Mobile Monday Boston
Mobile Monday Boston is a group for those of us interested in mobile device opportunities. They host regular events, keep a blog and online discussion group, and are a great resource for Boston startups interested in mobile technologies.
Their last event took place just yesterday. It was titled Browsers — Driving the Web, or Driven by the Web?, and it was a panelist discussion about mobile web browsers. The moderator was Ed Mitukiewicz of Orange Labs Boston, and the panelists included:
- Keith Waters - also of Orange Labs
- Mike Phillips - Co-Founder of vlingo
- Brad Lassey - Mozilla, working on mobile Firefox
- Franklin Davis - Nokia, business development
- David Carson - Google, technical lead for Android browser
The event was hosted by Orange Labs in Cambridge, and their offices were very sleek and modern.
The discussion covered a lot of basic ground involving mobile enabling the web. Questions and topics included:
- Interesting facts and figures about the mobile industry:
- Around the world, more mobile devices exist than PCs. There are roughly 3 billion mobile devices and 1 billion PCs.
- In many countries, mobile phone penetration is high but access to PCs is low. This means that for many people, a cell phone was their first web enabled device.
- 1 billion mobile phones are sold per year yet…
- Less than 1% of all web browsing is done from phones
- Diversity of platforms and devices
- Applications versus widgets versus mobile web
- Web transcoding, content proxies, etc. for mobile devices
- Resources for developers:
Afterwords there was snacks and drinks at the Royal Sonesta hotel. I had a chance to meet some of the organizers and panelists. Alessandro Pace, one of the organizers, showed me some demos of Flash running on his phone.
