Joining the dots at Chinwag Live MoSo Rising

On November 11th 2008 a cross-section of mobile and web practitioners assembled to discuss the ascent and future of mobile social networks and media. It was the second mobile-focused event in a row for Chinwag this autumn, but the discussion was completely different – see my previous post.

Unfortunately, someone in the audience repeatedly disrupted it right at the beginning, which threw the panel off slightly, and it took some time for the discussion to find its sweet-spot.

Speaking to jamescoops of mjelly afterwards, I totally agreed with his view that events like this need to begin from some kind of shared framework of understanding, from which they can then progress to a fruitful debate, and in doing so also surface and deal with the blind-spots of the audience, as at Chinwag Live events the diversity of specialism and experience is broad – a state of affairs which (for good reasons) I think should be cherished.

To try and make up for this here, I’ll quote from the event description that was co-written by myself and Julia Eilon:

“The rise and rise of mobile social networking and services is upon us, but is ‘mobile access’ enough or do users seek more?

Spurred on by web leaders like Facebook and MySpace and with lower data charges spreading for mobile web access, mobile social usage has soared. Are location-based services going to be key to its success, or is there more to the future of this most social of devices? How can brands engage in the mobile social space?

Will there be a battle for survival among the current myriad of mobile-only social networks and video / blogging platforms, or can they succeed with focus on novel functionality and user experience? Should online niche social networks also make the move to mobile? Where are the revenue streams and how effective can the ROI be?”

PANEL:

Harry Blunden – Head of Digital, ?WhatIfInnovation!
Justin Davies – Founder, NinetyTen / BuddyPing
Alfie Dennen – Co-founder & CEO, Moblog
Chris Seth – MD Europe, Piczo (unable to attend at last minute)
Roy Shelton – CEO, Next2Friends
CHAIR: Bena Roberts – Mobile Media & Advertising Consultant, Founder & Editor, GoMo News

What follows are some excerpts from my notes. The full-fat podcast will be out soon…

Business models and traction

Roy Shelton – when Next2Friends started they thought they could charge subscription, and then build it up around advertising, but now they’re using it mainly as a white label service to power others’ services.

Alfie Dennen (who has also been busy with some noteworthy personal projects) spoke of the phone as a vector. There’s no chance of traction unless an operator / carrier deck deal is in place. So Moblog has done white label products. Practically speaking, there are quite a lot of ways you can make money from mobile social platforms and services, but it’s still quite guerrilla, he stressed

Justin Davies – the network operators will be key. Think of the power of being able to take a picture and instantly send / share it with my address book.

Jay Cooper from Blyk (in the audience) challenged this, saying Blyk have proved that the ad-funded model can work – it’s not about technology, it’s about having a community. Panel members countered that it was rather about Blyk’s very unique business model

Who, why, what, when and where..?

Next2Friends are working with the UK’s biggest gay social network to enable real-time posting of photos to the web based around voting upon “who do I want to sleep with tonight?”

Alfie – in China there’s an issue with LBS in that you can’t say where a lot of things are. Moblog had to write an algorithm that screwed up the location slightly.

Justin – just to get the location licence you have to jump through a lot of hoops with the operators, but ultimately, in terms of revealing your location on LBS, it’s up to the user. We need more regulation, and to know and think about the boundaries surrounding us and the legalities surrounding that.

Roy – the advice Next2Friends were given in the UK and US was very different, so they went down the self-policing route. UK is also governed by OFTEL (now OFCOM) regulation of content for under 16s.

Courting brand relationships…

Conor McKenna of mobile social search engine Taptu asked: what should brands be doing and what should agencies be putting in front of them?

Harry Blunden of WhatIfInnovation addressed this, flagging up “branded utility” as a hot idea (although not so new – I first heard of it from Simon Andrews in August 2006), and social networks on mobile are in that space. WhatIf have been looking at brands and mini meet-ups – for example beer voucher giveaways driven by social network awareness.

Harry Dewhirst from Ring Ring Media pointed out that simple campaigns like Flirtomatic’s incredibly successful Strongbow offer showed how direct marketing and response will work in this space. More sophisticated targeting is also possible, he added, and it could drive some fantastic campaigns.

Forecasts for (next year, I think) on mobile are a billion for Myspace and 4 million for Facebook. [NB. I didn’t note if this referred to revenues or users, or who said this; I’ll update when podcast is released]

Harry continued that Ring Ring advocate cross-pollination of social nets and off-deck, as well as ads and placement on-deck.

Luis Carranza from Iris Digital observed that the term “mobile advertising” sets up an assumption that it’s just broadcast and online advertising transferring onto the mobile phone, but we need to improve and evolve the marketing approach so that’s is attuned to the medium. Harry Blunden put a different spin on this, stressing that social networks are just an innovation in digital communications.

