Firefox OS App Days Madrid summary: this platform rocks!

Last Saturday I attended the Firefox OS App Days in Madrid (it was a parallel event in a lot of cities) organized by Mozilla Hispano. Firstly I would say a big congrats to the organizers for the perfect organization: a pure entrepreneur environment venue (The Garage) in the city center, good food, working WiFi,  very good introductory keynotes, and the opportunity to show apps done during hack session and other just ported from web/js sites. Congrats to the winner of the developer devices by Geeksphone.

About 130 attendants (including web design experts, entrepreneurs, students, geeks) had a lot of fun being introduced to this new platform that could become revolutionary. Also attendedrepresentatives from Geeksphone, the first manufacturer that presented Firefox OS devices that will be available soon and from Telefonica which is a partner of Mozilla trough their Open Web Device initiative.

The concept of WebApp based in HTML5 and JavaScript having access from the web to the device resources (camera, storage, contacts) using APIs with different security hierarchy levels makes very easy to create compelling cases, even easier that in popular platforms as iOS and Android.

Firefox OS could be the leading platform replacing the feature phones because it bring-down the 2 barriers:

1) Economic as it enables full smartphone experience with more affordable hardware.

2) The IT literacy needed, the one people forgets. Today we can find people is keeping feature phones not just because they can not afford an smartphone but they fear the interface, icons disappearing, touching and arriving to screens were they can read "kill proccess", "stop service" etc. The web UI is great: more intuitive and just a button to be "at home".

We have analyzed the plarform (soon will shot the demo of our client for joyn based in network REST API) and it is what can be used by telcos to include as web their IMS messaging, RCS joyn, avoiding to include "fat clients with all protocol stacks". In several countries were Firefox OS will be the main smartphone platform telcos may try to challenge from the beginning the great OTT messaging alternatives and we want to help them to compete offering value and innovation to their customers :-)

juan