mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends - m-trends.org

Like Rudy, it took me a couple of days to recover from 3GSM and gather my thoughts. Pictures still fly by whenever I close my eyes about what I’ve seen and what I’ve done the last week. But that’s for another post. Apart of the adventures, this years 3GSM congress was the perfect opportunity to be a pure mobile Internet guy for a whole week. In practice, this meant not to touch the notebook for a week, leave it at the hotel, and do all my blogging, emailing, picture uploading, podcast downloading, web surfing, etc. from the mobile phone.

Well equipped with a Nokia N93 and a Bluetooth keyboard I kept uploading pictures to flickr and blog entries to my mobilesociety blog on a daily basis. Uploading pictures via 3G was out of the question due to still horrendous roaming prices. Fortunately, the N93 is also Wifi capable and Barcelona has a lot of open Wifi hotspots. So thanks to open hearted folks in Barcelona I uploaded pictures while coming or going to the congress. Also, Nokia had an open access point at their booth despite not even Nokia people themselves knew about it. Another convenient way to upload pictures over lunch. Thanks Nokia! Using Wifi hotspots was more of a necessity rather than comfort as it has one big disadvantage: You have to stay where you are while data is transfered due to the short range of the Wifi.

Sending and receiving my eMail and sending my blog entries on the other hand was much more comfortable as I used the 3G network for it. Anytime, anywhere, much better than the Wifi experience but also a bit more costly. A reprimand goes to Typepad, as they still haven’t fixed their blog upload via eMail service. Half the time my uploads were rejected and I had to try twice. Hey guys over at Typepad, is this really so difficult?

To stay up to date what is happening in the rest of the world during the week, I used the browser on the phone and mobile optimized versions of my favourite news pages (BBC, Tagesschau, Heise, Teltarif) over either Wifi if available or the 3G network. I also do this quite often at home while sitting on the couch, so I was already used to this part of my “mobile only week” experience.

I have to admit that especially for blogging I missed my notebook. I found that mo-blogging is still severely restrictive. In particular I wasn’t able to link to other pages, like my flickr page and other interesting info which is really a great disadvantage (hello Typepad…). Also, not having other web pages open simultaneously in different tabs restricts the ability to quote from other sources. Inserting pictures to be presented as thumbnails is also a pain. Thus, my blog entries of last week contained no links and no pictures. The links which are there today were inserted later.

All in all, I didn’t miss the notebook a lot, but quite frankly, I was still happy returning to the bigger screen and to use both the mobile and the notebook depending on the situation. Here are my humble wishes for next year to further improve my mobile experience: Lower 3G data roaming fees and an improved mo-blogging interface. Too modest?

My first thought to start this years’ 3GSM wrapup was to check what I wrote last year: “It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.” I couldn’t find any better paragraph to resume’s this year event. Check the image (left) I took from the same spot as last year and notice that the telecom world is still a Man’s Man’s Man’s World. I invite you to find the women on the image… This incited me to continue my “Women in Mobile” interviews

Does this mean it was boring? Not really…too many interesting people around to talk to and change opinion with… No big news coming from the exhibition either: no real differences with last years’ show apart from more people, 60.000 (!) and an extra Mobile Content pavillon, but one could tell from small things that changes are (finally?) to come. Let’s have a closer look at all things mobile.

DEVICES
On the handset side, no real innovations as last years’ Nokia Nseries, but a lot of improvements by many manufacturers and cool handsets I got the chance to play with.

Nokia N95 and the new Nokia Communicator E90 lanched at 3GSM, N95 is a real cool phone, I’m looking forward to the mobile apps that are going to play with the GPS functionality, the E90 Communicator is a really cool phone with many apps but honestly a bit too heavy for me. The LG Shine phone (check also the LG Prada phone) was surprisingly solid and extremely good in usability design, and the touchscreen… a big improvement with the Chocolate. I played around with the MOTORIZR Z8, it’s the first time since longtime I got a good feeling about a Motorola I would like to mention also the coming Samsung’s F700 Ultra Smart Phone, with touchscreen, slide-out qwerty keyboard and 5-megapixel camera(!) My favorite design phone goes to Sony-Ericcson with the W880i Walkman Phone (metallic edition), real cool as you can see on the picture here, cool design and easy usability.

Note that Blackberry is still very popular amongst business people in the telecom industry, not one conversation without having someone look at his BB or do something urgent with it. What about the real BB, guys?

You can view my 3GSM Flickr Photoset here.

