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.
Video from Last Mobile Monday Event — Boston Startups | 09-Jul-08 at 7:37 pm | Permalink
[...] is a video of the last Mobile Monday event that I previously blogged about. The event was about mobile web [...]