We recently attended Carsonified’s annual Future of Mobile conference in London, the leading event of its type in the UK. There were a number of speakers throughout the day including Kevin Systrom from Instagram, James Pearce from Sencha and Tom Hume from Future Platforms. We also had a chance to meet Dominic Szablewski, the creator of Impact, a games development platform for HTML5 that he created for his final project at University.
The beauty of this game engine is that anything created can by played on the majority of web browsers, including iOS, and we’ve been addicted to his Biolab Disaster game since seeing him demo it.
X.Commerce also gave a couple of talks throughout the day and got us all thinking about how the future of technology will be powered through buying and selling. Their platform brings together merchants and developers in an attempt to provide better end to end retail experiences; utilising the existing technologies of Paypal, Ebay and Magneto. Another company dealing with money represented at the conference was Dwolla. CEO Ben Milne explained that Dwolla is an entirely new system for making payments, selling itself on its simplicity and lack of charges for merchants or sellers compared to those that can be incurred when using traditional card services. Dwolla has also launched a proximity based mobile app which could transform the way we make payments offline as well. Although this service is currently unavailable outside of the US it promises to be the next big thing in sending and receiving money.
A common theme throughout the day was HTML5 and how it can be utilised in app development. We were shown PhoneGap and how easy it is to quickly and effectively make a cross platform app, alongside a very nifty tool that removes the need to debug on the device itself. HTML5 is moving on in leaps and bounds, and the debate as to whether it is 'better' that developing applications natively continues to be a hot topic. We've brought a lot of ideas back from Future of Mobile and are excited about implementing them.