It's always a pleasure to mix-up with different folk from the mobile crowd, especially from such a diverse set of backgrounds across the value chain. I think that the Mobile 2.0 formula for this works well - diverse set of people, community participation, lots of panel sessions.
I'd prefer to see some unconference stuff included, perhaps a quarter-day slot, just to allow the crowd to drive the whole event for a while and get their issues on the table(s).
If you want to see what I said throughout the two days, you can ping Twitter for a search "
pgolding mobile20" and "
pgolding mobile2" (as the hash tag seemed to changed halfway through day one.
During the developer day (day 2) and wearing my O2 Litmus hat, I ended up taking James P's slot for the "Evolution of the Mobile Web Browser" session, much to James' delight (he's not technical :)
The session was chaired by Raj "Mr Browser" Singh, that dude from Skyfire -- a slightly cool browser ;-)
For me, the most interesting thing happening in the browser space is obviously HTML5, so glad that we had a chance to discuss this and clarify a few of the features and their significance for mobile. Indeed, we agreed that mobile is what is driving HTML5 in some areas. I intend to post some updates here about HTML 5, summarizing its features and significance for mobile. I'll do that by posting an update to my deck that describes the evolution of the mobile web towards the "
real-time always-on web."
No need to write a long-winded post about the conference. I will probably post up a few slides to summarize. Meanwhile, a couple of key insights for me came from the VC session. I'd love to pass these along to my fellow mobilist readers - I also plan to update the deck "
The Mobile Developer's Dilemma," to produce a more robust document.
Tim Chang (Norwest Venture Partners) suggested that the one area that gets his attention generally, and this applies to mobile, is where an innovator manages to include gaming mechanics into another area, such as gaming with healthcare, gaming with LBS, gaming with music (e.g. Guitar Hero) and so on. We saw a great example of this in the
Waze app, which won the Smaato prize.
Greg Franklin (Intellect Partners) also said that any service/app that can lower the cost of healthcare whilst improving it would get VC attention. Greg's an interesting guy because of his long association with operators and trying to help them with innovation via partnerships and innovation programs etc. His word of advice to me was that innovation initiatives inside of an operator have not worked anywhere that he knows of - and can't work! We're kinda getting that, which is why O2 Litmus and other programs (to be announced) lean more heavily in the direction of open innovation. It's still early days though.
With those couple of nuggets, I'll let you ponder on your next healthcare and/or gaming-inspired innovation! Good luck.
Comments
Where is this unconference ?