As the power and flexibility of the mobile phone platform grows, developers have the opportunity to create new, creative applications which take advantage of the mobile phone’s unique features. Applications can combine GPS, voice, and the use of in-built cameras to add a new dimension to gaming and social networking software, among others.

Writer and consultant Clay Shirky discusses his experience of teaching at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program over the past three years, and the lessons he's learned from a number of his student's own projects.

Clay describes the technology behind several of these projects, details what faculty and students have learned about design and deployment of applications that rely on phones, and speculates on future developments both on the phones themselves, and on ways of integrating the phone network with internet-hosted infrastructure.

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Clay Shirky teaches at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program. He writes and consults on the social and economic effects of the Internet, concentrating particularly on the decentralization of applications (peer-to-peer architectures and programmatic interfaces) and on the current explosion in social software. His writings are archived at shirky.com, and he currently runs the N.E.C. mailing list for his writings on networks, economics, and culture.

This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Gareth Butler
• Post-production audio engineer: Stuart Hunter