The 3GSM World Congress gives you a good overview of where the actual market is today - still a lot like last year - it looked at first sight… Some interesting movement could definately be ’seen’ in the mobile image recognition space.

Image recognition should not be confused with barcode scanning and QR-code technology though they are somewhere historically related of course, I wrote some of my views on this before here. Image recognition technology goes one step further in the sense that it doesn’t need a seperate application to be downloaded, or a decoder to decode, or a seperate ‘recognizable’ product code to be printed, and works - at its best - on most camera phones.

Some examples I saw during 3GSM were Global Peer Award jury winner Realeyes 3D (France) and finalists UpCode (Finland) and Tagit (Singapore), showing at the same time that real innovation can come from any corner of the world.

Since Google bought Neven Vision last summer and the attention visual search provider Riya got last year, the time seems right to bring image recognition commercially to mobile phones. One of the most interesting demo’s I saw during the exhibition was at the stand of Alcatel-Lucent: opening a video call, pointing your camera to a magazine ad connected your phone to your TV set over a 3G connection to be able to discover or store additional services to be viewed at home, dig?

Image recognition technology has some obvious advantages additionally to 2D-Barcodes like QR Codes or Datamatrix:

• They are graphically richer and more appealing, they can contain any logo or personalised image. Adding one to your blog, publication or advertisement might be less esthetically obtrusive than chaotic black and white codes, makes them ideally for next-generation mobile marketing campaigns.
• Unlike 2Dcodes, individual tags are easy to remember because they are images, not secretive machine only readable bar-codes.
• The Augmented Reality interaction paradigm makes it easier and more appealing for the user, your phone becomes like a sort of “magic lens”.
• Contextual menus can pop out of the tags: look up in wikipedia, listen to contents recoded, add contents to that tag…..it´s object hyperlinking or the mobile read-write web!

Daem Interactive had another interesting demo running with some logo’s and my face (!), pointing a cameraphone to it over a 3G connection connected the user immediately to m-trends.org mobile, very cool!

Ignacio from DAEM showed me this demo the first time in July last year, some might have seen the demo before at Under The Radar or MobileMonday Paris, now Ignacio gave me finally a go to blog this ‘atom3g’ demo of their patented application. Check it out, some of the coolest stuff around!

More insights on 3GSM later here.

People are consuming music on their mobile phones in an increasing way. The way most people do this now is through their operator, downloading realtunes straight to their phones. Innovative companies like Futurlink have a different idea how people will do this in the (very) near future, using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and soon NFC, I wrote on this before in my Proximity Marketing post.

At 3GSM, Futurlink presents Wili-co-ITS, a new technology to distribute and sell content on the point of sales directly to the end consumers mobile phones using an interactive touch screen with an advanced Bluetooth and Wi-Fi application platform. Dig?

Wilico-ITS includes an advanced software called Suite which permits the creation of flash movies on the touch-screen and advanced interactive mobile music catalogues to be downloaded in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi mobile phones (all versions of Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc.), all in an automatic way without the necessity of having advanced programming skills. Wilico Suite permits to personalise the design of mobile phone music catalogues incorporating multimedia content (images, texts, music, videos, etc.). The solution allows obtaining real time statistics remotely through an Internet connexion or GPRS/UMTS.

Just think about putting this kind of screens in a MacDonald or other FMCG POS and the possibilities of uploading and downloading content within proximity through mobile phones; think a YouTube+MySpace+Wilico-ITS combination scenario for example… get the picture?

CEO David Masó showed me a demo this week, very impressive! Make sure you check them out at stand Hall 2 - 1A05, if not I’m sure you’ll hear more about this innovative start-up this year.

Just back in October I’ve been writing about how Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO’s) in Germany have revolutionized the mobile telephony landscape in Germany. Due to their fierce competition, prices have been tumbling like never before. At the time, I was hoping that MVNOs would sooner or later also start to do something about mobile Internet prices as prepaid mobile Internet access was still at around 20 euros per megabyte (!!!). After Three’s recent announcement to waive international roaming charges for both voice and data it looks like the second landslide breakthrough of the year for the mobile Internet comes for German prepaid customers.

Just a couple of days ago, two MVNOs (Alditalk and Simyo), both using the mobile network of the KPN subsidiary E-Plus have announced that they’ve slashed prices for prepaid mobile Internet access by 97%. Their new price: 24 cents per megabyte, to be paid in steps of around 10-50 kBytes depending on the operator. The minimum price for connecting to the net from a mobile phone is thus around 1 to 4 cents. I consume about 30-40 megabytes per month for applications running on my mobile phone such as eMail, weather forecasts, blog reading, Flickr picture uploads, blog entry uploads, instant messaging and web browsing. With their new offer I can now do this for about 10 euros a month without the need to have a 24 month post paid contract and a sharp eye on the data counter.

