alias.brianna

The first speaker is up! Here’s David from Spontu!

He starts off with the question: How will the mobile look like in the future? Future being about 4 years… and he’s got a video (from youtube). It turns out to be a Nokia advertisement for the N95 “I’ve got a thing, but it’s not one thing (dishes out dice from his pocket), it’s many.”

How will social networking look like in the future? Naturally this is a tough and complicated question. How will our facebook experience change?

3 things fundamentally good
1. social networking will become concurrent - in sync with regular life
2. circumstantial
3. socially impactful

“Newsfeed” - facebook example again. Usually these events happen in the past. In the future, there might be some sort of newsfeed with present data. The future? Don’t we have Jaiku (amongst other things) for that already? For the stuff that really matters to us all? Haha…

The real question is what can we do today to change the social networking environment? 6 parameters in the equation:

1. Development platform - phones are very diverse. you have to pick your development environment. is it going to be symbian, java?
2. Connectivity - what is your method of connectivity? Internet, sms?
3. Positioning - how do you want to position users? there’s a plethorsa of technology availble? GPS positioning? peer to peer with bluetooth?
4. Monetization - how am i going to make money with this aplpication? Today most monetary gains are from subscription. There’s advertisements but that’s something you can’t exactly rely on.
5. Partners - who are you going to work with?
6. Target market - who’s going to use your application?

Some lessons learnt by David through working with Spontu:
Motivation - what is yours? Be intellectually honest. Solve a real human social inefficiency.
On choice of technology - Don’t gamble. Use what works with an eye on the future. Change is sometimes needed and good.
On competition - Don’t compete. Build on top of other people.
On convenience - Build a good enough solution to a real problem. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Some things are more ubiqious.
On target market - socially all-inclusive. Take a common development or appraoch. The problem with social networking is it’s not all-inclusive. Pick the technology, pick the pillars of your product.
On strategy - Don’t plan a killer app. Execute a killer strategy. Instead of defending your product at a fixed point of time. You need to know how it starts and how it will evolve. Use the technologies available to your advantage.

*Newsflash* Some changes to the program:

Trond Bugge can’t be here today. Damn the flu bug. He does send his greeting over the internet through video though. It’s being screened now.