Perfectly Portable – Japanese Mobile Culture Influencing the Front-End

Today’s development environment is heavily focussed on “mobile first”, but the long-term transition to this framework has been a challenging one. From mobile technology’s first forays into web connectivity, user-friendliness, and market shaping, Japanese mobile culture has without a doubt had a lasting influence on how we make our development and design decisions. This talk traces the advent of the mobile first paradigm from its roots in the Japanese mobile revolution, through to the power within the country’s changing topography of market end-users, and some of the current issues that face mobile development and design in both Japan and the West. How did Japan’s early mobile connectivity set the pace and priorities for not only burgeoning technology, but also the incipient business models that would grow to dominate our tech culture? Has the advent of smartphones really evened the playing field? Through the lens of cultural psychology, technological history, and market analytics we’ll take a closer look at how and why our mobile web is inextricably linked to Japan. http://rejectjs.org - http://twitter.com/rejectjs Music by: https://soundcloud.com/7digits Video by: http://wecap.de