Last night I attended an event by Digital Alberta in Calgary - the Mobile Madness and Crowdsourcing Mixer. It was one of the monthly themed networking events put together by the association. Here's the synopsis of the event from Digital Alberta's website, which, by the way, is true to what the event delivered.

Paul Poutanen and Stephen King of Mob4Hire have enjoyed tremendous success from creating a business that harnesses the power of the crowd and their mobile devices. Jon Lam of Ph03nix New Media spoke of his plans of raising $2 Million for the iPho3nix fund to develop 133 iPhone Apps. Tapium's Richerd Chan, who makes iPhone Games and cool applications and Michelle Sklar, host of BNetTV, moderated this insightful look on the industry.

Here are some event highlights from my perspective about the mobile industry:

• Mobile web is experiencing huge growth. Smart phones are in the mainstream.
• Problems with mobile distribution remain. Companies like mob4hire use the power of crowds to test mobile technologies before they get introduced to market.
• Most of the talk at the panel was from a developer's standpoint. That is, things discussed were: how to build? is the market ready? how to monetize? how to fix operational problems.
• The industry is still relatively new. As a result a lot of problems are coming not from developers but from a lack of infrastructure of mobile networks and carriers and lack of technology standards.
• According to Paul Poutanen of Mob4Hire there close to 100,000 mobile applications on the market right now. paul predicts that within 5 years there will be 5 million mobile applications. Application personalization will play a huge role in the growth of mobile application market. We will all have a personalized application that fits our mobile needs.
• One of the questions from the audience was: how do you promote your Mobile Application? A collective answer from the panel was along these lines: 1) you have to promote where the consumer is (i.e. at app store properties), 2) external marketing vehicles are of great importance too.
• As pointed out by Jonathan Lam of Ph03nix New Media, mobile developers should not be afraid of a market of 100,000 applications. Most of them are developed by amateurs, not by professional / for-profit developers. So, there's definitely an opportunity rather than threat.

Stay tuned as Sarah Blue of TechVibes reviews the event in greater details.