Courtesy of Chinwag

I can haz mobile web access?

Jez Dutton, a senior planner from Glue, asked about the key drivers from the consumer perspective, and what are the cost issues?

Speaking with his developer hat on, Justin Davies said that 4 or 5 companies will end up controlling access to applications, but you also need to be aware that you can’t develop an app that is similar to one Apple already have.

In terms of countering the billshock that accompanies metered access to the mobile web, Alfie reckoned that bundling Facebook with Orange was a red herring. I’m not quite sure how this follows, but I’m sure he can set me right on this…

Harry Blunden countered this directly – it’s the original online social networks (Facebook, Myspace, etc) that have driven mobile web adoption, and the experience is improving because of the services and usability they have offered on mobile.

Is mobile the leader of the pack?

Another good question came from the audience in the form of this poser: is the social net phenomenon predicting what is already happening to us on our mobile phones (was Facebook the peak?) or [in the words of the song] is this just the beginning?

Harry cited the Accelerometer in the device [it’s in the iPhone, and some N Series, S60 and Sony Ericsson models from my brief scan of the web on this, and of course has been widely toyed with] – as a an omen of coming improvements in usability and user interface. Alfie observed that the iPhone is not the second coming, it’s just a sign. It’s a necessary evil given the Apple lock-in. The question is more “what will Nokia do?”

Channel 4’s mobile work around the Embarrassing Bodies series was more to his liking. They got 55,000 downloads of information on mobile after they offered a text-in service to receive more information. The context of mobile as a personal device was key to uptake, Alfie explained. How many people would want to download content about that topic to their PC, when, for instance, partners or family members might also be able to see or access that information? On mobile, it made sense.

Conor McKenna made the point that a lot of people who are using mobile web aren’t online [ie. on a computer] much or at all, such as taxi drivers and doctors.

Explaining the evolution of Next2Friends, Roy Shelton said firstly it was about early adopters; the second wave was creative types, aspiring film-makers and the like; then the social shopping function emerges with sharing and getting opinions. Conor chipped in that mobile social is big in parts of Eastern Europe, with ItsMy going ballistic in Hungary.

Luis from Iris revealed that they’re launching two social networks on mobile handsets in the next year. With time running out, Luis asked – what is the one thing that you would say to mobile customers? For Alfie it was “be there” (though his voice dropped an octave, he was only half joking); while Justin directed his message at producers: “keep it simple.”

–

PS: I’ll update this post with the RSS and iTunes links when the podcast is released.

PPS. I’m *still* semi-sulking coz no-one, at the event or elsewhere, has mentioned the Jim Morrison allusion in the event title

Mobile search and location reshaping the digital space

Locative media first came onto my radar in 2005 when notice of a collective called Proboscis and their Urban Tapestries initiative hit my inbox at NMK. Excuse me, geotagging the city you say? My curiousity was duly piqued…

Looking into it, I discovered an intriguing creative underground of technologists and artists doing some rather facsinating things with urban geo-mapping, robotics, storytelling and locative media. They even released a limited edition downloadable book about their work.

This was definitely a fringe phenomenon but the Social Tapestries project followed, and along with PLAN (Pervasive and Locative Arts Network), a 2-day globally-framed conference on wireless locative media at the ICA I was lucky enough to attend, it was clear this was coming out of obscurity. Augmented reality was coming to a place near you and me…

Courtesy of Chinwag Live: Search & LBS. L-R: Plazes, Taptu, The Cloud, Rummble, MSearchGroove, Jo Rabin

Jump forward three years, and while things haven’t exactly moved at light-speed, the calibre of people and companies we invited to speak at Chinwag Live: Search & Location Based Services on 8th October bespoke a phenomenon that is now unstoppable. Moreover, we’re now witnessing the birth of its business development phase…

PANEL:
Felix Petersen – Co-founder, Plazes / Head of Product Management, Social Activities, Nokia
Chris Moisan – Product & Market Development Manager, Taptu / blog
Andrew Scott – Co-founder, Rummble
Peggy-Anne Salz – Chief Analyst & Producer, MSearchGroove
Adrian Drury – Head of Commercial Strategy & Business Development, The Cloud
CHAIR: Jo Rabin – Consultant & Co-Founder of MoMo London

When an articulate line-up of some of the global leaders in mobile search and LBS are giving their best right in front of you, it can be hard to keep up. So I decided to change tack in my note-taking habits for our events series. I focused on listening to the panel discussion, and then took sporadic notes of points that struck me in the later discussion with the audience.

And boy, it was a conference-load of information packed into 100 minutes. But I needn’t have worried, because not only do we have the fantabulous podcast (coming next week), there have also been some superb write-ups from delegates including Mjelly, Cogapp and Mido.

