We have just landed from an action packed two days at the fifth annual Appsworld conference held at London’s ExCel. As the leading global developer conference and exhibition space, Appsworld houses over 300 exhibitors and over 12,000 attendees from all across the app ecosystem including; developers, marketers, manufacturers, platform owners and industry professionals.  See the following as a brief rundown of the talks and events we attended and some of the people and companies we met.

Building geo-location into your Android App

After arriving at the ExCel and doing a quick lap of the conference, we went to go see a panel discussion on building geolocation into your Android app. As AppTrails are one of our main services at Calvium, we were interested to see what others had to say about using the technology. On the panel sat Donal O’Callaghan, Lead Android Engineer at British Gas and Yasir Khan, Senior Android Engineer at Yell.com – both of whom were being moderated by The Next Web’s Editor in Chief Martin Bryant.
The discussion explored the building blocks for developing android location based apps, tools and tips for choosing the right API and advise on embedding geographic functionality and features (such as geocoding, routing, geofencing, mapping and real time location based messaging.)

It was interesting to see how other companies are making use of geolocation and the big turnout for the talk is yet further proof that location technologies are still very much a thing of the moment. As expected, the panel touched on the possibilities of beacons for future geolocated apps and they briefly discussed being able to hyperlocalise action within apps; heaters in individual rooms switching on when you enter them for example.

App Marketing & ASO tools

One area we were particularly interested in finding out more about was app store optimisation and the tools you can use to help make your apps more visible. As an app developing agency we’re increasingly finding that app marketing is an area our clients are becoming interested in. Luckily, tools and companies specialising in this area were in no short supply at Appsworld. We learnt about multi-screen marketing (and flashing neon glowsticks) with Wapple, Instant App Marketing (and dark Belgian chocolates) with AppTweak and mobile app tracking (and bottle opening coasters) with Tune.

The Appsters

Often coined as ‘The Oscars of the apps world’, The Appsters is an award ceremony recognizing the best of the best within the world of developers. The award winners are decided by a judging panel of independent experts, delivering plaudits to worthy nominees across key categories.

We’re thrilled to say that this year Calvium made the shortlist for the Appsters ‘Innovation’ category with ControlZapp, the app we developed for lighting company Danlers Ltd. The app is a remote lighting control that utilizes bluetooth LE technology. Amongst many other features, the app can control lighting to automatically respond to people being in, or out of a room, to the level of sunlight or even the times of sunrise and sunset.

We attended the ceremony, which was held at the O2 Arena on the first night of the two day conference. Unfortunately we didn’t win the award, but with the stiff competition in a highly populated category we’re still very proud to have made the shortlist. However we did have some winners at our table – indie game developers of the year and our neighbours just across the bridge, Wales Interactive. Well done boys!

Android app marketing: tips for publishers

First on the agenda for the second day of Appsworld was a talk from Ruth Barnett, VP of Global Communications at Swiftkey. She was discussing different strategies to increase profits within the android markets.

Her opening statement was fantastically simple but often overlooked – product comes first. Good marketing will come easily to those with a good product. Ruth also went on to talk about making the most of the app store, investing in relationships, getting media briefed and involved early, making the most out of social media and working as a team to achieve the best results.

Conclusion

The Appsworld conference was an interesting and fun filled two days hearing about some really inspiring ideas and meeting some very nice people doing great things with mobile. We will very much look forward to returning to Appsworld again in 2015 and seeing how individuals projects have progressed, ideas have developed and what amazing branded goodies people come up with next! (ps. this year’s freebie winner was OneNote’s multi USB cable).