Reps/SIGs/Evangelism Reps/Conference participation/Samsung Devcon

Warning: With effect from 1st September 2023, the Mozilla Reps program was closed and activities ended.

Conference details

Samsung Developer conference, San Francisco. This was the first developer conference by Samsung trying to get directly in contact with developers with their new platforms.

Your goals

I was invited to give a talk about the state of HTML5 in terms of technology and tooling. I also wanted to start conversations with Samsung to maybe get our foot in the door for Firefox OS harware/

Audience type and size

About 900 Attendees, mixed developers and middle managers, some CEOs and startups. My talk was pretty full and there were great questions.

Mozilla's participation at this event

I gave the opening talk in the HTML5 track and took part in a panel on tooling for the web.

Audience reactions

All in all feedback was very positive - especially showing off the developer tools with Appmanager was a big win as Samsung's tools are much more complex in comparison.

Evening event/party

The day before the conference there was a press meet and greet at The Press Club on market street which allowed press to ask questions without rushing. Good plan. There was a party with guest speakers and dinner at the exploratorium in San Francisco, which was a super sweet venue. Nobody cared much for the presentations at the afterparty though - they should have kept it to networking.

Materials (eg. slides, presentations, audio clips, photos etc…)

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/samsung-devcon-state-of-html5-chris-heilmann Screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hq22HdEznM

Infoworld did a post on my conference talk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/mobile-browsers-lag-so-mobile-html5-apps-suffer-230085

Other notable presentations

Samsung pushed hard for their Smart TV platform and their secure Android layer called Knox. Tizen was not mentioned much, it was mostly about Smart TVs and multi screen experiences. The security talk in the keynote was superb, very well presented.

Organization rating (1: bad - 10: excellent)

6

Overall feel of the event

It was Samsung's show - so a lot was based around products and releasing them. I found there were too many tracks and it was easy to miss talks. Smaller would be better, but this was meant to rival Google IO.

This event helped us…

Lots of good networking.

Was it worth it? Should we participate again?

Yes.

Connections

Re-kindled talks with Sencha about supporting Firefox better. Stormy took that over. Some good contacts in Samsung and invites to Salesforce to talk about HTML5