MeeGo Summer Seminar: Trip Report

The MeeGo Seminar Summer 2010 edition took place on July 26th, 2010 in Tokyo, Japan. The event was packed. More than 530 registrants, 21 sponsors, 16 speakers, 3 tracks (Business, Technology, Qt+Atom), multiple demos and the announcement that the GENIVI Alliance has selected MeeGo as its future in-vehicle infotainment center.

Below are some pictures from the MeeGo demos.

One of the questions I received as part of the discussion panel was about what makes MeeGo a great platform and diffrentiates it from other efforts. The questions actually came from one of audience members through the panel moderator. I think the answer to this question was the longest answer any panel participant gave to any given question:

MeeGo is an open source project hosted under the auspices of The Linux Foundation with an open governance model, open discussion forums, open mailing lists, open technical steering committee meetings, open roadmap process, and governed by the best practices of open source development. By the way, there are no contributor agreements to sign, either.

MeeGo is aligned closely with upstream projects and combines mobile development resources towards a unified platform that supports multiple device types (handsets, tablets, netbooks, connected-TVs, in-vehicle infotainment systems). It requires that submitted patches also be submitted to the appropriate upstream project and be on a path for acceptance. As a result, a large number of upstream projects will benefit from the MeeGo contribution. MeeGo offers a complete and optimized software stack, from the kernel to the libraries and middleware components up to reference UX implementations, along with a rich cross-platform development environment and tools.

MeeGo offers equal opportunities for all industry players to participate in the evolution of the software platform and to build their own assets on MeeGo and offers differentiation abilities through
the customization and branding of the user experience. Furthermore, it offers the ability to participate in the evolution of the software platform, and other Linux mobile and desktop efforts will benefit from
MeeGo’s work.

MeeGo has an active community that consists of more than 8,000 participants registered at MeeGo.com contributing source code, QA, documentation, translation, etc.

For application developers, MeeGo has a very attractive offering:
– Support for a single set of APIs across client devices –> easily and rapidly create and deploy apps

– Support for five different device types –> create an app and run it on multiple device types

– Support for multiple app stores –> host your app in several stores, or even create your own store

MeeGo also offers a compliance program to certify software stacks and application portability from the get go. Overall, MeeGo has too many unique characteristics and advantages that makes it really easy for me to support it.

Did I answer your question?

It goes without saying that I did not get any questions from the panel moderator for 20 minutes after my long answer on this question. The MeeGo Seminar was quite a success on all fronts. We are planning our next Seminar in Tokyo in December and before that we’d love to see you at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin, Nov 15-17.