Future of Mobile 2008 - London - Conference day

Posted on | November 19, 2008

Warning: This post includes a rant! Please do not read it if you are easily offended.

I attended the Future of Mobile conference in London organized by Carsonified. I must say I was very disappointed because of some organizational fails. I was expecting much more from such a team as the Carsonified team. Their conferences were synonyms of greatly organized conferences, nice venues and friendly stuff.

At FOM I’ve been sadly disappointed many times. Here is why:

• No free Wi-fi. The friendly lady at the registration desk suggested to pay for a BT Wi-fi connection. The problem is that Wi-fi was clearly promised on the conference website. Call me picky if you want but If something is promised I expect it to be delivered (since we’ve paid more than 600€ to attend the conference and workshops). I guess most of those who attended need an internet connection to work even when they are at a conference.

• No goodie bags. Where were the beautiful Carsonified Journals or FOM T-shirts? I haven’t seen them, so even if I wanted to buy some for the team back home I just could not. Is the crowd of FOM inferior to the one at FOWA?

• No lunch. I can live with this one, but still 600+€ and no lousy lunch? At least we had lunch on workshop day.

Come on, we’ve paid a lot to attend this conference and most of the speakers were just promoting their own stuff, so I guess they came here for free or even paid to be on the lineup.I understand that Carsonified has to pay for the venue and I know we are in a huge global financial crisis (sarcasm on) but still… I am very disappointed. Rant over, now on the good points.

On the other side the talks were good, some of them exceptional. I will write an in-depth overview of the talks as soon as I manage to collect all the slide sets.

Here is the lineup and my rating of the talks:

• Rudy de Waele (mTrends) - 4/5 - overview of trends in mobile, nice presentation and a good start.

• Simon Rockman with Rich Miner (Google), James McCarthy (Microsoft), David Wood (Symbian), Andy Bush (Li Mo Foundation), Olivier Bartholot (Purple Labs) - 1/5 - a bunch of mobile OS guys, talking about the wrong problems. Where are cross platform standards?!?

• Dough Richard (Trutap) - 4/5 - some promotion for Trutap and an interesting view on the mobile market. There is huge potential in emerging markets.

• Mathew Millar (Adobe) - 3/5 - open screen. Flash is installed on 1 billion devices. Can we get a cross platform API, so we can port the stuff from desktops to mobiles? Can we get access to the camera and microphone via Flash?

• Tom Hume (Future Platforms) - 5/5 - a really great overview of the pain points one will encounter while trying to create a mobile app. Realy nice slide set.

• 6×6 UK bloggers:
• Andrew Grill (london-calling.org.uk) - 4/5 - nice explanation of mobile marketing
• Vero Pepperrell (Pepsmedia) - 4/5 - social media all over the place
• Helen Keegan (Beep Marketing) - 5/5 - great talk by focusing on people instead of technology. I completely agree! Good job Helen ;)
• James Whatley (Whatleydude + Spinvox) - 4/5
• Jemima Kiss (The Guardian) - 4/5 - good use of the words “shit” and “fucking” :)
• Ewen MacLeod (Mobile Industry Review) - 4/5 - again nice usage of “piece of shit”

• Rich Miner (Google Android) - 4/5 - interesting presentation about the path to Android and reasoning behind it; Google claims it does not control Android app development. Come on, who are they kidding :)

• Andrew J Scott (Rummble) - 4/5 - Location based services 101 + Rummble

• Tomi Ahonen - 4/5 - A looooonnnnnggggg, but good joke at the beginning. Mobile as the 7th Mass Media book promotion. Some data about mobile content business, good use cases.

• jMac (jonathanmacdonald.com) - 5/5 - great talk about marketing in the mobile world. Saw the “punch” cartoon for the third time that day. We have segments of one. Really loved this talk.

• Yahoo! Blueprint - not another mobile OS, not a platform for games, not proprietary, not limited to Yahoo! it is a sort of platform for cross device development (they say thousands of devices). Blueprint works as an app in Yahoo!Go or as a standalone app or as a mobile web app (more info).

• A great panel with guys from startups and operators. Moderated by Ewen MacLeod
• Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone)
• Mark Curtis (Flirtomatic)
• Alfie Dennen (Moblog)
• Justin Davies (BuddyPing / SkyHook) - thanks to James Whatley for helping me here.
• Carl Uminski (Trutap)
• James Body (Truphone)
• Sam Machin (I will pretend that I don’t know who Sam is working for)

Another great point was the great party in Archangel. A nice relaxed atmosphere with really interesting people. It is a shame I could not meet everybody but I liked the attitude of the speakers as they were all available for a quick chat or a long debate.

Footnote: The following image has been shown at least three times during the conference.

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