MoMoLondon November - Ad Funded Mobile Services

Just dropping a quick note in to say that the theme for Mobile Monday London for November is Ad Funded Mobile Services sponsored by the kind folks at AdMob. We are holding it this month at Imperial College. I will be the MC for the evening (better remember to iron a shirt) and it will be another packed evening ... oh did I mention it will be our 2nd Birthaday :)

Mobile Monday London 8th Oct - The Mobile Web Revisited

Yes it is that time of the month again. Next monday MoMoLondon is back in town after the networking and MoMo Global Summit. The topic for October ... and rather well timed ... is The Mobile Web Revisited. There is an interesting lineup from the W3C, dotMobi and Openwave amongst others to show where things have moved in the last year. With all the goings on regards the Vodafone mobile web proxy I think this should draw more interest than normal (places are going very fast as I type). If it isnt already too late, register yourself at our MoMoLondon Yahoo Group and add yourself to the October registration database.

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.

Chinwag Live

If you havent got anything to do on July 5th, I cant think of anything better from a professional networking point of view than joining everyone at the Chinwag Summer Party for a drink or two and a BBQ. Lots happening there, check out the Chinwag site.

June MoMoLondon

Well Mobile Monday London seemed to go OK on Monday, but the turn out was less than impressive and I feel the need to ask the question ... 'What does it take to get people to actually come along when they have registered a few days before?'. Its a little puzzling why people say that they can attend one day and then just not turn up or have the courtesy to mention it to anyone. This is a community of people in the mobile field in London and I think it is time to start laying some rules that people that dont turn up should give something back into the community. Anyway, to stop this being a really negative article, huge thanks to Symbian for sponsoring the event and the speakers that came along to give a really interesting coverage of what is happening in the more graphical end of the mobile ... interesting stuff. Podcasts will be available soon for those who couldnt register and those that couldnt be bothered to turn up!

MoMoLondon June fast approaching

Blimey a month goes quickly, doesnt feel that long since the May event, due to time pressures we keep missing the first monday of the month (which is sort of what we aim for). So this month it is all about Mobile Games and Multimedia with some interesting names lined up. I think there are a few spare places left so pop over to our yahoo group and come along on Monday the 11th.

Will the mobile community be at the Chinwag summer part

Chinwag have announced they are holding a Summer Party in July to bring together the New Media world for drinks and BBQ. I hope there will also be people from the mobile fraternity to make up the numbers. I certainly will be there ... for pure social reasons naturally.

London Wiki Wednesdays

Last night I went along for the first time to London Wiki Wednesday and found it very interesting. A good group of Wiki veterans and real users turned up (around 50) and debated about general social and community uses of the Wiki tool (probably true about all community tools). However it did go on for way too long and I didnt really get to meet anyone and left around 10ish just to get home. It is well worth going to if you are a Wiki nut or interested in how Wiki's can be used by communities.

Ymogen @ MiniBar

Friday night seemed to go fine at the MiniBar. I presented a story I built on the route down to the venue (uploaded via Wi-Fi at the venue upon arrival). Take a look at the Story on the site (will only be there for a couple of weeks now) and let me know your thoughts. I could have done with 5 minutes to go through a few more interesting aspects of where Ymogen are heading but everyone will see when we Beta in the summer.

Google Street View

Rather interesting buzz going around about Google's new Street View addition to the maps, seems to be in San Francisco so far but take a look, its really interesting. I am guessing they have used a mix of GPS, a 360 camera nailed to the top of a car and driven around town and let the device automate based off certain GPS criteria ... probably with a large set of hard-drives in the car boot?

Ymogen to present at MiniBar

Just a quick note for anyone interested, friday 25th May I will be presenting on behalf of Ymogen at MiniBar. We will show a quick story built on the night (just before hopefully) and play it out as the presentation. The idea is to show how location, the immediacy of mobile and rich media can be brought together with a strong narrative to produce an interesting story. Anyway lets see how it all goes on the night as I only have a 3 minute slot to present!

MoMoLondon May

Monday saw the latest MoMoLondon hosted by Qualcomm at The Hospital in Covent Garden. I was MC for the evening and did the minimum possible due to having 8 speakers. However it felt like it all went quickly and being that I dont know a huge amount about mobile widgets was very educational. Qualcomm were very hospitable and we had some interesting mini-hot-snacks which everyone appreciated. There were some well known industry faces again this month, of which a few I think Dan Appelquist interviewed on camera after the event. It appeared most of the speakers agreed on where they saw mobile widgets going, but I think their views were a little too optomistic for the right now. Anyway, I can relax a little now that is over :)

Social networking ... or collective destruction

The blogsphere over the last 24 hours has lit up on the subject of Digg and various codes being copied around for unlocking protected DVDs. The real base of this is:

• Is this the community making the decisions on what is right or wrong, and who are they to make these decisions?
• How can the site feel confident they can moderate content and keep the trust of their user base?
  
• Is the community being dragged along on something they dont fully understand the implications of?
• If your community is producing content of a questionable nature, what can you do about it?
  

So are we really starting to see the start of the community working as a union for constructive or destructive behaviour on social networking sites? This is very relevant to me in my new role at Ymogen. If one day a user submits something that say infringes copyright, if/when we pull the article what are the consequences and who has the final say? By the look of the situation with Digg it appears that outcome has potentially damaging affect on the brand and the trust of its community. We will see if this dies down and if the bloody thirsty mob go back to being normal cizitens over the next few days. I feel this shows how people can react in a crowd and in many cases lose sight of what is reasonable. Who is in control, the site or its community? Lets face facts, Digg could well be successfully sued and put out of business, will everyone be much happier then?

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.