Cutline Speaks

GigaOM’s Mobilize: The Future of Mobile and New Opportunities for Users

posted by Meghan on September 11, 2009

Today, GigaOM held its annual Mobilize Conference in San Francisco. Companies and entrepreneurs from all over the world came to town to demo new projects, discuss new opportunities in the space and delve into the challenges facing developers in this ever-changing mobile landscape. As mobile is a continuously, fast-growing industry with around 280 million wireless subscribers in just the U.S. alone (source: CTIA), the sessions and break-out discussions were nothing short of empowering and inspiring. Considering the amount of content and topics to discuss, I'm glad that Om kept it simple and kicked off the conference with these two questions:

1) What happens when we turn up the speed of wireless broadband by an order of magnitude?
2) What opportunity does that create for you?

After attending a few sessions, the answers to these questions were clearly addressed and the possibilities seem endless. The session topics opened the audience's eyes to the opportunities that wireless broadband speed can bring to individuals, companies and countries when it's combined with the relative context, location and appropriate advertising. Yes, the benefits to consumers individually was discussed heavily, especially when Motorola's CEO, Sanjay Jha, announced the new MotoBlur and MotoCliq with T-Mobile, but I found the true benefits are to the massive communities not yet connected to the mobile space. As the sessions progressed, Om's second question regarding what opportunities a high-speed wireless connection could bring to an individual began to expand to cover what opportunities mobile device improvement and network reach could bring to massive amounts of people in developing countries.

Here are some of the points speakers made throughout the day:

• Context is key for any mobile product 
• Location will increasingly become part of your phone within the next year
• Netbooks are outgrowing PC's by a ratio of 2:1
• By 2013 the Web will be used as a platform, according to Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google
• The debate between push or pull mobile advertising continues
• The number of US mobile users accessing internet daily via phone doubled from 10.8M to 22M devices between 2008 and 2009
• Social networks lead mobile adoption with 180 M people accessing these sites from their smartphones every day

For more about Mobilize and panel discussions on video check out - http://gigaom.com/

I learned a lot from the event and realized how much I want a netbook! Looking forward to seeing what comes next in the mobile space.

 

Motorola's First Google Android Phone, the Cliq

Tags for this post: gadgets