Privacy’s endless permutations

Privacy and security are big issues stalking this space. If your location is being tracked – sure, that’s a technical achievement. But why would you want your friends to know you’re in a work meeting, or your employers to know your nocturnal movements, or your ex-partner to know you’re in a nearby restaurant with your new flame..? The permutations are endless.

Plazes CEO and product honcho of Social Activities at Nokia Felix Petersen stated that the privacy issue is threefold – firstly: tracking (passive / implicit) versus publishing (active / explicit). But there’s the mental transaction cost of changing your presence status all the time. The second aspect of privacy is time; for example, is it okay if people see me after 8pm? Also, the kind of place. There are complexities to sharing and personal relations in real life that need to be addressed, and as far as I’m concerned slicing them by “my friends only / family / everyone” barely scratches the surface.

The challenge is how to bake in these options without making it too complicated, Petersen reflected. That’s the third aspect – people want privacy options but they won’t use them much. In reality, Plazes have found 90% of the people don’t use it, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be there, he stressed.

Andrew Scott of Rummble told a similar tale. They have these privacy settings and only about 5% of their users use them; on the other hand, 25% of photos (on Rummble or Flickr) are geotagged.

Who owneth the data, maketh the sale..?

Adrian Drury of The Cloud remarked that there’s an interesting question about who owns the data when lots of different players are coming into the value chain, for example Skyhook, and ad-serving platforms. How do we protect the user from their data being abused? The people that own the brand relationship aren’t usually the same people that own the geodata.

As talk turned to the topic of monetising LBS and mobile search, Andrew Scott said media buyers needed to be more flexible about the stock they buy, in order to make relevant advertising work. Adrian Drury brought it back to the inventory question and where the money is; he stressed it’s about scale, scale and scale.

At the point where the LBS industry can deliver enough volume of users, volume of available devices and consistent platforms, then we can actually go out to groups of people or industries that are marketing and advertising and have an interest in doing that on a location based basis, and who can actually build campaigns around stuff that is location-based; then suddenly you bring another element to this industry. Today there are X-thousand iPhones in the UK, in 24 months there will be a multiple of that. That’s another consistent platform, and offers advertisers the availability to push campaigns out to that platform.

Interactive billboards – poised to pounce?

Interestingly, Adrian cited the billboard industry as ones to watch – the JC Decaux and Viacom’s of this world. They are one enormous advertising inventory industry that is yet to converge with the digital world in any significant way. But obviously location-based services bring them immediately into the digital world, Adrian observed, and they will be – and are – thinking about that quite heavily.

If it’s pull it might work, Felix countered, but he reckoned its niche. What doesn’t scale is the example of a billboard pushing something to you. It’s either too small an audience (one person on holiday walking across a bridge in Istanbul) or it’s just super-spam.

Billboard advertising (via Bluetooth I assume) won’t work if it’s done in a spam like way, Felix continued. The alternative? Either you start profiling (very time consuming, not very attractive) or you have socially relevant check-in points, for example being checked into a relevant wifi network (in Starbucks, or a hotel or an airport) – that’s the closest model to what we have on the web right now. Banners don’t work, he elaborated, but ads that react to your interaction with a location are going to be received differently (like Adwords react to the content of the page you are on and the history of your searches), and that’s what we need to crack.

Recommendation and discovery – playing the long game?

In this vein, Peggy was far more excited by content recommendation and discovery. She mentioned ChangingWorlds – a server side solution that does the profile building and what Xtract has done with Blyk. Granted, it involves heavy-lifting and mega-crunching of data, but it’s a much more exciting opportunity and potentially *far* more lucrative.

Claudia Poepperl from Mobile People (mobile local search) noted that the Yellow Pages industry is $30billion industry, that’s where the money is. How much are the panel partnering with Yell or Yellow Pages in order to tap into that massive revenue stream? Andrew Scott said it’s too complicated for local advertisers – it’s the heavy lifting that stopping them getting it right, and Rummble simply won’t carry these ads until they are personalised and relevant.

Intermediary quandaries and scale

Chris Moisan of Taptu said, as a mobile search engine, if you know someone’s location and there’s an intention then having Yellow Pages content where there’s a relevancy is a no-brainer. But the issue for them as a start-up is that to index that much local content isn’t possible yet.

Felix observed that the key intermediary is who whoever bills and owns the namespace for the small retailer. As yet, there’s no unified scheme comparable to phone numbers that allow the small to medium sized local retailer to claim this space that someone else has built.

Qype and Yelp are trying, but they’re rather small, he explained. Whoever will own it can unify it. Yellow Pages are in a good position to do that but they don’t. At the moment it’s the preserve of Google and Nokia.

Scope for location based advertising?

Joel Brazil from Tipped asked how many local search services would you expect an average local retailer would buy advertising from annually; and how would they actually engage in the sales transactions? How many different sales reps could they entertain and buy advertising from?

