The impressive lineup of speakers we’ve assembled for next Tuesday’s Xconomy Forum, Mobile Madness: The New Future of Computing, is doing the trick–we’ve sold most of the available seats at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center, and only have about 20 more available. Now’s your chance to secure one of the last seats. If you missed the earlier announcements, this will event will explore the newest mobile devices, mobile infrastructure technologies, mobile application platforms, and mobile marketing and advertising opportunities, with an emphasis on the space that these developments are opening up for entrepreneurship and business growth.
We guarantee you’ll find this event both educational and entertaining throughout an afternoon of talks, panel discussions, and special segments. One unique and somewhat experimental session will be the “Mobile Smackdown,” where teams representing four of today’s leading mobile platforms—Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Phone—will engage each other in a head-to-head debate.
Which operating system is the best for developers? Entrepreneurs? Consumers? We’ve instructed our four teams to put their passion about these questions on display. Each team will explain why its preferred operating system has the best phones for consumers and business users, the best app store, or the best software development ecosystem, and why it’s the one that creates the most opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship, and profit. There may even be a little trash-talking involved (in fact, we encourage it). I talked today with the Android team, Carter Jernigan of two forty four a.m. and Henry Cipolla of Localytics, and they’re raring to go.
Local tech legend John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures will be on hand as our referee. His job will be to keep the teams in line—or, if necessary, rile them up! The first half of the segment will be a no-holds-barred debate, but for the second half, Landry will lead a calmer, more reasoned mini-panel discussion of the relative merits and demerits of each platform. And at the end, we’ll ask the audience to render their verdict vote on which team did the best job of representing its platform and which platform is most apt to support a flourishing ecosystem of innovative and profitable third-party apps. May the best platform win!
But the other parts of the afternoon will be equally exciting, including scene-setting talks by Jhonatan Rotberg of the Next Billion Network and Kate Imbach of Mobile Monday Boston, keynote talks from representatives of Microsoft, Cisco, and Nuance Communications, and a leadership panel featuring executives from mobile companies AT&T, Jumptap, Raizlabs, uLocate, and Zink. (The full agenda is online here.)
We’ll close with the Mobile Showcase, a lineup of 10 (mostly) local startups and organizations doing important work in various corners of the mobile industry. Representatives from
