So be it! If you want to find out more about these topics and others vitally important to the future of the mobile and Web industries, come join me in Barcelona on June 18^th and 19^th for Mobile 2.0 Europe. Day one will be a developer day featuring presentations, tutorials (and unstructured sessions) on key software technologies and innovations in the mobile and mobile Web space and day two will be more strategic, focusing on disruptive innovation in the mobile space and featuring startups and innovators from across the spectrum. It’s going to be an exciting two days.

The event will be held on November 3rd and will once again be taking place at the Grand Hyatt off of San Francisco’s Union Square.

This year we have some really fantastic speakers and panelists and we’re also trying something slightly different: running a “builder track” in the afternoon, along-side our regular track, that will focus on hands-on mobile development, user experience and design. That track will feature mini-tutorial sessions on topics such as Gears Mobile, Nokia Web Runtime, Yahoo! blueprint, iPhone web development and mobile user experience and design topics (with a focus on case studies). This is all in line with my view that when it comes to mobile innovation, it is time to stop talking about it and start doing it.

Registration is now open, so reserve your seat today by visiting http://mobile2event.com. Full program will also be posted soon.

On the next day, November 4th, against the back-drop of the U.S. election, I’ll be helping to run a bar-camp type event focusing on how mobile technology is being used as a lever of social change. This is a topic that I’ve been working at the fringes of for some time. I’m very privileged to be working with the folks at MobileActive.org (who will be fresh from running their own event in South Africa). If you’re interesting in helping out with this event or participating, get in touch with me here and add your name to the event wiki.

As for the Web 2.0 conference which is just closing down today, it has been a mixed bag, but on balance I actually think it was better than last year. Lots of the conference has been focusing on APIs and the whole “Web as a platform” concept, which I think is a key area of innovation in the Web. We’re already seeing how efforts like Amazon Web Services and Facebook’s APIs are creating waves of innovation and that’s only accelerating.

I found Facebook’s announcement on allowing users to export their data particularly interesting. Openness like this will be the trend for social networks moving forward and Facebook has clearly decided to be a part of this disruption. Devil is in the details, of course.

Of course, the mobile content at the summit has been very superficial and disappointing. The panel on mobile social media could have been interesting but it was a little too much Nokia-focused (how could it not be as it was sponsored and organized by Nokia and featured Anssi as a panelist). It still could have been interesting but the panelists had to spend too much time explaining the mobile social space so we couldn’t really get into the meaty issues.

Another low-light was the “conversation” about the 700mhz auction between Verizon Wireless (Thomas J. Tauke) and Google (Ram Shriram). Martin Varsavsky from FON was incongruously placed into this conversation as well but really this was an argument between Google and Verizon. (As a sidebar, what FON is doing is really really cool, and I am especially excited about their partnership with BT, which Martin unfortunately was not able to get into in any detail.) The problem with the 700mhz discussion is that Google is trying to frame this as them championing the little guy (“no blocks, no locks” is their mantra) and Verizon is trying to frame the discussion as their crusade against government intervention and regulation. This might seem like a big story in the States but from an international perspective, I am scratching my head a bit. I don’t think the spectrum auction has anything to do with open access (which is an inevitable trend). The whole thing seems to be about control and money — it’s a crass power-play by Google into the carrier space. Which is cool, but call a spade a spade.

Anyway, I’m now sitting in probably the most interesting session of the event, stuck in at the tail end named “The Semantic Edge.” (Presumably Tim O’Reilly couldn’t stand to name it “Semantic Web” which is what it’s about). What’s exciting about this panel is that we are hearing about cool new technology available now that is leveraging the semantic Web. Twine is a semantic application just coming out of stealth that ties together information from other sites and social networks. Very cool. Freebase (interesting choice of names) provides a semantic search which can provide impressively deep information using a combination of natural language processing and semantics. This is easily the most interesting stuff that’s been presented at Web 2.0. Taptu (who came out of stealth at Mobile 2.0 on monday) should be up there as well as they are actually using some of the same technologies to enable a remarkably better mobile search experience.

Another side-bar: it’s very good to hear people talking about the importance of W3C semantic Web standards as an interoperable glue between these semantic platforms.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/17/mobile_2_zero_event/

http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/11/mobile20_great.html

http://jlarienza.blogspot.com/2006/11/mobile-20-san-francisco.html (in Spanish)

http://gigaom.com/2006/11/07/mobile-20/

I was particularly impressed with the coverage in the Register. They never print anything positive about anything, so we must have done something right. If you attended the event and you wrote about it on your blog or took pictures, please leave a comment or trackback on the mobile2.0 event blog, here.