Mobile 2.0

The second annual Mobile 2.0 just wrapped up.  The key takeaways are:

• Mobile Web (iPhone Safari Webkit sets the standard)
• Mobile Advertising (4 out of 10 Japanese click on mobile ads)
• SMS (Dominant and growing messaging technology but still underutilized by mobile apps)
• iPhone (Shape of things to come and raises the bar for all other handsets)
• Mobile Social Networks (Perfect for personal nature of phones)
• U.S. is out of touch on mobile data due to cheap flat rate pricing
• Speech/Audio (unexploited technology)
• Flat data roaming prices needed

The words "Microsoft" and "Windows Mobile" were never uttered at this conference which I find strange based on the tens of millions of devices we have in the marketplace. If I based my view of the mobile landscape on this conference, I would believe that people only carried iPhones and Nokia Nseries devices. One of the speaker panels pushed the notion that truly rich and innovative apps can't be acheived until mobile Linux with open APIs takes hold of the mobile OS marketplace (I guess the Yahoo! guy on the panel hasn't seen his own company's Yahoo! Go application for Windows Mobile yet). While we wait for that to happen, speakers at the conference conveyed that the primary form of mobile app development was web-based (I guess the offline strategy was just a fad).  Questions about mobility in the enterprise went largely unanswered.  For the most part, the only kind of mobile apps people talked about were for social networking. I wonder how many social networking apps we need?

I often felt like I was in an alternate mobile universe. I came down to San Francisco to avail myself of differing mobile viewpoints than I might have by working for the Windows Mobile product group. I've learned a few things and plan to reach out to this mobile community to better educate them about what Windows Mobile brings to the table.

Rob.