If you can measure a conference’s success from the volume level during the closing cocktail hour, then Xconomy’s Mobile Madness forum yesterday in Cambridge, MA, was a smash.
A record-setting crowd of more than 250 people headed to the Microsoft New England R&D Center Wednesday afternoon for the third annual edition of Xconomy’s half-day mobile conference. I emceed the event and moderated three of the five segments, so I was pretty busy asking questions and keeping the conversation moving—but even from the front of the room, I could sense an even higher level of focus and engagement than in past years. The tag line for the conference was “Getting Down to Business,” and I think that’s exactly what mobile entrepreneurs in New England are doing: figuring out how to use today’s amazingly powerful handsets and tablet devices to offer valuable new capabilities to consumers and businesspeople, and how to make money doing it.
It’s impossible to sum up all the issues that were on the table, but overall I thought good answers emerged for nearly all of my seven big questions about the future of mobile. How soon will 4G broadband arrive? It’s already reaching millions of people, as panelists from companies like Qualcomm and Clearwire emphasized, but it’s just not very evenly distributed (as William Gibson famously said of the future). What’s holding back enterprise adoption of smartphone and tablet apps? IT departments don’t know how to handle all of the employee-owned devices flooding into the workplace, as panelists from Enterprise Mobile, Ondeego, and Apperian explained.
One highlight of the event was a keynote presentation by Stephen Wolfram, founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, which—as Wolfram demonstrated—is finding some pretty remarkable applications for its Wolfram Alpha question-answering technology on mobile devices. (I’m an especially big fan of the two Touch Press iOS apps, The Elements and Solar System for iPad, that draw on data from Wolfram Alpha; Wolfram is a co-founder of Touch Press.) We’ll be publishing a gallery of shots from Wolfram’s talk and other parts of the event tomorrow.
It’s become an Xconomy tradition to invite local companies to give quick “burst” presentations in between the longer discussion segments of our events, and we had three great bursts at Mobile Madness. One was from Microsoft’s Anthony Kinney, who showed off some of the great new features of the Windows Phone 7 operating system, and another was from Meredith Flynn-Ripley, CEO of MediaFriends, which is making enormous headway with its HeyWire multimedia messaging service for mobile phones.
And we were especially glad to welcome burst presenter Steven Saltman, who used Mobile Madness to launch his new startup, Zizzout. In an interview before the event, Saltman told me that the vision behind Zizzout is simple: it’s a “visual marketplace for people selling stuff.” Using Zizzout’s mobile app, which will be available for the iPhone in about three weeks, people can take pictures of items they want to sell, which get posted to Zizzout’s website and shared with other app users in the local area.
Saltman says he and co-founder Christian Picker hit on the concept for Zizzout after meeting each other at the Cambridge Innovation Center’s Venture Cafe last fall and floating a number of startup ideas. “I said, I have so much stuff to sell, and I sell stuff on eBay and Craigslist all the time, but it’s really a pain. I wish I could just take my phone and walk around my apartment taking pictures, and get rid of everything. Of the 10 ideas we floated, that seemed like the one we could best execute. I said, ‘You do the design and I’ll do the mobile app development,’ and it’s gone exactly as planned.”
Rather than handling the whole payment process the way eBay does, Zizzout helps sellers and potential buyers communicate through an internal messaging system; once they settle on a price, it’s up to them to complete the transaction offline. Saltman thinks the system will appeal to people who
