As you may have guessed, GigaOm's Mobilize Conference is all about mobile devices and applications. But the real story here are the trends seen in the future of mobile. We've raced so quickly into our own future, via iPhones and tablets, that it can sometimes feel as though whatever's next is completely elusive. But as Mobilize's numerous talks have shown, the future is all about the repercussions of everyone having computers in their pockets.

Indeed, the big buzz at the conference is about enterprises being infested with personal mobile devices. Instead of buying everyone a BlackBerry and sending them on their way, corporations now have to push out custom applications to iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. Those devices aren't necessarily secure, so these applications can't store local data, nor can they keep passwords on local storage. It's an entirely new problem.

But then, it also isn't. For years, enterprises have been offering their online services to employees via either VPN or Web-based portals. The real change here is that the applications on mobile devices are being written like RIA apps: they're rich interfaces to corporate data structures. And over the last two to three years, the idea of writing an RIA has become further unpalatable as Web applications became more and more sophisticated. Hosting Web apps is just easier than maintaining a stand-alone application.

Thus, the real shift that everyone's seeing here at Mobilize is destined to be short-lived. Will your company build three (or five?!) mobile device applications, or one HTML 5 Web application? It's a no-brainer, even though right now it seems that the thing to do is to write custom code for each device.

The next big trend at Mobilize is the transition of voice capabilities away from carrier-offered services and towards mobile VOIP. It's been a long time coming, this transition, and there are at least a dozen companies here at Mobilize hoping to take advantage of this, including one that will hand you a local number to call, then bridge that number to any other number in the world, circumventing all international calling charges.

Of course, VOIP has been lagging in its transformative powers, mostly because phone-focused developers are few and far between, but also because the carriers have been very stand-offish to such companies. We'll see how they manage to flush out in the coming years.

The really interesting trends I heard about here came from Sam Ramji, of Apigee. Sam intimated that one of the trends he's seeing now is for mobile developers to install some sort of link-aggregation system in Google AppEngine or Heroku. Thus, when someone opens a new page in a mobile app that asks for info from 7 different APIs and RSS feeds, these components in the cloud are used to pull all that info in without flooding the limited mobile connections used by most people.

But the real truth behind this is that APIs are becoming the lifeblood of mobile, and of modern businesses. Ramji said that developers are increasingly the intermediaries between businesses and their end consumers. This is a good thing, he said, because it means a company can be dealing with 500 middlemen through its API, rather than one through a phone. More middlemen, more end buyers. The secret, he said, is incentivizing developers to build intermediary systems on your APIs. and the best way to do this is to give them a cut. His example was of an app that lets users make an appointment with a plumber. Real estate agents get 5%, so why can't a developer get 5% of every appointment made?

In the end, the moral of this story is that developers are the gate keepers of business now. They're the most in-demand people in society, at present. And they're only going to become more important. So treat your external and internal developers well, folks. They'll be more important than you may know as time goes by.