I attended Mobile Persuasion 2007 last week at Stanford, and once again I came out with mix feelings. It was the first edition, it went quite smoothly, and all in all people saw it as a success.

The good
The speakers were relatively switched on, and generally the topics were interesting. A few presentations raised my interest -imagine that! In no particular order:
- Rachel Hinman (Adaptive Path) and Mirjana Spasojevic (Nokia Research Center) presented a study on mobile web they did while working at Yahoo!. The take home findings are 1) Think uniquely mobile, not mini PC; 2) Think always with you, not just on the go; 3) Think building and reinforcing common ground and identity; 4) Think access to what's essential, not browsing.
- Josh Ulm from Adobe showed a lovely Flash ambiance home screen implementation on a Samsung.
- Jordy Mont-Renault from Digital Chocolate demoed AvaPeeps - a mobile dating game with ghetto language and graphics. I am not sure if the game is any good, but at least the presentation was highly entertaining.
- Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games) gave probably the most interesting talk of day. He argued that games influence players to take action through gameplay. Games not only deliver messages, but also simulate experiences. While often thought to be just a leisure activity, games can also become rhetorical tools.
- When Deb Levine (Internet Sexuality Information Service) started Sextext.org -an outreach sexual education program for young people in San Francisco, one of her challenge was to figure out the most effective technology to reach the kids. The answer was quickly found after a couple of days on the streets doing ad-hoc interviews: pull SMS. It's personal, cheap, on-request, convenient, always accessible, time critical, easily consumable and deletable.
- Ame Elliott (PARC) presented "Tokyo youth at Leisure". The study and findings were not very interesting; what was interesting was the description of her [pre-]study expectations/pre-conceptions/fantasies and the lack of action on the results. If the results are not delivered in the right format (a PowerPoint does not count nor work) to designers/marketers/business folks for interpretation, these studies are a pricey waste. Ame presentation was a sad example of this.
- Gabriel White (ex-Motorola, currently at Frog Design, blogging at Small Surfaces) briefly discussed the challenges of designing the MotoFone, a product for the last 1 billion.

The bad
BJ Fogg tried to take us on a journey, and crammed 20+ speakers in just 8 hours. Each speaker had 7 to 10 minutes to present, and the floor had just enough time to ask a couple of questions to each panels. Not so good. This curse happened to be our salvation when we had to suffer, every so often, the poorly disguised marketing pitch for yet another stupid mobile service.

And the ugly
Nothing was really ugly, except maybe the closing panel of so-called experts, which was 30 minutes of 30 seconds me, me, me, self-promotion. At the end of the day, let me tell you, it is torture. Pretty please, let's have an inspiring speaker next time.

To conclude, it was interesting to see and hear, I have learnt a little, caught-up and met new people, so I guess, for $150, it was good value for money.