Monday 24 November 2008

Future of Mobile 08: Summing Up

So here's my summary of the Future of Mobile 2008, before I start putting up my notes from the Android and Yahoo Blueprint workshops on the following day...

Emerging markets in developing countries will most likely have a lot of capable phones

  • Simon Rockman (Head of Requirements, Sony Ericsson) disagrees -- there are still loads of "just voice call" phones being sold at very low prices
  • Doug Richard at Trutap is aiming his app at emerging middle class around the world -- this includes people living in a wooden shack in Mumbai :-)
  • Rich Miner of Google Android sees Android moving towards lower range handsets than G1 -- "it's capable of running on 200MHz chips"

Marketing, especially on mobile, needs to involve people, not spam them

  • Gapingvoid cartoon used at least three times:
    "If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they'd punch you in the face"

The conference felt like a poor relation compared to Future of Web Apps

  • There was no free wifi -- this should be an assumption nowadays
  • Without wifi you lose out on the back channel from twitter etc, which is vital to keep the audience involved. The people that were online were either using their iPhones or had 3G dongles. I ended up paying £10 a day...
  • There were no lunch facilities at all. Last year there was at least a café on the premises to keep people together.
  • Again, this means the conference misses out on enabling a lot of networking
  • FOWA had videos of presentations going up within the hour -- FOM still hasn't had anything put up by Carsonified. What's going on?

Apple continually ignore such conferences -- and get away with it for the moment...


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