The real breakthrough lies somewhere else, however. I talk to lots of people about how my mobile device allows me to stay connected with the applications mentioned above and how this enriches my life. People are usually quite interested but my arguments always disintegrated at the point when people asked about the cost. Once explaining that a post-paid contract and a minimum data subscription fee of 10 euros is required the discussion came to an abrupt end. Most if not all people then said that they were not willing to give up their prepaid SIM card for this. Even people with postpaid contracts were not willing to pay a fixed amount of 10 euros extra as operators so far insisted on a minimum data package instead of charging a reasonable price per kilobyte. I don’t think it was the 10 euros people cared about so much but rather the fact that operators wanted people to pay this sum up front each month.
This change of mind also opens the mobile Internet for students in high schools and universities who’ve seen the benefits but also shied away from minimum subscription fees and contracts. On top, students and researchers are the number one source of new and creative ideas and are one reason for the Internet being what it is today. With this move, we are moving one step closer to the mobile killer environment!

And, as a closing note, I hope similar tariffing will come to Spain as well soon, so Rudy can unblock GPRS for his kids and show them what the mobile Internet really is

In an ideal world access to the Internet would be ubiquitous and instantaneous. We’ve come quite far in the past couple of years and Internet applications on mobile phones usually work quite well as long as the network connection is stable. This is usually the case at home, in a hotel room, at work, while waiting for the bus, queuing up in the supermarket or in general, while your are not moving much. But in a car or on a train things are quite different and I just became painfully aware of this fact once more as I spent the better part of the day in a train returning home from a three week trip and frequently resetting my mobile phone.

While on the train, network coverage varies greatly, from UMTS coverage over slow GPRS to outright nothing for several minutes. Both phone and applications didn’t take this very well. Such an environment creates three problems: Even while the train roams through covered areas data transmission is not quite continuous in GPRS as the phone needs to interrupt the data transfer for a couple of seconds every time the mobile moves to a new cell. Applications can usually handle this quite well. Then, there are times when network coverage is completely missing. Many applications don’t like that at all as they assume that once they’ve connected to the network they can send and receive data at any time. And then there is the case when the phone moves to a new cell and the network suddenly pretends it doesn’t remember it had a connection to the phone anymore. This is usually due to bad network engineering but it still happens often enough. In this case most phones simply drop the connection without reestablishing it. Applications, however, often don’t recognize this and think they are still connected. In the best case the user can then exit the application and restart it. In the worst case, the user has to restart the phone to persuade the application to cooperate again.

Dear mobile phone and application developers: I very much value your work but please do not only test your software on a couch but do consider moving scenarios for Internet applications as well. Test your mobile phones and applications in trains and cars! Mobile phone operating systems must give the application the means to detect the state of the network connection and applications must use this information intelligently. An eMail application for example could abort downloading eMails or continue to do so in the background once connection to the network is temporarily lost instead of just blocking indefinitely. Also, applications should indicate to the user that the network is temporarily lost and offer to pause/exit/resume data transfers instead of sitting there and waiting for the next bit to arrive five minutes down the road. Lot’s of work still to do here!

I must be one of those ‘kinetic elitists’ described by Yasmine in an earlier post. I don’t like the word elitist a lot and I also haven’t received a lot of airport privileges yet. A desk, a chair and a power socket would already suffice while waiting for a plane. In the past two weeks I’ve traveled from Germany to Nice and further on to Paris and my suitcase is packed again and ready to leave with me to Milano, Italy in the early morning and further on to Erfurt in the east of Germany next week.

In the past couple of years, my live as a traveler has changed a lot as wireless networks now keep me connected to the rest of the world more than ever no matter where I am. Sometimes I have to admit that it seems I am now better connected at the airport waiting for a plane than at home just a couple of years ago. This is important to me and it reduces the effect that traveling has on me as no matter where I am, the Internet is there. I now (almost) have the same possibilities I have at home to communicate, to be creative and to consume information. No longer do I have to wait with some tasks until I get back home, I can do them anywhere instead of killing time. Just now I am thinking back of how it was 10 years ago (1997): No mobile phone, no mobile Internet, no wifi, 3G not even on the horizon, completely disconnected the second I left home… No way I ever want to go back.

