The Tech@Tuck program this year focused on mobile strategy and included vendor demonstrations and a speaker panel focused on mobile technology's present state and projected changes over the next few years.
The panel included Terry Kramer, regional president of Vodafone Americas, Emily Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group Research, a technology research firm, Mark VandenBrink, vice president of technology solutions at Samsung Telecommunications America, and Kevin Bradshaw, CEO of buzzd, a mobile social networking company.
VandenBrink predicted that converged devices, or devices that communicate and coordinate their activity, will be the future of mobile technology.
"The big opportunity in mobile is how do you rethink convergence," VandenBrink said. "How do you think about multiple devices?"
All of the panelists emphasized that, in the future, people will have access to all of their media wherever they go.
"The whole idea is that the world is going mobile, that people are not going to have to go to their homes or their offices to access their information," Kramer said.
Bradshaw said he hopes one day to see "nano-personalization," a technology that involves a device of the smallest possible size that would allow people to store information and interact with hardware present in the environment.
Even within the past 12 months, the mobile landscape has changed dramatically because of the increasing use of the Internet in mobile applications, panelists said.
The relationship between the Internet and mobile devices "seems almost something like the wall coming down between East and West Germany," Green said. The rush of differing approaches to mobile interfaces has produced both great confusion and potential, she said.
"You used to be able to build quite a good mobile startup, and you could define yourself fairly clearly," Bradshaw said. "It's totally different now the Web has come to the mobile in the last 12 months."
Major corporations like the social networking web site Facebook have taken on new importance in today's world, Bradshaw said.
"All of us guys who used to be fairly big fish in mobile phones, there are now some blue whales on the block," Bradshaw said. "Everything I used to ever dream about doing on a mobile phone I can now actually do, and I'm scared."
The panelists also discussed the trends they see in the mobile technology business.
They agreed that media content must become more easily transferable between devices, even those made by different companies.
"There are too many media formats, and [one device] doesn't automatically figure out how to use [files] on another device," Bradshaw said. "Honestly, it's pathetic."
Bradshaw suggested aggregation, a system in which one company would be directly paid for content but profit off of the content's use would go to multiple companies.
Innovators must also temper their use of advertising, which can reduce the price of innovative technology but also releases more of consumers' private information.
"We've seen a real change in what consumers will tell us over the last couple of years about how they feel about having their content experience subsidized by marketing and advertising," Green said.
Regardless of what trajectory mobile technology takes, it is going to make dynamic progress in the next few years, according to the speakers.
"We are at a perfect storm now with the speed of the networks, the devices that are so attractive, all of these things have allowed this massive explosion of data," Bradshaw said.
The panelists warned that increased regulation of wireless technology would limit innovators' abilities to respond to consumer needs.
Kramer cited the example of a killer using Twitter to find a victim as "the nemesis of our industry," because such problems could lead to "huge regulation."
The speakers also discussed the emerging market in India, predicting that the country would become an exporter of innovation to more established, less fluid markets.
"In the emerging markets, without a very limited, fixed infrastructure, mobile networks will be the primary access to information," Kramer said.
Tech@Tuck also included vendor demonstrations by Verizon and Samsung, among others.
