Asokan Thiyagarajan, Technology Evangelist, Ecosystem and Market Development, Mobile Devices Business, will present "Technology Trends Driving Mobile Application Innovation" at the upcoming MOTODEV Summit in Beijing. MOTODEV recently caught up with Asokan and asked him a few questions about his session and about trends in mobile software.

Q. Why is your session important, and what will attendees learn?

A. Developers need to know the key trends in the industry to write cool new innovative applications. The intent of this session is to make developers aware of the global trends that can help them create good applications and get them to market and succeed.

Q. What technology trends are driving application innovation?

A. The merge in technology has been a key trend – earlier applications used to be vertically focused – for example – gaming or location based. With the higher bandwidth that is easily available and accessible to applications, more applications are being developed that merge technologies. Some examples of innovative solutions are location based peer to peer games, buddy locators, web2.0 applications etc.

Q. What cool things are you seeing in the wild?

A. The access to higher bandwidth has provided access to lots of cool new applications. The web is getting closer to the handset – and hence a lot of cool client-server-like applications are coming down to the handset. Social networking, which has been a huge cool aspect on the PC side is coming down to handsets – people can shoot pics, videos and upload them on the fly to their blogs or social networking sites like myspace – from a mobile handset.

Q. Where do you think the industry is going?

A. The industry is moving towards consolidation of a myriad of devices into a device called the mobile phone. The watch or a musical device is being replaced by one always-on device – the mobile phone. This is exciting for developers so as to create cool new applications as the platforms are being enhanced to provide a lot more services.

Q. What mobile handset feature is underutilized in mobile applications today?

A. There are quite a few features that are not being utilized – feedback to users by sound or by the use of the vibrating motor, providing a good user experience with good and useful UI. As technology trends keep changing, I would say that the most underutilized feature is data connectivity which could open the doors to nicer, cooler and innovative applications.