Stephen Mellish, head of mobile at global technology group Radical Company, said that smartphones would become so powerful that the word "mobile phone" would have to become obsolete.
"The word hasn't been invented for the devices that we have in our hands," he said.
TEDx events are spin-offs of the annual TED conference in California. That event,whose slogan is "ideas worth spreading", has attracted speakers from Bill Clinton to Richard Branson.

Today's event was curated by Herb Kim, who organised an earlier TedX conference in Liverpool in 2009, and Dave Brown, of Liverpool software firm Apposing.
The event, held in Screen One upstairs at FACT was so popular that it was also broadcast live to a "simulcast lounge" downstairs. Tickets to both rooms sold out.

The theme was "a mobile future", but speakers took that as an opportunity to discuss issues from the wisdom of crowds to the importance of failure.
Mr Mellish gave some examples of how leading industry thinkers thought the mobile world would develop. David Temkin, of AOL, for example, said that one day privacy would become "quaint" as we became used to devices tracking us wherever we went.
Mr Mellish added some predictions of his own. It would soon be possible, for example, for us to have chips embedded in our bodies to monitor our health. We could access that data through our smartphones.
"Mobiles," he said, "will become a gateway to those devices."
Similarly, Mr Mellish said, airport security will become more streamlined as biometric devices connect to our mobiles, effectively replacing paper passports.
"The passport won't be in the phone," he said. "It will be in the cloud. The phone will just be the gateway."
Ultimately, said Mr Mellish, we will all be connected to global networks, all the time.
"We started by saying there's no word currently for mobile," he said. "Is the dictionary definition going to be 'me being connected everywhere?'"
Ian Wharton, of London developer Zolmo which created iPhone apps for Jamie Oliver, said the common description of mobile being "in its infancy" was wrong.

He said "There's a better description of this industry - a largely misunderstood but ambitious teenager, one that's going to be seen in the next five years trying to define itself by experimentation."
It is, said Mr Wharton, "offensively simple" to make a mobile app, meaning that bedroom developers can make apps and get them, online just as easily as any corporate giant can.
"In the mobile industry, the barriers to distribution have in effect evaporated," he said.
The challenge developers face is getting their apps to stand out. And the way for them stand out in the mobile world, Mr Wharton said, was for them to have "Content + Great Brand + Story to Tell".
He then went on to discuss the apps Zolmo has created with Jamie Oliver. Its first was "20 minute meals".
Mr Wharton insisted that mobile products were best when they were designed and made from scratch. Zolmo, for example, commissioned videos of Oliver in the kitchen rather than relying on reused television footage.
"Consumers are savvy," said Mr Wharton. "They know when content has been repurposed and corners have been cut."
And he added: "If you want to build a great product, you need relentless and unyielding attention to detail."
Mr Wharton had three key conclusions for the future of mobile.
Firstly, he said. "Design and technology are not mutually exclusive".
Secondly, with a nod to Einstein, he said: "Make things as simple as possible but no simpler."
And finally, he said: "Be cavalier. Dare to fail."
He added: "When you have an industry with so much potential, you cannot be cautious."
Finally, he said: "In an industry like this, if you piss off a handful of people, you're probably doing something right."
In the afternoon session, Tom Scott, presenter of forthcoming Sky 1 series Gadget Geeks, tested the limits of the idea of the wisdom of crowds.
He asked the audience five questions, and got audience members to tweet him their answers.
The questions were:
* In the first series of Red Dwarf, how many times is the fake expletive "smeg" used?
* As of November 2011 how many wind turbines are there operating in the UK?
* As the crow flies, how many miles are between here and Trafalgar Square in London?
* In the UK National Lottery, which ball has been picked most often?
* In the song Roxanne by Sting and the Police, how many times do you hear the word Roxanne?

