July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I started my user experience education in a very different way than most.

Long before smartphones, apps, and mobile advertising, I worked for The Walt Disney Company … but not as a technologist. I was a costumed martial arts performer and my manner of ‘user-engagement’ was as Leonardo – the blue bandana-wearing, katana-wielding, pizza-eating member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – who performed together with his turtle brothers on stage at the Disney MGM Studios in the early 90s.

As strange as it might sound, many of the lessons that I learned about Walt Disney’s philosophy for crafting a deep, engaging guest experience have inspired my core principles around breakthrough mobile user experience.

Now, more than ever, the mobile app landscape is seeing an increased focus on the importance of a deep, engaging user experience.  Not only must the app itself be handcrafted to surprise and delight the user, but integrated advertising units must do the same. Publishers and brands are both starting to appreciate the importance of crafting deep brand experiences, instead of just slapping a banner onto the bottom of the screen.

2012 made a half-step in this direction with the adoption of rich media advertising.  Rich media ad units are still typically screen-edge banners, but they offer more resolution, higher-quality animation, and more varied tap actions.  Although rich media was a much-needed upgrade to previous mobile banners, the next phase will be much more dramatic.

2013 is shaping-up to be the year of native mobile advertising, much to the benefit of publishers, brands, and users.

Native ads are different from conventional ads in three specific ways:

1. They are more organically integrated with the app itself (think beyond the banner)
2. They expose more of the phone’s internal features (photo roll, advanced social media, etc.)
3. They provide for much more engaging ad creatives and branded content

While the shift to create a native ad experience on mobile might seem revolutionary to some in the industry, it’s at the core of what I’ve been working on at Zumobi for years and reflects many of Walt Disney’s principles that I learned from my experiences as a Turtle. With this in mind, here are a few Ninja lessons that I see reflected across the dynamic landscape of mobile advertising and user experience…

We should all strive to surprise, delight and engage our guests

At Disney, you’re not an employee, you’re a Cast Member. You’re not at work, you’re On Stage.

With mobile advertising, we are challenged every day to move beyond the 320 x 50 cage, and truly express a client’s brand in a way that is native to their unique values. While banner advertising is an important aspect of advertising, it is not a style that surprises, delights, and engages the user. Tomorrow’s native app-within-an-app experiences will let users make purchases, share user-generated content photos and media, and engage deeply with social media.

As designers, we should strive to channel Walt’s philosophy to create tomorrow’s breakthrough native mobile experiences.

They can’t see your face; they CAN see your expression

When you’re in costume as a Ninja Turtle, people can’t see your face directly.

However, every emotion, smile, and expression is channeled through the character, and consequently felt by the guests.  I believe that the same metaphor applies to software, apps, and mobile brand experiences. While the user cannot see the designer, they can sense the expression that they wore when they handcrafted a given user experience.

In this way, it is always essential to remember that the passion seeps beyond the confines of an app or campaign, and directly drives engagement.

Zen and the art of mobile advertising

There is a yin and a yang to all things, including mobile advertising.  In the same way that soft-style kung fu blurs the lines between striking and blocking, good native advertising blurs the lines between content and sponsorship.  Have a lifestyle app targeted to mothers? Offer recipe content as part of your campaign. Want to reach potential auto buyers?  Offer compelling automotive content in mobile enthusiast sources.

This is an incredibly exciting time for apps, mobile, and advertising – the most dramatic opportunities are still untapped.

While the last five years has proven to be thrilling in the landscape of mobile, I foresee the next five years to be even more exciting.

John SanGiovanni is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Design at Zumobi where he coordinates the product design strategy and manages Zumobi’s in-house creative studio. A former Microsoft Technical Evangelist, John has more than 13 years of experience as a wireless strategist and mobile user interface designer and has authored or co-authored more than 12 patents in the areas of mobile advertising, hardware interfaces, and interaction techniques for next-generation mobile devices. John recently spoke at the Seattle Interactive Conference where he presented his case for the future of mobile advertising. View his complete session here: or the highlights here

photo credit: Jenn and Tony Bot via photopin cc

This is the time of year when we all look toward the future rather than the past and decide how we want to grow and change in the year to come. Whether you have a formal list of resolutions or just a general taking-stock moment, you probably do have a couple of big goals for 2013.

