#NodeSummit: Mobile

Moderator - Todd P (Battery Ventures), Jason Delker (Sprint), Kiran Prasad (LinkedIn), Matt Ranny (Voxer)

Mobile changing a lot of the things around how we interact with computing - obviously. Sort of just client-server all over again. It's client-server but with really powerful clients, so you can do more on the client side.

There was a lot of discussion about the ability of CIO's to control the apps or services their employees are using. An employee could often is bringing their own mobile device to work and expecting the mobile device to work. The app on the mobile device might be better than the one the CIO provides.

The life cycle of a laptop might be 3 years, but the life cycle of a mobile device might be 12 months.

An employee bringing their own device makes it nice for the CIO because the CIO doesn't have to buy or replace that gizmo. But the difficulty is data security or ownership of data.

The end of corporate mandated devices? It's happening anyway because the employees are bringing their own anyway.

How the bleep does this apply to Node.js? They're talking about the general trends of mobile devices and usages. It is about the way that the computing environment is changing. Node.js is coming along at a time when this new model, mobile computing devices, is becoming common. Hence Node.js has to be applicable to that model, and many people say that it is.

The usage pattern of mobile device interaction with web services is completely different from desktop. Lots of tiny requests.

At LinkedIn their mobile apps are complete Node.js based. Reduced memory footprint etc and overall it's doing phenomenal for them.

Definitely they're struggling with tools, for analysis of bottlenecks etc.

Sprint is developing an application hosting platform both for use of their own applications they develop for their customers, or for 3rd party app developers to use. Details to be revealed soon.

Mobile phones are no longer phones - they're small portable computers with a bundled telephony application.

Users expect costs to go down. Devices that on a 12 month cycle are getting more and more powerful. The mobile devices today are more expensive than just a few years ago. For the network operator all this gives a throughput challenge in that how do they keep up with the ever growing demand for additional capacity.