I must apologise for the delay with this post. I was on my way to the airport when I received the call from Vodafone to inform me that the Betavine Portal had just gone live.

If you’re not familiar with the Portal then check out my original post to learn more.

I had a chat with Stephen Wolak, Web Technologies Manager at Vodafone Group. Stephen gave me his thoughts about the Portal – here’s what he had to say.

We hope that Vodafone Betavine will become a hub for developers using all types of technologies to try out their ideas and get feedback on their applications from their peers. We aim to bring together the developer community with the early adopters to their mutual benefit.

The Portal is technology agnostic, our resources section will grow over time to include links to all relevant technology resources that developers may need to create applications in the mobile and internet communications space.

We are planning a set of student competitions in order to engage academia in the creation of new mobile and internet communications concepts and applications.

We will update the Portal with an open source site to encourage the development of open source software in this space.

We are also working on an API section that will allow developers to test new concepts in web services and mashups, the APIs we hope to offer include text messaging and picture messaging.

From working with these guys on the project, I do get a sense of honesty, openness and a willingness to engage with even the small guy working from a bedroom. In my opinion these are some of the ingredients required to run such a site.

I particularly like the engagement with students to help them better understand what the industry needs coming into the workforce. It also helps those of us who are already in the industry, to encourage more students to move into mobile. I just hope some of them can bring some User Interface (UI) design skills to the table, as it’s a void that needs to be plugged badly!

There are now 7 applications ready to download from the Portal. I’ve included a link to each of them below.

MediaToob
Great podcasts to the mobile, in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian

Bluescanner
Scan and log nearby Bluetooth devices
8 downloads

GameOfRealLife
The game of life using Bluetooth scanning
5 downloads

SocialPlayer2
Social Player by MyStrands, version 2.0
0 downloads

SunsetGPSLogger
Automates the creation of GPS trail data..
11 downloads

Semantic Firefox Extension
Semantic browser that enables trust
10 downloads

SocialPlayer
Social Player by MyStrands, version 1.0
0 downloads

By the way, I forgot to mention in my original post that Daniel Appelquist, a technologist at Vodafone group and Margaret Gold were heavily involved in the project.

If our readers find it worthwhile, we might provide ongoing updates about the Portal and evaluations on applications as they’re uploaded. We’d obviously continue to contribute to the Portal itself.