Rael Dornfest (who is always interesting to listen to) moderates a panel with Russell Beattie, Jory Bell, Juha
Christensen and Trip Hawkins about the state of the mobile web. Rael runs MobileWhack and never
runs out of cool mobility issues to discuss. The first thing he's talking about is how things work differently in
different parts of the world and why this group of people might have something interesting to say about it. Juha
doesn't think there's any kind of a killer app, while Russell says it's more of a collection of apps that becomes
killer. There's always a going to be two devices - Computers and Phones and it just depeneds on how much one acts like
the other. Phones aren't really being used for "browsing" as much as they are for "searching" and the closer to
browsing you get, the more computer like your device needs to be. One the fly searches however are great for phones
with those capabilities. Taking a little bit of the web with you so to speak. Trip says the mobile phone is turning
into a mobile social computer and while the carriers are focused on voice, they are like a gas station that is focusing
on selling the gas, but their built in convenience store is realy part of the draw and will be the tail that wags the
dog. He's also talking about how most people don't know how their phones work and aren't using much of the features,
and carriers are worried about how adding more apps to this causes more problems. Russell is talking about SMS and that
it's so successful (mostly outside of the US) because it's so painfully simple, his 65 year old grandmother in Spain
knows how to use it because there's just one field, and one option (send). You have to try to not understand it. Rael
is talking about the OSX app Quicksilver and how it's the same kind of thing, super simple UI that gives you only the
option you need at that moment. Trip is talking about how computers in the shape of phones are much more prolific than
the computers themselves and it's a disruptive technology.
Questions:
Elliot from TuCows asks if the multipule delivery methods will work, Trip says people just have to get used to it.
Jeff Jarvis asks about pod casting and asks about media and entertainment being delivered though these devices.
Russell doesn't want to downplay pod casting as he thinks it's pretty cool but thinks that service is going to keep
improoving and people will be able to stream the content they want on demand and won't be worrying about downloading
the content beforehand.
The discussion leads to the point that there's way more phones being sold than iPods so as cool as they are, phones
are still more out there and that will be the focus.
Here's an MP3 of part 1
session (20 mins), and here's one of
part 2.
