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This month we held a CloudCamp event in Gateshead. The venue was probably the best venue we have ever used, it was a 12’th Centry Church called St Marys.

The following presentations were given:

We are very grateful to Gateshead Council for allowing us to use the venue, NorthernNet for being our platinum sponsor and all of our silver sponsors, including Microsoft, Everycity, StormMQ, OPSource, emailcloud and Arjuna.

This month we had another excellent turnout to see John Lunn from PayPalx tell us about all the new mobile offerings from PayPalx. The video and slide deck are here:

After his presentation John was joined by colleague Anthony Hicks (@anthonyxcom), Jon Nairn (@jonstep, working for @neverodd), Alex Reid (@alexjreid) and Peter Bull (@RoguePlanetoid) for a panel Q&A session.

General points of note from the session and pub discussions:

• Perhaps surprising to some, the iPhone market accounts for a small proportion of mobile devices, and Android mobiles are apparently selling at twice the rate of iPhone.
• iPhone users are generally more comfortable with app purchasing, and represent a more general consumer demographic.
• Submissions and updates are developer-driven for Android, so app deployment can be rapid- especially when compared to Apple’s approval process.
• Development for the less popular platforms may attract incubation or start-up funding.
• Some high-qualify third-party technology exists for integration, e.g. Bump, OpenFeint.
• Commercially, producing good middleware may be a better gamble than a good app.
• Windows Phone 7 Series sounds promising.

Thank you to everybody who attended and James for allowing me to plagiarise his write-up 😉

Last night over 100 people attended SuperMondays and watched two excellent presentations by Alex Reid and Lorna Jane Mitchell.

Alex Reid:

Lorna Jane Mitchell:

Thank you to Alex and Lorna along with our sponsors Northern Film and Media, Sunderland Software City and Newcastle University.