Open Mobile Platforms
This is Mike Rowehl, moderator of the Beyond Mobile 2.0 panel at >Play this year. I just finished up helping out to organize an event in San Francisco called Mobile 2.0 as well, what fantastic timing! One of the big themes from across the industry that came out at the event was that open platforms and public APIs are having the same kind of impact on mobile as they’ve had on the web. For some more details about the event, I have a post on my personal blog linking to Mobile 2.0 related stories.
One of the major areas that I would like to talk about is what’s missing currently for someone to be able to create that killer mobile app? Payment services were mentioned multiple times, personalization and preferences, authentication and identity. Context of the user was also mentioned a number of times, occasionally as location, but also as “what is the user’s state of mind” and what do they appear to be trying to do. What else do we need to build the next generation of services and what can we do to ensure that the environment evolves the way we need it to?
Having a Jaiku channel worked out really well for the Mobile 2.0 conference, so I setup a Jaiku channel for the >Play conference as well. It worked fantastic for backchannel chatter during the conference, being really easy to join and leave from a phone and IM and the web. I hear signup is closed down for a while as they integrate with Google, but I think if you’re invited you can join. I have 10 invites left it seems, so if you’re interested in signing up to try out Jaiku during the conf just email me – mike at admob dot com.
Mike,
Welcome, I hope to talk to you more during the conference.
I will ask the first set of questions, days before the conference:
Will I get to pay just once for TV service (for my home cable or Satellite) and will get t watch the programs time-shifted and place shifted from my mobile phone?
Will we always pay separately for the same media based on each device we use to consume it?
Hey Rags, I certainly hope so. If you use MythTV instead of an off-the-shelf DVR you can already transcode video to 3GP and stream it. The problem really tends to be on the media licensing side, and unrealistic expectations for mobile TV on the part of carriers and content providers. It might be a while before The Big Players come around on the issue though, so it’s probably going to be a while before your Comcast bundle includes the ability to stream whatever you have stored on your DVR through to your handset.
In the meantime look for folks like ShoZu and Kyte.tv and TinyTube.net to fill the gap in whatever way they can, normally with specialty content or user generated stuff. If you’re looking to time and place shift you might have to self service however.
Good question for the panel, thank you.