I’ve been attending SXSW on and off since 2001, but in all that time, I’ve never actually been on a panel. Hopefully, with your help, though, that will change in 2012. This time around, my distinguished colleagues Neven Mrgan, Majd Taby, Tom Dale, Lia Napolitano, and I have submitted a proposal for a panel called “The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web?”.

The idea of doing a panel discussing the mobile web’s growing viability as an alternative (or, more interestingly to me, as a compliment) to native apps occurred to me after I read a really insightful blog post by Majd called “Building the Next Generation of Mobile Web Applications.” While I’ve more or less built my career on native app development, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon, I’ve increasingly come to feel that a lot of companies could benefit from a little more nuance in their mobile strategy than the typical “iPhone app: check!” approach that prevails today. Particularly as mobile web frameworks improve and mobile browsers move the window of what is technically possible, I think it will be increasingly wise for many companies to consider implementing a great mobile web experience as the baseline, and save native for applications that truly benefit from it.

Among us, we have quite a breadth of mobile design and development experience on both the native and web side—Neven has created games for both, for example, and Majd and Tom are major contributors to the SproutCore framework (the technology behind Apple’s impressive new iCloud web apps) as engineers at the mobile web startup Strobe—so it should be an interesting, wide ranging, and relatively religion-free discussion! Be sure to visit the SXSW Panel Picker page for a full description. We’d appreciate your vote!