Matthew Haughey from Metafilter was next up. All in all not a terribly inspiring speech from a man who is obviously happier in front of some code than presenting. Nothing hugely new here – three messages which have been given by others earlier in the day:
– “be a third place”: people have work, home and the place they go to hang out. If you can be that place, as Facebook is to many, then you’re on to a winner
– “eat your own dogfood”: live and breathe your app; respond to a pinch point in your life or work and build something YOU would use
– “allow unintended uses – build out based on the edges”: watch people using your app or community in different ways and capitalise on this.
Next was Heidi Pollock who gave some interesting insights into mobile app development. In no particular order:
– africa as growth market: ppl using mobile to access the web because they don’t have a PC, not because choose to
– screen size standard 176px, and stick to a 10k download limit. Some phones down to 128px. Motorola V3 is 30chrs x 8 lines…
– more than 3000 phones types, often with browsers unique to each type
Interesting that there are no H or LI tags in xhtml mobile 1, and that B tags are used instead of STRONG (B is shorter, so less bytes!). Ultimately this all means that the Semantic Web is left behind on mobile devices…