Just got back home after visiting the first Nustart Hej!-conference about entrepreneurship and web 2.0. It was a pretty good conference with the same feel and content as Reboot or LIFT. A typical “conference 2.0″ where everyone is blogging, photographing or filming the event. Nice.

Amongst the speaker were a few entrepreneurs talking about their services or giving advice on how to succeed. So, anything about the mobile web?

Well, yes, to a certain degree (for example, Andy Smith from Jaiku mentioned the mobile phone but it seemed like it was the Twitter-like chatting that was the thing about Jaiku - and I don’t think that was Jyris original intention) but it is still assumed that by “web” we mean access to the internet using a web browser on a PC. All the innovation happens on this platform. This somewhat limits the true potential of the web.

One example is Polar Rose who has a platform for recognising faces in photos. Now this could be a truly groundbreaking feature and I’m sure it will be a huge success, but it assumes that people are uploading the pictures to online albums like Flickr or Picasa. Of course the algorithm should be integrated directly in to the cameras so that whenever I take a picture I can see the name of the persons whos faces are in the picture.

For this to happen today, Polar Rose would have to cooperate with the camera manufacturers and license their software to them. The cameras would also require an internet connection which most digital cameras don’t have. Of course, the mobile phones are almost there, but the rest of our devices also need to open up for innovation with platforms such as Mobile Service Architecture.

Web 3.0 was mentioned as the “next big thing” but no one really knows what it is. I’m guessing that the “internet of things” comes close. When you can write a midlet that uses the Polar Rose web service API and install it in, say your fridge so that it can greet you personally each morning, then we’re close.

This might seem farfetched but as the price of hardware and software goes down, quickly a point is reached when the benefit of having a generic and open platform is higher than the cost of adding it. My guess is that linux, java and the web technologies will play a major part in this. Or, maybe Joe Armstrong is right and it’s Erlang that will be the platform of choice. The evolution of consumer robotics might be the path that leads us there.

Whatever will happen I’m sure next year in Hej08 we will know more.