Adrian replied probably not a lot. At the minute you have a brand relationship or a portal relationship – Yell, Google etc, and they will give most advantage. Felix simply said it’s whoever owns the namespace, whoever drives the traffic. Peggy Anne Salz of MSearchGroove explained that she was doing research for NearbyNow, looking at special offers and exclusives for location based advertising. One major benefit might be in stock replenishment.

Andrew Scott reiterated that companies need scale to make these marketing campaigns work; and the most relevant and least intrusive ads work best. In the future there will be mobile, geocoded ads, remarked Felix later in the debate.

Platform wars: telcos v operators v digital media decks

Adrian situated the fragmentation and user experience issues more broadly. The mobile network operators are old fashioned telcos, and do things very slowly. They have this GPS platform; they’re all able to do this and none of them have productised it particularly well at all.

They did a very bad job in their media deck and they had years and years lead-time to get it right! Then along comes Apple, puts a good media deck on their network and gets it right, with Nokia following close behind them. That will change things and there will be a real fight, Adrian predicted. Who owns the location data – is the operator or someone else? Whoever controls the location data will be the one who wins the war and takes the margin on this, he predicted.

Technically it’s been possible for over ten years for the operators to know where you are, by triangulation and other means, Felix concurred. But the operators just saw it as a way of retaining customers, which totally misjudged the nature of this kind of service which grows in value when you can use it with all your friends, not just your friends on the Vodafone network. That was their fatal mistake.

Power moves to the edge…

But new technologies have changed this, Felix said. Now the power really is moving to the edge: with GPS phones, with third-party providers like Skyhook who provide the wifi databases, and you now have the crunching power in the phone itself. The context is really here in the phone, not in the network – calendaring, who is close by, how many of your friends are in the room.

Like with Nokia Maps, he explained, you don’t need to build something into the *highways* to see if there’s a traffic jam, because if you have enough people using Nokia Maps you can see how fast they move and if they’re all slowing down, then there’s a traffic jam..

Andrew remarked that on a recent trip to the States, he discovered that AT&T were considering scrambling their user cell ID info so that Google couldn’t use it. But Rummble use Skyhook, Google Gears and Google Maps, so they’re not dependent on the operators. Adrian added that wifi networks are also distintermediating the operators. Yet more mounting evidence of the coming battle in this space…

Business in the here and now

Dan from Sponge wasn’t convinced the pot of gold is Yellow Pages. But, he asked, how can the fragmented world of location based services present something simple and attractive to the Slug & Lettuces and Heinekens of this world? Adrian replied there’s a massive difference between whether you’re doing search or display advertising.

With talk turning again to marketing budgets, Adrian encapsulated the barriers currently facing marketers in the location-based space – you need to give media campaign planners enough scale so that they can organise their budgets. In turn, he asked, what premium is there on location?

Such scale in location based services has not currently been achieved, the panel agreed, and clearly no one had all the answers. But I’ll wager some of the companies involved in this absorbing discussion will play a part in changing that.

Merging physical and digital space

While the business development side of LBS is getting interesting, it’s all a million miles from the work of Proboscis and their ilk. But Felix Petersen said that truly locative media will facilitate some amazing things; people will not change, but outcomes will. And this very week (until this Sunday Friday 24th October!) another quite remarkable London-based urban mapping and discovery project is underway.

This time locative authoring and the “public based commons” is getting an accessible game-play twist, with the individual (but collective) mapping out of the answer to a question that players must solve by getting involved in discovering hidden objects and mapping them by GPS.

Utilising Twitter, mobile blogging and GPS, it’s the work of Moblog co-founder Alfie Dennen (in association with Demos, HomeMadeDigital and TED), whose objective is to unlock the urban “noticer” in all of us within a fun, engaging scenario, whilst also raising awareness of the XDRTB campaign started by photographer James Nachtwey which is highlighting the ravages of drug-resistant tuberculosis. As it happens, Alfie is also speaking at our next evening panel ‘MoSo Rising’ on November 11th.

The occurrence of these two separate events in the same fortnight in London was not consciously pre-planned, I promise. But it’s certainly something to be noted, or should I say “noticed”. One thing’s for sure – Felix Petersen was dead right to say the merging of real-life and digital location is starting to move in from the edges. The clue is in the patterns emerging. Better watch out…

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[NB: Really, this is just a fraction of what was covered in this event. I especially recommend Mjelly's post for coverage of the event's first half. I'll update this post next week with a link to the podcast when it's released]

[NB 2: cross-posted on my Chinwag blog]

Widget Week part 1 – Mobile Monday: Mobile Widgets

Widget Week kicked off last Monday 14th May, and hard to believe though it was, there was me at a MoMo London that I’d come up with the theme for, and someone thought I was called Brenda. Typical

After a quick intro from MoMo’s Alex Craxton and myself, it was on to the substantial roster of speakers – most of whom also gave demos.

