Play Conference

location based services

I was invited to talk about AdMob at the >play conference in Berkeley today. I had hoped to make it out for the whole day, but I got hung up in the morning and only made it out for the afternoon. Too bad, the afternoon was fantastic. Wish I could have caught the location based services panel in the morning.

I caught the “Where is Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?” panel and was really impressed by some of the things that Stephen Farrell said. The conversation had wandered into the use of Second Life and Word of Warcraft outside of the standard game/entertainment usage, which unfortunately seems to be getting branded “vCommerce”. That part is pretty unfortunate, but luckily I was able to ignore it. Stephen mentioned that virtual meetings take a form that’s more like real life meetings in terms of bookend interactions. On conference calls there’s this flurry of beeps as everyone leaves at the same time. However at the end of a virtual meeting people tend to split off into smaller groups and talk about what just happened. Those smaller interactions tend to add a lot to the potential value of the meeting. I’ve been spending a lot of time on conference calls lately, and that point really struck a chord for me.
It seems like a few of the big companies have managed to get the right people in the right places recently. I keep running into Microsoft people in the right places saying the right things, Nokia seems to be engaging with a completely new community, and now IBM. Interesting. I’m not really sure what I think about it yet. There was a decidedly mobile slant to the day, so I was hoping to hear about some interesting mobile stuff from IBM. Now such luck though.
Lots of the folks from Berkeley who where there for the day either have worked in mobile or were looking to work in mobile, so there were some great conversations. Everyone was interested in talking about ways to make new things work rather than trying to tell you why you can’t do something. Great group of folks. There were two main points that kept coming up with respect to working in the current mobile environment.
The first is that the pure mobile Internet user is a mostly underserved segment of the population. People working in mobile have been saying for a long time that future Internet users will be coming online with handsets instead of computers as their primary access source. It’s not speculation any more. Those users are there. They have handsets, flat rate data plans, are using mobile applications already and are looking for more. Online businesses aren’t paying too much attention to those users yet because the desktop usage they see is much larger than the mobile usage. Eventually they will, but not yet. Until then there’s a window of opportunity for applications targeting that group.
The second is that location based services on handsets make a lot of sense, but there’s some still uncovered territory in getting that set of systems up and going. One of the biggest gaps is in tools for getting small businesses up on the mobile web, or accessible from mobile in some way. Maybe that’s publishing tools so that small businesses can get their content up in mobile friendly ways. But judging by the way that the fixed web evolved it’s going to be a relatively small group interested in taking the time to work up their own content, yet all will be interested in reaching those users in some way. I’m betting that figuring out the right way to deal with that disjoin is one of those billion dollar answers.