Just back from Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley, and here is a short write up of the event. Of course you can also read the Twitter stream here. It is the second year that I have had the pleasure of representing O2 Litmus in San Francisco. It really is a unique event in the calendar. It's run by the community for the community. It's large enough to meet a variety of really interesting and influential people, but small enough to be personal and interactive. Unlike so many events where presenters and panelists speak and run, at Mobile 2.0 they hang around to speak, listen and network. The business day opened up with a keynote from Intel's Pankaj Kedia. Pankaj's opening video "what is cool?" is shown below. Highlights of Pankaj's talk were Internet is going mobile. Every mobile device becomes a mobile computer. Computers become truly personal presenting multiple ecosystem opportunities. Some interesting stats were provided:

• 2 billion photo's are uploaded to Facebook every month
• 1 billion Google searches per month
• 22 billion videos uploaded to YouTube per month
• 210 billion emails sent per month

Pankaj also covered Moblin, a new mobile O/S from the Linux foundation: Next up was the first panel of the day, “Developers, Mobile Ecosystem Development & Third Party Services & Applications” the moderator was Gregory Gorman, Tertius Advisory Services.

• Mitch Oliver, Vice President, Ecosystem Development, Qualcomm
• Terrence Barr, Senior Technologist & Ambassador, Sun Microsystems
• James Parton, Head of O2 Litmus, O2 UK
• Oliver Gunasekera, Global Alliances Director, Symbian Foundation
• Patrick Mork, Vice President, Marketing, GetJar

A short clip from the panel is below. Later this week I'll post my thoughts around the subject of what a mobile operator can bring to the mobile developer ecosystem which we discussed on the panel. James Parton at Mobile 2.0 SF from O2 Litmus on Vimeo. My personal favorite part of the day is always the VC panel, this year being no exception.

• Tim Chang, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners
• Michel Wendell, General Partner, Nexit Ventures
• Greg Franklin, Principal, IntellectPartners
• Frederic Veyssiere, General Partner, North America, Innovacom

Some observations from the panel...

• "mobile apps could be interesting lifestyle apps but not VC fundable companies" Could not disagree more
• Greg Franklin tip to get VC backing - you need to have strategic partnerships into the value chain somewhere
• Frederic Veyssiere tip to get VC backing - you need 80% of your team in place
• Anything to deliver better health care at lower cost will get the attention of the VCs
• Frederic Veyssiere - the healthcare ecosystem is very complex, which is a challenge for mobile ventures to crack
• Frederic Veyssiere - telecare apps as example of viable services for 'seniors'
• Tim Chang - daily active usage (DAU) is the key metric in 2010 - in-app charging and micro-transactions are key models
• Michel Wendell - avoid corporate investors at round A funding because they will want to heavily influence the company direction
• Frederic Veyssiere - trend is towards mobile corporate investment to take lead positions in early stage funding rounds
• Tim Chang - bring game mechanics to real world activities for mobile app success.
• Tim Chang - take gaming mechanics and apply to other markets – e.g. gaming + LBS (Foursquare), gaming + healthcare, gaming + music (e.g. Guitar Hero)

On Day 2 of the conference we moved to Microsoft's facilities in Mountain View for a developer oriented day of debating technology and the challenges / opportunities of mobile. Paul Golding represented O2 Litmus on the first panel of the day "Evolution of the Web on Mobile Devices" Be sure to read Paul's thoughts on his Mobile 2.0 Blog post here. All in all, two great days of mobile business and technology, wrapped around excellent networking.