Last week the “Summer of Widgets” event in Germany took place.  This was the last  public event before the end of the  competition.

Very early on a Saturday morning Peter-Paul Koch (@ppk)  gave an introduction to W3C widgets.  Chris Heilmann, Y! Evangelist (@codepo8) introduced everybody to one of the major  APIs of Yahoo!. He explained in detail the YQL (Yahoo Query Language) and demoed the developer console showing some javascript examples.

Every participant was well prepared thereafter with the widget specification, the betavine widget SDK and YQL knowledge to create his very first widget. Peter und Chris supported by explaining the do’s and don’t. To ease on device testing for developers our event partner perfectomobile offered unlimited access to their impressive “Remote Device Testing Platform”. Vodafone and  Perfectomobile  cooperate and give away immediately 3h and 1h/month if you use the  voucher Code “betavine” for the registration.

I also managed to interview both on widgets:

At the end of the long and exciting day everybody had created a widget.  Our event partner Amazon webservice also gave away a voucher to the participants to start your widgets business immediately.

The evening ended with an invite to the local beer “Kölsch” and the “German to Kölsch Translater” widget at the famous Gaffel am Dom .

To get an idea about the event just look for the hashtag #vfsow on Twitter, the pictures on Flickr and Imageloop . Chris has also published an article on  the famous Y! Developer Network about us !!

Thanks to all participants, sponsors and especially to our co-host Widgetlabs who made this event a success. Looking forward seeing you all at the next event to “mobilise” even more content with you.

If you have not uploaded your widget - please do at the official Vodafone App Shop.