Ocasta Labs

We are pleased to welcome Hugh Neale to the Ocasta Labs team. Hugh joins from university after completing his degree in Computer Science and will working on both server and client software, branding development and user interface design.

Martin Higham will be speaking this week at the Mobile Web 2.0 conference in Barcelona.

The workshop will be on ”Using CouchDB to develop mobile solutions”, an introduction to CouchDB, why it is appropriate to mobile development and lessons learnt from developing Agora for Vodafone Betavine.

Further information on the conference can be found at their web site:

Ocasta Labs are pleased to support Vodafone R&D in their deployment of Agora, a new breed of social marketplace.

Agora allows people to buy and sell goods on a much more social level than standard e-auction sites. Chatting about purchases is encouraged, bartering is allowed and the whole service is mobile optimised using location and integrated to a phone’s handset capabilities. First demonstrated at MobileMonday London, the service is now available to the general public. The initial launch of Agora is for Android handsets, the client application being available on Google’s Android market by searching for Agora.

The Agora service was jointly developed by Vodafone R&D and Ocasta Labs. Ocasta Labs provided OcastaTrade as the service infrastructure and client engineering resources.

More information on the project can be found at Vodafone’s Betavine web site:

Ocasta Labs have released five new widgets for Vodafone 360 phones. These were commissioned by Vodafone UK and are available for the Samsung 360 and Symbian widget platforms.

The applications are all example of client- server integration, utilising APIs from closed and open sources:

The WoW Armory allows users to access the popular World of Warcraft service and display all character information.

PropertySearch provides location based searches on houses for sale and to rent.

MyUK shows government statistics on the country.

Areas shows government statistics on a chosen neighbourhood.

SocialBuzz shows the most popular links on Twitter in the last hour and day.

Comprehensive data on URLs embedded in Twitter posts is now available through the Infochimps web site. Infochimps is an open catalog and marketplace for the world’s data. You can share, sell, curate, and download data about anything and everything.

The Twitter URL data has been gathered by the ChatCatcher system (www.chatcatcher.com) which analyses Twitter, Identi.ca and FriendFeed embedded URLs and places comments back on subscribing web sites. The data contains the Short URL (if used), destination URL and time of usage. Potential uses for the data include social monitoring, web site comment tracking and trend analysis.

An initial data set is available now. Twitter real embedded URLs 19th January 2010 to 31st January 2010. Further data sets will be uploaded over time.

For more information on using Twitter URL data please contact Ocasta Labs or the ChatCatcher team.

This paper discusses the need for federated social networks that support open standards, as a means to support growth in the field.

Social Networking needs to move to be a full Internet service if it is to grow and become consolidated across all users of the Internet. Find out why this is so and how it can be brought into existence.

Developing the Social net

The Betavine team at Vodafone R&D have become the first customer to take Ocasta Labs” OcastaChat server.

The server has been configured as a demonstration and trial solution, to encourage mobile developers to explore further the possibilities of open mobile application development

A whitepaper covering OcastaID and the use of OpenID by mobile network operators is now available from Ocasta Labs. The paper explains the benefits of using OpenID, the drawbacks in the technology and how deployment can be improved if carried out by mobile operators.

OpenID is a superb protocol for centralising web authentication, which when deployed by a mobile operator becomes an even richer, more robust and user friendly solution. Learn how.

We are pleased to welcome Keith Duffin as a partner at Ocasta Labs. Keith is based in Virginia, USA and has extensive experience in solution deployment and design, especially to mobile operators and telecommunications companies who require extremely high uptime and performance levels.

Keith will work on the operational control of Ocasta Labs services and deployment architectures for our operator solutions.