Dan Frommer, Contributing Editor, Business Insider (moderator)
Paul Gelbm VP, Mobile Practice Lead, Razorfish
Peter Farago, Chief Marketig Officer, Flurry
Eric Friedman, Director of Business Development, Foursquare
Jake Levine, Managing Director of News.me & Entrepreneur in Residence at Betaworks
Huge opportunities exist for social networks in mobile. While channels like Facebook are seeing a large percentage of their traffic driven by mobile users, this activity is still coming from a small percentage of all mobile users. Gelb believes that mobile is inherently social. After all, the mobile phone is at its root a communications device. Consumption patterns between desktop and mobile social usage vary, as do patterns between smartphone and tablets. Experiences must be tailored for the context of the use of a device or application.
One key difference between the desktop and mobile environment is the use of location data. This creates new opportunities for developers (without the ability to constant track location, for example, Foursquare’s experience as it exists would not be possible), but at the same time it creates new concerns on data and privacy. Similarly, user tracking is very different, as developers and publishers move from cookies to information about a device.
Evolving technologies may not be driving new use cases, but they certainly enable them.. For example, NFC-enabled phones can evolve existing use cases for mobile devices (e.g., Foursquare check-ins) or enable new use cases (e.g., mobile payments). Gelb notes that while early adopters may be bullish towards replacing a wallet with a mobile phone, the general population will have to become comfortable with new technologies in existing use cases before they adopt brand new ones.
