The past few weeks have been very spotty in terms of blogging, with so much of my time being focused on getting stuck in to new projects and flirting with a few more potential ones.

Yesterday, however, was an insightful (and social) day for me, spent at Future of Mobile in London. Future of Mobile is in its second year, organised by the great team at Carsonified. I did a dreadful job of tweeting or blogging the event, being far too busy buzzing around chatting to new people, but many others did a stellar job of documenting what turned out to be a very interesting day.


During my presentation at FOM, photo by Rudy de Waele

The very lovely Tom Hume (who’s excellent presentation teased us all with colourful macaroons right before lunch) posted his review of the event earlier today. Helen Keegan, fellow blogger and geek gal, shocked the crowd with her “There is no future to mobile” (your faces were all priceless when she stated that), James Whatley was (as usual) the most energetic body in the room and – at the risk of potentially getting an ass-kicking for saying this – the younger share of the speakers did a rather stellar job at keeping the audience awake and interested.

I was asked for the slides to my 6 minutes presentation on Why Community Matters throughout the day, so as promised, here they are. (And thanks to Carsonified for being mad enough to let me loose on stage)

Why Community Matters

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: futureofmobile fom)

In summary, I think we all agreed that we’re looking at a fragmented, young and constantly evolving industry and there’s a whole lot of work to do in order to get to a stage where normobs can really make the most of the technology that’s racing ahead, in terms of accessibility, simplicity, pricing and education. But without a challenge, what fun would it be!?

Some more coverage of the event:

5 responses to “Future of Mobile 2008 Round-up”

  1. […] from the Carsonified team, blogger Vero Pepperrell aka That Canadian Girl (who gave a great talk on community evangelism) and Mark and David from Taptu, a mobile search […]

  2. James Whatley Avatar

    There’s a video of your talk up on Vimeo lass c/o @Reyes 🙂

  3. […] The need for a re-think also echoed through many of the presentations during the Mobile Content conference and the invigorating discussions/exchanges that followed. You could sense this groundswell at Future of Mobile when six social media practitioners/industry bloggers – including Helen Keegan of Beep Marketing, Vero Pepperell of Pepsmedia and James Whately of Whatelydude – took the stage to tell us where mobile has failed and why. (More on Helen’s take here and a worthwhile summary of Vero’s advice to the industry here.) […]

  4. Scott Avatar

    Vero,

    I’m a new reader of your blog. Just got done digging through some of your archives and I really like your focus 🙂 Your presentation is really spot on. It not only applies to blogging, entrepreneurship and business; it also applies to life. What’s even more funny, many of us, including myself, sometimes find ourselves attempting to be more respectful online; however, by focusing on technology, we oftentimes forget about respect in the real world.. E.g. today at Starbucks, I was watching six people standing in line. Every single one of them was on their phone. While they are focusing on technology, they forget the world around them.

    In one sentence: it’s important to not sacrifice your immediate real life community for online community…

    – Scott from http://scottdig.com

  5. […] Canadian Girl, Vero Pepperrell offers a  “Future of Mobile 2008 Round-up”, Vero’s post includes a link to the slides from the presentation she gave at the London event on […]