Still digesting some of the speakers’ talks from the Mobile Journeys forum in Sydney. Although many of the speakers from telco research groups had valuable things to say, it still seems like the reinvention of the wheel a lot of the time. The same old problems (over-hyped capabilities, kludgy interfaces, clunky mis-matched standards) surface over and over. Why are the lessons not learned from the early days of CD-ROMs, the Web, etc.?
I find it rather disheartening that faster connections, better tech, etc. are still seen as “the next big thing”. These things aren’t big, they’re simply progress. Understanding the social nature of mobile interconnections is the key as the guys from Aware and Mark Pesce pointed out.
I had been joking with Mark that I would Bluejack him at some point. But I ended up doing it by accident - he doesn’t believe me, but I thought it was the laptop of the person in front of me. Perhaps that was Shane Williamson’s I saw who was blogging during the forum. By the way Shane, I agree about blogs being the digital social networks Mark spoke of, though there is something slightly more intimate about Orkut, etc.