Mediaboss Marketing

With the convergence of social networking and mobile phones becoming more pronounced, tech companies are working toward a future when those devices are beyond smart and become intuitive, speakers at a San Francisco conference said Monday.

Using built-in accelerometers, GPS systems and compasses, a phone can have a "sixth sense" in determining when its owner is driving to work or sitting down to lunch, speakers at the Social-Loco Conference said. And then the phone can tap into a social network to make contextual recommendations, such as routes to get around a traffic jam or a new dish to try.

"It should be able to understand you automatically," said Sam Liang, founder and chief executive officer of Alohar Mobile, a Palo Alto company that is working on just such a mobile platform.

The conference at the Mission Bay Conference Center focused on social networking, location-based services and mobile phones, trends that are particularly important to the biggest social network of all, Facebook.

Generating revenue from mobile users is one of the key investor concerns that dragged down Facebook's stock price after its debut as a publicly traded company last month. The company previously warned it did not have a proven method of generating revenue from mobile. But in the past few days, Facebook's stock has rebounded, closing at $31.41 per share Monday, $6.59 per share lower than its initial public offering price.

Facebook is working on different mobile advertising opportunities and has seen "really significant interest" in ads in mobile news feeds that the company has begun testing, Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions, told Bloomberg.

But the company isn't announcing any new mobile ad products just yet.

Still, taking advantage of social, mobile and location-based technologies is a key to Facebook's future, one of its executives said at the Mission Bay conference.

"The mobile phone is probably the most social device that any of us have," Emily White, the Menlo Park company's director of mobile partnerships, said during a conference keynote.

"It is the most closely held member of my family that is not walking and breathing and something I rely on to do everything from waking up in the morning, to getting me to work, to figuring out, in some cases, what I need to wear," she said.

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Conference looks at social, mobile possibilities