David Pollington of Vodafone R&D gave the opening talk – a scenesetter that summarized the key issues and opportunities he saw clustered around the emergence of mobile widgets.

First off – do we want a mobile internet or a mobilized internet? What do people want when mobilized? They certainly don’t want to have to fire-up a browser and search – so widgets are the perfect solution, or at least that’s the hypothesis.

Self-service approach to the Long Tail

Widgets are good for users, Pollington said, giving a threefold justification. You can provide customisable widget templates, hence enabling a self-service approach to the Long Tail; widgets are more bandwidth efficient; and they enable and embody always-on connectivity.

They’re also good for developers, he continued. By leveraging web technologies widgets open mobile service development out to the web development community.

They’re good for business too, he added, but I couldn’t keep up with his rapid-fire delivery! In terms of exploring new presentation options, Pollington said he would like a snapshot option, so he can tab though his widget screens.

In turn, widgets are enabling mash-ups. As a mash-up example he cited the single-click download of a map for one of the addresses in his address book.

Wigdets contextualize

In the same vein, when capturing a camera event a widget can offer the user options for annotating and blogging that image. Widgets aid contextualising services. The contextualisation comes with utilising location data in the calendar.

2008 will see a paradigm change in how widgets change mobile access to web information and services, he concluded.

Then came a short presentation on uiOne, the [event sponsor] Qualcomm user interface profile that according to representative Anwar Ahmed “enables rich and dynamic user experiences on wireless devices”. The speaker stressed the rapid development of customisable interfaces on uiOne. End users can also use it for presentation, theming and micro-segmentation.

Then it was the turn of Cees Van Dok, the creative director of Frog Design. Their strapline is ‘evolve, expand, envision’. Their relevant product is Celltop. It runs on the Alltell mobile carrier network in the US, who approached Frog to develop it, and from the demo it seemed rather nifty.

Open source-powered platforms

Ganesh Sivaraman of Nokia (who also came along to Chinwag Live Media Widgetised) was next up. His talk was quite compelling. He spoke of taking web apps and widgets to mobile devices on Nokia’s S60 platform. S60 has over 50% share of market on converged devices.

Built on top of the Symbian platform, it offers page view, toolbar, web feeds (RSS and Atom), and visual history. He described it as a world class browser developed by embracing and participating with the open source community.

The next step, reasoned Sivaraman, is internet going mobile, taking all Web 2.0 websites and web services to a mobile widget. With Web Run Time, S60 extends and integrates the best in class web components across the platform, he continued. It leverages all known web technologies with two principal outcomes: (1) They develop with standards-based web technologies; (2) Millions of web developers can now go mobile.

By 2010 Nokia predicts 4 billion mobile device subscribers. It will be much easier to facilitate the spread [of mobile web?] by creating templates to crank out widgets.

Web standards and then some…

Charles McCathieNevile of Opera Software kicked off with a bunch of Opera-related statistics. In 2006 they shipped about 140 40 million high-end browsers on four of the major converged device platforms [thanks to Chaals for the correction]. 2006 also saw 40m Opera desktop browser downloads. There are 10m Opera Mini users; and 500,000 My.Opera.com community users. There are around 1,000 Opera widgets; and Opera also runs on the Nintendo Wii, airplane seats, Archos, and the Nintendo DS.

If the browser is the platform and Opera widgets are cross-platform, then web standards are the glue… but there is more! The Opera platform also dug into the camera, for example, so you can use it for photo uploads to a widget [if I noted that correctly].

Widgets everywhere!

Opera took a draft widget packaging spec to the W3C to ensure that widgets can work anywhere. [UPDATE: McCathieNevile has since contacted me to stress that the point of taking the spec to W3C is to kick off the collaborative work of coming up with a single widget standard that everyone implements. So instead of developers being asked to build on X, Y or Z's platform, they just build widgets and the user decides what platform offers them the most, since platforms will be compatible]

So what can we expect in the future? Messaging between mutually trusted widgets, Charles posited, and mash-ups between widgets – although that poses bigger technology and security challenges.

Widgets will be interoperable soon, he reckoned in conclusion. When you can take your widgets everywhere that’s when it’s really going to take off and make a big difference. So true!

Following Charles even deeper into the web domain (or at least, deep by MoMo standards) we got a short demo from Paris-based personalised homepage outfit Webwag who I’d just stumbled across a fortnight beforehand. Adding to the night’s predictions, their able COO and co-founder Florent Pitoun said that by 2010, 50% of internet users will have a personalised startpage.

Widgets on demand

In my opinion, the Webwag homepage is akin to that of Netvibes and Pageflakes, but it has unique strengths, as Pitoun demonstrated. They provide the facility to create widgets – including mobile widgets [UPDATE: enabled further by their recent aquistion of Mobease] - through their Widgets On Demand function.

