Sao Paulo, January 2011.

After an intense week, the attendees of Campus Party Brazil, otherwise known as “Campuseiros”, started to head home after a truly memorable event. Hours of conference sessions, workshops, hack sessions and dev contests were packed into the week-long event, with many Campuseiros already anticipating the next event in 2012. Until  then there are lots of ideas, initiatives and contacts to get going on during 2011, with several of the BlueVia team joining in all the Campus Party fun.

The fourth Campus Party  Brazil started with a special event. On Monday night, the “Something Better” initiative was launched by Jose Maria Alvarez Pallete, president of Telefonica LATAM,  along with Paco Ragageles, one of the founders of Campus Party. Something Better aims to foster tech fans to contribute to projects that carry a social benefit. While in areas like health or ecology there have been organisations such as Doctors Without Borders or Greenpeace working for years, this isn’t as common theme with tech companies. Something Better aims to be the platform where technology changes our lives for the better. The presentation demonsteated the commitment of Campus Party and Telefonica to the project, but we’ll have more news on the initiative in the future. In the meantime, you can take a look at the Something Better presentation at Campus Party TV.

On Wednesday, Alexandre Fernandez of ViVo and BlueVia’s very own James Parton presented the keynote on the ViVo Developer Platform (VDP) and how it will be evolving into BlueVia. The VDP project, launched in 2010, achieved impressive results: 900 developers in the community and an app store with more than one million downloads per month. To celebrate, ViVo announced a developer contest, inviting them to develop mobile apps through VDP. In addition to cash prizes, the grand prize is a trip to the forthcoming Campus Party USA, which will be held in July in San Francisco. So if you are a Brazilian developer, don’t miss this amazing opportunity and head to the ViVo Developer Platform to find out more.

James Parton also presented BlueVia, the new global developer platform from Telefonica. The Brazilian audience were told about the SMS, advertising and user context APIs, BlueVia’s business models and groundbreaking revenue share opportunities that BlueVia brings. The developers were excited about BlueVia and during the Q&A section there were lots of questions when BlueVia is going to be available in Brazil. As you know, we are working to role BlueVia out across Telefonica’s global footprint, with more updates soon.

In the final three days, ViVo presented three workshops showing different aspects of the app development process in VDP: business models, marketing of apps and programming. Jose Lecy, head of VDP at ViVo, was in charge of the workshop on  business models, showing how VDP’s business models can lead to recurrent revenues for developers. This approach helps to make app development sustainable and reduces entry barriers to the mobile app economy. Lecy also  offered insights about the Brazilian mobile market, where because of the fragmentation of devices, the feature phone still represents a huge proportion of the market – a massive opportunity for Java ME developers.

Marcelo Castelo and Chester, both bloggers and app developers, were in charge of the workshop on marketing apps. In addition to a funny presentation (even for those who can’t understand Portuguese), they presented their experiences of app development and how developers can monetise apps through social media. Finally, David Ruiz from Telefonica R&D took charge of a live programming session, where attendees had the opportunity to develop a simple but effective application for Android using VDP.

All in all it was a fantastic event and we can’t wait to attend future Campus Parties!