London Mobile Monday was packed with people and demos this month. The greatest challenge for presenters was the switching between hardware (PCs) between presentations which created a hiccup of two. Nevertheless, they did a great job of keeping everyone entertained.

If there was one overall theme it was the ability to create mobile applications quickly and cheaply. IncredibleInc described their dating application and how it is better (cheaper) than web site based dating. They told us the service has been set up in only nine weeks with a budget of only about 15K pounds. Steve Proctor of iTagg set up a new SMS poll in minutes showing how easy (and cheap) this can be. He described problems with codes of conduct/operator guidelines and the importance of reliability and security of SMS aggregators. Rhys Lewis of Volantis described how the W3C is working on standards to allow normal and mobile web sites to be created from the same content.

m-Spatial showed what appeared to be a normal WAP site. However, the presentation proceeded to show that geo-tagged data was being dynamically presented from commercial and public (e.g. flickr) sources. Cool stuff. It would have been good to know a bit more. For example, how can the service scale to heavy usage when it is does so much (on the server) for each user? How does it deal with public services like flickr whose quality of service may not be predictable?

I was slightly disappointed that a few of demos didn’t cover any technical and marketing issues. This may have been because there were a lot of demos and not enough time. Also, there was no time for questions the the end which usually flushes out lots of interesting points. It was also interesting that a few presenters chose to just show PC based demos rather than demos on a phone. In fact the ebay demo didn’t show ebay mobile alerts as they were said to be too involved to set up. Ummm.
 
Thanks to the presenters and Volantis for hosting the event. It was a very useful event. Bafta was a great venue and allowed a large number of people (239 people registered) to attend. Maybe fewer, deeper demos would be better for the next demo Momo? It’s interesting that Momo Silicon valley has scaled back it’s presenters this month to make it ‘quick and informative’.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.