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).

Global Mobile Monday Summit

I will be travelling to the Mobile Monday Global Summit mainly for the sunday and monday (although will be around on tuesday morning). So if you want to catch up about the mobile industry, want to chat about social networks and collaborative efforts then come and have a chat. Take a look at the agenda and you will see that outside of 3GSM this is about the main global event in the mobile industry. I will be there along with fellow Mobile Monday London founder Dan Appelquist. I believe there are still some available places for registration on the main site, not sure about the accomodation at the actual main hotel. I will report back with some event news when I am out there.

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.

Chinwag Live 5th July

If you are in London on the 5th of July and would like to get together with a large chunk of the London New Media scene then register yourself with the Chinwag Live event and get yourself along to Imperial College on the night. See you there.

Mobile Entertainment Magazine meetup

On thursday night (21st June 07) I went along to the Mobile Entertainment Magazine Meetup event in Soho. They were celebrating the launch of a mobile version of Rough Guides for Samsung phones. Although the idea sounded interesting, I found this a very tedius event as nobody from either Samsung or Rough Guides really seemed to come around and introduce anything or anyone and speak about Rough Guides. I found a couple of guys from Creativity Software there who were my only guide to what was happening being that they had built the actual application, which incidently is very interesting. It basically seemed like a lot of business execs there to drink (or get drunk) and talk to head hunters (of which I bumped into many). The event left me feeling a little cold and wondering what use it really was to the sponsors of the event. Anyway, I bumped into a few people I knew and got into an interesting chat with some folks from M:Metrics so it wasnt all a waste of time.

Identity, privacy and security

I think the recent trend in Web 2.0 social networking communities and the way that mobile services are now being widely used the industry is starting to sound louder about issues regarding personal identity, privacy and security. I am not the best person to talk about this, only that recent events I have attended these have been some of the top most debated points and worries that people have. Is it enough to say the kind of arguments such as 'If you havent got anything to hide you have nothing to worry about'? You hear people say this a lot when the debate is about the possible introduction of UK citizen identity cards. However, when you talk to people in the know, you start to realise that identity theft can actually be a convenient way of not so honest people to do what they like under your name with no or little way to trace who they are are, laying blame at the doorstep of the innocent. So how do you protect your identity and keep what really matters private? Most people on the internet have a tendency to use the same password for all of their logins, this is very dangerous. With the rise in usage of things like internet banking, online purchases, election voting, blogs and so on, ID theft and the tracability of activity on the web brings around some disturbing possibilities. As Product Manager at Ymogen, we are building a collaborative tool to build rich media stories, and we will have to be very careful when we think about how we can protect identity. We also need to think about moderation to protect people such as children when it comes to the content people will put into stories. The internet is said to support the concept of Liberalism, but the community at the moment on the internet seem to fail to understand the responsibilities required to protect and secure people, their privacy and security. If you have some links to good places to find deeper information on this subject please add a comment.

Web 2.0 at the Dana Centre

On Wednesday night, I went along to the Dana Centre to attend the Web 2.0 discussions there. It was an interesting evening with the following speakers lined up for a quick intro and then group discussions around things like identity, preferred social networks, mobile, security and so on. All interesting stuff, including the chat in the pub afterwards. At this point in time I think there are a number of really interesting trends in computing. The Mobile and Web2.0 trends have a lot in common about how people communicate, collaborate and organise to meet up. Naturally this is all open to abuse, and I am starting to hear people talk about identity a lot more now than say 2 years ago ... probably about time as well. A lot of people are concerned how this affects the young using all of these tools today and how they interact with each other in more tranditional social environments such as school. On the other hand, I hear a lot of people talk about the social networking trend being a great leveller and remover of nationalist boundaries, perhaps a bit of a hippy ideals is required :)

Anyway, the speaker lineup was ...

• Gareth Mitchell - BBC World service 'Digital Planet' presenter
• George Hadjigeorgiou - General Manager, communications and community projects, Yahoo Europe
• Aleks Krotoski - Technology Columnist, The Guardian; researcher, University of Surrey
• Tim Malbon - Creative Director, Interesource
• Alison Wheeler - CEO of Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Foundation

There is an interesting cross over where people think about the new 'trend' in social networks to be a web phenomena, however I believe this started back with the boom of mobile phones back around 7-10 years ago. I still think people keep their closest friends on their mobile, maybe on their social networking site, but they tend to use Web 2.0 sites to reach out a little further to find new and interesting people/friends/colleagues. I got my current job through LinkedIn which to me at least makes me believe this isnt all just a fad!

Podcast now available for June MoMoLondon

Quick article today, the podcast is now available for the June Mobile Monday London, to be found at our podcast site (sponsored by Clarity Capital).

24 hours of Flickr in London

So tonight on the way home I decided to drop into the 24 Hours of Flickr to see what was happening and what Flickr were promoting. There were quite a few people who turned up, Flickr put on wine and a few snacks and the space seemed to be set up for networking. You could wander around the 'How We Are' exhibition at the Tate as well which was interesting for look at historical photographs which is a nice tie-in with the evening. I didnt really get much in the way of photos from Flickr, there were a couple of screens showing photos around the globe that day but it wasnt that well presented and it didnt grab attention as it should have. I wonder what Flickr got out of the evening except just a good way to meet their community. However it is nice to go along to something different and it is a nice venue (and on the way home). I took a few photos, on Flick naturally ... take a look.