Well who was to blame?

Last night BBC Panorama aired their investigation into irregularities for premium rate services for GMTV (amongst other programs such as Blue Peter!). This morning I watched live to see the response and the MD of GMTV was on air to answer questions and to underline that they had ended their business with Opera Telecom. I am guessing a lot of service providers right now are looking to pitch to GMTV in the meanwhile. I wonder who is actually to blame here, if I was the client I surely would have asked how many entries were taken upon the winner being picked, and then when I wanted to check the revenues from that competition I would have noticed the gap in the figures between the winner selection and the actual time the competition was really closed ... me thinks there is more to come on this side of things. Couple of things to check, a more up to date story from the beeb and the official response on the GMTV web site. They have dated this back to 2003 which is the really interesting aspect of this which I doubt they will ever manage to quantify. I dont think anyone comes out from this well, Opera Telecom should have been managing this and keep it above board as they would be well aware of the OfCom and ICSTIS regulations, its their business, plus the client GMTV (who has been running these competitions for years) should also be more than aware of how these services work. I also think the regulators shouldnt escape some blame here as all they do is slap the wrists in such circumstances and then react when it is all basically too late to do much except mop up the mess ... and what a mess!

May Mobile Monday London

A quick note on the next Mobile Monday London for May, it is going to be on the 14th (previous monday is a bank holiday). The theme will be mobile widgets, a subject I dont know a huge amount about but ironically I will be the MC for the evening. So if you would like to present send me an email at alex@mobilemonday.org.uk or join the yahoo group at groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon to await further news and we will see you there.

Premium rate back in the news

Quick post this time, it appears GMTV (a British early morning breakfast news/show) is now under the magifying glass this week due to more dodgy goings on regards premium rate competitions. Again it appears that competition winners are being selected before they close them meaning large numbers of people are not even entered for the draw. Panorama is on at 8.30 on the BBC covering all of the controvesy around this subject and I think a bit of naming and shaming is going to take place. I am glad I havent worked for a company that has rigged this type of thing. Shows what can happen when the companies in question do not follow a strong ethical and quality procedure in house. GMTV have issused that Delloitte are being brought in for a full independent investigation so I await that news to see if anything will actually change ... or as I suspect things will evenutally go back to normal.

Where now for premium rate

Chances are if you are reading this, you will know something about the premium rate industry. Recently it seems almost all of the UK media industry has been affected by competition fixing, failures to handle competition entries correctly, over-charging and so on. It doesnt paint a good picture for the industry. I am glad to say that ever since I worked at Broadsystem and Telecom Express I never saw any of this go on and always pulled heaven and earth together to resolve technical issues so that they had no affect on the consumer. It appears most of the issues in premium rate telephony and text come down to human error, very few things I have read appear to be technical issues. I do wonder if the government and the governing bodies such as ICSTIS have kept their head in the sand to make sure the industry runs above board. Its almost impossible to police this area because premium rate is used so widely these days.

So where now, many of the big brand media companies have put their premium rate services on hold. They must be losing a huge amount of revenue which they would have budgeted for at the start of their last financial year. So I think we have to assume they will wait for things to quiet down before starting where they left off. But there are questions left open here, who is keeping an eye on the industry?

ICSTIS appear to wait for complaints to come in before before slapping somebodies wrist rather than pro-actively getting involved with the industry. It also seems the government doesnt understand the ins and outs of premium rate. Also I think we will start to see this industry offshore as the industry aims to continue to bring costs down. I also believe the mobile operators need to be more pro-active, they seem happy to deliver and bill on the traffic but dont work closely with the service providers to clean up the industry. I cant remember the mobile operators really taking any interest in how providers actually used their services, as long as the money kept rolling in eh?

So, it's time to replace parts of ICSTIS, OFCOM, gambling and lottery commisions with a new body, and this time give them the task of working closely with the industry and actually help them rather than just publish ednless reccomendations and expect the industry to police itself. The industry and bodies up to now have been rather lazy when it comes to being above board, there are better ways that dont have to appear heavy handed to encourage more openess and greater honesty. Nuf said!

