MoMoLondon packs em in for July

Hi folks, I would have posted this earlier in the week, however it has taken me a while to get some time to really reflect on Monday's MoMoLondon event. We themed around 'Enabling location in applications' to cover areas such as actually what is around for you to build location into, how to share it and how to access some of those capabilities from your handset. A really great thing about the event was it was packed, not a spare seat and the whole thing ran along smoothly and on time ... gosh! We also had some of our global MoMo colleagues in from Spain, Germany, Italy, Finland, USA, Estonia and more, great to see everyone over a glass of wine afterwards. We also welcome Helen Keegan (aka technokitten) officially to our organisers, who no doubt most mobile folks will know already, and she has helped us out on numerous meetings in the past.

Huge thanks must go out to Ted and Kate from Skyhook Wireless for hosting the event and putting on the party at Bar 100 afterwards, much appreciated by all the MoMo community. Also thanks to our other speakers and demoers Ben Ward (Yahoo! Fire Eagle), Charles Wiles (Google Gears), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Justin Davis (Buddy Ping), Mark White (Locatrix) and Matt Womer (W3C). Not only did they keep the momentum going but made a really good Q&A panel at the end of the event ... cheers folks!

Taking a bit of a look around the web, we have found quite a few blogs post Monday's event, so here is a quick round up from other people that attended ...

• David Wood
• Ben Matthews
• MJelly
• Inma Martinez
• Simon Judge

And so MoMoLondon takes a breather for the summer. We are still interested if anyone would like to sponsor drinks at a bar for a networking event ... email me alex@mobilemonday.org.uk if you are interested. We will be back in September where we hope to have some interesting announcements regarding our website, and hopefully a full autumn and winter events diary. Keep your eyes on our Yahoo! Group for more information.

(Pictures taken from Dan Appelquist and Mike Butchers from Flickr ... nice shoots guys!)

MoMoLondon July is all about location

MoMoLondon is back for July on the 14th (important that bit remember!), sponsored by SkyHook Wireless with a great lineup from Skyhook, Yahoo, Google, Rummble, Locatrix and W3C. All set to be a great event, and there will be a number of our friends from the global MoMo community in town. Keep your eye out on friday for the registration opening.

Its all happening since my last post

Well I havent posted to my blog for a little while now so I thought I would do a quick update on whats been happening. I have pretty much finished the MoMoLondon website and am now readying it for deployment to a host (more on that when it happens). I have also got back into the real world and taken a Technical Program Manager job at a company called SNAPin (a US based company with offices in London). Its a great role interacting with most areas of the company and I will need to get my head around all things mobile from the operating system, network operators through to the user experience (phew!). Also in a couple of weeks the next Mobile Monday London (14th of July) themed around Location, with an alternative slant on it, more about that later as well.

MoMoLondon - June 2nd - Wassup in mobile media and marketing?

The next MoMoLondon event is to be held next Monday (June 2nd) and will be an open panel discussion regarding the future of the mobile industry in the media and marketing industries. This should be a great insight into opinions from the panelists from the BBC, Financial Times and Fjord ... the panel will be hosted by a good friend of MoMoLondon Helen Keegan. Look forward to seeing everyone there, registration is now open, take yourselves to http://www.rss.org.uk if you are already registered with our yahoo group, otherwise register here first.

MoMoLondon May 2008

MoMoLondon May 2008
Originally uploaded by Alex Craxton

Last night saw the MoMoLondon community come together at the Thomson Reuters building at Canary Warf to discuss 'Monetisation through Advertising' with a great panel of Russell Buckley, Ray Anderson, Shan Henderson and Claire Valoti. Thanks to everyone that came along and had a chat with over a glass of wine afterwards. See you on June 2nd for 'Future of mobile applications'.

My wakinet.org site

I have spent a day playing around with my wakinet.org site. If you take a look, let me know your thoughts as it is early days yet and I intend to reflect some of the stuff I get up to there along with posts to my blog here and more trivial day to day stuff on twitter.

May MoMoLondon registration open

Registration is now open for the May 12th MoMoLondon event, the theme this time around is Monetisation through Advertising and is kindly being hosted by Thomson Reuters down in the Canary Warf end of London. Should be a good lineup this month with hopefully a good panel discussion to wrap things off. If you are in town and would like to come along, make sure you are a member of our Yahoo! group first and follow the instructions on the post to the group for registration.

Ever spotted a happy person with mobile email?

