I have attended the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco in Oct. 15. It was great to see so many people from the mobile space in one place. In fact, the event was like a Mobile Monday gathering on steroids...The conference started with a great keynote by Tomi Ahonen, author of several books in the area and also a fellow blogger. One of the main points Tomi made was that mobile is as different from the Internet as TV is different from the radio - so solution providers shouldn't just copy apps from the Internet and "squeeze" them (couldn't agree more..)
Another issue in Tomi's keynote that relates to my previous post on Virtual Worlds, was the rise of these worlds. One world he mentioned in particular was Cyworld, the Korean virtual world. 43% of the Internet users in South Korea have an account there (!). This compares to 21% of the USA Internet users on MySpace and 17% of the UK Internet users. Cyworld also features 30,000 business that opened a virtual presence, as well as over 500,000 branded items. And as for mobile it already has a mobile service in Korea, and soon will have that in the US as well (Ahead of most of the virtual worlds).
The keynote was followed by some very interesting panels (great panelists). I won't go to details about each and everyone, but here are a few observations about things I saw and heard across the panels, and in the networking breaks:
Mobile social networking / content sharing is big. Nearly everyone I spoke with is doing something in that space. It's not very surprising due to the success of that segment on the web, but it seems that adapting that to mobile is not so easy, and the barriers are not just the form factor and all the usual technical issues, but also the high data rates which came up several times. When these are made more reasonable we should see the market evolving much more rapidly.
In any case, I guess Google's acquisition of Jaiku, a mobile twitter, will just make this space more crowded, so for those of you who want to be there - hop along now before it's too late...
Another hot area is mobile advertising, companies such as Smaato, Amobee, Greystripe and others are trying to start a revolution we are all waiting for... Advertising as a business model is probably a good fit for the mobile world. The prices for content are way too high, and the players in the mobile content field are struggling on a daily basis, since the download rates of content are flatlining in recent years.
Other issues that keep coming up are the keypad as a barrier, and what is its future - whether a touch screen like the iPhone, voice activation solutions (For example one such solution was integrated in tellme which was acquired by Microsoft recently) or other creative solutions.
Also, not surprisingly, the handset fragmentation issue came up... Devices are still very different from each other making life difficult for application developers, but at least one of the positive changes is that device information which was once difficult to obtain is available through multiple suppliers, some are even open sources (My favorites are WURFL and TastePhone, which is Java specific, but based on real values sent from phones).
The need for open standards also came up and is definitely another key driver to the industry, panelists kept reminding us that in fact we are in the early days of the industry, and despite all problems, we're advancing pretty well compared to what happened back in the days of the internet, PC and so on... So once standards kick in, we'll have much more viable and effective opportunities in our (currently) humble mobile space...
On the traditional launchpad several start-ups presented their "goods". Among those were Heysan (free mobile IM), Taptu (mobile search engine), Mippin (content optimization), Kyle.tv (video blogging) and more.
All in all, it was a great event with a great turnout, so thanks to the guys from Mobile Monday and the Open Group for making it happen. See you there next year...
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