Me, I’ve decided that in 2013, I want to dress more professionally, write more in-depth long-form pieces, crochet blankets for Project Linus instead of playing Pocket Frogs during my winding-down-before-bed-time, and pray the rosary every day. And I’m counting on a couple of different apps, sites, and services to help me make it happen.

For your own goal-fulfillment needs and wants, here’s a great list of apps, websites, and cool services to help you become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in the new year.

Eating better

Farmigo for better food ingredients

Farmigo is a cool new service that will get local, farm-fresh produce and dairy products to you and a group of your friends and neighbors. Your group has to be at least 30 people strong, so think about pooling together with co-workers, PTA members, or any faith-based community members in your life.

Urban Remedy for juice cleanses

Urban Remedy won’t just cure your New Year’s Day hangover. This juice-as-a-service subscription will keep you healthy, energized, and fit throughout the year, no shopping or chopping required.

Fresh Dish and Hello Fresh for home cooking

Fresh Dish and Hello Fresh both meet the same need: our desire to cook at home and eat with our loved ones. These startups will help you by delivering fresh ingredients and recipes to your door. Each meal takes 30 minutes or less to prepare, plus you don’t have to do all the shopping and prep work.

Better relationships

Pair for your current relationship

Pair is your go-to app for building a stronger, sweeter bond with someone you already love (or double-plus-like). It will help you stay connected by sharing intimate moments and just-between-us messages throughout the day.

Seekly to find new romance

Seekly is a video speed dating app perfect for helping you find someone to spend your time — or even your life — with. Created by two professional, busy women, the site focuses on taking the creepy, time-wasting elements out of online dating.

At the Pool to make new friends

At the Pool isn’t about dating; rather, this startup wants to help the terminally shy among us to get out into the world and make new friends who share some of our interests.

Improving health and fitness

Noom for weight loss coaching

Noom is your personal fitness coach. This app will help you set goals, identify tasks, and track your progress.

Lumoback for better posture

Lumoback‘s premise is simple: We’re happier and healthier when we sit up straight. Its teensy, Band-Aid-like hardware and mobile app will keep your spine straight and better aligned. You mom would’ve loved this about 20 years ago.

Yog for jogging with buddies

Yog connects joggers and runners around the world in real time. Schedule the time and place for your jaunt, and get others to join you virtually. Yog provides audio and visual cues to connect you to your workout partners.

Striiv for step-by-step fitness

Striiv is an iPhone app that gives your fitness plans a big dose of metrics. This social pedometer tracks the steps you take and the calories you burn, then it can sync that data with your Facebook friends and other Striiv users to keep you competitive.

Learning new skills

Treehouse and Codecademy for coding

If you want to learn more about the web in 2013, look no further than Codecademy and Treehouse. Each of these services will teach you how to code. Codecademy does it for free from an interactive text entry box in the browser. Treehouse charges you and gives you a full library of video instruction from top-shelf teachers.

MindSnacks for languages

For learning other kinds of languages, there’s MindSnacks, a startup making iPad games for educational purposes. The bite-sized lessons come in cute packages with real educational value; it’s more than just a brush-up or crash course.

Coursera for college-level learning

Coursera isn’t some skeevy online degree mill. This startup offers “massive open online courses” in partnership with some of the top U.S. universities. You can study genetics with a Duke scientist, data computation from a Johns Hopkins data scientist, or world history from a Princeton professor.

Udemy for your downtime

Got a few minutes to kill? Want to do something more productive than Angry Birds? Try Udemy. Its iPad app will help you turn those few idle moments into learning opportunities.

Fixing your style

Fourth & Grand for gentlemen’s fashion & styling

One of my husband’s resolutions is to dress better in the new year. As a SOMA-dwelling tech founder, he’s surrounded by hoodies and jeans. So how to up the professionalism a notch, especially when styling outfits is a foreign language? Try L.A.-based subscription startup Fourth & Grand. They’ll send outfits and accessories and give you detailed advice on how to wear them.

Le Tote for ladies’ clothes

For the ladies, Le Tote helps you mix it up, sartorially speaking, without adding more clutter to your closet. This “Netflix for clothes” will outfit your new, infinite closet with outfits and accessories. It’s like living with a stylish roommate who has no personal budget and is exactly your size.

