Dawn was a long way from cracking when I set off on Monday to make the 2,000 mile round trip to attend the Guardian Mobile Business Summit in London.   So, when Richard Holdsworth of Wapple put forward the notion that we should consider the user as mobile, rather than their device, I had to feel the man had a point.
As I wrote I’m increasingly interested in how content owners perceive the Web and mobile.  I’d hoped to hear more from media companies, although with hindsight, I was probably at the wrong place to hear a balanced perspective on old business models versus emerging ones.  We were firmly in the land of the new.   No matter: I did hear a number of interesting and new (to me) thoughts.  Those that especially stuck with me.  My interpretations:

Ilicco Elia refreshing regrets about mobile advertising: that it can appear a race to the bottom on a number of micro-measurements that speak to conversion rates and (presumably) awareness, but little engagement beyond that.  What new experiences was mobile enabling, beyond a quarter-page sized ad?   A good (perhaps rare?) counter-example might be something like Gameloft’s branded games.  There was little doubt in the Finch household, after all, that we would be seeing Ice Age 4 when it arrived in our local cinema.  Ilicco went on to indicate that mobile was supposed to promise many of the things the Web was to: more predictability, relevance, measurability, but that the corpus of work in the offline world is huge and does not yet exist in mobile (or Web).

I especially enjoyed Jan Chipchase’s ramble through users finding new use cases for functionality, and then his (unsettling?  dystopian?) imagining of a world where facial recognition is instant (although there seemed to be some question about how “real” Google’s Project Glass is), I do at least know that Steve Lau is real.   We all know (even if we don’t understand) that our cognitive processes are profoundly influenced by technology.  Jan put forward the notion that soon our social vocabulary, even our ego, will be influenced by such things as facial recognition, and that this is coming sooner than we might realise.  How do we deal with that?

William Perrin, founder of Talk About Local was amongst the bulls about augmented reality.  It was perhaps strange timing to be discussing Aurasma given that news broke later in the day of HP’s write down of Automony’s valuation. But I liked Talk About Local.  I’ve had reservations in the past about things like Faces of the Fallen, which serve partly to highlight the digital divide in the most grimly stark manner (after all, the civilian casualties of Operating Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom remain literally countless).  Such projects contribute to a sense that the Internet is only teaching us more about things we might otherwise know about.  Talk About Local seems somewhat more community-serving, however.

Of course, I was keen to see the level of interest in Firefox OS.  I think that the audience was entirely engaged and there seemed a palpable sense of disappointment that Andreas wasn’t talking about a UK launch.  Perhaps my bias is showing.

…or perhaps not.
Either way, there’s impatience and palpable desire for HTML5.  Speaking of which: there was an app for the event.  All in all, it was pretty useful, but not terribly stable on a Galaxy SII running ICS.  I saw nothing in the app that an HTML5 app couldn’t do today, probably with more stability on a wider variety of screen sizes…