Photo Drew Benvie
Today was the 3rd annual Mobile2.0 Event in San Francisco. This is my favorite mobile conference, fast paced, intimate and with a no PowerPoint rule!
Mobile 2.0 always seems to draw the best presenters and the attendees are a nice balance of developers
and entrepreneurs from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This year's event was no exception. Kudos to the organizers: Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone; Gregory Gorman, Tertius; Mike Rowehl, Skyfire, Peter Vesterbacka, Some Bazaar and Mobile Monday and Rudy De Waele, dotopen / mTrends for pulling together so many great speakers and panelists, keeping a grueling schedule on time and generally making Mobile2.0 a fun and rewarding experience.
This year's event used a new format with an all day Business Track and a separate afternoon only development oriented Builder Track. I attended the morning half of the Business Track and the Development Track in the afternoon. There was just too much to cover in one post so I'm splitting my Mobile2.0 report into two parts. This post covers the morning session. Part 2 covers the Builder Track.
The Day started with an brief introduction from Gregory who said he hoped Mobile2.0 would help the attendees to learn how to continue to innovate in the face of a global recession.
David Wood from Symbian gave the keynote on why Symbian was going Open Source. David started by channeling Steve Balmer, saying it was about "Developers, Developers, Developers". To solve hard problems mobile needs to engage developers and the open source world has a huge pool of productive and engaged developers.
According to David, Symbian is on target for an initial release of substantial parts of the code under an Eclipse Public License in the first half of 2009, with full code release by June 2010. Some of the code will be under be under a Symbian Foundation License and will only be available to Symbian Foundation members but the cost of membership will be nominal; on the order of a few hundred of dollars per year. David announced that the annual Symbian Partner Event, which will held in San Francisco on Dec 4, 2009, will be open to non-members for the first time. Details at SymbianPartnerEvent.com.
The panel on Mobile Browsers; "How Is Web Different On Mobile Devices?" was my favorite of the morning session. It featured representatives from four major browser vendors; Opera, Access Netfront, Skyfire and Mozilla. The moderator was Vodafone's Dan Appelquist who lost his voice midway through the panel but soldiered on croaking his topics and questions in what sounded like considerable pain.
The panel started by tackling the always contentious Full Web vs. Mobile Web question. The consensus seemed to be that a mobile optimized experience is better, but browsers need to be able to handle any site. Many of the creators of the long tail of web content don't have resources to develop mobile optimized versions. Users need to be able to access both full web sites and mobile optimized ones.
Opera's Taksuki Tomita went further saying that in his experience many users prefer using full desktop web sites on their phones and get quite angry when sites force them to use mobile version. The panel agreed that if a content provider offers a mobile optimized experience they also need allow mobile users the choice of
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 4, 2008 @ 1:20 am
7 View Comments
