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Mobile Developers Get Their Very Own Professional Association

Mobile application developers unite! That is the theme for a new professional association that will launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. that intends to bring organizational support to mobile developers.

According to InfoWorld, the association is to be led by Jon Potter, the former executive director of the Digital Media Association. It is intended to promote mobile developer interests, collaboration, education, cloud hosting and governmental lobbying. Do mobile developers need their own guild?

The specific duties of the of the new industry association will be to offer a collaborative network based on an online database, offer product testing facilities with multiple platforms supported, offer discounted and free tutorials and certification programs as well as discounted cloud services through Rackspace.

The Rackspace collaboration is the interesting part of the proposed association. The company is heavy into entrepreneurial evangelism (see: Robert Scoble) for all things innovation because the cloud provider believes that the more startups, app developers and entrepreneurs out there that are successful, the more of a chance they will end up using Rackspace for cloud hosting.

We got in contact with Scoble and this was his reasoning for supporting startups:

“Usually we support startups wherever they are. We do that for several reasons: 1. Hosting decisions are usually made early on in a company’s life and it’s hard to change those decisions once they are done. 2. Startups influence hosting decisions by other, more traditional, companies. Sort of like how Canon supports professional photographers so that the masses will buy Canons to be “like the pros,” Scoble said.

“The growth in startups will come on mobile. That’s where more people will be, and more of those users will be looking for new applications and solutions. We’re investing in groups that help mobile startups so that we can be involved in the biggest growth area of startups.”

It will be interesting to see how this mobile developer association differs from the services offered by CTIA – The Wireless Association. CTIA is the largest mobile industry group in the United States and has historically been focused on equipment manufacturers, broadband and spectrum issues, security, enterprises and development. CTIA has branched into more developer-related issues in the last several years, recognizing the rise of the application ecosystem by starting a second large conference apart from its main event in the spring. This last year it was CTIA Enterprise and Apps hosted in San Diego.

According to InfoWorld, the association will generate revenue through sponsorships and membership fees.

There are a variety of candidates that would be ripe for joining such an association. All the various gaming studious such as Glu, XMG and even Zynga would be ideal. The integrated development environment (IDE) providers along with framework creators like appMobi, Sencha, Appcelerator and others would be a great fit. Larger organizations, such as the aforementioned Rackspace, or a couple of the big tech companies like Apple, Google or Mozilla could be ripe for sponsorship opportunities.

Developers: Are you likely to join this new association? What benefits can you see it bringing to your endeavors? Let us know in the comments.

Top image: Jon Potter

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