This morning I attended a mobile media seminar hosted by Capitol Communicator and Brunner Digital in DC. There were about 40 attendees and the group was starting at a nice level of sophistication. They gave a number of nice example of what large brands are doing in mobile, but also addressed the fact that any one can enter with a simple SMS campaign opposed to starting in with a custom app.

I thought it was amusing how the mobile development platform was compared to the early days of web development where you practically had to build a different site for each browser. In this case, the diversity in standards is even greater because of the new ways of interfacing with the devices such as turning an iPad or pointing your iPhone.

Some nice open source resources are emerging like PhoneGap or Wurfl at allow you to detect the device type in addition to your OS or browser detection. They also had some useful stats on market share and how mobile devices are expected to surpass tradition web surfing in the next year or so. I’ll post these when I get a chance. Mary Meeker fro Morgan Stanley was also recommended as a great statistics resource by Bill Hennesey of Washington Post Digital.

As someone that just spent the last hour “patiently” trying to find a wifi hotspot that would accept a standard RDP connection just to add two seconds to a Flash animation, I’m eagerly watching the emergence of viable mobile platforms and happily participating where it makes sense.

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The new Apple iPad doesn’t support Flash or other Web plug-ins. It simply supports HTML5 and other open standards, bringing us back home to some old school fundamentals. Just like viewing websites on an iPhone or Blackberry using an internet connection, if your code is semantic, clean and uses progressive enhancement, it will naturally display pretty well. You still have to test, of course…and you can always do more with a custom mobile template…but it is a solid foundation.

There is a lot of press about how this might be a bad product sales move for Apple because it does automatically eliminate many existing websites from displaying on the iPad. The HTML5 video tag also is still under development since the video codec is not natively supported in all browsers.

As for myself, since I continue to manually code my work instead of relying on WYSIWYG tools, I enjoy following the latest standards and incorporating the new advances into our ever-expanding best-practices. If you are curious about how ready your site is for iPad, check out the iPad development standards,  I know I will be…and upgrading my sites along with CSS3. Happy geeking!

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