No? Neither have I. You see loads of people in London with Blackberry and Nokia email phone, but typically you see them reading something followed by a long sigh. I think this comes down to email typically being a more involved interaction where more information is usualy exchanged than most people want to deal with on the move. Also many people really misuse email communication as a whole, as though sending an email to somebody means they now have to jump your commands. Reading through an email conversation on a mobile is not an enjoyable experience. If you have ever received many emails from people with a Blackberry you tend to get a short response, so should you really be sending shorter messages to people with a Blackberry? It feels like we need something between the length of a traditional SMS and the never ending email conversations. Perhaps when people are more online with their mobile conversational applications such as twitter and jaiku will find a role within a business environment. I also believe if you really want somebody to do something for you, there are better mediums than email, perhaps an email just to point them to a task list or application might be as far as I would go. As you might have guessed, I am not a fan of email, I dont often have great experiences with email. You either get a conversation that would be better done over IM or in person or you get one liners that could work better as a text message.

Microsoft misses the point with mobile (again)

If you have been on the tube in London recently you will probably ... no ... you will not have been able to miss the adverts for Windows mobile everywhere and anywhere. I cant believe Microsoft have gone and done it again, selling their platform as an extension of the office. Missing the idea of it being a personal device. Dont they get where mobile has been and where it is going? I think somehow they want a piece of the Blackberry 'people' market. Remember the apple advert sneering at microsoft ... just feels they didnt get the jibe Apple were getting at ...



So here is an interesting challenge, go to google and type 'microsoft mobile' or 'windows mobile' and see what you get. First link ... tells me a lot about where they are targetting their mobile products right now.

And so the final stages into Alpha

As blogged before, the website for Mobile Monday London is nearing the stage where it will go into a closed Alpha. We are going to attack it from a user experience angle so that we can be sure that it will serve our community now and into the future. It will hopefully be released into a public Beta for our community before the summer gets going (to hold me to that) and we are now putting together a roadmap of features it has now and some milestones over the next year, looks to be an exciting future for it.

London isnt to blame, its in Beta

London Mayor Ken Livingstone today announced that London was going into Beta, and therefore anything problematic, wrong or broken are just teething problems. Mr Livingstone was quoted this afternoon saying:

'We understand peoples worries and frustrations with the recent issues, however we are looking to fix these for the final release of London. We are taking Heathrow back into a closed Alpha for the meanwhile to sort out some of the bugs and will use private invites only to make sure we dont have to cancel any further flights in or out'.

When questioned further about also putting the London Underground into Beta, Mr Livingstone said that in fact it had been in Beta for nearly 100 years, they had yet to get around to updating the logo suggesting it would have been a misuse of public money.

Mr Livingstone also pointed out that many people hadnt noticed the Beta symbol on the London 2012 Olympics symbol when it was released in recent times. The public have been asked to keep on the lookout for other services and commitments that the London Mayor's office have pledged to that are in Beta before complaining so loudly.

The new Totally London badge is expected to have the footnote ... 'Its not our fault, we are in beta afterall'

MoMoLondon new website close to alpha testing

I have been working on a new website for MoMoLondon over the past couple of months (when I have time to code) and here is a sneak preview (click on image):

It still needs a designer to go over the layout and images, a web developer to clean it up but the basics are now in place ready for some closed testing. If anyone is willing to host a simple JSP/MySQL site for MoMoLondon then please contact me directly (info on right panel).

MoMoLondon - Review of April events

Mobile saw the end of a busy weekend of mobile industry activity in London with MoMoLondon's User Expereience. Considering quite a few from OTA had turned up people were engaged by a really good speaker lineup and an open invitation for sponsored places at MEX from Marek. We showed a couple of demos and did a quick review of the weekends activities. We have had some great feedback from the community on both events so hopefully we will be doing similar next year (dont hold me to that!).

Had to put this on the blog, its Phone Phight, written by Lastminute labs overnight at Over The Air ... (spot Tom cheating with an early jab) ...



... and OctoBastard from the Future Platforms folks ...



And finally just before the demos at Over The Air, here is a quick video sweep of the audience ...

Over the air, in the press

Another update on Over The Air (will keep adding to this), now I have caught up with emails, blogs, twitters, life and so on, here are some interesting articles/reviews I have found on the weekend event ...

The Register (little mention of Mobile Monday London in there, damn)
Guardian
BBC Backstage
BBC World - Digital Planet (about 20 minutes into the report)

And from the blogsphere

Dale lane
Mark Ng

Question is, where were the rest of the technology press, they knew it was happening and many were invited along, perhaps there are too many events on at the moment and they are stuck at Heathrow T5 or something?

Slideshow of Over The Air

Just thought I would put a flickr slideshow covering the 2 days of Over The Air ... enjoy

And now to Mobile Monday London

Well Over The Air is over and thoughts already turn to monday's event on Mobile UI. Dan Appelquist will do a quick review on summing up the weekend, probably in a 'its been emotional' fashion :) ... but in all seriousness we have a great line up as always so hope to see folks there.