Following the response and feedback I got on the “Understanding Mobile 2.0” article I wrote at Read/WriteWeb a couple of weeks ago, I created a wiki space to start categorizing the so-called Mobile 2.0 companies.

You can acces the directory at mobile2companies.com.

I decided to use a wiki tool, called Wepaint, so companies can add their own information and keep it updated. You just need to sign-up to add your Mobile 2.0 company info page, you can add images, slideshows, video’s, and RSS feeds as well, and tag your page(s).

Companies can use the tool to keep the web community updated with latest news, elevator pitches, presentations of new products/services, etc. You can browse the wiki by category, by keywords, subscribe to the wiki feeds on new pages added or updated, comments and news, a lot of other stuff out there yet to discover.

The directory is far from complete, I just gave it an initial injection and added some companies I know to start with, so the best thing to do is add your page if you don’t find your company in there and update your page if you don’t like what I added, it’s a wiki, you know

Kudos to Carlo for helping me with the introduction texts.

Contact me if you would like to contribute to this project, to become a writer/moderator, to help develop the wiki, and for any suggestion and comments. I hope these pages will be usefull for the entire mobile value chain, spread the word!

In his earlier post Rudy commented on Winksite and Shotcode working together for a better mobile user experience. Winksite now includes Shotcode and QR-Codes on it’s web pages which lists blogs and other web sites that use their service to create a mobile friendly version of their content.

Users browsing Winksite on their PC to search for interesting content to read on the go can now simply use the camera of their mobile phone to scan the two dimensional bar code next to the description of the site to access it from their phone and to set a bookmark.

Despite the excitement, one crucial ingredient is still missing to make mobile web browsing attractive not only for you and me but for everybody:The mobile network operator. Once some of them follow 3’s X-series program to partner with Internet companies the final usability gap will close as bar code readers will be pre-installed on mobile phones and Internet access via the mobile phone becomes affordable and transparent. Let’s hope it happens rather sooner than later before the 2G barcode landscape diversifies even more.

I have been writing and reporting for quite some time now on the convergence of networks, the introduction of hybrid devices and media becoming accessible on mobile devices, lately all connecting easily to the web. With game devices such as the PSP accessing the Internet over wifi and the introduction of the iPhone, we now embrace the era of ubiquitous mobility and nomadic computing. This will have a far-reaching impact on the way we access products/services, and the way we communicate with humans and machines. It will change our mobile lifestyle and the way we consume media and advertising.

m-trends.org started as a personal opinion blog on mobile media lifestyle trends and continues doing this with a framed focus, critical opinions and analytical thinking going beyond the hype. To create a broader view and opinion, I invited Yasmine Abbas and Martin Sauter, two personalities I highly respect for their opinion and work, to join me and write regularly at m-trends.org on subjects that are in the air, things we have in common or like to discuss and write about, to start conversations on topics, each from his own perspective and experience.

Yasmine Abbas, is a French DPLG architect, holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS 2001) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Design (DDes 2006) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At Harvard she focused on how neo-nomads, digitally geared people on the move, reclaim a sense of belonging to places in the age of multiple mobilities and digital technologies. She does that too: research and problem solving to design environments, products and services that work for people and drive business results! Yasmine will bring her design/cultural/social context and sensibility to m-trends.org. I interviewed her earlier this year in the Women in Mobile series. Do checkout Yasmine’s personal blog neo-nomad.

Martin Sauter has a special twist on Web 2.0. His professional focus is on mobile network technology and services and he consults mobile network operators for Nortel, one of the major network infrastructure vendors for 2G and 3G networks. His quality time activities include his mobile network blog and book writing. His latest book, “Communication Systems for the Mobile Information Society“, discusses the how’s and why’s of GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Wifi, WiMAX and Bluetooth. On the academic side, Martin holds a Dipl. Ing. (FH) degree from the University of Applied Sciences in Ravensburg, Germany and when not busy travelling enjoys lecturing and discussing today’s and tomorrows mobile networks. This is also the area that Martin is going to cover at m-trends.org. Check Martin’s Mobile Technology Page, his personal blog about his thoughts on the evolution of GSM, UMTS, WLAN, Bluetooth, and WiMAX.

A French girl living in the Boston, US, a German living in Paris, France and a Belgian living in Barcelona, Spain, this looks like other kinds of hybrids: different opinions on various topics in a ubiquitous mobility era with views from different angles, written from different locations, by people who are always on the move… This will definately create more value to m-trends.org; if there are any subjects you would like to have covered here, please suggest or contact me by email.

Expect some diverse and interesting subjects covered soon here, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do, initiating this kind of projects together.