Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Selects PhoneGap for Launch Pad Competition
Panel of Judges Picks Nitobi’s PhoneGap As One of Five Chosen from Over 80 Applications
Vancouver – Nitobi Inc. has announced that its PhoneGap project has won a coveted spot in Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco’s Launch Pad taking place Thursday, April 2 during the Web 2.0 Expo, in San Francisco.
Nitobi will present PhoneGap along with four other companies to a panel of industry experts including Anand Iyer of Microsoft BizSpark, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat. Nitobi CEO, Andre Charland, will showcase PhoneGap in front of a live audience at Web 2.0 Expo, the leading global gathering of developers, designers, marketers, and business professionals building the next generation Web. John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO of Federated Media and Program Chair of Web 2.0 Summit, will host the live competition where each company will present for five minutes for feedback from both the judges and audience members.
Created at iPhoneDevCamp 2008, PhoneGap is a free, open source development framework for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. Using PhoneGap, developers can author mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of native mobile device capabilities like geo-location, camera, vibration and sound–features that make the iPhone so popular. Developers can use PhoneGap to build applications for the iPhone, Google Android and Blackberry.
“Since PhoneGap’s recent launch we’ve received a flood of positive feedback from JavaScript developers who wanted to build iPhone apps, but didn’t want to learn the relatively-obscure Mac programming language Objective-C. PhoneGap provides an easy, open source alternative,” said Charland. “Being chosen to present at Web 2.0 Expo is another sign that we’ve hit on something big with PhoneGap.”
There are now dozens of applications built using PhoneGap available for download from the iPhone app store.
“We’d like to applaud the impressive and distinct solutions that these five Launch Pad winners have presented Web 2.0 Expo,” said Brady Forrest, Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair. “We received over eighty submissions to the Launch Pad competition this year and are thrilled to see this continued industry enthusiasm and advancement at a difficult economic time.”
A People’s Choice Winner will be announced at the end of the Launch Pad. Audience members will be asked to vote for their top choice based on the demos. Votes will be tabulated in real-time and projected live on screen.
