Live From New York, It's The Mobile Business Expo @ Interop!

Hello from Gotham City!  Yesterday was the opening day of the Mobile Business Expo at Interop.  The show has a really strong attendance so far, which is a great sign, particularly given the complete meltdown of the financial markets just a couple of miles away from where I am writing this post.

Yesterday, I sat on the opening panel called Wireless: So Much to Do that covered key issues in enterprise mobility and also moderated a panel on mobile browsers.

The panel I moderated had a great set of thought leaders in the space of mobile browsers:

• Chris Blizzard - Mobile Evangelist at Mozilla, makers of Firefox
• Anna Chagnon - President and CEO of Bitstream, makers of the ThunderHawk Browser 
• Kiyo Oishi - COO of ACCESS Systems Americas, makers of the NetFront Browser 
• Tatsuki Tomita - SVP of Consumer Products at Opera Software, makers of Opera Mobile

We covered some really interesting topics, including:

• To what extent should carriers dictate technology roadmaps?
• Where should the processing and rendering occur?
• The role of the browser: Browsing versus Services?
• What lessons are there to learn from the desktop browser wars?
• Widgets? AIR? Silverlight?
• What else is needed to make sites mobile friendly?
• Is it still fair to call it a “micro” browser?
• What about the physical limitation of screen size on mobile devices?
• What sorts of HW innovation do mobile browsers need?
• What are the three things that a content developer should watch out for?

It was a great discussion where the panelists were able to share their views on what the market needs and where it's headed.  All were in agreement that the mobile Internet is game changing for (mobile) technology vendors, carriers, general business, and most importantly - the consumer.