What a week it’s been – we asked Keith Ahern, CEO of Oomph to give us his thoughts.  Friday  19th August.

To paraphrase the familiar ever-changing weather phrase:  “If you don’t like the tablet market, wait a week”.  What a week its been in tablets – Google buys Motorola for $12 Billion USD and becomes a tablet maker and tablet OS vendor.  HP scraps its $1.2 Billion USD investment in tablet maker and tablet OS vendor Palm/WebOS.  These are big, bold moves  – its the clash of the titans for the future of personal computing.  The future of personal computing has not being fought out in such spectacular fashion since the Netscape/Microsoft browser battles of the late nineties.  In this bizarre universe Apple is setting the rules and as a result everything is getting more Apple like (closed source, curated app stores, single vendor owns the stack from hardware to software) e.g. Microsoft buying Nokia, Google buying Motorola and HP buying Palm/WebOS, RIM/Blackberry buying QNX.   This is a very expensive game to play in and HP decided to jump out of the ring and sell services to everyone else instead.  How you interact with the internet, information and content is being shaped right now by some very smart people and tablet crazy consumers.

For all of this tho, it’s a market that is growing exponentially and customers are calling.  It’s an opportunity to personalise, capitalise, inspire and captivate.   It certainly makes our event next week pretty timely; August 25th to the “Tablet Wars! Navigate the tablet minefield” .  This event run by the good people at AIMIA in conjunction with Oomph (a division of Mogeneration).  It should be a great event, even if the speakers, including me,  have to change their presentations daily.   If you can’t make the event be sure to follow #tabletwars on twitter.

Ps thanks to ZDNet for the very relevant image and article about this week, you can read it here.