Congratulations to Dan Appelquist from Vodafone, and his co-conspirators, for leading a very engaging forum on the future of mobile applications — Mobile 2.0 — in San Francisco on 1 September.  I keynoted at the very first Mobile 2.0 in 2006, so it was good to be back.

Given the plethora of entrepreneurial apps developers in the audience, I spoke on our Mobile Entrepreneurship Initiative as the lunch-time presentation.  I showed our video animation, too, and people seemed really locked-in as it played.  All of this was a significant diversion from the other topics of the day, which focused on technologies, monetization and the next big things.

Within the main agenda, I enjoyed these sessions:  Larry Berkin’s “Who’s In the Driver Seat in Mobile?” gave an interesting history and predictions for the future regarding handsets, operating systems, content providers, advertising and the ecosystems that contain parts of all of these. The panel, “Is the Cost of Innovation Changing? Can Small Companies Still Compete?” had relevance to our mobile entrepreneurs, but perhaps more so in the future. Discussions around advertising and around HTML5 Web apps vs. native apps permeated many sessions.  Matt Womer, from W3C, gave a good talk on the state-of-the-art of HTML5.  I see HTML5 as getting closer to being able to provide all the benefits of native apps, but with the open, royalty-free, globally-linkable benefits of Web technologies.

Regarding my talk on mobile entrepreneurs in Africa, many people came up to me afterward my talk to say how much they appreciated hearing about the social-good aspects of the Web and Web Foundation.  Some kind folks offered to help us as mentors for entrepreneur trainees and by providing services.  Thanks to all of these folks.  If others are interested and did not catch me at the meeting, please contact me directly.