So, I'm back from a weeks holiday and full of beans, and looking at my diary the next few months are fuller than I realised:

• I'll be attending the Brighton and Hove Business Awards next Friday (26th September), where LocoMatrix has been shortlisted for Most Awesome Use of Digital Media;
• On 29th September I'm heading up to a SkillsMatter talk on Pragmatic Agility. If you've never been to one of these, I thoroughly recommend them;
• The next day I'm on a panel at a Mashup event being held at the offices of BBH, on the topic of iPhone, Android and Symbian;
• On 15th October Joh and I will be doing a talk at the Werks in Brighton, expanding on my Barcamp presentation to cover off our experiences adopting Scrum at Future Platforms - very much following on from the talk we gave at SkillSwap nearly a year ago.
• The Symbian Smartphone Show follows on 21st and 22nd October; I'm expecting this one to be particularly interesting, given the changes going on in mobile right now;
• On 6th November I'll be talking at the Sussex University Enterprising Engineers evening, on experiences at Future Platforms building all sorts of lovely mobile products;
• And last but not least, I'll be speaking at Future of Mobile London on 17th November, on the strengths, weaknesses and tradeoffs of various mobile platforms;

Phew. All that and the Brooks 10k run on 16th November to keep me busy ;)

If you're going to any of the above and fancy catching up for a chat, do drop me a line...

"It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn't add up to a Windows killer.

...

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a "platform for running web apps". It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It's also got Google Gears built in. Great. I'll alert Tim Berners-Lee.
"

I'm *really* enjoying this guys writing.

So, Barcamp Brighton 3: absolutely fantastic. I'll scratch down a few thoughts before they evaporate:

• Really annoyed I missed Paul Silver talk on social networks and death: he brought it up at Tuttle last week and it sounded really great;
• Saw 2 talks on Selenium: I am going to be force-feeding this to our QAs until they burst;
• The last afternoon was appropriate New Age, given that we were in Brighton. Sunday closed for me with a yoga session with Jenny, meditation and GTD with Michael Rose, then a retrospective on the whole of Barcamp ably facilitated by Joh;
• The highlight was Rebecca talking on typography and design, which seemed to be the best-attended of the whole event (necessitating a mid-point shift in venue) and generated some really good debate afterwards. No Tantek, there is no repository of mobile typography. Yes Tantek, mobile fragmentation really *is* that bad.
• I also really enjoyed James' skit on Derrida and XKCD (so much that I forgot my promise of a good kicking if he ever mentioned Big D again), and the session which combined Thai OCR, DNA sequencing and minority African languages... but ended up being a database optimisation back-and-forth with the audience :)
• We decamped to a dark corner for the warts and all of Scrum - my talk on the last year at FP, which I may be repeating locally in the near future...

The only low point for me was the university food - but hey, out of everything that had to be organised and put together to bring an event of this scale to fruition, that's quite properly a long way down the list.

Already looking forward to the next one :)

The next few months will be interesting, I think. I've been asked to join the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group as a W3C Invited Expert. Specifically, I'm going to be contributing to the work of the Content Tranformation Task Force over the next few months.

If you've been reading this blog, you may know that the task force's attention is on a topic which interests me: over the last couple of years the deployment of transforming proxies within network operators has caused headaches for mobile content providers, and led to some quite fiery debate in various online forums. I'm looking forward to contributing a perspective from the corner of the mobile ecosystem where Future Platforms and our clients sit: independent software developers and content providers.

And - I appreciate these words may come back to haunt me - I'm really looking forward to seeing the work of a standards body from the inside. This is an aspect of the industry I've never experienced - other than through the artifacts the W3C etc. produce - and I'm curious to understand it better.

dConstruct 2008: The Jones/Biddulph Connection: Designing for the Coral Reef

I shut the laptop and just watched this one :)