Russell Beattie

Surj Patel and Nat Torkington from O'Reilly have asked me to moderate a panel at next week's Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The topic is Obstacles in the Mobile Platform and they've invited speakers from Sprint, Nextel, Orange and TeleNav to have a roundtable about the subject! It's going to be very, very cool. Here's the description:

The mobile phone is the computer we carry with us everywhere, and it's getting location-aware. Mobile development is beginning to reach the mainstream, but adoption has been slow. What are the obstacles to programming and deploying services, and what will it take for the mobile platform to fulfill its potential? A panel made up from the wireless carriers to hacker developers aim to shed light on mobile phone development.

Now, I'm going to be working with Surj to come up with some good questions for the panel, but do you have any that you think would be great? Please leave me a comment as I'd love to hear about them.

Questions in the forefront of my mind have to do with getting to the realities of cellular-based LBS: schedule availability of services (Sprint), what the uptake is so far for LBS nationally (NexTel) and internationally and what we can learn from that, what are the realities of LBS services (do they really work indoors? Do consumers expect that they do?), what are the opportunities for developers beyond traffic and navigation? What about security: Soccer-moms want to know where their kids are, but want to be guaranteed that noone else knows.

Thoughts? If you're going next week, I'll see you there!

-Russ