Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Flash in the pan?
Philip Torrone of Fallon Worldwide gave
a very cool presentation of how his company, a major ad
agency, has been working in the mobile space with big names
like BMW. He stressed how his company now found it easy
to leverage much of the work they had done in the desktop
space to help their customers expand their reach to the
Pocket PC space. Philip demonstrated some very funky media
rich stuff, which was mostly done in Flash. Personally,
as a programmer, I am looking forward to getting away from
"scripting" environments and working in the rich
.NET developer environment. However, if you are partial
to tools like Flash and haven't checked out what is going
on with Flash and the Pocket PC you really should check
out Philip's site: www.flashenabled.com.
The Future Panel
On the last day, the event wrapped up
with a panel on "The Future of the Pocket PC".
Chris De Herrera (of CEWindows.net fame) moderated a group
of five other key industry players who fielded crystal ball
type questions from the audience. As a developer on a mission,
I found that Bob Schreib of Symbol Technologies had some
of the most interesting views to share, as they relate to
our future. I had spent a lot of time speaking with Bob
earlier down on the exhibit floor. He is a great source
of information with vast experience when it comes to how
Pocket PCs are being used by business. During the panel,
he mentioned what he called "the low hanging fruit"
of our industry, as the retail and warehousing markets.
More specifically, he described how there are large percentages
of those markets where Pocket PCs can be deployed in simple
and practical ways that lead to very quick return on investment
for the business. There are few sales that are as easy to
make as the ones that involve simple solutions that pay
for themselves quickly and then start making the customer
money. Bob figures mobile devices have penetrated only 5-7%
of this huge low hanging fruit market. Mr. Schreib sees
the combination of .NET tools and Pocket PCs leading to
a potential 90% penetration of this space in a few short
years.
Conclusion
The phone space looks like it is going
to present a huge consumer market opportunity. The challenge
for us will be to come up with the innovative and compelling
applications that users will buy to use on their smartphones.
Derek Brown and others think games and applications that
make intelligent use of connectivity will be the early winners
and that it is unlikely that there will be just one killer
app. Instead, it is believed that the motivator for consumers
will more likely come when there is a wide assortment of
compelling applications available, much like the circumstances
that lead to the eventual wide adoption of the Windows OS.
Businesses are slowly starting to make
moves where the ROI is easy to see. For those of us who
are also targeting the business market, Bob Schreib's concept
of "low hanging fruit" may hold the key to success
in that space.
I have described here a small handful
of the individuals that caused me to reflect on our industry
in new and interesting ways during the Pocket PC Summit.
There were many other speakers and fellow attendees that
generously shared their great ideas and experience during
the few days of the event. Like any good roller coaster
ride, I was left feeling exhilarated and anxious to repeat
the ride again.
Previous Page