Openplug was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week and here are the highlights after a hectic week packed with meetings, on- and off-site events, networking parties (yes, this IS work) and lots of walking and talking …

On Monday, I sync’ed up with the folks at OMTP. OMTP is an organisation driven by major mobile operators worldwide that creates fast-track common specs for reducing fragmentation between mobile devices in areas that matter for services and contents deployment. OMTP has created a script API called BONDI that aims to standardise the syntax for widget and rich mobile apps developers when it comes to accessing mobile device functionality like messaging, contacts, etc..

At OpenPlug we decided at the onset to adopt this great API for ELIPS Studio instead of reinventing the wheel. BONDI was originally intended for Javascript only, but we have been the first ones to create an ActionScript binding for it. And that’s what you will find in our mobile device services APIs extensions to the Flex framework.

On Tuesday, the Symbian Foundation very kindly invited us to demo ELIPS Studio on their booth, as well as our popular TweetMWC app that was created specifically for the event.

I had the chance to explain to app developers for Symbian how ELIPS Studio would help them develop and deploy faster on existing Symbian Series 60 devices, thanks to the greatness of ActionScript programming and the Flex framework while retaining the ability to use native features of the Symbian platform (by far the most deployed smartphone plartform in the world – see latest Gartner stats here).

ELIPS Studio also allows to build native .SIS packages that can be deployed to app stores like OVI store and the Symbian Foundation’s very own app “wharehouse” Horizon. For instance, our Tweet MWC app is now available on OVI and is featured on Symbian Horizon.

On Wednesday, I took a quick escape off-site to attend TechCrunch Mobile 2010. Congratulations to Mike Butcher from TCEurope for organising a great event at a really nice venue, and assembling a great lineup of speakers and panelists. Most of the talks centered around mobile apps, cross-platform development, native vs web apps.

I got a chance to fast-pitch ELIPS Studio in less than 30 seconds in front of the 150+ attendees. My main point was that AIR is not yet there on mobile devices, still there is a need for rich apps. To make my point, a quick show of hands poll indeed showed that all attendees preferred using twitter via a Rich Desktop App like TweetDeck rather than through the web interface. And well, this is exactly what ELIPS Studio allows on mobile. Right now. On all platforms. With excellent performance.

In the evening of Wednesday, we were one of the happy few companies demoing at Mobile Cocktail (a spinoff from TechCocktail).

TweetMWC and ELIPS Studio took center stage amongst the Android developer crowd at the B hotel bar.

You can see me in the MobileCocktail photo gallery explaining the ins and outs of cross-platform native mobile app development in Flex.

Thanks to the team at Android.es (esp. Roberto) and Franck Gruber from techCocktail for making this happen.

Finally, Thursday was dedicated to WIPJam at App Planet, the zone that MWC organisers dedicated to mobile apps.

WIPJam was a full day gathering of mobile app developers, platform vendors, mobile development tools companies (like OpenPlug), analysts … etc.

Again cross-platform development and app monetisation strategies were hot topics. Thanks to Caroline, Teresa and Thibaut for this excellent networking and discussion opportunity.

The informal discussion circles revealed a striking point for me: nowadays most app developers still use not-so-modern development languages like C or C++. Not that I don’t like those but they are clearly beaten to the pulp by Actionscript when it comes to learning curve, development productivity, testing/debugging, integration of web services … so I hope that by next year most of you will be able thanks to ELIPS Studio to share great success stories at WIPJam.