Birchbox for shine & polish

If personal grooming is high on your to-do list for 2013, try Birchbox, the startup that sends you sample-size beauty and lifestyle products and tips on how to use them. Gents, they’ve got manly boxes for you, too. You can try everything and buy what really works for you.

Dollar Shave Club for ‘f*cking great’ razors

We San Francisco women know why shaving is a New Year’s resolution-level goal: Between the pervasive chill and the pervasive leggings, we’d never do it if we didn’t force ourselves to. And a shiny, new box of razors from Dollar Shave Club just might be the motivation you need to get the job done.

Productive and professional

Asana and 24me to get things done

If you’re looking forward to a 2013 in which you get things done like a mofo, look to these two apps: Asana, a task-management godsend, and 24me, which will automate your entire life. Both of these apps eliminate work-about-work: meetings to plan meetings, hours spent making to-do lists and checklists. Instead, they help you focus on actually completing tasks and getting on with the fun parts of your life.

LinkedIn to stay connected & informed

LinkedIn had itself a big old redesign orgy this year. The result: An iPad app that’s both beautiful and useful, a suite of mobile apps that will help you stay in-the-know, and a new look and feel for its website that focuses on news in your industry. Spend a few minutes a day with LinkedIn, and you’ll probably look smarter, more connected, and more confident in the workplace.

Nutmeg to spice up your finances

Nutmeg is a simple solution for getting your financial life on track. This app will help you build and manage your personal investment portfolio, all while keeping your personal and financial goals in focus.

Pathbrite to kickstart your new career

Is 2013 the year you finally land your dream job? If a change would do you good, check out Pathbrite, which switches out your boring old resume for an interactive portfolio of your accomplishments. Show off a lifetime of education, special projects, promotions, and advances in a gorgeous micro-website you can show your potential employers.

Image credits: All via Flickr, creepyed, Edsel L, Shutter Daddy, kharied, besighyawn, evocateur, kristaguenin

Additional reporting by Christina Farr.

Washington state is the toughest recruiting market for companies looking for agile developers, according to staffing and recruiting agency Yoh … which makes it the best place to be looking for a job. California is not far behind, with San Francisco being the city with the highest ration of open jobs to job-seekers in the agile market.

Yoh and jobs site CareerBuilder say that the imbalance is resulting in impressive earning opportunities for Java developers, web developers, project managers, business analysts, and .Net developers. Agile developers are getting average salaries of $110,781 — and a 90th percentile salary in the $160,000 to 170,000 range — as startups, development shops, and established enterprises such as Microsoft, IBM, and Northrop Grumman compete for scarce talent.

The states with the most demand include:

• Washington
• Oregon
• California
• Utah
• Minnesota
• New York
• Massachusetts

The cities with the most talent, however, have only a partial overlap — which means that developers who are willing to move could see impressive income gains.

• San Jose
• Chicago
• New York
• Houston
• Atlanta
• Austin
• Dallas

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: Tess Aquarium via photopin cc

The infographic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on work by Yoh at www.agiletalentstudy.com.

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This guest post was written by oDesk CEO Gary Swart.

Next year we may not be commuting to work in flying cars yet, but it won’t really matter—many of us won’t be commuting to work at all. It’s no secret that telecommuting, flexible work arrangements, distributed teams and even entirely virtual companies have exploded over the past few years. We’re bringing the work to the workers, reversing the almost antiquated model of bringing workers to the work. And in doing so, the way we work is changing rapidly, with everything from organizational structures and team workflows to career paths and education undergoing radical shifts.

Here are four trends I believe we’ll see in 2013:

Specialists will dominate the job market

In the past, being highly specialized in one thing wasn’t usually viable; there just wasn’t enough volume to support it. Today, the Internet is cracking open the potential market available to specialists, creating a long tail of opportunity that not only supports them but seeks them out. Just as Amazon.com created a market for lesser-known books, online workplaces are doing the same for specific experts not commonly available in many local markets.For example, Toronto entrepreneur Sima Gandhi needed a Portuguese translator this year to help with business she was doing in Angola. While finding such a specific and somewhat rare skill was challenging locally, she was able to find a translator online who actually lives in Portugal. The working relationship has already lasted for half a year, and is a win for Sima—who found her specialized worker—as well as for her contractor, who is now a resource for someone halfway around the world.

