have a guess what next year’s big Google I/O giveaway may be…

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including links to additional coverage and information on Google’s Motorola acquisition.

The conference page sets up the event as follows:

Big Data is a huge disruptor. An algorithm can level established competitors; the resulting insight can upend an entire industry. In the second Strata OLC, we’ll look at how lean startups and tech giants are rewriting the rules of business by mining their knowledge of customers, partners, and markets. We’ll see how Big Data services tear down barriers to entry, and which verticals are most vulnerable to attacks by data-literate startups. And we’ll look at on-demand platforms for collecting, cleaning, and analyzing vast data stores.

This quick paced half day conference will include a tutorial on “Building Data Startups“, a panel discussion on “Turning Bits into Dollars, Yen, or Euros“, a couple of real-world application discussions with Foursquare and Zynga, and a discussion on “Cloud Big Data Platforms” from Amazon which will presumably focus upon AWS.

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network.