As people submitted answers to Mr Scott, their Twitter avatars popped up on the event's big screen.
Then it was time for the answers, staring with Red Dwarf.
"The answer is 31," said Mr Scott. "You said 160.
"This is the first bias. It's fairly domain-specific knowledge.
"I once asked this question to a group of about 30 sci-fi fans. They came up with 31.2.
"They knew that the first series had six episodes. Roughly it was used every five minutes or so. That roughly means about 30."
For wind turbines, the answer was 3,419, but the crowd said 4,110.
Mr Scott said: "Most people travel around the country by car or train. You know how big the country is and how often you see a wind turbine."
For London, the answer was 177, but the crowd said 285.
"That's a big overestimation," said Mr Scott. "That happens every time I do this talk."
That is because, he said, the question asked was "as the crow flies" - and no-one really flies like a crow, instead going a less direct route.
The answer for the lottery question was 38, though the crowd said 26. As Mr Scott pointed out, Lottery numbers are distributed randomly and cannot be assessed by crowds.
Finally, for the Roxanne question, the answer was 28 - a number the crowd guessed exactly.
That, he said, is because the song is well-known, so most people are able to make an accurate guess.
The "winner" in the TEDx audience, who guessed most accurately in all questions, was Twitter user kateagogo - Kate Stewart, managing director of Liverpool design business Team a go-go.
The interesting question, said Mr Scott, is what the crowd does not know about.
Crowdsourcing on a particular subject can be useful, Mr Scott said, "if that's what the crowd knows about.
"But be careful," he added. "It's not infallible by any stretch of the imagination."
Jeff Coghlan, founder of Cheshire new media agency Matmi, took the crowd through the history of technology, from the first mobile phone in the 1970s through to colour screens in the 1990s and the iPhone more recently.
Now, mobiles are the most popular way of accessing the internet in many countries around the world.
In Egypt, for example, some 70% of the population rarely or never use desktop PCs to access the web.
Looking at the future of gaming, he said, technology could soon kill off the "traditional" console as people can download high-quality games through the web rather than buying £40 disks from a shop.
"We can make games that can be streamed through a television," he said. "They can be 3D console-quality games. Why do I need a console?"
Next, he said, people would want to access those games wherever they were.
"I want to cut away from the ropes," he said. "If I go home I want it on the tv. If I go to a friend's house, I want it on their tv."
He added: "Social is going to be reinvented. TV is going to be completely reformed."
Nicholas Cumisky, of Google, spoke about the way companies were using mobile technology and apps.

Mobile sites, he said, were not just about making small purchases. He used the example of Marks & Spencer's site, through which people could buy two sofas worth more than £3,000.
People might consider buying through their mobile, he said, as an extension of their existing relationship with a brand such as M&S.
But, he said as the big screen showed an image of empty shelves in a shop, many firms are missing out.
Only 21% of British advertisers, he said, had a mobile presence.
"It's like opening a store," he said, "and saying yes, but on Thursdays we're closed."
The final speaker was Mills, co-founder and "Chief Wonka" of London digital agency and mobile specialist Ustwo, who told the audience how they could learn from failure.
Clad in a black T-shirt with the word Wonka on the front, Mills - full name Matt Miller - took the audience through the successes and failures of Ustwo's forays into mobile gaming.
In fact, he has coined a new word for the Ustwo story - "Succailure".

Ustwo's games included Mouth Off, which sees users hold their phone over their face so a cartoon mouth on the iPhone screen can speak their words.
The app proved a hit, getting coverage on television and websites around the world, while films showing Mills' baby daughter and the app got hundreds of thousands of YouTube views. usTwo even teamed up with hit cartoon Ben10 to create a branded version of the game.
Mills said: "When you marry the world's biggest cartoon with the world's biggest mouth replacement app, you get pure love".
But other games were less successful - such as Inkstrumental, which was heavily promoted byApple but sold disappointingly.
And other worked differently to the way they were expected to.
Granimator, for example, allowed people to design their own wallpaper for iPads. Ustwo's designers expected people to share their designs online - but, despite 500,000 downloads, very few images were tweeted.
"We'd failed yet again," deadpanned Mills.
But more recently, Ustwo got more attention thanks to a unique feature in its Nursery Rhymes storytelling app.
Using the StoryTime feature, parents were able to read bedtime stories remotely to their children at home. That feature made it into newspapers and websites around the world.
"None of them were really talking about the app," said Mills. "They were talking about this 'dreadful thing', remote reading.
"But it went to number one in the book chart."
Mobile designers must, said Mills, keep trying to find new ways to do things.
But, he deadpanned again, "don't innovate if you want to make money."