Mobile Internet World - Day 1 - Afternoon

The afternoon at the Mobile Internet World was okay, not great. First I attended a panel discussion on the evolution of mobile devices. There were three panelists, an IBM employee, a Nuance employee, and a Qualcom employee, all of whom were very smart and well spoken. There were three insightful ideas mentioned in this presentation.

First, the idea that people want mobility in all devices, but don't really care about the underlying operators or networks. The simply want to be able to get pictures from their camera to their Facebook page, or get their most recently purchased book from Amazon onto their Kindle, or their most recently purchased iTunes song onto their iPhone. It seems that some devices do this better than others. The popularity of the devices that do it well should help competitors adopt the innovation.

Second, the advent of 4G networks will really push the idea of delivering services to users, independent of the device. Enterprises will cease to standardize certain desktop computers. Instead, it will entirely be up to the employees. Developers will get whatever high powered machine they want, and executives will get a highly mobile laptop. Regardless of the device, the same services will be delivered to each.

Finally, with regard to open versus closed mobile platforms, people (and open source software advocates) can argue all they want about how good open platforms are (such as Android or Symbian), but the fact is, the two most successful mobile platforms are produced by RIM and Apple, and subseqently the most closed and most expensive systems. Even though they are closed and costly, the users' love for these devices is still immensely high. (heck, I just switched off Verizon merely so I could own an iPhone :)

Next session was another panel entitled, "Device and Operating System Wars." On the panel was an employee of Limo, the Linux mobile foundation, and the director of marketing for deviceanywhere, a service that helps you test your mobile apps on many devices (more on this later). Probably the single biggest theme out of this discussion, was that operators (like TMobile and Verizon) are very hesitant to provide a device based on an open platform merely for fear that the user's experience will be negatively impacted. In my opinion, this is a very real fear. I think Android's success will help strengthen, or weaken, the fears of the operators.

In the last session of the day, I heard from Kate Walsh, an employee at the Yankee Group in charge of advertising for the Mobile Internet World conference. She described how the Yankee group leveraged an improved mobile website, as well as social networking platforms, to significantly increase the number of conference attendees from 2007 to 2008. Personally, I joined the Facebook group for the conference about a month ago. It was cool to see the other people going, but beyond that, I didn't really take advantage of it. She also placed presences on LinkedIn, Twitter, RSS enabled the website, and provided registration discounts to people who registered on the mobile version of the conference's website (darn, if I only knew). To me, these are obvious ways for cheap publicity, and nothing revolutionary. I'm glad the Yankee Group is eating their own dog food. It's no secret that these platforms are heavily used. Maybe it's just that enterprises are starting to understand that (and use them).

More to come tomorrow...