Oscar Wilde

A couple years ago, when I was invited to speak at Nokia OpenLab, I met a guy named Jari Pasanen. He was a VP at Nokia and he delivered the opening keynote.

Less than a minute into his keynote, he expressed his gratitude to Nokia for letting him be himself and still climb the ladder. Jari looked more like a Viking Biker (a Viker) than a shot-caller at some multinational. He stood at least 6’2″, had a shaved head, and wore earrings and black motorcycle boots.

I’ve been similarly blessed. But it hasn’t been because of any one company. Rather, it’s been the whole f*cking internet.

Over the last decade, I’ve become an expert of sorts at how some things work on the web. And that means that I’ve been able to help other people make sense of something very big, powerful and complex.

The result is that I’ve been able to make a good living being myself. I make decent money wearing jeans and sneakers, and helping older, richer, more powerful guys figure out how their businesses should use the web.

I’ve gotten to travel to a lot of cool places and meet a lot of cool people and even made a bit of a name for myself. Sometimes, when I roll into a conference, the bitches be all like “OMG, CT Moore! Ooh, I want to have your baby, CT!”

Okay, well, not exactly. But from time to time, I do get some recognition from complete strangers, and that feels kinda nice.

Pai Mei

The point is that what it means to be an expert is changing because we live in a world where technology moves so fast that most of it becomes obsolete before anyone can really master it.

Experts use to be people that mastered using certain tools toward a certain end. Now, experts are people that have a lot of experience trying new tools and finding new ways to achieve the same old goals.

Yesterday was fire, today was electricity, and tomorrow will be cold-fusion. There’s not enough time to spend mastering any of them, but that doesn’t really matter as long as we can light and warm our homes.

Just look at the world around you! Look at the things you do and how much they’ve changed in recent years.

Did you ever think that so many tools would seem so primitive (pagers, flip phones, cash)? Did you ever imagine that you’d be doing things this way? Can you imagine how you might be doing them tomorrow?

This is a clip of Nokia’s Brett Murray (from their Technology Inside Promotions Team) talking about Indoor Positioning, which is a technology that picks up where GPS lets off: indoors. It can be used to both better target mobile users with relevant advertising, as well as help those users figure out where they are within larger complexes such as offices, malls, stadiums, or even urban cores. More importantly, however, all the indoor positioning services offered by Nokia are opt-in sytstems: through Nokia’s “privacy-by-desing,” users can decide just how much of their personal information they are willing to share with a larger, mobile network.

iPhone Version

A few months back, I was thinking about how mobile communities would bridge the divide between physical spaces and digital networks. Coming from a humble video bloggers such as myself, that kind of preaching might have come off as, well, a little preachy. So recently, I elaborated on the thought:

Through technologies such as GPS, NFC, and LBS, the mobile web will close the gap between online/digital and physical interaction, merging digital experiences with physical spaces and experiences. In fact, Web 3.0 may not be the semantic web, but a mobile one that’s part physical and part digital.

Granted, I still sound a little drunk off of the mobile kook-aid, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Nokia recently launched the Ideas Project, an online space where we can all “interact with thought leaders and their ideas related to the future of connected communications.” This following video features Ari Jaaksi, a Nokia Open Software Expert, talking about how mobile technologies are going to help the internet and the real world become the same space (Hat tip Glenn Letham).

Ever since Nokia invited me to Helsinki for Open Lab 2008, the mobile web has figured big in my mind. Since then, my mobile coverage has popped up all over the world wide interwebs, and varied from the theoretical to tangible.

But for those of you who don’t spend as much time obsessing about mobile tech, I’ve put together a list of 5 posts to help you get your bearings on both where the mobile web is, and where it’s probably headed. They’re from a variety of places that I blog, and feature text and both original and syndicated video. Enjoy…

• Mobile Communities: Web 3.0 – Social media might have changed the way people interacted online, but the mobile web is going to change how people interact offline, as well.
• Social Mobile Gaming – In the video interview, Akoha founder Austin Hill discusses how Akoha works, and in doing so, illustrates just how the mobile web is going to change the way people interact both online and off.
• Mobile: The Future of Ecommerce – Guess what. The mobile web is going to be for a lot more than just play. It won’t only make money, it’ll move it around, and in this interview, Nokia’s Jeremy Belostock explains how NFC will be used to do that (if you don’t know what NFC is, watch this first).
• Mobile Gaming to Grow Despite Recession – In a nutshell, because mobile services are still approaching critical mass, these sectors will probably continue to show notable growth rates despite the current state of the economy.
• Nokia is Crowd Sourcing Traffic Reports – That NFC technology I just mentioned, well it can be used for a whole lot more than ecommerce, and one of those things is generating traffic reports by aggregating the physical movements of every device and determining where everyone is and how fast they are moving. Big Brother much?