Demo and DemoMobile are recognized as the major events that "demo" the products and services poised to have the greatest impact on the technology landscape in the year to come. Technology executives, venture investors, journalist and analysts converge at Demo and DemoMobile to preview and discuss many new ideas. The best part of the conference is the opportunity to network with many old and new friends.
Needless to say, DemoMobile is more specialized than Demo and in fact brings a laser focus to the area of mobile computing. There have been skeptics over the years about mobile. Some have wondered whether the wireless Web is for real. Others wondered if the operators would get their act together and offer some valuable services beyond voice.
I believe we have now reached the point where major changes and innovations are about to emerge and make mobile computing a significant reality. The Internet is no longer where your PC is — the Internet is where you are. The folks at DemoMobile say "An always-on person who adapts and adopts technology to meet professional objectives and personal needs". The purpose of the DemoMobile conference is to enable professionals and organizations to figure out what all this means to them. There will be a select group of demonstrators and presenters to help.
Chris Shipley, executive producer for DemoMobile, will give a keynote talk about her view of where things are and where they are headed. This will be followed by a number of talks, panels, and of course demos. You can check out the complete schedule and list of presenters here.
I am quite excited to be moderating DemoMobile panels on two aspects of mobile computing that I have been writing and lecturing about for quite some time.
The first panel, on Thursday, September 9, will be called "Breakout Applications & Data Services". Even though handheld devices are getting very sophisticated and wireless networks are getting more powerful, the most advanced data applications are news, weather, sports, and stocks. And even those are crude. Email and SMS meessaging are available but their implementations are not impressive either. Why the focus on high bandwidth for mobile devices if we don’t take advantage of it and gain unique capabilities for mobile people? Where are the really exciting data applications and services?  I plan to explore these questions with the panel and I am confident we will learn a lot from them about new applications and services that deliver real breakthroughs.
The panelists are top guns in their areas:

• Bryan Biniak, SVP & GM, Wireless, American Greetings Corporation, and President, AGmobile
• Doug Gardner, Executive Director, AOL Mobile
• Doug Garland, SVP, Broadband & Mobile Services, Yahoo!
• Sunjay Guleria, VP, Marketing, MusiKube
• Christian Lindholm, Director, Multimedia Applications, Nokia Ventures>

The second panel will be on the afternoon of the last day – Friday, September 10, and will be called "We’re Wireless, Now What"? The idea behind this panel is to sort out where things are going – a glimpse of the future beyond the next year or two. The panelists are an impressive mix of executives in the know:

• Jeffrey K. Belk, Senior Vice President, Marketing, QUALCOMM
• Sameer Gandhi, Partner, Sequoia Capital
• Michael Masnick, President, Techdirt, Inc .
• David Rivas, Chief Technology Officer, Consumer & Mobile Systems Group, Sun Microsystems Inc.

When the conference gets closer, I will share some of the specific questions that I hope to explore with the panelists.