Editor’s Note: Gary Kovacs, Mozilla CEO, posted on his blog about his keynote speech at CTIA. This is reposted below:
Today I have the honor of delivering the opening keynote at CTIA Wireless 2012 with a presentation titled “The Web Will Connect our Future.” Alongside speakers that range from the CEOs of the top US mobile operators to President Bill Clinton, I was humbled to be asked to represent Mozilla and present on an inspirational topic I am passionate about. What I am most motivated and inspired by is the open Web and in my speech I shared with the audience that not only has the Web changed our lives once, but in mobile, the open Web is about to do it again.
At a show like CTIA, it’s really easy to get caught up in the excitement of new devices, or fun applications or services just launched. Most people don’t realize it, but the devices available today not only define our expectations of our Web experience, but they also constrain it, not unlike AOL did back in the days of “you’ve got mail.” As we increasingly expect to access more of the full Web on mobile devices, our passion will take us to a place where today’s devices can’t reach. That’s why we need to move beyond the silos of native operating systems, and hybrid apps on proprietary platforms, to device-agnostic platforms that run the full, standards-compliant, and open Web.
My call to action is for the mobile ecosystem participants to stop developing proprietary platforms, requiring proprietary tools, and to start to focus on developing the open environment. Innovation needs to happen beyond the language of the web. We all need to work together to stress the Web as a platform, to push over a few remaining hurdles like graphics and video and native device API access, and work together on the common language – HTML5. Web technology doesn’t lock you into a specific development environment. It’s egalitarian and open. It enables people to create as well as consume information, to share, and the technology is standardized, free to implement, and easy to learn. It’s time for us all to collaborate to create the Web of the future. It is exciting to share this message, on behalf of the open world, with the mobile ecosystem players at CTIA.
You can watch the live stream of my talk here: http://daily.ctia.org/WIRELESS2012/ beginning at 9:30am CT.