In 2013, deeper focus will be considered basic career guidance, especially as higher demand for specialization leads to higher compensation.

Custom catered education

To support this career specialization, education will become more customized as well—it will be broken down into smaller, more focused units of learning. We’ve already witnessed the rise of online coursework (as seen in Coursera and Khan Academy), and 2013 will see the emergence of extremely short-term online courses and trainings in very specific skill sets (such as through Lynda.com and Code Academy). This shift towards modular, highly personalized education will enable professionals to learn the specialized skills they’ll need to be competitive and keep pace with the rapidly changing skills landscape.

Big use of big data powering agile staffing

To stay competitive, businesses are moving faster than ever, and creating flexible teams that they can adapt as dynamics change. However, this “need for speed” has to be balanced with process analysis if a business is going to be both fast and successful. Businesses that are using big data to streamline their processes will start applying this analysis to hiring and managing. In 2013, analytics-driven HR will become an important way for companies to gauge the effectiveness of things like team structure, individual progress, collaboration tools, workflows and decision-making processes, and working relationships between team members. Examining data on team interactions and outcomes will help teams keep moving in the right direction even while sprinting.

A new disruptive skill will emerge

If next year will be the year of specialization, what will be the next big skill to specialize in? It likely doesn’t exist yet. Look at mobile apps, for example, and you can see how quickly high-demand skills take off. I work for online workplace oDesk, and while in Q3 2008, businesses spent $62,500 on mobile app development through the site; in Q3 2012, they spent $6.3 million, and that’s still growing at a rate of 133 percent year-over-year.

Interestingly enough, two of the biggest growth skills we’re seeing on oDesk right now are HR (at 272 percent growth this year) and statistical analysis (at 190 percent growth this year), already bearing out the trend towards analytics-driven hiring and managing. In fact, we’ve even seen job posts in those categories that are as granular as a “LinkedIn Specialist” or “Yelp Researcher & Analyst.”Career success today is about watching skills as they emerge, customizing your education, and not being afraid to dive into that niche specialty you’ve always been interested in — it could be the big skill of tomorrow.

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos via photopin cc

The question is simple: Does Apple want to win, or does Apple want to be niche?

Apple’s modus operandi has been to make a limited set of very few products. It chooses those products with almost unbelievable selectivity and with extreme care and attention to detail. This has been a winning strategy for taking Apple to the top. Following this approach has made it the biggest company in the world by market capitalization as well as by the biggest profits.

But staying at the top requires a different set of strategies … which is one reason, perhaps, why Apple stock has fallen 20 percent since September of this year as Android has captured massive market share. And why analysts like Gene Munster are calling for an inexpensive $200 iPhone.

Or, perhaps, even cheaper:

“We imagine an iPhone at a low price point to capture the initial smartphone purchase from customers upgrading from feature phones,” analyst Ben A. Reitzes said recently in a research note for investors. “We believe Apple can sell a phone … below $150.”

The tip of the spear

The reality is that Apple has, to a large degree, been the spear-tip of innovation in the computer and electronics industry. The mouse, the graphical user interface, the touch interface, the touchscreen smartphone, the tablet, the immersive, unified, and elegant operating system … these are all innovations that Apple brought successfully to market when others had failed to do so before.

And all of these innovations have been rewarded by sales, market presence, and profits.

But a market-opening strategy — simple, minimal — tends to not work as markets mature and require products that spread out to fill available niches in the new ecosystem. That is precisely what Apple saw, to its pain, in the personal computing industry of the ’80s and ’90s.

Part of the challenge is that as disruptive innovations penetrate a market, the competition becomes less between “amazing vs. awful” and more between “amazing and really, really good.” Or also amazing, but in a different way.

Mac OS was crazy better than Windows 3.1. It was still better than Windows 95, but the gap was not quite so wide — and plenty of people might legitimately disagree with that statement. Even more so about Windows XP, and, by the time Apple and Microsoft had moved on to OS X and Windows 7, the gap in quality, usability, and elegance was even smaller.

