Kinoma Notes

Y’all, we had a wonderful time at “South By”!

South by Southwest Interactive was an amazing opportunity to talk with hundreds of developers about our new, open Kinoma app platform, and to introduce thousands of non-developers to Kinoma Play’s awesomesauce.

(Are you a mobile app developer? Couldn’t make it to SXSWi? No problem — you can still sign up for early access to the Kinoma SDK here. )

The booth

The Marvell booth was absolutely thrumming with guests.

Visitors could start at the front counter, where we had a bunch of Marvell-powered ASUS phones running Kinoma Play for Android.

Or they could just wander on in anywhere to talk with us and relax in our comfy chairs.

The booth even had built-in whiteboards where people could sketch the kinds of mobile apps they want to see, or even make for themselves.

The panel

Our own Peter Hoddie, VP of Kinoma at Marvell, spoke at a panel called ”Platform Success: Earning Developers’ Trust, Hearts and Minds”. The panel talked about how developers can thrive in mobile.

Moderated by Harry McCracken, the panel also featured Brandon Watson, director for Windows Phone 7; James Keller, co-founder of Small Society; and Ben Satterfield, 2008 and 2009 SXSW Web Award Winner.

The party

Finally, we invited a few hundred of our newest friends to a rooftop party overlooking Austin’s historic 6th Street.

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to talk with us.

We learned a lot (we hope you did too!), and we’re excited to get the Kinoma platform into your hands and hear what you think.

Removable memory is pretty much all alike, isn’t it?

We wish! For better or worse, there can be big differences in quality and speed between one storage card and another.

For quality, all you can really do is buy a brand you trust. But for speed, the good news is that there’s now a standard way of classifying the throughput of SD and SDHC cards — the Speed Class.

It’s really easy to understand, too. Class 2 cards guarantee a minimum transfer speed of 2 MB/second, Class 4 cards a minimum speed of 4 MB/second, etc. A card’s Speed Class should be clearly marked as a number in a round “C”, as shown above.

We recommend that you always buy storage cards that are Class 4 or higher, and we normally buy Class 6 cards ourselves.

With a faster card your phone spends less time on data transfers, which translates to more efficient media playback. As an added bonus, copying media between the card and a PC will be faster as well.

• SD Speed Class [SD Association]

All of us here at Kinoma wish you a happy, safe, and restful holiday.

“The Crunchies” is an award ceremony organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat to honor the companies and products you believe most deserve industry recognition for achievements made in the past year.

The nomination process ends Wednesday, December 10 at midnight PST, so please vote right now. You can vote once per day.

Click on these links to nominate Kinoma Play for any (or all) of the following categories:

• Best Mobile
• Best Design
• Best App
• Best Technology Innovation/Achievement

We just learned about this, so we’d appreciate if you’d vote every day you can, and encourage fellow Kinoma fans to do the same.

Thank you!

• Announcing The Second Annual Crunchies Awards

Do you have one of the HTC — or in the case of the Palm Treo 750, HTC-made — phones listed below?

If so, you only have a little over a week to upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.0 before the official free upgrade downloads go away forever.

• Palm Treo 750 (on AT&T)
• HTC S620/S621 (HTC Excalibur)
• HTC P4350 (HTC Herald)
• HTC P3300 (HTC Artemis)
• HTC Advantage

So be sure to get your upgrade download now, even if you don’t plan on upgrading right away!

• HTC puts Oct. 31 deadline on 6.0 upgrades [WMExperts]