Future of the Mobile Web

Last week we hosted an event loftily entitled "The Future of the Mobile Web" at the Dublin Convention Centre.

We had a small but heavy-hitting guest list in the shape of the Riegers from Yiibu @stephanierieger, @ bryanrieger, Jason Grigsby @grigs and Lyza Danger @lyzadanger from Cloud Four, Nokia's Andrea Trasatti @andreatrasatti, Dave Evans from Amobee, Ernesto Jimenez from Vodafone @ernesto_jimenez and Adobe's Roger Wood @rogerjwoods.

The genesis of the event was admittedly self-serving – we spend far too much of our time debating the finer points of mobile web in here and felt there was a lot of noise in the debate that we wanted to cut through with the help of a broader, expert forum. But we also had a nobler motive: we wanted to see if we could establish some common ground/consensus on things like HTML 5.0, web versus native apps, responsive design, standards, fragmentation, the long tail of devices that are in use out there and other issues.

We managed to cover this and more in a frenzied day and half at the Dublin Convention Centre last week. I think we made good progress. There was plenty of common ground but there were certainly more nuances than at least I would was expecting.  Bottom line? This stuff is not easy. It's a complex landscape not just for developers but also for those whose job it is to formulate strategy. But we think we made some inroads into sorting out the myths from the realities and have enough to go on to provide some idea of the direction of travel. We are planning to get all these topics down and documented in a whitepaper that we will publish openly soon. So watch out for that. In the meantime, our sincere thanks to all the above who attended (and tweet streamed on #fomw) the event last week and I look forward to next time.