(Yeah, I’m a 25-year Mac guy, so I still think it’s a big difference, but that’s a biased and a history-influenced opinion. Objectively, the gap is much smaller than it was.)

History repeats itself

Clearly, you can see a parallel in the mobile-operating system world.

In 2007, the iPhone broke our brains. It was so new, so different, so amazing, so incredible, that it seemed like an alien artifact from a technologically superior civilization. It was so much better than Windows Mobile or BlackBerry or Nokia or feature phones that it created its own market space. It invented its own niche.

In 2012, the difference between the iPhone and its competitors is much smaller.

Yes, the iPhone is smoother, cleaner, and has a more elegantly integrated ecosystem of content, operating system, apps, glass, silicon, and accessories. But it’s an incremental advantage over Android. And, again, many would find that statement controversial or just plain wrong, saying that Android  is better than iPhone because of its freedom, openness, capability, and device diversity.

And the reality in the market is that Android is winning. With 75 percent market share in smartphones and rapidly rising market share in tablets, Android seems to be an unstoppable force. Reasons abound for this, including the fact that it’s free for carriers, that carriers can load it up with their own proprietary crapware, that it supports a vast array of devices, and that it presents a way for manufacturers to fight the Apple juggernaut.

Plus, Apple’s core fans are often also Google users, sucking them toward Android devices because it all just works together (where have we heard that before?).

But Android is also pretty bloody good, especially in the last few iterations. It now has a massive app ecosystem, and it benefits from Google’s suite of web-centric services, which is slowly but surely getting more tightly integrated with each other and with mobile devices. And with the latest versions, Android is even looking pretty well designed, too.

Apple: the thin red band

Developer and entrepreneur Tom Dale puts the core challenge this way: “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.”

I agree with that, and the reality is that cloud-connected services are really the most important thing for our smartphones to do. We don’t carry a piece of glass and plastic and silicon so we can stay in the little box: We want to get into the big wide world of the Internet.

The problem for Apple, if the current sales and market trends continue, is that iOS will get less and less important, relatively speaking. And those massive profits will start to wither away, start to follow the leaders — the new leaders — and we’ll be back to the ’90s.

But there is another way.

More products, more price points, more aggressive pricing?

Steve Jobs was never afraid of changing his mind, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview. And Jobs was never afraid to make himself obsolete, replacing the best-selling iPod Mini with the new iPod nano in 2005.

I think that if Apple wants to continue to be the leader — or, should I say, recapture the title — it will need to do something crazy. Something against its current corporate DNA. Something that it has never done in the past.

And that’s coming out with more products at more price points with more aggressive pricing. (It’s heresy, I know.)

Apple analyst Patrick Moorhead agrees, saying that “Apple has done pretty well with its ‘one size fits all’ approach. It won’t be enough in the future to keep a commanding presence like they have today in phones.”

Here’s the reality: Not everyone wants the same size phone. Not everyone wants white or black. Not everyone can afford a top-end phone. And those who want something different don’t necessarily want to have to settle for last year’s model to get it.

It’s not just about us

That’s true in rich North America and western Europe. Those markets, while they are wealthy, provide great margins for electronics companies, and are easy to focus one because, frankly, we live here. But they are not the ones to look at for growth, because our markets are saturated. Seventy-five percent of all new mobile phone subscriptions on the planet in the third quarter of 2012 were in Asia and Africa, according to a massive Ericsson study.

And guess what: The 3 billion people who don’t yet have mobile phones at all, mostly in India, China, and Africa, are not going to be buying iPhone 5s, or 6s, or 7s when they their first mobile device. They’ll be buying a feature phone, or more likely in the next few years, a cheap Android phone.

So what, you might say, there are no profits there — just look at Nokia, which still sells a ton of feature phones but can’t make money at it, having to hock its own building just this month. That’s true today. But consumers in developing nations who are poor today may not be poor in the future. Chinese middle class, anyone?

Trends like this have contributed to people like Jay Yarow saying that “Tim Cook has to be worried that his company has become a niche player in the biggest global computing market” and economist Jack Bass reminding us that market share matters and that Apple should make changes to its product and pricing strategy.

