Future of Mobile, London IMAX Cinema, 14th November 2007

The fact that I didn’t have a laptop with me is partly why this post is a bit late, the other is how long it’s taken me to sort out my longhand scribbled notes. So the fact that I didn’t blog from my phone on the train on the way home may indicate the Future of Mobile is ‘not yet’

Hats off to Ryan and all at Carsonified for another excellent conference - I feel privileged to be able to attend these things in my home country rather than having to read about happenings in the States. It was a thought provoking and informative, if long day.

So what did I ‘take home’?

One Web - the future of te Internet is mobile. Adapt the experience to exploit device capabilities maintaining thematic consistency across all the various ’screens’ (PC / mobile / TV etc.)

Standards are crucial - but some people are stubbornly doing their own thing.

iPhone will revolutionise the market - not just because of the UI / design, but because it’s setting new consumer expectations of mobile devices as more than a phone, and challenging the established mobile business model (carriers / operators control)

Convergence is an assumption - actual usage is multiple specific devices for specific tasks (e.g. phone, Blackberry, satnav each with a SIM) and different people want different things maintaining fragmentation.

Platforms are maturing - including the upcoming Open Handset Alliance. Diverse but maturing.

Exploit device potential - rich user experience not lowest common denominator - media query / WURFL / W3C core vocabulary. Mobile web experience is still poor ‘like kissing a girl who’s leaning away from you’ (Tony Fish)

Content may be King but context rules - location based services still unjustified hype, mobile search results are poor, massive security / privacy concerns.

But overriding all of that - due to the sheer scale of the market (more than the whole population of China) the potential for a successful application is massive.

As John Connor said: ‘I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set.‘

It’s all to play for!