Webwag will be LBS-enabled in the near future Pitoun added, and you can checkout what they’re doing at http://beta.webwag.com. He also demonstrated Webwag’s intra-widget communication ability between the Flickr widget and background widget, both on his mobile phone.

Then we had a quick talk from Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. He made a call for interested mobile folks to contact him about the “web trigger” widget they are developing that will both collect user numbers, and offer the “read and sign terms and conditions” facility (if I understood him correctly).

Last up was Kaj “Hege” Häggman, the business development manager and inventor of Widsets (run out of the Nokia Emerging Business Unit) who also spoke at Chinwag Live Media Widgetised two evenings later.

Facilitating user-created apps

Given David Tollington’s and Charles McCathieNevile’s insightful contributions, and the limitations on time, he passed over the implications of widgets for a quick overview of the technology and usability aspects of Widsets. As such, it has a user-customisable UI; produces mobile mini-apps that perform a specific task; and is good for keeping an eye out for updates.

Widsets have an SDI coming out this summer that allows complex widgets for communities. They also facilitate user created apps – you can create a Widset for your business, or a Widset for your blog.

Widgetisation simplified

Collaborative filtering is important, Häggman continued. You can trust your community when it comes to selecting widgets for your mobile. What’s more, distribution channels will come pre-installed on all new Nokia models, and also on selected Blackberry, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG handsets.

They’ve also partnered with Netvibes to get mobile widgets on there, he explained. So why should content providers work with Widsets? Because they’ll get many distribution channels, it’s easy to do, all mobile technology challenges are dealt with by Widsets, the server is stable and it will enable new business models.

I loved how this MoMo looked at mobile development innovation from a broader web perspective without recourse to the standard mobile web 2.0 clichés. Opera, S60, Widsets and widget aggregator outfits like Webwag are very well placed to both benefit from and push forward innovation and convergence in this area.

Widget Week hypothesis proven?

It also dovetailed – far beyond my expectations – with my previously-stated view that the UK, Ireland and North-Western Europe as a whole is better placed and (currently) much farther ahead of the US and the Far East in terms of understanding and innovating in this space. Feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong.

However, that’s not to detract from the topical span of MoMo’s global chapters – which is *hugely* impressive. Check the worldwide MoMo aggregated events here: http://www.mobilemonday.net/community

Big thanks to Daniel Appelquist, Alex Craxton and Jo Rabin (the MoMo London trio) for running with my Widget Week idea. It wouldn’t have been the same without them. Hopefully we can get the web developer community properly on-board for Widget Week 2008!

[UPDATE: Rod McLaren of Mobbu has also provided a great write-up here, via Florent]

Interesting bits round-up for 19 May 2007

First Moblog from Mount Everest!

The Call Of The Mountain (via Alfie). Forget lazy usage of the word and of the moblogging medium – this is literally awesome. Or at least it will be if mountaineer Rod Baber can get a signal further up there – there hasn’t been any posts since he left base camp. Hope it goes safely.

[BTW, have you seen the total makeover of MoblogUK?]

Capturing & sharing fragments in time…

At Minibar in East London on 20th April the standout demo was Rememble. It’s a Flash-based social timeline that can save content – from images and emails to text messages and audio – as ‘membles’, taking them from mobile phones, PCs, digital cameras and web services.

Coming soon from the workshop of Gavin O’Carroll -  a talented guy and fellow Northern Ireland exile who I got to meet at Chinwag Live Media Widgetised on Wednesday – it’s still behind a beta-testing wall (but you can get a beta account). Conceptually, Rememble is an original twist on life-caching propositions and poised to break new ground. Convergence in action!

Ego run amok is so 2.0 

Nice little riposte from Twatter.org – clearly built by a Britisher

What’s up with web culture? 

Bruce Sterling’s rant podcast from SXSW 2007 – egad, just do yourself a massive favour and listen to it [warning - the contents of this podcast may flatten your pretentions but that's why it's so refreshing]

Last but not least…

Happy Widget Week It rounds-off at Beers & Innovation: Widget Nation on Tuesday 22nd May. Hope to see a few of you there.

New Directions In Mobile is Pandoras box unleashed

Where to start with New Directions In Mobile, the NMK event held on Tuesday 3rd October at 01ZeroOne in deepest Soho?

It was all in the mix – mobile TV, the mobile web, business models, user-generated content, statistical trends, and brands on mobile. Lordy. Just beam me down now, I’ll feed it all to you over my super-bionic network in a nano-second, and shazzam! Well maybe…

But really, you had to be there. For now, I’ll share a good few highlights.

