As I typed the first draft of this post I was sitting in a crowd of about 15,000 people and what I learned (other than the fact that the Mythbusters draws quite a crowd) was that if you want to know the future of web applications the answer lies squarely in the hands of a 22 year old.

I could probably count on two hands the number of people who hadn’t reached for their phones sometime during the event. They were texting, talking, surfing the web and tweedling with software. Surprisingly enough few of these people fit the common mold of the digerati.

Text Me

The million dollar question in software is, “how do I reach the mainstream?” the answer, if there is such a thing, will almost certainly have something to do with the cell phone.

How do you do it?

Here are a few tools that if properly implemented could take the mobile market by storm.

Localization. Help cell phone users find each other. With the explosion of GPS what is needed is a buddylist for life.

Shared Information. There needs to be more coherent ways for cell users to share rich media. With fast networks now the norm, its time to become more content-centric.

Mobile Access. So many of us have calenders locked to our computer. The next step is finding a way to use your mobile device to query information in other areas of your digital world.

There is no magic bullet solution to user adoption, but if you are looking for a rich market that has been relatively untouched by the “Web 2.0″ craze, this is it.

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