This week, the BlueVia team headed down to The Big M conference in Bath, “a brand new independent mobile focused event aimed at those who want to learn from and connect with the very best people in the industry.”

Day one kicked off with Raam Thakrar (@raamthakrar) talking about app distribution and monetisation, both subjects that BlueVia are familiar with. Ramm’s main point was to make sure that developers needed to move on from a “hobbiest mentality” and make sure they sort out the product proposition and find distribution channels that will really scale. More notes from this talk over at It’s Developmental.

Ramm was followed by Arel Balkan (@aral), who gave another of his inspiring and speeches on UX, titled “Beyond Usability”. Bruce Lawson (@brucel) from Opera came next, and gave the following presentation on “Web Anywhere”:

Ewan MacLeod, editor of Mobile Industry Review, was next up and always makes things interesting. This time round he spoke about what frustrates him about mobile and how operators and hand set manufactures should be help fix the problems of connecting services. We’re aware that we operators haven’t got a good track record of working with developers (watch Ewan’s  interview with BlueVia’s Jose Valles for more on this), but he did mention that BlueVia is the start of operators doing things right and mentioned the user context API as an example of this.

BlueVia then took to the stage for our 5 minutes of fame, talking about BlueVia and getting people ready for the developer connect sessions later in the day. There were lots of positive vibes about BlueVia on the day, so if you want to follow up and find out more, take a look at BlueVia.com or get in touch with Elayne Checketts at elayne@bluevia.com

Our very own Paul Golding (@pgolding) gave the closing keynote on “Future Mobile Innovations”:

The event continues today, so make sure you keep updated by following the hashtag on Twitter #bigmconf or follow @bigmconf