Mobile 2.0 Europe: exploring the future of mobile

Written on 7th July 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Last week marked the first edition of Mobile 2.0 Europe, the first European iteration of the popular Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The conference, held in sunny and vibrant Barcelona, was a big hit with 300 professional attendees, excellent keynote speakers and panels, lots of innovation from start-ups, high-level networking and a TechCrunch party to remember.

Mobile 2.0, an co-organization between dotopen, ESADE Business School and Mobile Monday, kicked off with a good keynote by Pekka Pohjakallio, Vice President, Suites Management and Marketing, Services and Software at Nokia. He was very clear about the fact that Nokia’s future will be in the internet sphere, not the hardware manufacturing business. One take-away was the four things Nokia considers to be key: people, places, media and development.

I’m sure there will be a lot of reviews from the 4 panels (Mobile Social Media, The VC Perspective, The Operator Perspective and Open Business Models) elsewhere so I won’t bore you with a detailed review, but if I have to share something about each one of them, this would be it:

• The companies involved in the mobile social media market each have their own perspective on what’s going on now and what the future of mobile will look like, their views are not aligned at all.
• The venture capital panel was largely negative (or should I say, careful) about the business models of the majority of mobile startups they have looked at in the past.
• The operators sure didn’t seem to have made a lot of friends (or people who actually understand what it’s like in their world) in the audience.
• The business models panel showed that it’s hard, but not impossible to get a significant user base and revenue stream out of mobile if your angle is true innovation.

The rest of the day was filled with startup presentations. I will post my thoughts on the ones with the most potential in my opinion tomorrow!