As I have mentioned previously, I’m really trying to cut down the number of conferences I go to this year. However, both the OpenExpo in Bern (from which I returned last friday) and the Bossa Conference in Brazil (which I’m there since saturday) are too important to skip.

OpenExpo went very well, I had some good talks with people regarding further platform development. I had a talk where I outlined three major factors of OpenMoko (Freedom, Experiments, Innovation) and the forthcoming middleware initiative. If you manage to understand german, have a look at the video.

The second of three days Bossa have passed now and I’m really enjoying Brazil. My talk about OpenEmbedded was on the first day and since then I’m more relaxed. I have never been a fan of the climate in Germany, so what I’m being exposed to here (an average of 29 degrees) is just about right Apart from the most amazing venue I’ve ever been to, it’s the people and the topics which are completely right on spot. After the conference I will work for a few days with the INdt guys on merging our OpenEmbedded trees and collaborate on Python and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

On a more personal note, OpenExpo and Bossa were partly responsible for bringing fresh new motivation into me and my middleware work for OpenMoko. All the developers I have met agree with me that — for the time being — there’s hardly anything more necessary than a solid framework for people to get started with their own approaches on how to improve how we interact with mobile devices. Services like telephony, PIM storage database, network, location, and context, need to be there — no matter which UI toolkit or applications we are going to focus on.

I’ll be heading back to Germany on saturday, looking forward to a spring full of refreshening infrastructure development (and some shiny bread-and-butter applications, of course — middleware development needs to be application driven).

Let me finish with some more great news…

1. The price range for the Neo FreeRunner has been published, it’s going to be less than 400 USD — which is quite a substantial improvement over the estimated 650 that was published last year. Given the features (Wifi, GPS, GSM, BT, Accellerometers, VGA) and the openness (priceless!) I think it’s pretty decent price.
2. OpenMoko Inc. has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2008. I’m looking forward to mentor some exciting projects. Please start submitting student applications now!

Cheers!