The future is about mobility

So said Marc Davis, Yahoo's social media guru at last month's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. "The mobile web is not just about accessing the web from your phone," he said "Mobile phones that are location aware, temporarily situated and socially connected will transform our experience of the web, the world and ourselves."

"The next web," he says, "will be about place and time." He suspects that we are near the point at which more people will be able to access the web via their phone than their desktop computer.

Both Mr Davis and the Chair of Mozilla made pleas to developers to devise applications for mobile devices that users can access, use, save, store information that's relevant to users. Widgets are big business too apparently, because users can choose exactly what they want and how they want to access it.

But this brand new mobile future is still about 18 months away, which is just as well as it means we've all got time to learn and absorb the business implications and applications.

A good place to start is the Windows Mobile site, which has a useful ‘starting up' section.