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This weekend and early next week I’m off to Sevilla for an exploratory workshop on Mobile 2.0, organised by the European Commission Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), for its project on mobile content evolution and its socio-economic impact.

The project is looking at user adoption and acceptance issues, the promotion of innovation in this domain, the new emerging mobile 2.0 applications, and the possible existence of bottlenecks with the aims to explore techno-economic models and their viability, to assess the position of Europe in this field and to identify EU possible policy options. The workshop will also serve to identify key areas for future EU research and innovation policies. Most European operators and handset manufacturers will participate, together with some application providers and experts. Looking forward to catch up again with Ajit Jaokar.

If you have any question or input related to the topic I can bring to the attention, leave me a comment or contact me on Twitter.

Monday April 28th is also the launch of the first Mobile Monday Andalucía and will take place in Sevilla and covers Mobile Innovative Services. The event will focus on new technologies such as digital signature or Near Field Communication (NFC). Mobile Monday Andalucia is organised by the Andalusian Regional Ministry of Innovation, Science and Enterprise.

I will moderate a panel including Alejandro Romero from Yahoo, Antonio Navas from Kimia, Angel Romero from AT4 wireless and Rafael Selma from TB-Solutions. I’m really excited to discover some more about the field work on new technologies trialed here in Spain recently on digital identity and Near Field Communication (NFC). Note the recent trial launch of Orange Spain to bring NFC mobile ticketing to public buses in Málaga.

Anyone who’ll be in the neighborhood and who’d like to get in touch with me, don’t hesitate to ping me.

My apologies for the use of another “2.0 meme” but after my participation in a debate on the Future of Mobile Music at the Digital Music 2.0 Conference in Barcelona this week I felt I needed to update you briefly on some new thoughts on the subject. Since my writings during the MuLiMob project, my piece on “Connecting Cultures through Music“, and “DRM, free at last!” I haven’t been writing on the issue anymore.

Last Tuesday, in a Lab on Media and Human Experience, a filosophical flow excercise in between media, technology and philospophy, we discussed about ‘connected and un-connected spaces’ … media convergence is happening but the media industry is still pretty much off-line as of now, so the question is: where’s the bridge? And where is it happening?

I must admit I was pretty amazed that during the Digital Music 2.0 Conference comments and questions coming from the audience were still of the type such as “CD’s are still the major part of the business, digital music distribution only 9% of the market”, and - a couple of times - “How can you become so big without spending budget on marketing, I mean really “0″ on marketing?” and my favourite “Will mobile phones replace MP3 players one day?”… Us speakers had a though job to bridge our message of the indepth changes that are currently happening the way we consume music and the business surrounding it.

Trying to stay humble, I realized one more time there is still a lot to do to bridge the digital connected (internet connected tools, things, people and services) with the more unconnected world of tradional TV, CD’s, DVD’s formats.

When Edgar, the organizer, asked me in November to participate to this conference, I was quite sceptical since I had my made my conclusions on music 2.0 a couple of years ago while finalizing the MuLiMob project, it would only need some time for the industry to realize the curve of the long tail and that something profoundly was changing the music industry due to the innovations happening in web technologies and the way communities were influencing the way we consume music. Communities like last.fm were adding new ways to discover and listen to music opening opportunities for people to meet others with similar music tastes. This community has now grown to 15 million users and Claire Levy had the pleasure to anounce CBS bought last.fm for $280 million, real good news for recommendation technologies and online communities involving music in general

Mobile Web 2.0 or Mobile 2.0, Music 2.0 or Mobile Music 2.0, people say these are all hype terms, in a way they are but there are some real changes and differences to be finetuned, so why this title?

In my panel with operators Telefonica and Orange, it seemed as I was coming from another planet with my presentation on the current state of Mobile 2.0 and the the next generation data services for connected devices. Understandable knowing it took them (the operators) a couple of years to outcompete the SMS Service Providers (selling ringtones and wallpapers), and the same operators have been positioning (= investing) the last couple of years as music retailers to start selling realtunes… meanwhile another range of competitors are coming in their field.

