We recently attended Dallas Digital Summit 2013 in the boxy but cool Irving Convention Center. Despite terribly icy roads, a good mix of agency, corporate marketing people, startup specialists and freelancers were on hand for this first-timer in our home town. Follow our Twitter feed @signalmind and the event tag #DDSum13 for updates posted Dec. 10-11 during the show.

We were looking for discussions on how mobility will affect digital marketing strategies for the next couple years. Indeed, mobile delivery was touched on in many of the talks, albeit a distant third to social and search marketing. Particularly interesting was Wednesday morning's "Next-Gen Mobile Apps" in which the next generation of "apps" was clearly demonstrated to be anything but apps -- the next generation of apps is simply the mobile web.

John Busby of Marchex Institute described the behavior pattern of mobile as an "Online to Offline" exercise. This means the next step a customer's mobile search will create is usually a phone call. Or, a visit to a physical location - both taking online results to an offline means of customer service. Quantifying the value of that is not easy, but they can measure marketing response by specific numbers called at specific times of day. His stats from DIAKelsey cited more than 70 Billion phone calls will be made from mobile search by 2016.

"Online-to-offline transactions are for new prospects who are still making selections," said Busby. "Consumers will still want to talk to someone before they book."

Strategy consultant Tim Hayden resonated that topic when he discussed how apps are evolving toward mobile web. "We have too many apps -- it gets in the way of users," he said. "The browser will be the main way we experience mobile apps." With so many new devices and platforms coming out every year (Besides constant updates to iOS or Android, new platforms like the XBox zero), you create a proliferation of apps that must be maintained and supported on many different platforms.

The key to answering this, he says, is to go beyond making mobile web simply conform to devices and responsive design patterns - but to make mobile apps that are "reactive" and personalized with relevant content for the user. We couldn't agree more with that -- having the right context (perhaps predicting the user's problem, location, and more) is critical to serving up exactly what a customer wants on mobile.

The afternoon's "Reaching Mobile Consumers" also provided some good nuggets. Lara Mehanna of Mobile DataXu, mentioned that retail stores can realize a 15% lift in new customers at a per-customer marketing cost up to 60% cheaper by having a mobile presence. She described mobile as one essential part of a broader advertising strategy including display ads, video content, search and social. One interesting stat from the panel was that tablets such as iPad, Nexus, etc. are overwhelmingly consumed in the early evening, during prime time TV hours, so that's when you need to target these users.

Of course, the highlight of the show had to be the conclusion, with career musings by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Elena got to shake The Woz's hand and snapped a picture with our uber-geek hero! Randi Zuckerberg's keynote captivated the audience with her early stories of running marketing for "The Facebook" as Mark called it then, as Facebook later became a familiar (and quite hilarious) part of our social zeitgeist. Twitter's Brent Herd also spoke about the amazing worldwide changes their technology has brought about -- including impact on world events and the way we measure influence and celebrity. (More than 70% of Twitter's posts and traffic are incidentally from mobile devices!)

Several digital agencies with local presence were exhibiting and/or recruiting there - a good economic indicator. We didn't see much emphasis on unique customer applications for mobile from the vendor or agency community, other than simply being ready for mobile search (which we call "waiting for Google"), or having delivered specific things like QR codes (which we should discuss at a later time). There is still a lot of air to cover for mobility in the future, but overall this event was a good start for this often underrated but very large Dallas-area tech community.