April MoMoLondon

The next Mobile Monday London is going to be on the 16th of April, we are currently confirming sponsors and a venue. The theme will be on location. The very first event we organised over a year and a half ago was on 'Bridging the physical and mobile world' and it is time to revisit that concept again. there is a huge amount of innovation happening right now, for me this is really relevant as I have just started at Ymogen. I will be working along with the rest of the company to build the next generation of the community platform. The idea is rather than just provide an online content store, we put a huge emphasis onto the community itself, the people that author the stories rather than just pictures, where they were and so on. So back to MoMoLondon ... if you are interested in speaking or demoing then send me an email on alex@mobilemonday.org.uk

Mobile Monday London Demo Night

Monday night saw the return of Demo Night at Mobile Monday London. Jo Rabin worked with City University to bring us a large venue (shame we couldnt fill it) and Stuart John was the MC for the evening. It all went smoothly considering what could have been the case for 10 demos in a row ... and we didnt go over the planned amount of time! The podcasts will be available online soon at momo.claritycp.com. As always I tried my best to hold myself steady whilst taking some photos of the event, here they are on Flickr.

Finally, if you have any feedback from any of the Mobile Monday London events please send them to one of the following organisers:

alex@mobilemonday.org.uk
dan@mobilemonday.org.uk
jo@mobilemonday.org.uk
paul@mobilemonday.org.uk
stuart@mobilemonday.org.uk

Moving on ...

It has been a while since I have posted to my Blog, but the news is I have now finished at Telecom Express and am having a short break before I get my teeth into the new role at Ymogen. I am excited about the opportunities at Ymogen, everyone seems really enthusiastic about their goals and I wont be the only new bod there which is a comfort. I hope to get to meet more people around the industry now my role is going to include more contact with clients and aid in the business development.

I did enjoy my role at TE (and before that Broadsystem before the media division was bought by TE) working on high profile TV, Radio and Print media campaigns. I remember working on such shows as I'm a Celebrity, The Gadget Show, 5th Gear, Back to Reality (jeez!), The Match, Stars in their eyes ... I could go on ... but I wont :) Naturally I wish everyone at TE all the best for the future an no doubt our paths will cross again soon. Please keep in contact with me through my linkedin account.

Mobile Monday Global Peer Award Winners

Well I have just had a trawl of the net to see who the winners of the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards 2007 were are they are as follows (I believe the event will be available in podcast quite soon) ...

The MoMo Jury Award: Realeyes3D (Mobile Monday Paris)
The MoMo Audience Award: Plazes (Mobile Monday Geneva)
The MoMo Chapter Award: Mobile Complete (Mobile Monday Silicon Valley)

Huge congratulations to all the winners and everyone that got through to the finals in Barcelona this year.

Off to pastures new

Well it has finally happened, I have decided that I need a new challenge and will be leaving Telecom Express in early March for pastures new. It seems to be a really good time to get into a innovative company in the mobile/web space in London right now. I have decided to work for Ymogen on a social networking platform (more on that when I have made the transition) and I am excited at the aspect of driving their products, a lot of trust is being placed in me, but thats great and a challenge I think I really need right now. This means I wont be leaving the media/mobile space just taking a leap into another area of it.

Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards

The finalists for the Mobile Monday Global Peer awards are now up on MoMo Barcelona's web site. Good luck too everyone involved and especially to Reporo which is London's entry into the competition. Its a little like a Eurovision type of contest so lets see if people follow a similar pattern to geographical voting :)

Possible Mobile Monday London Media event

I am currently planning a future Mobile Monday London event based around the media industry. In the last few years we have seen the media industry slowly adopt other forms of communication and interaction beyond voice and text services. Also the media (print, radio, TV, web) is the route to market so it is really worth discussing this within the context of where we are heading and where people see future revenue. So I would like to cover how the changing mobile scene affects and enhances the following areas of the media ...

