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All aboard for the last Mobilism!

On 16th and 17th of May the third edition of Mobilism will take place in Amsterdam. Mobilism is once more going to be special this year, not only for its speaker line-up, on which more below, but also because this could well be the last Mobilism.

Ticket sales have been pretty bad until now, and we have to face the fact that we may lose money on Mobilism 2013. Now we love the mobile web, we love conference organising, and we love our speakers and attendees, but we're not going to pay for the privilege of running the conference — certainly not if the bill runs in the order of tens of thousands of euros.

In fact, the situation is so dire that we’ve cancelled the videos, which means the sessions will not become available online. We dislike that, but again, we dislike paying them out of our own pocket even more.

Don't worry if you already have a ticket, Mobilism 2013 WILL run, no matter what!

Still, pretty soon after the conference we will have to take a decision on its future — and the way it looks right now is that it won't have any. That's a pity, but the market has spoken, and it's supposed to be always right.

In the spirit of going under gracefully we finalised our programme last week. We can now announce the last two speakers:

• Thomas Fuchs of of Prototype.js, Zepto.js and Micro.js fame, will show us why our sites and apps are broken if they don't load in under a second. He'll look at optimizing bits and pieces from a JavaScript (frameworks) perspective.
• Martin Kool, from Dutch web company Q42, will present a case study about a successful cross platform HTML5 game. Martin will show us how they picked their framework of choice, handled cross-platform development and used HTML5 mobile constraints as a benefit. He'll also cover marketing, launch and post-launch and share all their in-depth sales details per appstore.

Together with such luminaries as Josh Clark, Max Firtman, Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, and ten others, as well as the pre-conference workshops, this will ensure that you’ll get the latest updates on the state of the web on mobile, and the philosophies and techniques you need to make your website future-friendly for this brave new world of countless devices.

We hope that our line-up, combined with this cry for help, will sell the 60 or so tickets we need to break even on a bare-bones conference. Even if that works, though, it’s unlikely that Mobilism will return in its present form. If there is insufficient support for a conference, that conference will have to disappear — or be simplified significantly, at the very least.

Anyway, I hope we’ll see slightly more of you at Mobilism than current ticket sales suggest. You can buy your ticket here.