Market share does matter

Market share does matter, because ecosystem health — diversity of apps, availability of content, compatibility of services, and more — depends on it. Without market share, a platform loses developer share, and a virtuous circle turns vicious.

That’s true even though Apple continues to grow. The problem is that Android is simply growing much faster.

Which is why analysts like Moorhead are saying that Apple needs “features like larger screens, NFC, enhanced security, and even pen support,” because they are attractive to buyers. And if market share is important to Apple, “they will need to more greatly diversify their iPhone portfolio to attract more kinds of consumers and businesses.”

That’s antithetical to the 1984-ish Macintosh-announcing ad’s “garden of pure ideology” that some feel Apple has now come to embody. It’s antithetical to what Tim Cook has stated very very recently: doing a few things very, very well.

Frankly, it’s not what I expect Apple will do, because I think Apple likes making just a few amazing, excellent, exclusive products. But I think that for the company to get back on top, it must do something crazy. Without a change, those market-leading profits will slow and eventually begin to contract. Apple’s market-leading ecosystem will cede leadership to Google and Android. So even if Apple’s mission in life is defined by creating just a few iconic products, the company might want to remember the lesson of the ’90s and start to change its tune.

The events of the past weeks, in which Apple stock lost $35 billion, then $19 billion, and then dropped below $500 for the first time since February might make this a little less crazy than it sounds.

photo credit: Nina Matthews Photography via photopin cc, shaniber via photopin cc, Yutaka Tsutano via photopin cc, sg_1969 via photopin cc, JD Hancock via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Jonathan Gardner is the global director of communications at Vibrant Media, with more than 15 years’ experience in the US and throughout Asia.

As 2012 comes to a close, we bid farewell to one “year of mobile” and get ready to embark on another. The industry keeps saying this will be the year, and then it isn’t. What gives?

It’s not that mobile’s slowing down — far from it. Consumers are spending more time on their mobile devices than ever before. They’re also spending more money. And ad spending is, appropriately, on the dramatic rise: Recent data from PWC and the IAB showed that mobile ad spend in the U.S. nearly doubled in the first half of 2012 to $1.2 billion. Despite these remarkable gains, however, mobile spending still represents just a fraction of ad spending overall.

As much as I’d like to say I find this these figures surprising, I don’t. Like lots of other industry-obsessives, I’ve been saying for a while that mobile will define our future. And I still think it will. My company, Vibrant Media, recently introduced its first “mobile-first” product, and we’re one of many heading in that direction. But for mobile to get to the next level, and for it to truly come first — for brands, consumers, and publishers — we need to see the existing mobile “divergence” transformed into mobile convergence.

The first step is to collectively to figure out what mobile can really deliver for brands. According to Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group, many brands still just don’t see a compelling rationale for mobile. “Strategic questions abound,” Lieb says. “At present, mobile is likely a stronger channel for earned and owned media than for paid for most brands.”

As I see it, at the moment “mobile” still means too many things to too many people. There’s a serious disconnect among the mobile-related needs and objectives of three key groups in the mobile landscape: brands, consumers, and publishers. This is the mobile divergence I’m talking about. As I wrote in greater detail on Medium, consumers want free content and utility to suit their device; brands are all about targeting and engagement; and publishers keep training their focus on revenue.

Of course, earned and owned media can deliver engagement. Look at the explosion of sponsored content we’re seeing lately, or the handful of smart, targeted local apps you rely on to find ATMs and gas stations. And for publishers, mobile has been shown to support – if not generate – meaningful revenue.

Tablets are hitting critical mass too, and they represent a potential-charged platform for marketers and publishers. Industry analyst Ken Doctor tells me he sees tablet ad sales pulling ahead of smartphone ad sales, even as minutes spent on tablets still lag. Tablets will likely stay in the lead as more exciting canvases for brand advertising, including the two “hyper-growth categories” (in Doctor’s words) of sponsored content and video.

Finally, we need to stop thinking of mobile as world unto itself. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. As Lieb reminded me, mobile is just another platform, facing the very same questions and challenges as TV, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers have done at various stages of their development. The sooner we recognize this – and the sooner we can bring what we’ve learned in other realms to the world of mobile – then the better our mobile ads will be, and the more we’ll be able to deliver for everyone involved.

