Helge Tenno, always about six hours ahead of the rest of us on 180360720.no, has a great post today summarizing a panel from the PSFK Salon this past weekend focused on the mobile user in which he relates a discussion about a patchwork approach to location-based solutions.

Put more eloquently: Mobile is about people, not technology, and the intersection of these two will be increasingly-defined by applications and tools that are uniquely combined by people to suit their individual needs and desires – not provided from a single, global source.

Helge writes:

The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

This is wonderfully well-put, I think.

More:

It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

Click through and have a read. While you’re there, poke around. Tenno is right on top of things, and a heck of a good writer.

When Jonathan MacDonald suggests that we ought to be talking about what mobile does, not what it is, he makes a fantastically salient point – a point that people are finally beginning to grasp as the discussion moves from platforms and hardware to a million simple, highly-configurable pieces of software.