Mobile Monday London August - Mobile Identity

Next weeks Mobile Monday London will be held at Sun's offices in Central London. The topic this month will be Mobile Identity which will be covered by a number of speakers and then discussed as a panel with questions from the audience. I will be MC for the evening. To attend you will need to register first with the MoMoLondon group and add yourself to the database for August.

Premium rate back in the news ... yet again!!!

Well I spoken about this before, at least once in this blog. Premium rate services are back in the news, again and this time the BBC is coming clean about various irregularities in picking competition winners blaming things like technical problems ... by this I assume they means 'people making the wrong decisions' as opposed actual problems with their technology. Anyway, this is covered in a BBC article which is worth a read, I have also noticed ICSTIS have promised to up their involvement within the industry, which I have always seen as part of the problem. If you just let your industry look after itself, this sort of thing is going to happen. This is the first time I have seen the words ICSTIS and proactive used together. This is seriously undermining trust for these organisations and no doubt there are jobs on the line here. I would suggest that the industry does some heavy self policing and make sure things are above board.

Mobile Monday London - Mobile Identity

Monday August the 6th has now been set as the next MoMoLondon ... and I must say it will be good to get the event back nearer the start of the month again! This time around the theme will be based around Mobile Indentity which is really important subject to discuss in such a group. In recent Web 2.0 discussions I have had outside of the industry with general users, Identity and trust seem to be the top subjects people discuss and worry about.

You read so much in the press about potential employers using social networking sites to check up on candidates. There is also the debate about how people use alternate identities, multiple identities (depending on which social network they are in) and how all of this comes back to things like payments and knowing who you are. It is interesting that the grey area between my identity regarding a credit card doesnt really differ that much to my identity in the respect that I own a mobile phone, for which I have an account. The regulations within the EU have been opening up to allow more flexibility in payments on mobile phones and I think this will lead to more interesting discussions around identity and how to qualify somebody is who they say they are. In the last 5 years I have worked for companies that provide services via mobile for clients in the childrens broadcast TV space, it is important that content (such as images and video) are coming from real kids and that this content can be checked against the right people for being authentic. This is a real problem to moderate with such huge amounts of UGC being passed around these days between users and storage sites such as Flickr.

Anyway, I am sure we will touch on some of these areas in August so come along. Join our user group at Yahoo. We are still looking for authorities on this subject, so anyone fancies speaking or demoing a related product at this event should contact either Dan or myself (dan@mobilemonday.org.uk or alex@mobilemonday.org.uk).

Flash mobs are back

Just when you thought it was safe, there are a number of flash mobs going on in the UK on the evening of the 19th ... more info at Media Stars blog.

MoMoLondon mixer last night

Last night saw a group of MoMoLondon enthusiasts brave the British summer weather (eg Lightening, thunder and heavy rain) to come along to our mixer evening at Floridita in Soho Central London. There was a good group as always, having a nice few drinks (sponsored kindly by GreyStripe) .

So many interesting conversations were had, some recollections of the Chinwag summer party queue system and how it felt more social in the queue than when we all went in :)

On another subject, Yazid Aksas of GreyStripe brought along his new iPhone to show everyone ... which was kindly (or not) shown around by MoMo's Dan Appelquist for all to look at and drool over. It looks a neat sized device with a nice screen and good build quality ... anyway, I am not going to write a review of it here :) See Dan pictured with a cheesy fixed grin on his face (some people eh!).

Mobile Monday London ... Monday 9th drinks evening

Mobile Monday London this monday (9th July) are holding an open drinks event in Central London. There is no registration, just come along from 6pm onwards and join us for a drink (smartish dress code at the bar). The venue is right in the middle of Soho at:

Floridita
100 Wardour Street
W1F 0TN
(map)

So I will look forward to seeing some new faces and our members monday evening! Remember to bring along your colleagues as well, we want this to be a nice busy evening.

Chinwag ... quite packed

Last night was the huge Chinwag event ... loads turned up ... although at the same time as the queues getting in were huge. This is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on which way you look at it, good that people really wanted to get in ... bad if you had to stand in the rain :)

Anyway, once we got in the event seemed to be a real mix of people from all parts of the New Media industry. So well done to the folks at Chinwag.

July London Wiki Wednesday

I went along to another really interesting London Wiki Wednesday last night. The packed room I feel actually helped the discussion and brought out some really interesting discussions around things like Wiki Vandalism. References were made to a recent conference where a speaker asked the audience how many of them had witnessed vandalism on an enterprise Wiki ... nobody raised their hand. So, within a trusted environment it appears the openess of the Wiki means less of a security worry than some people may expect. I think the fact that the Wiki, being mainly text based doesnt lend itself to messing around within a structured and formal environment, especially if you login and your name is tagged against the changes you have made to a page. The real value of these discussions are in the stories people tell from their experience. They dont always agree but you tend to find a common story about how people have found using social tools within an organisation. There will be another meeting in August with a discussion around 'How do you get people to contribute?' which is going to be really interesting. My entry into this discussion is that most Wiki's look technical, if you do some simple things like increase the font size, put less text on pages and brighten the whole site up that will do wonders.