It’s been a typically manic time inside the O2 Litmus team that I haven’t had a chance to post an update for a while. Well let me rectify that with a digest of recent activity.

A few weeks ago O2 Litmus was delighted to sponsor and speak at Over The Air 2009. What a great couple of days. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a positive vibe at an event. We had some great questions in the O2 Litmus session, and the slides I presented are available here:

The unquestioned hit were our new Palm Pre phone’s which we demoed to passers by, word of which quickly spread via Twitter!

You can view the rest of our photo’s from the event here. The organisers are already asking for ideas for 2010, so ping them using @ota09 now!

O2 Litmus itself has been going through a few changes over the past couple of weeks as well. As you hopefully know we are always asking for feedback on how we can improve the service, plus we are eagle eyed when other people comment.  With this in mind we are making a number of small, but important, tweaks to the site.

Firstly the Developers Tools section is now publicly visible. Previously you could only see this section if you logged into the site as a Developer. The original rationale was to keep the site clean and not confuse O2 customers that are visiting the site to try out the apps and services. On reflection, we were perhaps under selling what was available to you as a Developer via O2 Litmus. A number of people have commented “I’m still not quite sure what is does?”. Hopefully with this change, prospective members can now browse for the information they need.

We have also seen a couple of articles referencing that the O2 Litmus community is very quiet. Whilst it is clearly a big job to build a new community from scratch, and we have much to do, these comments have been made after referring the public forums, which seem to be playing more of a one way communication role, than for a two way dialogue. Therefore again, with a sense of transparency at heart, we are going to make all of the forums publicly visible to help promote and stimulate conversations in the community.

If you read the slides from Over The Air, you will be aware of some exciting upcoming developments. First our Palm Developer resources will go live any day soon, so stay tuned for those, and more. Secondly we have introduced our sister Developer community located in Spain, Open Movil Forum. You may also have seen our call for any Developers interested in launching into the Latin American market. This is just the beginning of a much more coordinated approach to serving the Developer community from Telefonica. Next year is going to be very exciting!

Our final development is a long overdue fix to displaying apps inside Litmus, now filtered by device type. This will solve the previous problem of having 10+ pages of apps to sort through to find something for your phone. Sorry it’s taken so long!

Last, but not least, our first Developer compeition “The App Showdown” concluded in September. Our winner was Jon Bonnick, and I had the pleasure of handing over the comedy cheque for £10,000. Congratulations to Jon! Check out www.o2litmus.co.uk for more on Jon, his app, and the compeition.

Ok, tomorrow I fly out to San Francisco for Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley. Follow me  on Twitter for live updates from the conference, and I’ll post a wrap up blog as soon as I get the opportunity.

That’s all for now, as always, feel free to contact me using one of the many social media tools available to us in this age of Web 2.0 wonder!