New at noteworthy from the Mobile 2.0 SF conference

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The Mobile 2.0 San Francisco conference was held on November 3rd, 2008. This year’s event featured a single business track in the morning and added a second “builder” track targeted at developers in the afternoon.

Two of my favorite presentations from the event were both from the builder track, Markus Spiering’s talk on Yahoo! Blueprint and Barbara Ballard’s presentation on designing mobile applications. Dennis Bournique of WAPReview posted a nice two part write up of the conference: part 1 and part 2. VentureBeat has a brief summary of the startups that presented at Mobile 2.0.

About a week and a half before the Mobile 2.0 conference berlinblase did an interview with Tim O’Reilly about his take on Mobile 2.0 in general. Tony Fish from the Mobile 2.0 event argues with Tim’s premise in the comments. During the event, Stuart Henshall raved about Qik and gave an impromptu demo using the new iPhone client. He posted a review QIK - Mobile Video Streaming about a week before the event.

Markus Spiering presented a tutorial on Yahoo! Blueprint in the builder track. Blueprint is interesting as it can generate mobile HTML/XHTML web-based applications, standalone mobile applications for Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian as well as widgets for Yahoo! Go from a single source. This covers the vast majority of mobile phones capable of running applications. Yahoo says that it is in talks with Apple to allow it to also generate runtimes for the iPhone in a way that does not violate the iPhone terms of service. Yahoo! has used Blueprint for a number of its own services and applications including oneSearch, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Go 3.0 and oneConnect.

Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design gave a nice presentation titled
The Full Web Isn’t: Mobility Goes Beyond the desktop which she uploaded to SlideShare. The deck has a nice set of examples showing four variations of an expense reporting applications: a full-web version, one with simple mobile customizations, one with more intelligent mobile design and a widgetized version. The presentation shows that there are clear benefits to redesigning the application specifically for the mobile device.