On Thursday, dozens of innovators crowded into a side room of the Westin Waterfront at BostInno’s State of Innovation Forum to hear local leaders speak their mind on one subject: The future of mobile.
Moderated by BetaBoston’s Scott Kirsner, the panel was stacked with local industry leaders including Adelphic founder Jennifer Lum, Intrepid Labs founder Mark Kasdorf, Cantina President Alec Francesconi, and Localytics Co-founder and COO Brian Suthoff. Throughout the course of the panel, speakers weighed on questions pertaining to everything from Apple’s mobile marketshare to the mirth of anonymous and disappearing messaging apps to the definition of mobile itself.
“Market share of iOS has been declining for a long time … and it’s going to shrink a little bit more yet,” said Kasdorf to the crowd. Lum countered, however, that rather than one leader in the mobile space, there will be a multitude of companies cropping up around the world and and furthering its development.
Among the features in mobile that have room to grow are voice and physical movement, added the Adelphic founder. “Audio and gestures are underused in mobile,” posited Lum.
One thing the panel did agree on unanimously, however, was that the time for mobile is now. “We’re not in a bubble, this is just the beginning,” shared Kasdorf.
Suthoff agreed, basing his opinion of his personal experience founding mobile marketing and analytics startup Localytics. “We always said that next year would be the year of mobile, but now it’s finally happened,” he said.
Wearables and anonymous messaging apps were particularly controversial subjects of conversation, both within the panel and the audience.
One attendee offered the opinion that before wearable technology becomes commonplace, its makers must tackle both the obstacle of fashion-friendliness and chargeability, claiming that when consumers don’t have to worry about juicing up their smartwatch is when they’ll really start catching on.
And perhaps it will, in the end, be Apple to take on that challenge. “No one has built a smartwatch that’s useful … but Apple might be able to nail it,” admitted Kasdorf.
On the subject of disappearing and anonymous messaging apps, such as Snapchat and Secret, Lum stood firm in her dismissal of their value for the community at large. Said the serial entrepreneur, “I just don’t see anonymous messaging apps creating a positive outcome … I’m not a fan.”
But, if Apple’s recently announced iOS 8 iMessage update tells us anything, it’s that the feature seems to be sticking around. “Anonymous and disappearing messaging apps are leading to this decay of content, and iMessage is moving this direction,” explained Francesconi.
Kasdorf was quick to counter, however: “You’re just not going to see billion dollar exits.”
And it’s important to keep in mind that, in five years, we might not be referring to the panel’s subject matter as “mobile” at all.
“I definitely think we need to start splitting up mobile from wearables, from the Internet of Things,” added Kasdorf. “Mobile is the thing in your pocket.”
Lum, however, offered up a more philosophical notion of the genre. Said the entrepreneur in closing:
You can think of mobile as a set of behaviors, someone on the go someone in transit. I think those behaviors will continue to be very independent.
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