Time: 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm

Venue: CBS Interactive Sydney

This is being run as part of the RSPCA Cupcake Day fundraiser – if you are a cupcake maker you can go to the RSPCA site & sign up to receive a cupcake kit.

Register (opens a Google Docs form)

Sponsors Needed
If you’d like to help out as a sponsor please

let the unorganisers know.

They need some prizes for the fabulous cupcakes & their bakers, & a food or drink sponsor would be nice too.

What is a CupcakeCamp?
CupcakeCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and eat cupcakes in an open environment.

It is based on similar principles as other unconferences such as BarCamps and you can find some more information here.

In this instance the plan is also to raise some funds to help out the RSPCA as well as enjoy each other’s company and a cupcake or several.

Check out the website at www.amplify.amp.com.au for the ‘full monty’ on what it is, why they do it, who’s coming and what’s going on.

She’s got a few External Festival Passes available at a cost of $3,000 for unlimited participation, including all workshops (with 19 well known speakers from around the globe).  Registration info is here & program info is here.

A slightly lower cost option is the Technology on Tap night at 5.30 pm, Tuesday 23 June at The Paragon Hotel, Circular Quay- price $10 at the door.

I’m told that Technology on Tap is “a unique opportunity to experience a TED-like event right here in Sydney, without the cost and time investment of international travel”.

Note: @MaverickWoman advises that “AMP makes no profit from these events & the external Festival Pass fees assist in defraying the cost of bringing top international speakers to Sydney”.

One of the social events that are part of the Connecting Up 09 conference is a Women in IT Brunch at which Jody Mahoney (Vice President, Business Development, at the Anita Borg Foundation) is the guest speaker.

For the uninitiated, the Anita Borg Institute was founded in 1997 by renowned computer scientist Anita Borg, Ph.D. (1949-2003). The Anita Borg Institute seeks to:

• increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, and
• increase the positive impact of technology on the world’s women.

Cost for the brunch is $65 and it is at 10.30 am on Sunday 10th May 2009 at Brighton Le Sands – registration form is here (opens pdf). Any queries call : +61 2 9280 3677

Now, we would say it was exceptional, wouldn’t we? But when you’re playing to a standing-room-only crowd of the most networked people in the country, you couldn’t get away with an untruth.

You can see everything that participants had to say by checking out our #silfed hashtag on Twitter. The most rewarding part for us — other than a capacity crowd! — was that participants agreed we lived up to the promise we make in our guiding principles:

Our contributors commit to:

• Sharing their experiences generously
• Giving practical advice
• Using real-world examples, Australian where possible
• Answering questions

We were also pleased to get tweets from Melbourne during the event asking if we could bring Entering the Mobile Ecosystem to Victoria.

We can and we’d love to. If you’d be interested in coming to an encore presentation of Entering the Mobile System, please leave a comment, send us an email or @ us on Twitter.

Simple idea – don’t spend $100 or more going to a fancy restaurant to celebrate IWD – instead join us for a slightly different celebration of IWD.

Our plan is simple: bring your own lunch and join us to support International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) charity and network with likeminded people.

Entry is free, gold coin asked to help cover room rental costs and donations to IWDA will be collected separately.

Registrations here

OzWeather, best-selling Australian app for the iPhone

In January Apple announced there had been 500 million downloads from its app store. That would have been a wonderful result for a store that had been open for only half a year; but it’s astounding when the figure stood at “just” 300 million downloads a month before.

OzWeather is the most successful Australian iPhone app in the Apple store. Priced at $2.49, it hasn’t been out of the Australian store’s top 10 since its launch in November last year. At the time of writing, it had the top spot.

It’s author, Graham Dawson, is a self-taught app developer, having made a career from developing niche software on other platforms. He estimates development costs at $15,500 (the amount he would have had to pay another developer to do what he did). That put the break-even point at just a few months from the release date. (After taxes and Apple’s cut, Graham makes roughly $1.60 per copy sold.)

“There’s certainly a market for more Australian apps,” Graham told me. “Every country has its own needs and cultural aspects. There are lots of niches out there.”

Aside from proving a demand for local apps, Graham has shown that users will pay for Australian content even when they’re getting something similar for free: the iPhone comes with a Yahoo-powered weather app as standard but its data is not as authoritative as OzWeather’s, which comes directly from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. There are plenty more sources of trusted Australian data that could be converted to an app.

“You just have to go out and look at what those niches are,” says Graham.

Beyond sales, there is the benefit to companies developing apps of getting their content in front of influential customers who will pass on what they like, making recommendations to their friends.

“iPhone users are passionate, viral, they’ll share their information and their findings,” says Keith Ahern, CEO of Australian-based Mobile 2.0 developers MoGeneration. “It’s easy to think iPhone owners are just 300,000 users out of a population of 19 million they can — and do — use iPhone apps to share content with people who don’t have iPhones. So they’re ‘only’ 300,000 people but their sphere of influence goes well beyond that.”

Graham seen first hand the passion of the mobile community. “Typically I get half a dozen emails a day from the feedback button in the app,” he says. “It’s extremely valuable.”

Graham Dawson will be speaking at our Entering the Mobile Ecosystem seminar on 2 February.

Find out more at our Entering the Mobile Ecosystem seminar in Sydney on 3 March 2009.
Location: Sydney Australia
Registrations: Click here
Date: 03 March 2009 Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 noon

Mobile internet users are passionate influencers, the sort of consumers that every marketer wants to reach. They’re willing to spend money on their interests and recommend the best of what they find to their friends. Not only do users of devices like the iPhone account for 30-40% of web traffic from mobiles, what they do online can influence the websites other people visit.

These are the same customers who use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other services to make powerful recommendations to their friends. They drive traffic.

The best way to attract the attention of these users is through the applications that that make their devices more than phones but real mobile computers.

Applications don’t have to be expensive and can actually make money. In the US Kraft has persuaded thousands of iPhone owners to buy for an app that markets Kraft’s foods: Kraft’s customers are paying Kraft to have Kraft products marketed to them.

In Australia ANZ, Westpac, St George and others have also entered the mobile ecosystem with branded applications on the iPhone.

This seminar is for you if:

• you are looking for new, inexpensive ways to reach customers
• you want practical advice from speakers who have done it
• you want to meet mobile app developers, including the developer whose Australian iPhone app tops the charts
• you want a clear understanding of the next steps for your business

Speakers

• Shane Williamson – Mobile Convergence Evangelist
• Graham Dawson – creator of the top rating Oz Weather iPhone app
• Keith Ahern – CEO of MoGeneration one of the leading Australian iPhone development companies with 5 high profile iPhone web apps released in 2008