Qt Developer events in Beijing and Tokyo, both draw record attendance

Qt Conference in Beijing

China is already one of the largest, if not the largest market, when it comes to Qt developers. The growth of Qt usage has been steady and rapid since 2008 across multiple industries. The set top box market in particular is growing very fast and it will be interesting to see how what appeared to be strong interest in the Nokia N9 – sold out in the stores - will result in new development efforts with regard to mobile apps.

In the keynote from Chinese micro-blogging specialist Sina, the new version of Sina’s Weibo application was presented (see video). This popular social network and media app (it’s a sort of Facebook-Twitter social network hybrid) has been designed for the Nokia N9 smartphone and built in Qt. When it came to the development, it took four developers about two months to create the N9 Qt app. Sina is now working on making the app available for Symbian devices.

In the keynotes we also received some extra focus on the Chinese Nokia opportunity and learned how the Nokia Store is the number one mobile app store and how N8 and other Symbian devices remain very popular and a good target for Qt developers

All sessions provided valuable insights on local Chinese success stories with Qt, and the feedback and interest around the product was a great chance to showcase Qt and increase knowledge about the use of Qt in the desktop space.

We know from our web metrics that Qt interest levels, traffic and downloads from China are growing with every passing day. It is my belief that there is still vast growth potential in China for Qt on desktop, mobile and embedded.

Qt conference in Tokyo: live streamed and also with record attendance.

Tokyo is not just capital of Japan, it is one of the globe’s capital cities of technology and consumer electronics. Having the Qt conference in Japan gave us a great opportunity to engage with the skilled Japanese Qt programmer community, and share knowledge with them over the course of the two day event. Japanese consumer electronics runs on a wide range of platforms, and the code and skills “reuse” nature of Qt combined with the higher performance at lower price points that Qt 5 promises to deliver appeals very much to Japanese developers.

With ISB Corporation as Platinum sponsor, SRA-Software Research Associates as Gold sponsor and Digia -- as well as Nomovok as Silver sponsors supported by TI and Freescale, our partners and sponsors made great contributions to make the two day event a great success.

The 15 exhibitors at the event shared the limelight with demos from community initiatives such as: Konoha Project at Yokohama National University, Kanto Qt Meet-up, Kansai Qt Meet-up, Nagoya Qt Meet-up as well as the KDE - Japan KDE Users Group

The fully booked tech track at our Japan event was designed to provide the latest and the deepest technical updates and the business track sought to provide better understanding of how Japanese companies can take advantage of Qt – and what “UI tools that are available” Qt, QML, Qt with HTML5…. An introduction to the next evolution of Qt Quick and "Live Demo Coding" also provided good examples of how easy and fast Qt Quick can take you from (literally) nothing to a good app.

The business track also had a very high attendance: Mr. Masaki Gondo explained how eSOL bundled Qt in its eT-Kernel SDK. T-Kernel is the most popular embedded RTOS in Japan, and the use of Qt enables device manufacturers using eT-Kernel to not have to replace what is a proven platform to achieve improved performance and differentiation of their products

SRA’s Mr. Ryosuke Yamada held a session entitled "Qt Everywhere" about how the community expands support platforms to Android, iOS and other platforms taking advantage of Qt's openness. This discussion was received with great high interest before Mr. Kazuyoshi Takahashi from ISB introduced the use of Qt in health care products, a traditionally strong industry for Qt and for Japan. He also highlighted how they benefitted from the Qt partners’ ISB support services.

A device that got a lot of attention was Spider (or more specifically its UI did). Mr. Masaya Takahashi from PTP presented SPIDER, which at this point in time is available for commercial use. It is a media server that records all TV programs on eight channels for a full week. Through the use of Qt and Open GL it can be searched easily and provides a nice UX (UI overview of content incl. text input).

At the end of the day, we welcomed Mr. Teppei Asaba from Fujitsu Computer Technologies, who has developed a common Linux distribution used broadly in the Fujitsu group. He emphasized the importance of having a common foundation (back-end /business logic implementation) across various products to efficiently focus on differentiation of the UI rather than building up all products from scratch. He mentioned that the Qt Everywhere concept fully met their requirement.

At the last of six case studies, yes it was a long day, Mr. Kazumi Koganezawa introduced how SSIL adopted Qt as a framework for their product to analyze electromagnetic fields. For him it was easy to learn Qt, and an efficient way to achieve high performance graphics capability, essential for products like CAD.

The evening ended with a networking party before we had dinner with the members of the various community initiatives.

Daniel Kihlberg
Global Director Qt Ecosystem
Nokia, Qt Developer Relations Team