Over the air ... a review

Well Over The Air is now over, and a great end to the day with some really interesting demos that were hacked together over the last 24-48 hours (quite a few of them over night). One was a mobile app to help mix cocktrails, one was a sword fight with bluetooth, another was virtual fridge notes and so on. I was really enthused and educated about mobile over this weekend, so I take away a lot. Unfortunately the hack I put together didnt work when we demoed it on stage (god damn demo demons) and we ended up with the 'most over engineered' award (wahey!) for probably an over complicated demo, although my hack was 10 java classes ... but we had some great feedback so the tiny idea might one day blossom into something else. I am not disheartened, it was a 4 hour hack and with the great help of Betavine we got something nearly there in time ... I havent done anything like this before and it was although nervy, was quite enjoyable.

Huge thanks go out to all of the organisers of Over The Air, I wont pull anyone out in particular as there are more people than I can mention here and it would be unfair to thank just a few of them. At Mobile Monday London we are going to review the conference and see how we can improve and streamline the event as there is interest to run a similar event abroad and no doubt they will benefit from some wisedom you only get by going out and doing this type of thing.

I hope that some of the demos I saw today I will see in some fashion in the not too distant future as they show great ideas can be prototyped into something in a short time. I would like to think one of the apps might make it as a demo in a future Mobile Monday London.

MoMoLondon April 7th 'Mobile UI'

Quick post today, the registration for the April MoMoLondon event is now open. This month the theme is around Mobile UI, planning through to implementation and is kindly sponsored by our friends at Taptu.

MoMoLondon website

If you wonder what I have been up to in recent weeks, I am getting close to finishing the new web site for the Mobile Monday London community. Yes in the near future we will be moving from the Yahoo group and Blogger mess we have used for the past 2 or so years. The idea has been to bring together the forum, messaging, blog, events management and events registration system. Of course there are many features we havent yet got around to, but will do over the coming year, such as the obvious and obligartory mobile site and integration with some more interesting social applications to help promote and share knowledge within the community.

We are now looking for hosts for the site from the mobile industry, its a simple setup so we shouldnt need anything particular special regards the platform although we will be sending out a lot of emails from the platform as part of the forum and event reminders.

Registration for Over The Air is now open

Click on the banner to go to the registration page for the over the air event on the 4-5th April. Registration is totally FREE and the event will run over night and all food and drink will be free for everyone that attends.

Over the Air is a special event being organised by Mobile Monday London, hosted by Imperial College and supported by the BBC. 48 hours of mobile and wireless development by and for the leading lights in the industry.

MoMoLondon is going Mobile London

Yes its nearly that time again, Mobile Monday London's next event will be themed on 'Mobile London' or at least what mobile is doing for the people of London (outside of just calls, text and web that is). If all this comes off (the logistics are complicated this time around) then this should be a really interesting event. More info when I have it, in the meanwhile register yourselves with our Yahoo! group if you will want to attend: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/momolondon and await an email about how to register for the event.

How to make sense of the noise of the Web 2.0 generation ... Web 3.0?

Looking back over the last 10-15 years, beyond the desktop that is, you could sum up the first real movement on the web was around discovery and communication. Then the underlying trend of Web 2.0 has really been around sharing and connecting. One side-effect of the Web 2.0 generation has been that everyone creates a lot of noise, things I will not be interested in clouding my view on what I might be interested. So how to make sense of all this. This is where it all gets complicated of course, if in the last year I have done things like go on holiday, join social groups, attend events, gone to parties, taken pictures and video, blogged, communicated and so on, how do these relate and what is relevant to other people. A recent conversation I have had regarding deep tagging (at the Creative Coffee Club in Central London) provides and interesting step into how you can flag things with richer assets such as video. Tagging right now appears to be the way the web is being sewn together, easier to implement of course but across multiple cultures lacks relevancy and can be very tenuous where two things tagged the same are actually anything to do with each other. Relevancy is a deep subject, the things I have mentioned above regard who I am, where I was, when I was there, what I was doing, what interesting things happened, who was there with me and the same information about them. As I have mentioned, things becomes really complicated as chances are, once you upload these to current Web 2.0 sites you may not able to answer all those questions, especially if you are in a room with lots of people you dont know or cant remember. So the point at which 'things' are captured is going to become more important. The mobile device right now is quite good at capturing basic things like photos, low quality video, texts and so on, and all we typically get in common is a timestamp (which relies on the device time being right). But it is hard to apply this meta data that relates them together, right now that is mainly done in retrospect. Some devices can do things such as geotag, some file formats have additional meta data such as EXIF on photos but it only goes so far. I think the geographical information is only going to move forward once devices really exploit this, GPS is limited especially when you are inside. So how can I capture things and apply the meta data right there and then. If I take a photo on my mobile, yes I might be able to tag a location, yes it will be timestamped but if my phone and the file format provided a way to immediately add some meta data that could go quite a long way to making sense when everything is uploaded. If I am videoing an event, how can I pin/tag things within that event so I can find them later on, deep tagging is not something you find in video/audio capture devices right now but it would be a great addition that could allow a system to automatically edit some of your assets when uploaded. Another interesting trend has been in micro-blogging where people write short bursts of what they are up to on things like twitter, facebook and so on. Because again this is timestamped, information such as this could help sew together other captured assets and apply some level of relevancy in a manner users might be more comfortable with. I realise some thought has been put into areas such as the symantic web, however I think the factors that will make this all work is when the user doesnt need to do anything or very little to apply this information at the point of capture. Anyway food for thought.

