First off, let’s talk about ConferenceGuide 1.1. The iPhone version has been published on the AppStore 2 days ago. Note that it still requires iPhone OS 3.1. New features in this version include:

  • Search in all screens including conferences, speakers and sessions
  • Session “starring”: add sessions to your bookmarks and filter starred sessions
  • When a conference is ongoing and you open the schedule view, it automatically jumps to the next slot
  • You can now view details about the venue for each event
  • Visual feedback has been improved when data is loaded from the server

And of course, a few bugs have been fixed, and some optimization was made. Claes is currently working on implementing the same features on the Android version. He will let you know when it’s ready.

Concerning events now, as you probably know by now, we have fully covered Devoxx a few weeks ago and it was a great success. That’s why we have started to add new events to our coverage calendar. The next 2 ones are Swedish events occurring in parallel on January 26th and 27th:

  • JFokus 2010: another java community conference that gathered 650 people in Stockholm in 2008
  • DagsVara 2010, a publishing and media event in Stockholm as well

Schedule and speaker information are now available in ConferenceGuide and you can start to learn more about these events and maybe prepare your favourite sessions right away.

Last but not least, you may have noticed that MacWorld also appears in the list of upcoming conferences, but does not present any schedule or speaker information. Actually that’s another thing that we have added to ConferenceGuide 1.1: we will add as many events as we can to our database, for free, even if it’s just with a logo, dates and venue information. The idea is to use ConferenceGuide as a big global event calendar for everyone. Now this means a couple of things:

  1. If you know about an event that is not in our list, please let us know so that we can add it
  2. If a lot of you suggest the same event, we will try to add schedule and speaker information to it (we will definitely do it if we are interested in it as well)
  3. If you participate in the organization of a conference and you would like it to be covered by ConferenceGuide to offer this service to your attendees, feel free to contact us. Schedule and speaker information is free, and you won’t even have to do anything. All we would like is that you talk about ConferenceGuide in your official communication about your event.

We have a lot of cool features and events to come in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. Oh, and by the way, if you have feedback, if you notice bugs, or if you have ideas about features or improvements that you miss in ConferenceGuide 1.1 for the iPhone, please leave a comment below.