The 3GSM Congress 2007 is over but the year continues to provide interesting meeting and discussion opportunities in real life for people working in the mobile industry. London is not only attractive for it’s monthly Mobile Monday gatherings but also for Symbian’s Smartphone Show and the Mobile User Experience Conference (MEX) which will take place on the 2nd and 3rd of May at the Wallacespace near Covent Garden.
It seems this conference is different for a number of reasons. Firstly, the conference has a 10 point ‘manifesto’ which deals with the current state of the mobile user experience and how the organizers around Marek Pawlowski think it can be improved. No beating around the bush, they come right to the point. The manifesto was then given out to potential speakers of the conference for them to choose one of these topics to kick off discussion from their point of view during the conference.
The speaker lineup is very interesting indeed as well. Christian Lindholm for example, one of my favorite ‘mobile’ personalities, formerly director at Nokia and serving as a VP at the mobile division of Yahoo for some time will lead a session on how mobiles and applications should adapt to changing physical environments of the mobile user. Among others, the speaker lineup also includes Cliff Crosbie, Director of Retail Marketing at Nokia, Al Russell, head of Mobile Internet & Content services at Vodafone, Mathew Menz, Head of Interaction Design of Motorola and Antti Ohrling, co-founder of Bylk.
The venue itself is also quite interesting. Instead of a standard conference place, the organizers have selected Wallacespace, which, judging from the pictures on their web space, is quite comfortable and very much different from normal conference places. I am quite thrilled about the whole lineup so if my daytime job allows, I’ll attend.