Upcoming needs to move forward

I have been a long time user of Upcoming, but I have noticed in recent months the number of events being posted there has drastically fallen, or at least in the London area that is my feeling. Upcoming (now owned by Yahoo!) has the potential to be a lot more than it currently is. Being that it is really based around what is happening a where the user interface doesnt have a natural feel for these simple requirements. Of course its major thing is that you can see what other people are interested or attending and a mix of this along with better tools but this is where competition from social networks such as facebook become a challenge, especially in the fact that facebook is a rapidly evolving platform that keeps the interest of its users hooked. Also there feels like a missed opportunity in not having a decent mobile site, this should really fit into a calendar and alert people to new events and send reminders for events, along with details of where they are. So where now for upcoming. Well I guess the future of Yahoo! is up in the air regards the Microsoft interest so perhaps nothing will change for a while, which is a real shame as I like these social networks that just focus on one area rather than try to be something for everyone.

MoMoLondon - Mobile OS reflections

Last night saw another successful event for MoMoLondon with a busy room listening to the debate on the future of the Mobile Operating System. The speakers brought up some interesting trends in areas such as Smartphones (and what exactly smartphone means), Open Source v Commercial OSs, web applications and how they are integrating more with the capabilities/features of the OS and M:Metrics gave some statistics of smartphone usage in Europe and the US. It was a good turn out, great to kick off 2008 and everyone catching up before the congres in Barcelona.

Anyway, here is a quick audience sweep from the event, David Wood from Symbian is speaking ...

MoMoLondon - February is Mobile Operating Systems

Mobile Monday London is back for 2008 with an event around 'Mobile Operating Systems' to be held on the 4th February. As always register yourselves first with our Yahoo group and from there you will be sent a mail when the registration for the event is opening.

New Year, New Goals

Its been a good break over the Christmas and New Year period, I have just started on a 2 month sabatical to help build up Mobile Monday London and I get a bit of time to relax before going back into Ymogen. So what has changed in the last few months, well firstly MoMoLondon is now a limited company, with directors (me being one) and we now have plans to move forward regards sponsorship and what we want to do for the community in the coming year. And we already have plans for events such as a 48 hour developers event (more on that later) and some other exciting themes in the coming months, february looks likely to be the next event. Keep your eyes on mobilemonday.org.uk for further news.

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.

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!

Bowled a Googley

Well we opened registration for the November Mobile Monday London group and it filled up almost during a blink. It is interesting running an interest group where you get some active members that learn all about the tools and get stuck in and make the best of things. On the other hand you get people that dont pay attention (too busy no doubt) and we get loads of complaints from people that they receive too many messages from the group ... without checking how they set up their membership in the first place. Never mind, I guess this comes when the group of people expands rapidly.

Mobile Monday London November

Well, another mobile is on the way and this time it is our 1st birthday and we will be holding it on the 6th of November at Google's UK headquarters.

For some mad reason I took it upon myself to organise this particular event and will host the evening. Luckily my credibility has been given a boost by getting on board 4 great speakers from the blogsphere. We are also going to 'big ourselves up' and cover what we have been doing as a group and how it relates to the whole global setup of Mobile Mondays. Plus we are going to have a vote (a simple SMS one) which I have set up here at Telecom Express.

