Tomorrow's Bar Camp in Graz, Styria, features an Open Data Hackathon. Everyone is invited to work on new uses for data of the recently introduced Austrian federal Open Data portal. Part of the bar camp is also the icamp, dealing with mobile development from Android to Windows Phone.

In case you have a business idea you want to turn into a business: The Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and StartEurope will hold a "Startup Live" event in Hagenberg this May. Registration is still possible.

Open Data initiatives are a growing trend and a chance for app developers. Presented properly, e.g. in a well-researched news article or a well-done app, these data can be of great use to people. However, data are often scattered all over the place. Austria has now taken a step to bring together Open Government Data at one place.

The Austrian state of Tyrol launched its Open Government Data portal. The trial program offers 12 sets of data in the area of environment and water policy, as well as detailed information about 570 mountain bike routes with a total length of 6,572 km. Open Data is becoming increasingly interesting for app developers - more and more data is published and can be used to build innovative mobile services. Tirol is following similar initiatives in Vienna and Linz.

Apps can serve a multitude of purposes and they can also be a means to produce art. Students from the Austrian FH St. Pölten have created an HTML5 web app, which allows users to collaboratively (re-)create a piece of art. If you'd like to try "Shared Painting" yourself, you can do so for example tomorrow and Saturday at the Open House of their university.

In a recent interview with a national newspaper, Martin Wallner, Director Telecom at Samsung Austria, commented on the situation of the leading smart phone producer in the country, also looking across the borders and at the patent war with Apple.

Africa has moved up to take over as runner-up in terms of mobile connections. 620 million connections are expected for 2011, growing to 910 million by 2015. Mobile broadband is still low, but growing mentionable.

As we put the recent Tibo 2011 conference in Minsk behind us, let's take a look at the app market in Belarus and the situation of app developers.

Поскольку недавняя конференция Tibo 2011 в Минске осталась позади, давайте посмотрим, что происходит на рынке мобильных приложений в Беларуси и каково положение поставщиков данного рынка.