Future Of Mobile - London 2011
We attended this year´s “Future of Mobile” conference in London and just returned. First of all, it was a great conference, well organized with great speakers. So let´s all say thank you to the fellows at Carsonified.
The conference was split into two tracks: a mainly conceptional track and a geeky track. We mainly followed the conceptional track. This one started off with a very interesting talk by Kevin Systrom (Founder of Instagram). He talked about how Instagram actually became Instagram as we know it today and taught us to focus on the main features of an application instead of trying to ship a Swiss Army Knife. There´s an article on the Instagram story available here. We highly recommend to read it.
Right after that Brian LeRoux from PhoneGap introduced PhoneGap, which wasn´t really new as they´ve been around for quite a while now, BUT at the end he presented their new debugging feature which is simple and awesome. Check it out here.
After a short break where we had an interesting chat with Kevin Systrom about the differences in American and German VCs and funding in general before we joined a rather boring talk from one of the sponsors followed by another great talk held by Antony Ribot from ribot about designing for different screen sizes. To be honest, I didn´t know that this is such a big issue as we´re working on generic, cross-platform applications for years now and we kind of grew into it but it seems to the majority of designers struggle with this. So Antony didn´t really talk about the methods, he had a more theoretically approach, which we personally liked a lot.
Lunchtime.
A smart guy named Dominic Szablewski from good ol´ Hessen started the afternoon talks with an impressive presentation of his HTML5 game engine impactjs. It´s a bit ahead of the time but this guy will definitely go places.
Ben Milne from Dwolla followed with his presentation of (of course) Dwolla and their approach to mobile payments. It´s location-based, it´s social and to be honest it´s a bit difficult to understand. Anyway, we´re not going to see it over here in europe in the near future, so we don´t have to worry. We had the chnace to talk to him personally right after the talk while all the others were kind of speed dating each other. He told us that´s Dwolla started quite well in the US and that they are currently talking to the banks and credit card companies. We don´t want his job but we are looking forward to hearing back of Dwolla someday over here.
James Pearce followed with a talk (here´s the presentation) on cross-platform mobile web development with some insights into problems, existing frameworks and a live-coding session. He also presented some very nice cases.
Last but not least there was a panel discussion: Should you build a native or HTML5 app? Well, we think this is a quite useless discussion in general and it was on stage. There is no right and wrong, it always depends on the app. But it´s also good to find one´s opinions confirmed.
That was it for the conference. Like we said before: Overall interesting talks, great speakers and a good organization. We can highly recommend this conference and we are looking forward to the Future of Mobile 2012.
Oh: The wrap party in the evening was brilliant. We had a lot of fun, we met some great guys, we got drunk and Ryan Carson paid for it. Cheers, mate.