While the new generation of phones and devices - Nokia Nseries up front - a new set of opportunities to consume music is arising, with the possibility to sideload or download music directly to your phone, whatever connection is it that you use (3G, wifi, bluetooth, usb, etc). At the conference, the operators were still defending the classic model - a song downloaded on the mobile has much more value and has thus a defendable value of 3€ including restricted DRM (!), adding the argument that NSeries and iPhones as the high-end range phones that are too expensive for the masses anyway.

My argument was that those phones might be more expensive but a simple calculation of my personal consumption learns that I buy average some 3 albums online/month (approx. 30 songs). So, on iTunes at 0,99€/song makes 356,4 € a year spend on digital music… while downloading over an operators retailer shop at a 3€/song rate, the same amount of content would costs me 1.080€ + additional download costs… the difference in 1 year would pay me a new phone, think about!

Also I would like to emphasize one more time that DRM has to be free - buy once, use everywhere - as it used to be with LP’s and CD’s. Amazon.com announcing it’s latest deal with EMI and 12.000 labels to sell DRM-free that plays on any device is another major step into Digital Consumer Enablement

I think that’s another reason why Apple is going to surprise a lot of people soon again… If I can connect my iPhone over a WLAN or to my computer to buy my music, it’s another great advantage for the iPhone users, from there I can carry it with me everywhere…

I have been playing lately with the Nokia N800 and I found it a great device, initiating quite often the WOW effect around me. At first I was sceptical (ah well, another device to carry that just doesn’t do everything yet!) but since I have start using the device - had it with me the last 10 days and used it in many different places in different contexts, my opinion changed from sceptical to enthusiast, well done Nokia!

When taking it out of the box, the first thing that surprised me was the impressive quality of the high-resolution touch screen (800 x 480 pixels) with up to 65,536 colors widescreen display, checked the demo video in full screen mode and yes, haven’t seen such a great quality on a ’small’ screen yet.

Start using the device is a piece of cake, the interface is really simple and easy to understand, everything shows or explains itself, the N800 discovered my WLAN immediately to start surfing the mobile web - nuance here (!) with this device you can surf ‘normal’ web pages, no need for mobile adapted .mobi style adapted web pages, this is the real stuff - check for yourself some shots I took from my blog, going to my Flickr pages, MyBlogLog and Twitter. Watching YouTube video’s (see corner right picture - video choice by one of my daughters!) on a portable device is a reality now, you can even view the vids full screen, great quality!

The N800 OS and applications are all build with Maemo, an open source - Linux based - development platform from Nokia. Kudos to the developer teams at Maemo, the N800 OS and applications I used are very stable, I didn’t had to reboot the device yet!

The RSS Reader (image below) is again very easy to use and consult your feeds, I could even view my vpod.tv video feed. This is a real need for me when travelling to stay updated, I can use both GPRS and WiFi connections.

Then I tried to setup a VoIP/IM service to be able to chat on the road. The N800 people have thought a lot about ‘easy of use’ to setup thing, it took me 2 minutes to setup the IM client using my Google talk or Jabber accounts, then I setup my Twitter account to be used from the device with Instant Messaging, besides web and mobile (see below). Note the virtual keyboard can also be displayed full screen and you can input text using handwriting recognition.

I also downloaded & installed the Gizmo VoIP & IM client for the N800, I’m looking forward to my first internet video chat, volunteers: please get in touch. I wrote on the Internet Calling service Gizmo and how it works on the N80 at Read/WriteWeb. I also wanted to play a bit more with Google Maps but for one reason or another the maps didn’t come out as I wanted - full screen map search would be great on this device! Maemo is working on a mapper client, I’m looking forward to start using that - you can check a video demo of how it’s going to look on the device.

