The Tizen Developer Conference, an annual event focused exclusively on the growing developer ecosystem around the Tizen open source operating system for converged devices, has unveiled announced the highlights and themes for this year’s conference taking place from June 2-4 at the Hilton San Francisco.
More than 1,000 developers and Tizen contributors are expected to meet in San Francisco for the 3-day conference. “Whether you are a platform developer wanting to use Tizen or an app developer who wants to build apps for deployment on Tizen, this is the only place you want to go. The whole point of the Tizen Developer Conference is knowledge transfer,” said Brian Warner, manager of the Tizen Project, a collaborative project managed by the Linux Foundation.
The goal of the Tizen Project is to build and support a cross-architecture, open source software platform that spans across multiple mobile and “Internet of Things” device segments, including smartphone, tablet, Smart TV, wearables, appliances, netbook and in-vehicle infotainment systems. “Basically, anything that has a screen or takes any meaningful user input requires an operating system,” said Warner.
TDC 2014 is being hosted and produced by the Tizen Technical Steering Group with the support of ecosystem partners. Key contributors to the project are Samsung and Intel. The Tizen Association also recently announced 37 new partners. Since its launch in November 2013, the Tizen Partner Program, now with 88 partners, has more than doubled in size.
One of the things that sets the Tizen mobile operating system apart and is fairly unique in the market is that Tizen was designed from the ground up to run on multiple types of devices, unlike other operating systems that are in the market, such as iOS, which was designed specifically for iPhones and was adapted for iPads, and Android, which was designed for phones because tablets were not even a device category when it first came out, Warner said. However, when it really comes down to it, Tizen is about far more than mobile phones, he noted. There are Tizen products on the market now but none are phones - such as the Samsung Gear 2 smart watches and the NX300M cameras.
Highlights of this year’s conference taking place from June 2-4 at the Hilton San Francisco include:
- New Product Profiles and Platform Milestones—Developers attending this year’s event will see product demonstrations and presentations on emerging and established product profiles including a new Tizen SDK release for wearables, Tizen for Smart Televisions, and the new Tizen IVI 3.0.
- The TDC 2014 “Tech Showcase”—A demonstration showcase featuring the latest in commercial Tizen devices, prototypes, reference devices and software demos related to automotive, consumer electronics, wearables, mobile and other “Internet-of-Things” (IoT) related devices.
- Samsung Gear 2 smart watch and Intel NUC ultra-compact PC giveaways—Every registered attendee that comes to TDC will receive a free Samsung Gear 2 and an Intel NUC ultra-compact PC to celebrate the growth of the Tizen developer and partner ecosystem, and the free and open nature of Tizen.
- Presentations by Mobile and IoT Thought Leaders—This year’s speakers include executives, technology evangelists and experts from Appbackr, Expedia, iControl, Intel, The Linux Foundation, Marmalade, OpenMobile, Samsung and Stanford University discussing application development and technology trends related to automotive, IoT, mobile, wearables and a number of other fast-growing market opportunities.
Application developers, members of the media and analyst community, and other connected device ecosystem stakeholders can register for TDC 2014 here.