FOM (Future of Mobile) is an event run by Carsonified who also run FOWA (the Future of Web Applications) previously reported by Digital Lifestyles. It took place on Monday and Tues this week (17/18th Nov) in Kensington.
It’s different from FOWA in a number of ways. The biggest of difference between FOWA and FOM (apart from size, there were about 3 – 400 attendees at FOM) is suits. The mobile industry is still run by corporations and they take life rather seriously.
The first day was made up of talks and panel discussions and took place in Kensington Town Hall, while the second was a day of workshops run in the Olympia Hilton.
The workshops were mainly technical (Android, Yahoo Blueprint, Google Gears, Adobe AIR) and one business “How to build a successful business model in mobile.”
Unfortunately Ryan Carson, who heads up Carsonified, couldn’t MC the event due to sickness and so James Whatley of Spinvox took that role at short notice.
Mobile industry veterans in attendance
It was quite jolly to see many industry veterans there Simon Rockman, now at SonyEricsson, Tomi T Ahonen, Rudy de Waele, James Body and David Wood (Symbian but ex Psion for those that can remember Psion!).
Doug Richard (ex Dragon from Dragon’s Den) gave a particularly interesting talk on Trutap and “Reaching the whole world, understanding development for emerging markets”.
Not surprisingly Google were there (represented by Rich Miner, who was previously at Danger) and were promoting how open Android was – even down to being able to get the complete OS source, though some Google apps like GoogleMaps are excluded from the open source license.
Andrew Scott from Rummble (thanks for sponsoring the party afterwards) gave a very insightful talk on how things can go wrong, quoting previous life/business experiences.
If you’re thinking of developing a mobile application or working with the operators, you should seriously consider visiting FOM next year, if they run it like this years.