Dale Lane walked away with our final prize for the Hack Challenge: an OpenMoko Neo 1973 handset. How did he achieve such a feat? Oddly enough, by developing a series of plugins for Windows Mobile that allow him to search Google, create TinyURLs and post to Del.icio.us:

The aim was to find some more small ways to improve usability in Pocket Internet Explorer – the web browser on Windows Mobile. Anything that we can do to cut out a step, or save the user having to input something, all helps with the overall experience.

Search with Google: Search for the currently selected text in the mobile Google search engine. Saves the user having to copy the text, manually enter “http://www.google.co.uk/m/” in the address bar, paste the text into the search box and hit submit.

The biggest problem with the new Google plugin was in trying to get the currently selected text from the Pocket Internet Explorer. I’ve written up my efforts to do this in a blog post here

Turn into tinyurl: Get the tinyurl link for the current webpage, copying it into the clipboard. Saves the user having to copy the current URL from the address bar, manually enter “http://tinyurl.com/” into the address bar, paste the URL into the box, hit submit, select the tinyurl result and copy it.

Post to del.icio.us: Opens a form to post the current webpage to the del.icio.us bookmarking service, prefilling the page’s name and URL. Saves the user having to copy the current URL from the address bar, manually enter “http://del.icio.us/post”, login, paste the URL into the box, hit submit, wait for the next form, manually type in a title, hit submit.

The plugins can be downloaded from http://dalelane.co.uk/files/blade_pie_plugins.cab

We’re curious to see what Dale starts doing with his new toy ;)

Sam Machin walked away from Mobile Camp London with a shiny new Nokia N95 thanks to his weekend effort – creating an app that pushes notes he writes on his phone, out to his Tumblr blog:

I use tumblr for noting down ideas / urls etc when at conferencing events and some one says check out this site… The app was designed so that I could note it down quickly on my phone and then when I`m sat at my PC later I can look at my tumblr feed and find all the links & notes I made during the event. Despite tumblr having a very simple API nobody seems to have made any kind of app for S60. I didn`t find too many problems during the weekend apart from not having enough time to implement a persistent store of the username & password on the phone although this will be done asap!

Currently the app only supports 3 of the tumblr post types (Note, Quote & Link) but I want to add support for photos via the camera and possibly saved in the gallery too, I don`t think theres much use for the chat or video links from a mobile at this time.

Once I`ve got the user details storage and the camera bits sorted I`ll post it as a free download on my site www.geektech.co.uk. It uses the
PyS60 runtime so I`ll probably build 2 versions of the install file one for people with python and one standalone that bundles the runtime.

You can watch all the Hack Challenge demos here.

Simon Maddox – our first place winner in the Hack Challenge, and soon to be proud owner of an iPhone, created an amazing way to find television content and then get it streamed to your phone:

My hack:
TV Shows is an easy way to watch TV shows (such as Heroes, Prison Break etc.) on your mobile. Show details are pulled from TV.com and displayed on the mobile. When you choose a show / season / episode, the system will go off to a video sharing website and pull the content to the server. Once the video has been encoded into a mobile streaming format, the user is sent a text message telling them their show is ready to watch. The TV show is then streamed to the handset (3G recommended).

Watch Simon demonstrate his hack to the camp.

As part of Mobile Camp London 2007, we offered a little design/hack challenge to create a mobile mashup in a weekend. Five teams took the challenge to heart and built some interesting apps, ranging from a way to pull tv-shows from the web to using Tumblr and an N95 to take notes. We taped the presentation for your viewing pleasure:

Two OpenMoko Neos calling each other at mobileCampLondon.

Improbulus from A Consuming Experience sat down with Michael Shiloh of OpenMoko and taped this overview of the Neo 1973 handset:

Will Lia of OpenMoko caught up with John Moore, who talks about his latest creation, Thumbtribes.

Thumbtribes allows you to locate friends & fellow users within a designated area. Through gps you can locate and ping friends, or simply spy on each other.

See Part II here

I caught up with Jono and Jonathan as they spent the weekend trying to get LastFM on their iPhone.

So, this is what it’s all about… A bunch of people, maybe two dozen, gathered around this table, banging their heads together, throwing out ideas… Developers, designers, tecchies all, pooling in their thoughts to figure out how to make the mobile experience more helpful, more useful, and more fun.

This, right here, is the whole philosophy behind mobileCampLondon.

The main driving thought behind the Hack Challenge is to figure out one thing that you want your phone to do that it doesn’t do. Those competing can use whatever platform they want – the purpose is more to see what kind of ideas are thrown out.

Some of the ideas thrown out:

1. Legos for electronics/mobile applications

2. Application that figures out where you are and gives a radius of where you can go in the time you have, shows areas you can explore….

3. Application that links RSS to mobile messaging, links into Google Maps to show where people were when they requested service

4. A tweak to Google Maps, so that it would tell you where you are, the map rotates north and gives you directions (“turn left” or “you’ve gone too far”)

5. A promiximity sensor that tells you, friend’s close, give him/her a call

Everyone involved will work on their ideas and these will be voted on (via SMS) on Sunday…

Let’s see who gets their hands on those fantastic prizes!