BARCELONA, Spain – Today I am in Barcelona for the Mobile 2.0 conference. There are about 150 companies attending, a mix of entrepreneurs, developers, and operators.
I’ll be on a panel on Mobile Social Media (info below), moderated by Peggy Anne Salz. It should prove to be interesting. And I hope I am not a curmudgeon. Peggy gave us panelists all a call to get the thoughts flowing and to help her understand our pet-topics and pet-peeves. She’s summarized them on her site (links below/after the jump).
In her two posts, Peggy lays out what all of us are thinking. The interests range through the usual suspects – advertising on mobiles, the lack of a mobile ecosystem akin to the ecosystem that has made the open internet so powerful, and keeping up with social media via mobiles. She also mentions the fallacy that mobile social media is strictly used from a mobile, rather than from all sorts of access tools with other formats.
But, in any conversation about fusing web services with how we use mobiles, operators always pop up as the elephant in the room. Big, controlling, and conservative, operators stand to gain a lot if they participated more in the ecosystem. My take is that operators are still coasting on old business models and are slowly shifting to the new reality of a more open world.
In any case, looking forward to the discussion today.
Go read the posts and come to the panel if you are at Mobile 2.0 Europe. If not, still read the posts and leave a comment.
My panel info:
9:30 – 10:30 PANEL: Mobile Social Media
* Peggy Anne Salz, MSearchGroove (Moderator)
* Market Overview introduction by Alistair Hill, Analyst, M:Metrics
* Tommy Ahlers, CEO ZYB
* Charlie Schick, Editor-in-Chief for Nokia Conversations
* Doug Richards, CEO Trutap
* Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO Itsmy.com (GoFresh)
* Alex Romero – Director Partnerships, Yahoo! Connected Life Europe
Image from Wolfgang Staudt