I spent the last few days in the beautiful surroundings of Amsterdam for Mobilism. ‘Twas an excellent affair: a well-organised, focused single-track conference. It may have helped that Amsterdam itself was looking bloody gorgeous for the duration.
All the talks were great but I was particularly happy to finally hear Bryan and Stephanie Rieger having so often favourited their presentations on Slideshare. They both blew my mind, though I’ll admit to a certain amount of confirmation bias in hearing their Content First message.
For my part, I moderated what I believe may have been the world’s first panel dedicated to mobile browsers.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself …somewhat at the expense of the panelists. There were representatives from Opera, Nokia and RIM present, ready and willing to take their punishment. They were the ones brave enough to actually show up. Despite PPK’s best efforts, there was an Apple- and Google-shaped hole on stage. Apple never sends anyone to any event to speak on behalf of the company. And Google were clearly just too chickenshit.
So kudos to the mobile browser vendors that did have the guts to take a grilling from web developers. The panel got quite technical for a while—which you may or not find boring, depending on how much of a browser nerd you are—but once we moved on to more philosophical bigger-picture questions, it got very interesting indeed.
Luke took some notes and the whole thing has been recorded for posterity. Oh, and a big “thank you!” to everyone who took the time to answer my request for questions.