There is nothing new about the card metaphor in mobile. The very earliest mobile web app standard, HDML (later WML), used a deck-of-cards metaphor. This was ar

There is nothing new about the card metaphor in mobile. The very earliest mobile web app standard, HDML (later WML), used a deck-of-cards metaphor. This was around the mid-90s. "The fundamental building block of HDML content is the card. The user agent displays and allows the user to interact with cards of information. Logically, a user navigates through a series of HDML cards, reviews the contents of each, enters requested information, makes choices, and moves on to another or returns to a previously visited card." - HDML spec [1] I'm not sure what Fred Wilson is getting at with "cards" today (he seems to be lamenting restricted APIs more than anything with the UI paradigm?). But in the HDML era they served a specific purpose: decks could be downloaded over high-latency networks in one shot and navigated offline, instead of waiting for each "page" to load. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_Device_Markup_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_Device_Markup_Language