• Traditional Print Media
• Television (Participation TV, iTV etc...)
• Online Media
• Other media (Radio, Teletext etc...)

... let me know your thoughts.

Blog renamed to MoBabble

Well I thought at some point if I am going to generally talk about the mobile industry I should give my Blog a name that is fitting. So MoBabble it is and please let me know if this clashes with another one!

Aggregating social networks

As always in the techsphere, if you have a thought like 'This is great but I wish somebody would do ...' the likelyhood is that somebody will. A couple of articles ago I spoke about how I wish I could bring together many of the social networks and manage them together I start hearing about various resources to do this. A good article is to be found on Mashable that covers such a product that will help people bring things together into one virtual-profile. Rather than repeat everything, its best to read it on Mashable.

Changing face of mobiles in media

Over the last year I have noticed a huge amount of change in the Mobile side of the Media industry. Not only have we new elements such as MobileTV but we are now starting to see a slightly different model of delivering services. For instance a couple of years ago a media company would have a large number of service providers with a multitude of services ranging from web, traditional voice (IVR), SMS and so on. These days many companies now will provide all of these services and manage them all on behalf of the media client. What is interesting is that this is becoming a complicated business model to try and support the now much wider variety of services thanks to MMS and WAP Push, Mobile Web, Games, Applications, Content delivery/receipt, LBS and the list goes on and on. It is evident that providing all of these technologies is a matter of resourcing and investment, however the business model that is required to understand all of these from both the technical and client point of view is a grey area. As always with technology the hardest part always comes down to getting the client to understand how best to use it. I still think many clients dont understand SMS so getting heads around some of the other available technologies is going to be hard work for some. I also believe the way premium rate and charging mechanisms is due for an update now that some big players from the world of credit cards are involving themselves. I believe mobile payments is a bubble we are yet to see as not only does the mechanism need to exist, it needs to be simple and the public to be educated in its use ... ah yes that little detail.

So for the media industry, now the web has really started to hurt the traditional media (print, TV and Radio), where does this leave mobile? The trends have been towards using the mobile to send in personal content such as pictures and videos, however there isnt much of a revenue model around this in the near term unless you find a client happy to pay a minimum fee. On the other foot, are people likely to want to purchase content/things from the media brand directly? Most of issues here come down to throughput, click throughs, requests and so on, but I still dont think most media companies have found the right mix yet.

Apple's new iPhone

Well Apple finally got around to showing their iPhone and first glimpses of it are a mix of good and bad. As a device, I believe it will give the usual mobile manufacturers a kick up the arse to produce better quality user experiences especially when it comes to richer media.

I think this has a huge impact on the future of the mobile web. The easiest way to navigate on smaller devices (as I always believed with my old Palm handheld) is to point at the link you want to follow and not scroll through endless options. Question is, does this change things like the Mobile Web Best Practices or not? It all depends on how other device manufacturers respond to this as not everyone will be bothered in buying such as device as their mobile phone. But as we know these devices have a habit of convergence.

I think if this device can work with 3G as well as other protocols it could be the first device to offer a better seemless experience between on device and off device services. Such as during a video clip, you can go off to watch another or jump over to the web site, say with film trailers as an example. At the moment I think it has been designed with the US market in mind, whether we will see a variation on it for the European market, we will await and see.

Happy new year

Hi there, just thought I would pass on my New Year greetings, hope its a good one for all.

Aggregating social networks?

Recently I seem to have been asked to join so many social network groups, you start to get a little confused to what is where, which contacts you have through which social groups and so on. What would be really nice is a way of aggregating information between social groups that relates to you. For instance, I am a founder of Mobile Monday London, so there are many aspects of that I want to keep up on, also I have been using LinkedIn for a few years, recently I have got into Upcoming, dragged into adding a profile on MySpace and the list goes on. So ... I have about 5 networks, potentially related that I have no direct way of aggregating. So, surely can we integrate these social sites together? I know the same people who are also on many of these sites and there is no link between them. If social networks are to be truly connected, then we need to remove the disconnect between these sites. Ideas anyone?

