The first preview of the +U mobile application was revealed at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin last Friday. It was a busy first few days at the show, especially on the weekend when many families made a fun day out of visiting the world’s biggest electronics show. It was great to see the first reactions of people when they had a look at our Story of +U video (as shared last week) and then got to test the preview application on one of our 4 Sony Ericsson Android phones in the Sustainability area.

Most of the +U development team as well as Paul Frigout, creator of +U, also joined me at IFA in exploring the feedback from the general public. The public was quite surprised to see a development like this and mentioned they had not seen anything like this before. Overall the feedback was very positive and everyone was quite excited about using the application themselves when it comes out next year. We had some interest from some German bloggers so Paul had his share of interviews again so he’s becoming quite a star!

The weather was also lovely so we managed to enjoy sunshine in the “Summer-garden” in the IFA grounds during our lunch breaks. We’ll be sharing another video later this week with some IFA highlights so keep an eye out for this!

The next steps in the development include reviewing the user experience journey as well as exploring the gaming angle further. Currently we are looking at badges and a potential points/highscore system or a “karma bar” as discussed in Development Day earlier this year but these are all going to be explored further in the upcoming month. In late November we will be running a closed beta with real volunteers to test the whole user journey so this is something exciting for us to look forward to. Following the beta test we’ll be making some final adjustments before a real pilot in February with Youthnet and releasing the application in the UK as well as the open source coding globally in March 2012.