Old school v New school communications

In the old days (!) telecommunications revenue worked roughly on 2 models. You either took a share of the revenue as a carrier or a share of the revenue as the terminator of a call. So making international calls, the cost was eaten up by a number of carriers, and if it was to a premium line the carriers would pay out to the terminator of the call (either one off charge or based off call duration). Right now, chances are you are still using your desktop email client or a Blackberry for reading and sending emails, so there is money being made in the client application or device. Nobody really pays for webmail, this is the domain of the advertiser.

Just as you got comfortable with this ... everything is changing. The web and broadband has meant that these days an increasing amount of communication is permformed online and in many cases through the browser. It is very interesting with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook now being used as communication devices between people and groups of people how this affects previous models such as voice calls, email and SMS. These days email and SMS are routes for messaging, but the user may not be using their mobile phone or email client. Services like Twitter, Facebook and Skype have changed the traditional models of communication and throw into question how this can all be monetised. Unless you can monetise being a carrier or a terminator of the communcation, where is the money to be made? Blyk feel one way is to do all of this for free is to use an advertising model. It will be interesting to see if this model works on the long run, as it could be disruptive to traditional billing models for communcation.

With the level of communcations now being passed through social networks, person to person through the applications rather than email or text, what threat does this pose to mobile networks. To communicate with me, I can insist you need to be part of my friends list or some group ... with many tools available I have the power to decide where I receive messages from. If users could run an application on a mobile that hooks up with Facebook to do messaging, video and voice, why use the mobile network for anything other than data transfer? If I was in a mobile network right now, I would be paying close attention to this area as you wont be the ones in control of peoples communications and contact lists any longer.

Swedish Beers on tonight

Quick note to anyone wanting to catch up in London in the absence of a September Mobile Monday London event will find networking and drinks available at the Swedish Beers evening at the Nordic Bar on Charlotte Street near Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road underground stations. Its mainly the media and mobile community but its a good event to get together and chat about work, life, the world whilst drinking some nice beer from the north.

Mobile Monday Global Summit - Part Two

I am back in the Uk and I think it is time for a quick summary of the Mobile Monday Global Summit. The main part of the summit was held in Helsiki and over 1000 people attended a joint event with presentations from many companies and panels involving a number of people from the Mobile Monday Global community.

Sunday saw the organisers from around 25 chapters globally get together to discuss the future of MoMo and how the global community can work together more effectively. The geographical spread of the countries represented was impressive and shows how important a network the MoMo community has now become worldwide. Sunday also saw the opportunity
for some members of the world press to interview various MoMo organisers before the main summit event on the monday.

Monday came, the venue (Wanha Satama in central Helsinki) was ready for a number of speeches, discussions and panels to run in parallel. The event was opened at 8.45 by Jari Tamissito who gave an open welcome to everyone. Then each of the MoMo organisers introduced themselves to the audience. There were around 30-40 members representing the countries from eastern-asia right through to north and south america.

Once the event kicked off the morning was filled mainly with representitives from Gartner, KDDI, Elisa, Nokia and so on. Also there was a panel for Start-Ups including SoonR, Qiro, Fring and Floobs. Blyk spoke about their upcoming release of advert-funded mobile services that caused a few discussions afterwards, I think a lot of people will be watching how successful Blyk will be regards users acceptance of adverts on their mobiles.

After lunch and some networking, there were 3 panels mainly made up from the organisers of MoMo globally on the subjects of Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Marketing and Mobile Social Networking. Go to Flickr to view more of my pictures (or search for mobilemonday globalsummit and you will find many pictures there).

I was there along with Dan Appelquist on behalf of the Mobile Monday London chapter. Please contact either Dan or myself (alex@mobilemonday.org.uk) if you wish to catch up from the event or would like to get involved in MoMoLondon activities either as a speaker, sponsor or host to our future events.

Mobile Monday Global Summit - Part One

I am sat at my hotel in Helsinki just taking a breather from the Mobile Monday Global Summit public day. Yesterday the organisers from around 25 countries worldwide (and I mean worldwide from asia, europe and the americas) discussed the future of Mobile Monday. The interesting thing is that we have over 50 chapeters now and all the time new ones are either launching or are planning to launch. It has been really good to catch up with people who before this weekend have just been names and contacts in a social network. MoMoLondon is working closely with a number of other chapters to bring Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco in October and just as a note, they are still looking for sponsorship. I will report back with a fuller review of the summit when I get back home and get some more photos onto Flickr. Just to say, MoMo globally is hotting up for the future, we just need to work together more than we have been doing and the summit is helping bring us together.

Mobile 2.0 Conference

My fellow MoMoLondon organiser Dan Appelquist is again co-organising the Mobile 2.0 conference over in San Francisco in the US. This was popular last year and a great success so I am told it is worth getting in early when registration opens (keep an eye on the conference page).