Drupal on mobile, the next BIG thing?

Ok, this is yet another session on responsive web design right? No, this session will take you through a journey in time from the beginning of the Internet to what the future of smart mobile web communications could mean for Drupal.

Stefan van Hooft will give an overview of different ICT technologies and join them up to into what he believes could be a massive opportunity for the Drupal community and a potential game changer for the industry!

The incredibly flexible and powerful Drupal system allows us to communicate via the web in a multitude of ways. You can spread your word with a blog, meet the demands of your audience with an online shop, streamline communications throughout your organisation and so on. Drupal is an excellent platform for all of these use cases! To get to the point of being able to communicate with the world you need several ingredients though:

• a physical piece of hardware
• an Operating System
• a data base
• php
• the Drupal software
• a place to host all of this on the web
• a domain name so people can find you on the web

Most of the above items nowadays are neatly tucked away in a cloud with elastic service provisioning, masses of storage and one-click performance boosts. This is all brilliant BUT what about mobile devices? Are they only good for accessing websites, sending emails or social networking?

The computing power and storage capacity of these devices has increased so much over recent years that they could easily function as a server for your website. Add the increasing wireless connectivity speeds into the mix and it would be perfectly possible to create a cluster of smart mobile devices that can serve Drupal websites with ease.

Would the Drupal community with its combined brain power be able to take on this opportunity and turn the web upside down... again?

This session is classed "beginner" since I'd like to keep the content accessible to all. If you are a developer who is interested in this joined up thinking, please do come along.

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Stefan van Hooft runs iCompute, a Digital Agency providing Drupal web design, marketing and ICT consultancy in South West UK. Stefan has a background in managing big computer network infrastructures in the Netherlands and UK and is a keen supporter and promoter of Open Source hardware and software.