Our friends at VentureBeat are hosting their first conference, MobileBeat 2008 on July 24 at Plug and Play Tech Center at 440 N. Wolfe Rd., Sunnyvale, CA 94085. The conference is looking at opportunities created by the changing mobile landscape. MobileBeat 2008 speakers include Rich Miner, of Google’s Android project and Matt Murphy, of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund.
They have just released the short list of 30 start-ups making a presenting at their conference, and I am looking forward to talking to them at the even. I am also conducting a panel on Mobile vs the Web, which should be ton of fun. I am doing some homework for it and looking for suggestions on the panel. So go ahead and send me your questions.
If you come-up with the right questions, you could be one of the three people who will get a free entry ticket to the event. So start thinking. And if you think that is all too much – relax VentureBeat is offering GigaOM readers a 10% discount – $45 per ticket – all you have to do is enter the code, GOMB08.
The most unique differentiator for mobile compared to web is its capability to bridge the offline (physical) world with the online world. Developers can create applications unique to the mobile world that allow users to merge these two worlds.
Physical world benefiting from online: Location based services bring intelligent context from the online world on to the physical world when a user is looking for a restaurant in his current location that say, majority of people liked on Yelp.
Online world benefiting from physical: Services that say, track foot traffic of users moving through a shopping mall can help mall owners decide which stores are well performing.
Om, my question for the panel would be that what do they see the roadblocks for such services? Would privacy conscious users be willing to trade some of their information for incentives?
as the mobile phone is used in place of many loyalty cards (grocery, movie rental, etc.) the retailers will for the first time have real-time access to reach their consumer. like many other loyalty card members i fudged most of my personal info when i first signed up & if i did give accurate personal info i sure haven’t gone back & updated this info following any of my many moves that i’ve made since. so while the retailer thinks it can reach out to market to me they really can’t.
if my mobile phone becomes my new loyalty card then that retailer will always be able to reach out & market to me through use of my phone number which no matter how much i move won’t change.