Stats and factoids

Among the choice trends detailed by m:metrics’ Paul Goode, the news that ringtones are in decline has gained a lot of coverage this week. Paul Walsh of Segala added the caveat that people are downloading less but increasingly creating their own ringtones. In turn, if you think that mobile gaming (a booming sector) is for the boys, smell the coffee – it’s more balanced between genders and 70% of consumption takes place among over 24-year-olds.

Demographics, however, reveal mixed news for the handset manufacturers – Nokia have increased their handset share in 3G services in the UK among older users, while Sony Ericsson lead the younger market.

The UK is a test-bed for 3G services with 10% of the population owning a 3G phone. We lead Europe for mobile video downloads but France has the edge on mobile TV viewing.

Mobile TV disrupts…

Steve Flaherty of mobile innovation consultancy Ketai Culture cut to the chase, and boy did he whet the appetite of students of disruption. Move over YouTube, mobile is gonna upset your business (and creative) production and distribution model, and then some…

Phones themselves won’t be the only terminals for mobile TV – enter the PSP, the Video iPod, and antennas for laptops (via DMB in Britain; DV-BH in Europe). The likely uptake of mobile TV has always been a moot point, but Steve revealed that Vodafone has signed up over 1 million subscribers [Correction: Steve has contacted me to let me know it was rather that Vodafone had delivered a million TV sessions in the first 3 weeks] in the first three weeks of launching their Sky mobile TV service. Could the simplicity of the concept of “Sky on your mobile” plus reliability of the Sky brand be a factor I wonder….

Lookout – brand channels incoming!

While there are similarities to TV, Steve noted, it’s in the differences that the opportunities and challenges of mobile TV reside: limited or no EPG; short programme formats; streamed rather than broadcast (for now); non-TV brands making an impact; channels dedicated to single programmes. And the last two factors open a Pandora’s box…

They have the power to re-cast our relationship with TV, just as the web has; and massively extend the opportunity for non-TV brands (which reminded me of the hugely successful Hallmark channel – a card company scores as a TV company – who’d have predicted that?); yet the value of mobile video on demand is still being hamstrung by network operators’ business models and high data charges to the consumer. But for a glimpse of the converged, multiplatform future, reflect for a minute on this: the most popular TV channel on Orange is FHM TV.

If shareholder certainties are uppermost in your mind, you’re in for some sleepless nights folks, as the roles of broadcasters, mobile operators and aggregators are still to be defined, Steve stressed. But as the entire market enters a transitionary period, who can afford not to innovate?

Clock ticking for walled gardens

Alfie Dennen of Moblog UK underlined the imperative for network operators (not just start-ups and brands) to innovate. They’ve created a system that has built-in obsolescence, so they should have the foresight to experiment and adapt services and business models to secure their future existence. They’re waking up to the fact that they need to start behaving more like mobile ISPs.

Paul Walsh of Segala raised the interesting point that the end-result of stripping stuff out of websites to make them work and easy to navigate on mobile can often be perceived as damaging to brands ie. removing graphics, advertising, logos and other so-called funky stuff. While at the minute WAP is a far superior experience to the mobile [open] web, he added, the issue is that you have no freedom on WAP, it’s yet another walled garden.

Accessibility vs. snack-mode culture

He championed following the W3C accessibility guidelines, which override the need to create your website twice (once for web, and again for mobile), because a by-product of the W3C guidelines is that your site will work well on mobile too. Plus the web will detect what device the user is using and the device capability, and tailor delivery of the website to fit that phone [cool, but apparently it slows down the browsing experience]. But this seemed to side-step the issue of content suited to the mobile device and the user’s context.

A whole new vista was then opened to me by one of Paul’s remarks. While we are obsessed with content-on-the-go, mobile snacking and mobisodes, we seem to forget that the way most people in the world will access the internet is via mobile.

So while affluent Westerners wired with broadband at home might lap up tailored content on their handset, people in India and Africa might be happy to get the full episodes, the full essay, the whole motherlode of information on the web on their phone, as in the main they have no alternative. Don’t factor that in at you peril and don’t assume that you know what your users want!

Collaborate with your community

Listening to the users was at the very heart of Alfie’s perspective, and he opened with a superlative rant on the part of the consumer that Ewan has published here.

With MoblogUK they canvassed users right from the outset and let them submit in competition their own designs for re-skinning Moblog pages. While responses may have been limited to people with design skills (but 80 submitted designs was great feedback for a start-up barely off the blocks!), it was a fantastic way of garnering feedback and understanding of the market from the get-go.

It’s so easy for anyone to use a wiki or a forum to collect further feedback. But who else even thinks of asking the question, Alfie remarked.

Consumers know what’s good for them…

Uptake of disruptive services is steadily creeping upwards as better and more innovative alternatives are launched and developed. Shozu and Juvino were two that Alfie rated highly. Enabling the freeflow of content between your digital spaces was another feature Moblog embraced with send to “my Blogger”, “my Delicious”, “email this” and “Digg this” buttons recently added to the Moblog user toolset. Creative Commons licencing is also offered.

