iPass at GigaOM’s Mobilize – Future of the Mobile Web

Monday, October 4th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

Here’s a part-two post about our participation at the GigaOM Mobilize conference last week. In addition to a few more comments that we had, I wanted to share a few articles that came out.

On Friday, I gave you an overview of some of the topics that I found interesting, including user experience with mobile apps. My colleagues came up with a few more:

• The idea of one’s mobile phone as a credit card and payment system is an enormous market and yet only the surface has been scratched.
• Security for the enterprise was a huge concern and yet everyone pointed to the lack of enterprise applications and the market opportunities – especially during the VC panel.
• A noted increase in attendance seems to illustrated that the mobile smartphone platform remains in a nascent phase of growth and opportunities still abound.

Valerie Potter, from Computerworld.com selected three big ideas from the conference, which included Evan Kaplan’s presentation on the Enterprise Mobility Bill of Rights:

“Give your mobile workers what they want
Evan Kaplan doesn’t think the “millennial workforce” has anything to do with age. Instead, the president and CEO of iPass, which provides mobile network services to enterprises, thinks “millennial” refers to attitude and style of work — people who are connected all the time, are highly social and have permeable work/life boundaries…”

A GigaOM article recapping Evan’s presentation during the panel on “The Next Big Idea,” explains that “a bleeding edge of 10 percent of mobile workers, led mostly by millennials, are defining the future of the mobile web. .. At any given time, these users have more than one device and lean toward consumer technologies, causing enterprise IT departments to follow suit. Kaplan believes that users need a new “Enterprise Mobility Bill of Rights” that allows IT departments and service providers to serve these leading users.”

This seemed to ring true for many people at the conference as they came by to re-read the list and tell us how much they agreed!

Tags: mobile device