Its been one of those months

It has been one of those months, you think it is going to be a quiet run up to Christmas and then a million and one things all come along at the same time. Luckily this month I took a back seat in the organisation of Decembers Mobile Monday London. The theme this month was Mobile Social Networking and there was a good mix of presentations and demos. I still get annoyed by people invited along to show demos at our events and they ignore our pointers and basically talk about the company and their clients. I think some people have really misread what we are trying to do a MoMoLondon, I dont think people come along to our events for product pitches.

Anyway, it appears the social networking is the real buzz at the moment, something I missed out of my last blog entry. So back to MoMoLondon, the picture shows everyone networking once Stuart John (Mobile Product manager at Skype) had wrapped up a packed evening. It made a nice change in the more informal surroundings of Skype's new office on Totenham Court Road, even if the seating arangements were somewhat original :) We had presentations/demos from Nokia, 3 (H3G), Intercasting, PitchTV, SoonR and so on.

An interesting event in more detail by Broadstuff covers the irony of social networking and the BBC Backstage gathering of London social networkers if you see what I mean. Unfortunately I couldnt make it to that event but it sounds like everyone had fun. London is very vibrant at the moment with innovative people, companies and networking groups ... great to be part of it I say!

Areas of mobile being talked about

It seems to be a good time to sum up areas of the mobile arena that are creating some buzz at the moment:

• Mobile web - huge amounts of talk in this area, including events such as Mobile 2.0 organised by my friend and Mobile Monday London co-conspirator Dan. A lot of talk seems to be around mobile AJAX, mobile web best practices and various ways of mobile search.
• Mobile payments - such as purchasing items through means such as SMS or an e-wallet system. I wonder when the credit card companies will get in on this act? It appears regulations are being relaxed across europe and finally the networks may actually start to agree on some mechanism that works across the board, lets not have another SIMPay.
  
• Messaging sticks around as always due to high SMS usage. But Skype's recent joint venture with 3 is worth keeping an eye on to see where mobile IM heads and if/when it will have an affect on text messaging.
• Mobile advertising has been spoken about at MoMoLondon as well as quite a few other events recently. It appears everyone is searching for the best revenue stream when it comes to new services such as Mobile TV and beyond.
• Mobile video is back with Mobile TV being the hot subject of the day. It appears most broadcast companies have this as one of thier strategies. Now the debate seems to be around digital rights and copyright of material. This links in with the popularity of video streaming sites like youtube about who actually owns the rights to the content. I see lawyers rubbing their hands as a trend from all of this.
• Mobile networks still dont seem to have their acts in order, all arent exactly in rude health when it comes to profits or market position. Acquisitions and being acquired seem to capture headlines at the moment. I wonder how many UK operators there will be in 5 years time?
• Mobile gaming is more interesting these days, mainly because the handsets have improved so much in the last couple of years. Remember the Nokia nGage ... thank god the manufacturers have remembered that most people use these devices to make phone calls and text each other.
  

Well its worth keeping an eye on many of the industry bloggers (especially Carnival of the Mobilists) to see how some of these materialise. Anyway, over the coming months I will investigate some of these a little further so remember to pop back.

Mobile Monday London November - Phew!

Well Novembers Mobile Monday London went really well. A full house, great reception from Google and I like to think I did a better job presenting this time ... preparation seems to be the key! The great thing about the meeting was the speakers, we had Helen Keegan, Tom Hume, Paul Goode and Ajit Jaokar, each giving their views about major trends in mobile. Some opinions were personal, most from experience and in Paul's case the statistics are difficult to ignore. The Q&A could have gone on all night, but there were drinks and food waiting so I couldnt let it run on too long. As always it is a great experience getting up in front of 150 people and being podcast ... I just hope it doesnt look that bad when the final edit comes together!