Richard Hurring from Marvellous noted that the permanent world of mobile presence is coming to brands and he explained why the mobile channel is so important for brands: it allows for impulse interaction and purchase as it’s anytime, any place and anywhere; it gives people and brands the power to interact; it drives control for users; and it’s an active (not passive) medium.

As the number of people with 3G phones is now equal to the number of households with broadband, more people will connect, Richard added, and he cited Peugeot (who have launched three cars with Marvellous) and Carling’s London barfinder (downloadable via WAP) as instances where thought-through mobile branding has really come to life.

Advertising forecasts and marketing response rates

A salient point from Beep Marketing’s Helen Keegan was that consumers, as ever, seem to be two steps ahead of businesses and brands when it comes to mobile. She cited research from Jupiter (released September 2006) that said mobile advertising spend will reach £2 billion pounds in the UK by 2010.

The more granular findings underlying that bold forecast highlighted the shift in consumer mindsets. Almost half of 16 to 25 year-olds said they were happy to accept adverts in return for free content, and 30% said they would be likely to respond to marketing messages (though the medium for the call to action – posters, TV ads, print, mobile itself – was not stated). A further 25% said they’d respond to mobile marketing specifically, and this was equally split between the sexes.

Bountiful options…

Helen went on to outline the opportunities and trends in ad-funded content, mobile advertising, sponsored SMS, selling your list (not-so-good), branded content, sponsored content, off-the-page promotion, subscription models, user-generated content and wholesale. Phew, so many options! It was a rich summary of the business landscape where you can make money now. But still, many brands’ mobile activities are poor, spam-like, or non-existent.

There were loads of other nuggets, case studies and interesting debates, but like I said, you had to be there. One Irish mobile marketing start-up even sent two delegates over from Dublin to attend. As Helen recently said, mobile isn’t going away any time soon. And the whole sector is ripe for transformation.

So next time there’s a mobile event anywhere of this calibre folks, get yourself along! Mobile Mondays are recommended and hopefully we’ll have a B&I soon that goes deeper into this area.

In the meantime, if disruption, content aggregation and new business models more generally float your boat, there’s still a few places left for Beers & Innovation 5 on 17th October.

[UPDATE: I've removed the apostrophe from Pandora's in the title as it makes the URL kinda crazy, so the URL has changed. As for the new punctuation, am expecting a call from Lynne Truss any minute... paranoia induced by journalism background etc. Use of etc induced by too much GapingVoid etc]

UK embraces mobile innovation?

I have to flag up our event New Directions In Mobile happening next Tues 3rd Octber, and why not be brazen about it?!

It’s bang on the money for the Beers & Innovation audience and is shaping up to kick some ass on the event circuit.

Plus the emphasis, as with all NMK events, is on debate and discussion. Also, we haven’t had a Beers & Innovation that focuses particularly on mobile as yet.

The event will look at smart thinking for operators and start-ups in this sphere, plus what’s new for mobile marketers, producers, distributors and innovators.

And we’ve some some *very* cool speakers involved.

Among them are Helen Keegan from Beep Marketing, Paul Walsh of Segala, Alfie Dennen of Moblog UK (and We’reNotAfraid.com) and Steve Flaherty of mobile innovation consultancy Ketai Culture. Plus speakers from mMetrics and Marvellous Mobile.

UK networks score with mobile video 

Two big announcements this week in this area seem relevant to the issues at stake. On September 21st, Vodafone’s Jonathan Bill told Justin Pearse of New Media Age:

“Mobile TV is now bigger than ringtones, the stalwart of mobile content… This is the coming of age for mobile TV.”

Apparently over half of all new Vodafone 3G customers choose to subscribe to mobile TV, and Bill said one of the reasons it’s so popular is that it is ubiquitous – you don’t need a specific application or phone.

According to MoCo News:

Competing UK operator Orange said that mobile TV and video combined was approaching ringtone levels, and that “the growth of mobile TV is the growth of 3G”.

[Bill's figures are] just for the Vodafone UK business, which has about 1 million 3G customers. If most of the people who sign up for mobile TV choose the £10 per month option, that’s quite an income stream.

In turn, 3 announced 50,000 paid users had signed up for their social network site Kink Kommunity, with their user-generated mobile video-sharing service SeeMeTV passing the 12m downloads mark.

So people’s embrace of innovation and new services on mobile, hampered initially by the hiccuping baby-steps of 3G, seems to be moving up a gear.

There are more details on the event here. It’s happening next Tuesday 1-4.30pm and costs £80 for employees of companies of 20 or more and £50 for employees of companies less than 20 and self-employed / freelancers. You can book for it here.