Tag: facebook-developer-garage-london | Layar Blog

Last Monday June 21st I celebrated the official start of the summer with a visit to London, to attend the Facebook Developer Garage London (FDGL; #fdgl on Twitter) and the Meffys Award dinner and gala.

The FDGL was a great event, organized by the local London Facebook developer community, together with Christian Hernandez (@christianhern) from the Facebook EMEA and Developer team. Facebook is now focusing much more on areas outside of the US, so they decided to send an executive team over to attend this event including Joanna Shields, Mike Vernal, Ethan Beard and Mark Zuckerberg himself! The atmosphere was great and I got to meet many great companies and developers – and managed to talk with “Zuck” for a while about Layar. He was impressed by what we achieved in only one year!

We are thinking about how we can integrate Facebook and Layar in the best possible way – so that Layar users can share their activity on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg indicated they are finishing designing their geo-location application and hope to offer it soon. Which is of course possibly also very exciting for Layar. Tweets about the event can be found here.

After the Facebook event I went to the Meffys Award dinner. The Meffys are the ‘Oscars’ of the mobile entertainment industry – awarded by the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF). This was a gala dinner – so unlike most geeky & startup events, people were wearing suits, tuxedo’s and cocktail dresses, and the dinner was held in a ballroom with chandeliers. Nice!

During the ceremony, 18 Meffys were awarded in categories such as ‘Best Music Service’, ‘Best Game’ and ‘Best Ad Campaign’. And guess what: Layar won the Meffy for ‘Technology Innovation’! This is a fantastic reward for Layar – showing that we have passed the ‘promising startup’ stage to become a mature business.

Rimma Perelmuter, MEF’s Executive Director, said “Congratulations to Layar on pioneering the field of augmented reality on mobile, which looks set to become a mass-market phenomenon.” Great, right?

The Meffys were by the way not the only award we received last week. Marc Rene Gardeya from Hoppala received the Autovision Innovation Award on behalf of Layar on June 16th. More information can be found on his blog.

Thanks all for a great event and great prizes,

Claire