Well I have a few weeks now to get my presentation together and work out what on earth I am going to say in front of around 150 people with a Camera pointing at me. The last 2 times I tried this I think I scored quite highly on the um-ometer. I plan to do a better job this time :)

Mobile Monday London now has over 1200 members and we have been running some very popular events hosted by many of the most important companies in mobile and IT at the moment. We have had some great complements from people from other groups regarding how well setup we are and how we go about organising the events. This tends to help that the UK is buzzing right now in the mobile arena and that we get a good level of attendence which makes people want to host our events. I will be glad for a rest after Novembers event though :)

Wild mobile apps

Just spotted an article on TelecomAsia, Tom Hume has also spotted this one. Interesting thing is number 3 ... a ghost detector. Now at Telecom Express and before that at Broadsystem I set up the mobile services for shows such as Most Haunted Live and Ghost Towns Live and I must say I wonder how this actually works. On Most Haunted they walk around with various boxes of electronics checking for temperature and so on. So does this mean you have to plug something into your phone? Anyway its a great arcticle.

Its been a while

Its been ages since I posted to my blog I thought I ought to put in an update.

First and foremost a quick update on Mobile Monday London. The most recent event was based on Funding, how do you start up a company, where to get funding from and so on. Now the summer is here, we are going to take a break for August before plunging straight back in with the September event on Mobile Advertising. There are now quite a few MoMoLondon events now available on podcast which I reccomend if you want to see where the industry currently is regarding London.

Also I have been over to Finland recently to visit the cities of Helsinki, Turku and Porvoo ... a nice and relaxing holiday. Also took a trip by Hydrofoil (very bumpy ride) to Tallinn in Estonia for a long day out. We also took in a couple of buildings designed by the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. (see picture of his famous lounge chair from Artek).

Anyway, thats all for now, I will try and keep this more up to date.

MoMoLondon and Podcasting

Well its all really busy regarding Mobile Monday London. The March meeting flashed by so quick, we have been talking with Glue regarding the web redesign and finally we have the podcasts online so people that cant attend can still catch up with the events. This was the first demo night, there were several people/companies demoing and it all went of rather smoothly. Dan was MC for the night and did a great job organising the speakers to come in. Volantis hosted the event at BAFTA ... which was nice.

MoMoLondon ... keeps growing

Its been a while since I last posted, January went so quickly. However, for the february meeting of Mobile Monday London I managed to talk myself into presenting the meeting ... seemed a good idea at the time. In the end, the meeting was our biggest yet, with nearly 200 people attending at Google's London offices. They put on a really nice spread and we also had the event podcast. Anyway, to the left is a piccy taken during the Q&A part after the speakers had finished. I must say it was slightly intimidating stood up there with the bright lights on me ... I think I will put my TV presenting career on hold for a while.

The speakers for february were Shannon Maher who heads up the UK engineering for Google, Margaret Gold from Luup, Jeremy Flynn the UK commercial director and Richard Watney and co from Reporo. The theme was around mobile payments and all the speakers had their own styles of presenting, some more confrontational than others. I will post again when there are more pictures and the podcast is made available on line ... hope it isnt too embarassing watching myself fluff my lines!

Mobile Monday London in december

Its not long to Christmas, but it didnt stop a big turn out for the 2nd Mobile Monday London at Fjord/Flirtomatics exhibition space. This time the focus was on the fragmentation of technology in mobile devices including some coverage of Mobile Java being that it is commonly used for applications on different mobile devices.

Much discussion on the group now seems to be what time to start, when to finish (oo eck its getting complicated now) ... and for some reason change the day sort of changing the whole naming convention we had started off with. No doubt we will find a happy medium in time, we even have people moaning because they have to travel long distances, the hint is in the Mobile Monday London name :-)

VoIP and Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

The IVR market has been around now for quite a long time, pretty much since DTMF (touch tone) based phones hit the market. We are all well aware of phoning a number, and going through a set of menus providing some very simple form of interaction to either purchase something, pay a bill, be put through to somebody from a certain department, talk to an expert and so on.

So in the world of VoIP, how does this change? Well it really comes down to how many people will use VoIP whilst sat at a computer or set top box or whatever. You see VoIP has no inclussion of an interactive medium other than the voice, and voice recognition is not quite as advanced as you might hope.

So, are people likely to use VoIP whilst sat at home to interact rather than use some form of the internet, can they be used together, can one trigger off another? Also if mobile phones end up becoming VoIP based how are they likely to interact ... are we still going to use the nasty old (but simple) DTMF system?

Personally I think it is time to think a little out of the box when it comes to voice interactions about how you make choices and how a call is designed. Currently we are stuck in a 'I am browsing' mode or 'press 1 to do something', 'what station do you want to go to?'. Ideally you would use the capabilities of the mobile phone such as LBS, maybe the joystick, maybe the camera ... who knows. Maybe this an area for discussion for the Mobile Monday London interest group.