Report from the Mobile Innovation Forum

Yesterday’s Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England attracted an enthusiastic standing room only crowd. Organizer Wade Rush describes the program in his post, Exciting but Tricky Times for Mobile Entrepreneurs.

Some personal observations:

First, I had no idea that the New England Region was so prominent in the emerging Smart Phone applications industry. Although the cell phone was invented in the US, leadership quickly passed overseas. When Kevin Short founded Groove Mobile to download music, he signed up half a dozen European carriers before Sprint followed along. Not so with Smart Phone applications. The US is the leader, with New England a top regional contender.

Second, Harvey Tuch from VMware both announced and demonstrated MVP, the Mobilization Virtual Platform, a virtual machine implementation running on a Smart Phone. Harvey was able to load two operating systems and run two applications simultaneously. My prediction: this may be an extremely significant advantage for Enterprise Applications, a segment that was much praised but little discussed at the Forum.

Third, not one speaker mentioned Near Field Communication as the technology that may propel the cell phone and the smart phone into the commercial marketplace. NFC is an adaptation of contactless smart card technology to the cell phone, allowing applications such as transit payments, credit card transactions, building access, and numerous others to reside on the phone. The MIT Media Lab recently produced a white paper and a video on potential NFC applications.

I’ll post more on these topics in the future.