Another practical use, specially for business people is the PDF Viewer with presentation possibilities, ideally for any powerpoint or keynote presentation to pdf and be viewed on the device (picture right), it’s great in person to person meetings, the screen quality is just so great. Adding some more functionality here would be realy usefull for people like me. If you own or buy a N800 now there’s a 1 month free subscription offer to use the Rhapsody audio/video streaming subscription service. Nokia and Real have teamed up to release a firmware update that adds Rhapsody support to the N800. I tried it out and I must say it works fine as on online subscription service: great artists and songs collection to choose from and very easy use to create your own playlists. I created a playlist with some of my favorite Motown music in a minute (see below), the sound quality of the device is quite impressvie too. The only thing here is that using Rhapsody is a great service to use as long as you have an good connection, meanwhile I prefer the MyStrands Social Player that works with the music I have on my device, hopefully soon available for the N800 too (disclosure here)

So, the verdict? I haven’t explored all the possibilities yet but I think I will carry this device with me for a while next to my mobile phone and laptop, I hate to carry too many devices all the time but I do see a lot of advantages to use the Nokia N800 especially while travelling, as long as I can find a WiFi around this is a gO!

NOTE: Tips & Tricks on the Nokia N800 at the N800 Blog, complete techspecs can be found here, view my N800 m-trends.org Flickr set here.

This is Sophia Berglund. Right now she is 25months old and growing so fast in her capabilities in communication - already she can muster small sentences in English, Korean, Japanese and some German! She can even translate! Sophia can create lines, shapes and forms by way of painting her communication…

But what makes me the most excited is seeing her grab technology with an incredible desire to learn and experience - she explores, she examines, pushes, prods, de-constructs the technology in some cases (i.e. she breaks my expensive “toys”)

Part of her 1st and 2nd years were spent in S.Korea where she was born into one of the most advanced mobile “handphone” cultures in the world - literally 5minutes after birth her first ever picture (and video) taken by a mobile/handphone and sent to our friends and relatives, she made her first mobile location based phone call at 5months and at 6months she was surfing mobile internet and watching mobileTV! She had her first “co-location” experience in 2006 when friends “broadcast” the 비 / Bi (Rain)**concert live over their handphone to my handphone - Seoul - to - Jeju…

Sophia is growing up into a digital world. Already she has a real-demo phone given to her by a friend at LGe - which she mimmicks her immediate social circle in making calls and surfing data.

Wow! Yes but today we question what is next - we talk of ubiquotous computing, mobile internet, mobile2.0, mobileTV, mobileGaming, mobileAdvertising, mobileMarketing, Location Based Services, Bluetooth, Proximity Marketing, smartphones, convergence, m-YouTube, moblogs, iMode, 3G, 3.5G, CDMA, FOMA, RFID, Flash-Lite, SVGt, mobile-Image recognition, mobileCameras, mobileVideo, Vlogs, iPhone (iPhone aka LG Prada), mobile UI, touch-screens, thumb-tribes, handy, handphone, keitai - blah blah blah and all of this jargon and often mind boggling marketing “psycho-babble” has made me think - where is it all going - how much “smarter” will the next generation of “phones” like my SonyEricsson P990i become - how much more can we cram into one single device!?

How many more times can my P990i crash - a victim of its own “smartness” - Yet I put up with it as when my P990 is alert and working it blows my mind with all of its functions and how they are symbiotic* to my daily needs - I can Wi-Fi (well not in Germany they lock their Wi-Fi connections), Google movie reviews before entering the cinema, take videos and pictures and Flickr them, I can use Googlemaps when lost or curious, watch movies, RSS Feed news and blogs, email, VoIP, Messenger, listen to music, video call whilst on business trips, bemuse my wife, and entertain my colleagues like I am a mobile guru! Seriously though what is next?

So - I think “convergence” will continue as a trend for maybe the next 2-3 years - not only in hardware but in software and services that we can ever expand the phones capabilities - with it computing power, battery power and size! Multi-media will play a big role - motion graphics - advanced touch-screens (iPhone aka LG Prada)
smart phones that know what you use and like and build a UI around your user preferences - broader personalisation with iTunes music and video, enhanced imaging and editing functions, more Bluetooth functions in urban locations, free ubiquitous Wi-Fi - oh I could go on with a list of endless options I could do with…

Sophia in 28years time will be 30 and the date will be 2035 - what do you the mocom (mobile community) think will be next and what will “mobile” have become - we all see attempts at mobile technology in clothing, e-paper (with Wi-Fi connectivity), cyborg like integration of receivers/chips into our bodies, organic and nano-technology - but really I would love to hear your thoughts!