These are the essential points of “convergence” for the industry’s mobile stakeholders: sponsored content creation, tablet-first design and development, and cross-platform thinking. Focusing on these will deliver the engagement brands crave, the service consumers deserve, and the revenue publishers need. And maybe – just maybe – they’ll make 2013 the true year of mobile.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dave Wright is the founder and CEO of SolidFire.

The initial rush to the cloud has been led by businesses moving data for backup and archival purposes and for less mission-critical use cases such as testing, development, and web hosting. This mirrors the early days of server virtualization where test/dev was the predominant early use case. As virtualization technology matured, security, performance, and availability concerns were addressed and server virtualization reached into production environments.

Heading into 2013 and beyond, the evolution of cloud computing will likely take a similar path. Using the cloud as a “cheap and deep” repository to host data is now well established. More than 1 trillion objects stored in Amazon Web Services’ S3 object storage should serve as sufficient evidence. What is exciting is that we are only scratching the surface of the cloud opportunity.

From an enterprise perspective, the public cloud is an extension (albeit sometimes rogue in its current form) to traditional on-premise IT resources such as compute and storage. While accounting for only a small percentage of IT operations today, there is little debate that a significant percentage of incremental workloads are being executed in the cloud.

For the cloud market to realize its full potential requires a continued push into the business and mission-critical application workloads that remain mostly on premise today. If Cloud 1.0 is about hosting business data in the cloud, Cloud 2.0 will be defined by the move to host production applications in the cloud. But where does the burden lie to drive this shift?

There are two constituencies that bear the responsibility of pushing this movement forward: the service providers that build and run clouds, and the technology vendors crafting the key infrastructure building blocks. Many players are vying for market leadership within each segment. Service providers going after this opportunity span everyone from basic web hosters, managed/dedicated hosting providers, co-location providers, telcos/operators, data center outsourcers, and IaaS pure-plays. Heck, even online bookstores and search engines are already part of the game.

The magnitude of the opportunity at stake in the cloud is also driving a massive innovation cycle from start-ups in the infrastructure vendor community. Without the right tools for the job, service providers will fail to drive the economics, performance, security, and reliability necessary to realize the full potential of the cloud. Legacy systems and software were not designed with this job in mind, and few service providers have the engineering resources to build the infrastructure themselves. Cloud infrastructure presents a whole different set of operating constraints that were not a consideration when most legacy vendors were crafting their wares. The scale, quality-of-service, automation and efficiency demanded from a cloud environment are unlike anything we have seen from traditional enterprise IT environments.

One area where innovation is occurring in cloud infrastructure is high-performance storage. Unlike compute, where wide ranges of price and performance options are available, cost-effective storage with predictable performance is not readily available in the cloud today. Attacking this problem is central to driving more and more applications to the cloud.

A key enabler of this innovation is solid-state storage and the dramatic price/performance advantage of flash over spinning disk. Applied to traditional IT cost centers, this technology is interesting, but when applied to profit-driven cloud services it is game-changing. Amazon’s Provisioned IOPS, launched earlier this year, is an early example of this extended innovation sequence where component level technologies, enable new architectures that drive new services. The combination of infrastructure innovations (flash) and the execution environment shift (cloud) are feeding on each other to enable a new opportunity for enterprise CIOs: run business-critical applications in the cloud with confidence.

So where do we go from here? Heading into 2013, the burden of proof is squarely on vendors and cloud service providers to deliver evolutionary new products and services. These innovations will drive the performance and economics required to extend the public cloud to an even wider range of workloads. If all goes well, 2013 will be the year that the industry comes together to move beyond “cheap and deep” and really start advancing the way the world uses the cloud.

Dave Wright helped start GameSpy Industries in 2008, and he led the team that created a backend infrastructure for millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004. Dave served as Chief Architect for IGN and lead technology integration with FIM/MySpace after IGN was acquired by News Corp in 2005. In 2007, Dave founded Jungle Disk, a pioneer in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses. Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace in 2008, and Dave worked closely with the Rackspace Cloud division. In late 2009, Dave left Rackspace to start SolidFire.

Dusting photo via Richard Harrison/Flickr