Yesterday I’ve been invited to a debate organized by the Fundació UPC about “internet in your pocket”. During the debate, Albert Calvet from CV&A Consulting talked about e-learning and its applications to cellphones. Carles Grau from Microsoft talked about the upcoming technology that Microsoft is preparing for new mobile devices, he talked about his Media Center integrated in some versions of Windows Vista, but I became surprised because he did’t talked about Windows Mobile Edition, that has become a winner between Operative Systems for mobile devices, maybe because the concept “PDA” is almost dead? Josep Fígols from Sun was really direct and concise; he said that Java is more alive than ever (making special attention to JME), he introduced the SunSPOT and said that any mobile device oriented applications needs a solid and strong backend (and of course, Java is the right technology to implement it). He also made a reference to the acquisition of MySQL by Sun (while Carles Grau noticed in an interview that Opensource has no sustainable Business Model behind). Xavier Kirchner from Telefonica I+D talked about more generalistic data and showed us why existing internet access from cellphones became a complete failure. I really liked his thought that we must look at cellphones as an interface to interact with social networking applications. I made a fast reference to most new devices (Iphone, Blackberry and Asus Eee PC) that make possible to take advantage from ubiquitous connectivity, but also to new devices that forge the anacronysm of typical input/output interfaces like keyboard/screen. Finally I talked about new network providers like Fon or future MVNO’s. A final reference was to Android and RSS as a upcoming platforms and standards needed to speed-up new applications development.

During the rest of the debate, we discussed about Opensource, about the inexistent initiative from the Y generation (while I was criticizing the University for not stimulating students creativity). Also there was a reference about the need of add semantic information to this huge amount of data that Internet is becoming. It was a really interesting debate that could have been running for hours because of topic’s interest and possibilities. Here you have my slides. I would like also to thank to the Fundació UPC the invite to a high level debate.