By Daniel Appelquist (@torgo), Open Web Advocate at Telefónica Digital. Dan is a web and mobile industry veteran, an active member in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and founded the Mobile Monday London, Over the Air and the Mobile 2.0 conference series.

Last month, I helped to put on an event called Over the Air (overtheair.org). It’s an event I helped to create, and it aims to be unique in the technology events landscape. It’s a combination of an overnight hackathon and a more traditional developer conference, the result feeling more like a festival than a tech event! We’re pleased that it’s been pegged by folks as the “mini SXSW of Europe” and compared to Maker Faire because of the roster of speakers and topics we cover. Have a first-hand watch of the talks…

There is a focus on mobile platforms, but in the years since our first event in 2008 the definition of “mobile” has been expanding, so now the event covers such topics as Internet and Web, apps, gadgets, internet-of-things (IOT), radio technologies, robotics, social and commercial implications of technology, user experience and even art and design.

For the last three years we’ve been privileged to be able to host this event at Bletchley Park, the facility famous for code-cracking during World War II and also as the birthplace of the modern programmable computer.

We have also partnered with the National Museum of Computing (also located at Bletchley), this year raising over £6,000 for the museum through attendee donations. Notable speakers at this year’s event included David Cuartielles, co-founder of Arduino; Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, founder of the IoT company Goodnight Lamp and co-organizers of the London IoT meetup and Linda Sandvik, co-founder of Code Club (one of the most prominent initiatives aimed at teaching UK primary-school-age kids to code).

We also ran a special Code Club session for kids, some of whom presented what they built on stage at the end of the event. We also hosted Song Zheng from TokBox to talk about what’s going on with OpenTok APIs, Francisco Jordano from Telefonica’s Open Web Device team to talk about Firefox OS and we also sponsored the Ignite Bletchley Park talks – evening lightning talks run in the Ignite format on the first day.

But Over the Air is not a Telefónica event – it’s an open event, and we had attendees and sponsors from companies and organizations up and down the spectrum as well as individuals.

Some of the presentations were videoed and for many others slidedecks are available – see a few below – all linked from the Lanyrd page created for the event. You can also see all the Ignite talks (which covered topics as diverse as IMAX cinema to Disney World to obscure programming languages) on YouTube (please note: some strong language in one of these presentations may not be suitable for young viewers). 

If you want to get involved, drop me a line at dan.appelquist@telefonica.com or start a dialogue on Twitter (I’m @torgo). Here are some helpful links…

• Over the Air 2013 Coverage on Lanyrd
• Presentations tagged ‘ota13′ on Slideshare
• Filmed presentations on the Over the Air YouTube channel
• Stephanie Rieger, Designing for Diversity
• Francisco Jordano, Firefox OS – Beyond Webapps
• Patrick Hamann, CSS and the Critical Path
• Lyza Danger, Do as little as possible
• Natasha Rooney, Updates on Offline
• Soledad Penades, Building web apps, one Brick at a time
• Chris Sinjakli, How our mother tongue changes our code