Kevin Leong | reboot10 – 1 comment
Free & The Mobile Internet
Free! Making it work for the mobile internet
The term “walled garden” is often used to describe offerings from mobile phone operators where content are sold and services are priced. Will the emergence of the mobile Internet – combined with browser on the phone becomes more useful and unlimited data plan – creates opportunities for “Free!” business model.
Kevin Leong is the founder and CEO of Mo'Blast and RadarAD. He has created a location-based platform that enables the company to create multiple mobile apps on a single platform.
Two of these apps, Fon11 and Open Landmark, debuted on the Apple iPhone site as Staff Picks. Other apps based on the platform are coming in the summer. Fon11, a mobile social networking app, is about bringing presence and location messaging to the address book. Open Landmark is being positioned as a dot org.
Kevin believes that mobile social networking will not be one single app, but a collection of social apps. His vision is to unleash a series of simple location-based apps on multiple handsets, and to open the platform to other developers.
Kevin was a software architect at IBM software and research labs. He is a professor of software engineering at San Jose State University. He spoke at JavaOne 2008 on scaling social software using multilevel caching techniques.
He received his Berkeley MBA from the University of California and BBA from the University of Texas.
His proposal is about the challenges. He want to share what he has done, why he made those early decisions with his companies in the mobile internet.
Does Chris Andersen’s “Free! Why $0.000 is the Future of Business?” thesis applies to the mobile Internet. He thinks so. Unlike Web 2.0 where cost is low, mobile Internet has challenges. He has been thinking about these challenges for more than two years. Some are technical challenges while others are business development.
His proposal is about the challenges.
I'd attend this
This is intersting, I know lots of free mobile websites that profits, and much more than you'd expect, mobile is so '01 though but maybe it needs a reboot?