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April 4, 2008
Over the Air
Well, I'm at the Over the Air conference and I'm blogging. I usually don't blog about any worky or geeky events but maybe it's time for a change. This may be partly inspired by the fact that a friend of mine just had a novel published by random house which looks like it will be a smash hit blockbuster wackadelic literary treat to the brain. I haven't actually read it as it has only been released in North America so far. It's due out in the UK on 30 April, but I have no doubt it will be brilliant. Padma has been selected as one of the Canadian New Faces of Fiction for 2008. So, if you're in the States or Canada, go buy The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan.
There's a dude from Imperial College talking about something called "Life Planning" which is a project involving trying to make technology useful to people. One project he talked about is Vortix. This is a NFC "Near Field Communications" project which involves an app on your phone giving you guidance about how to navigate the London tube network. He didn't mention how successful this was or if all the people trialling the system ended up trapped in the abandoned Aldwych train station as food for Ken Livingston's secret army of badgers.
Imperial Dude is gone now and it's my boss, Matthew Postgate, talking about the BBC's involvement in Mobile. He's doing a laudable job, although it may be a touch BBC-centric. I'm not sure how non-BBC folk will take it. It may be a bit sad, but I have to admit a small flush of pride looking at the plain-jane BBC Mobile site circa 2002 that I worked on. It makes me feel like a grey old survivor of a dangerous near frontier. I've now been working in this area for seven years. It sometimes makes me a bit stressed and I have to admit to the
And now Dan Appelquist from Momo London and Vodafone is speaking and the event becomes suddenly a maelstrom of acronyms and buzzwords. "Memes" "2.0" "Mobile AJAX" "bundesligaplayer" "toothpaste". I'm not sure he really said that last one but it's stuck in my head for some reason -- too much sugar in my coffee this morning, perhaps. He argues that this is "The Year of Doing It", that the majority of web use will be via Mobile within five years, and that we're past the time of talking about mobile and it is now time to start doing things on mobile. Have to admit, he's got prettier slides and a geekier patter than Matthew. I rate it a tie.
And now Margaret from betavine is talking about the point of today. We're all supposed to innovate and come up with something brilliant. Ideas come from "What Ifs". She suggests that before the car was built, if Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse" and the Morgan Aero8 would never have been born and I never would have got a ride in one after James and Bernie's wedding and my life would be slightly less rich than it turned out to be.
Now there's a Belgian guy on the stage. He's explaining the difference between mobile 1.0 and mobile 2.0. Basically, 2.0 is more advanced than 1.0. Confusingly, apparently it has four pillars. In which case, why isn't it called mobile 4.0? He's pointing out some interesting sites which I am now having trouble finding because I'm too slow and the screen is too blurry. One is http://mobref.com/ which looks like another WURFL but with marketing stats (ish). Mobile4hire, which looks like a network which enables people to buy and sell mobile testing services. He started out pretty boring but he's not pointing out a lot of interesting stuff so I'm paying more attention and typing less so I actually have some interesting links to impart but, paradoxically, I am unable to note them down. Whoops, I'll track them down later. Time for lunch.
Posted by YandaMan at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)