MOBILE EDUCATION: ALL THE COOL KIDS ARE TECH NERDS

While Plastic Mobile has known the title of this blog post to be true all along, it seems the general population is also warming to the sentiment. According to the October 28th Career Mashup survey results, the popularity of a tech career is on the rise! In fact, 47% of those who were previously unsure about a tech career are now interested. The same applies to 24% of those who were previously not interested in the tech industry. Meanwhile, CareerMash also takes credit for driving the interest of those who were already inclined towards a tech career up by 64%. Plastic Mobile attended the event to showcase our Joomo program, and we can attest that the energy was amazing and was seemingly able to lay the foundation for changing perceptions around ICT-related careers.

CCICT launched CareerMash.ca for high schoolers and influencers on September 15th of this year, with TechnoCompétences launching the complementary MaCarrieretechno.com shortly thereafter. Between the two programs, outreach in Ontario and Quebec has exceeded all expectations and the message is apparently resonating with students. Consider the following metrics:

• Students at Roy Thomson Hall event October 28: 1650 (target: 350)
• Today’s careers mash up tech with anything you imagine
• They come in 4 categories: leader (jobs have doubled in 10 years from 100,000 to 200,000), innovator, builder and problem solver
• Tech jobs are in demand (only 2.5% unemployment) and lucrative (25% pay over $85,000/year), with many opportunities for personal growth
• Young women can find fabulous and challenging careers in tech

The great news is that the CareerMash campaign now plans to live long for the next few years. Hurrah! Plastic Mobile is excited and in full support, and will be participating in this important initiative to raise Canada’s performance and competitiveness in the digital economy of the 21st century.

As we sat amongst our hacks/hackers peers and colleagues from the publishing world, we were giddy with anticipation to do a live demo our new platform Joomo. Joomo is an automated platform that enables anyone to create high-quality custom native mobile applications across all mobile devices. With a web-based studio you can create, edit, track and customize every aspect of your app, all for free.

When our host, Phillip Smith, told the audience that Plastic Mobile is going to build an application in the duration of our 8 minute presentation time slot, there were many skeptical faces in the crowd. Now I’m not going to toot the Joomo horn, and write about how unbelievably easy to use it is, or the incredibly engaging user experience, or how it’s simply visually stunning. And I’m certainly not going to get into the whole native back end discussion and the genius behind that, rather I’m just going to let you witness how Melody and Sep delivered as promised, and built an app for ’29 Secrets’ in approximately 5 minutes.

Warning: The quality of the video is not Oscar-worthy, but then again that’s usually how it is when something rare and awesome happens and we spontaneously try to capture it. Think of UFO videos-never great.

Plastic Mobile was featured on App Central show with technology host Amber Mac. The show airs on the popular Business News Network (BNN), CTV, and CP24. Watch it now below:

Check out Melody Adhami’s interview for AppTV. If you want to go straight to the segment, it’s around the 21 minute mark. Our Queen of Apps discussed the recently launched PlayBook app called Hockeycentral and winning a Webby Award for the Pizza Pizza app. In addition, talked about Plastic Mobile’s new online app studio, Joomo, to help bloggers and content providers build mobile apps for all operating system at no cost.

Earlier this week, we got a call from Regan at Intel APPUp to showcase our mobile platform, Joomo, at AppNation in San Francisco. With much delight, we took the next flight and we were ready to roll at this two-day conference that is all about apps. It’s great to be surrounded by so many people in the app and mobile space.

We are in the process of launching Joomo for everyone to engage it…so stay tuned for more details.

Joomo is a web-based platform to easily develop mobile applications for smartphones and tablets devices based on a personal blog or website. Our goal is toempower content producers and bloggers to enter the mobile space without dealing with the heavy costs and compete with media conglomerates. In addition, users will have the opportunity to monetize on their apps with Joomo’s ad-network. The platform is flexible to allow anyone customize their own mobile app by using our easy to use tools.

If you are at AppNation, visit our pod. Or email me:  melody[at]plasticmobile.com

Plastic Mobile team had a great trip to South by Southwest Interactive. Austin, TX was buzzing with over 20,000 people traveling from around the world to attend the festival. We hopped from one panel to the next keynote speech to the various industry parties. Most importantly, we enjoyed connecting with talents in the digital space.

Over the last few years, SXSW has become a launch pad for many start-ups. Social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc all got their popularity boost from this festival. For the sake of mobile, here are some highlights from this year’s SXSW:

1) Group Messaging: Before the festival began, the hot thing expected for 2011 was ability to message an exclusive group of people. After SXSW, we still don’t think group messaging got its sex appeal (yet). It’s still a tool that people will find useful on the specific occasions. Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, Yobongo, and GroupMe were all contenders in the group messaging app battle. According to an infographic published in TechCrunch, GroupMe won at SXSW. Now, I’m not sure if the results were skewed since GroupMe were serving free beer and yummy grilled cheese sandwiches. Marketing is king at SXSW.

2) iPad 2: Opening day of SXSW fell on the same day that the iPad 2 became available in the US. Apple made it convenient for the fellow SXSW tech aficionados to get their hands on the latest tablet by opening up a pop-up store in the heart of downtown Austin. Yes, iPad 2 was heavily talked about at the festival. Plus, we saw a lot of tablets being held up in the air, as people were testing out its camera feature. (I hope this doesn’t become a trend) As expected, the iPad 2 was pretty much sold out…well, they only had 64G version in Austin.

3) Mobile app creator. Everyone wants to create a mobile application. Many bloggers and online publications have the influence but not the budget to invest on a mobile application. New platforms are coming out help alleviate that problem – so people can produce high-quality apps at an affordable price. Plastic Mobile will soon be launching its mobile platform called Joomo (pronounced “You-Mo”). It’ll create applications for all platforms on smartphones and tablets based on a site or blog. Learn more about Joomo by checking out our site (it’s in beta): www.joomo.com

4) QR Codes: The movie Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal premiered at SXSW. Microsoft was a sponsor and used its Tag technology to promote the film. Essentially, Microsoft Tag is a form of QR Code where you scan the barcode and it’ll direct you to a specific site. The Source Code tag, took its users to a social game on Facebook. The game itself was based on the movie. Are we seeing a new trend for Hollywood in order to promote its films?

5) Deals: As Groupon leads the race on the daily deals space many other mobile applications are jumping on the bandwagon. Facebook has announced that they are testing daily deals in a few US cities. The co-founder of Foursquare, the geo-location mobile app, said in a SXSW presentation that they are aggressively looking into offering more deals for its users. All I have to say, let’s move away from the discounts on spas, massages, or bootcamp sessions. New deals please!