The talk that Clay gave mentioned the hackability of cell phones as a platform. Good to hear in an environment like this. Having Python released is a step in the right direction, but I think for the most part people just laugh still when I talk about lowering the barrier for people to experiment with their phones. There are some great hacks that are showing up, but they’re the exception and relatively few and far between. It’s not enough to just have the ability to play with this stuff, it’s making it easy to do so. Lots of people with good ideas about how to make mobility more useful and pervasive currently ARE NOT working on mobility. They’re doing all the things that would be made more interesting by adding a mobile component. And they’re not going to take weeks to figure out how to write simple little shims to make their phone interact with everything else online. Lowering the barrier allows those people with ideas (instead of just time) to participate in evolving the medium.

Tags: ETech2005