* BTW thanks to Bear in the Big Blue House
on Disney Playhouse for re-introducing me to this brilliant word “symbiotic” Children’s TV is great!

**비 / BMW Meets Truth**
and www.bmwmeetstruth.com

I would like to introduce you to Andrew Berglund, another regular guest blogger next to Yasmine Abbas and Martin Sauter who joined me here a couple of weeks ago. More great contributors will be joining M-Trends soon, if you would like to become one of them, drop me a line. If you have any ideas, comments and feedback on the contributions made or presented here, let me know; we’re covering different opinions on various topics in a ubiquitous mobility era, written from different locations, by people who are always on the move… If there are any subjects you would like to have covered here, feel free to suggest.

Andrew will cover the “creative” side of mobile society and the culture that surrounds it. In his contributions he will report on new trends that IHO push boundaries within the digital realm. Check his profile at his very - as he calls it - “un-web2.0 and un-mobile friendly” website. Just recently he left Interone as the Executive Creative Director - Worldwide working mainly on BMW (Global - EU, Asia, North America markets) and Unilever (Europe) digital media communications. As of April 1st he will have moved to Framfab and LBi as Head of Strategy & Innovation - an exciting remit to push boundaries of newer / emerging interactive medias such as mobile and social networks. Andrew has extensive experience in mobile development, concept, and creative communication strategies within the European and Asia markets - with the majority of his mobile work in S.Korea and Japan for clients such as NTT DoCoMo, MTV, Samsung, and LG (Cyon)

I know Andrew for a couple of years now and admire his work, his original views and valuable opinion, needless to say I am looking forward to his contributions!

This morning my last order arrived from Amazon.com. I am all excited since the package includes some of the books I’m really looking forward to read this spring like Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins and Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen.

Wonderful coincidence when Fabien pinged me yesterday evening if I was in for a drink with Adam who was on a brief urban transit in Barcelona, inbetween a flight from Sevilla, where he assisted Microsoft’s HCI 2020 conference, and a flight back to NYC. We went for a drink in Pipa Club, once the social gathering place for tobacco fans, now the mood setting for urban creatives, loungers, movers and groovers and people like us.

We talked about Agharta and Pangaea, some of the finest recordings from the least-understood period of Miles Davis’s career, Richard Horowitz who worked with Brian Eno - coinciding with a installation I went to see this week of 77 Million Paintings, about Paul Bowles and Jean Genet in Tangier, about Douglas Rushkoff and Psychic TV, and the link to Throbbing Gristle (hadn’t heard that one in a while!), about our network of people we happen to know both, including Kelly Goto, Yasmine Abbas and Nicolas Nova - the latter will be present at the next MobileMonday Barcelona on Mobile Gaming and Beyond.

In short, too much to discuss in such a short time, so we promised to continue the discussion somewhere soon. Maybe XTech 2007: “The Ubiquitous Web” on 15-18 May 2007 in Paris, France might be another occasion… Yasmine? Meanwhile I’ll start reading Adam’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, for sure, I’ll cover more of the book and its topics here soon.

The first time I have heard of innovative ideas of how to use mobile phones for advertising and marketing via Bluetooth was probably from Rudy here on m-trends. Last year, he reported how one of the political parties in Spain used Bluetooth to send ring tones, images and videos to the phones of supporters during party gatherings. Since then Rudy has reported on numerous other ways to use Bluetooth for marketing such as song downloads from ad banners in cities and recently when he wrote about Futurlink. Today I read an interesting article in one of Germany’s weeklies “Der Spiegel” which was quite critical.

The author’s criticism did not address the marketing or advertising scheme generally but rather focused on security problems and user behavior. In the past, many issues with the way Bluetooth was implemented on mobile phones were detected and it didn’t take long before tools appeared to exploit them. These would do almost anything from extracting phone book entries to establishing calls to expensive 0900 numbers without the knowledge or consent of the user. Also, malware was found which uses Bluetooth to replicate to other phones. It has to be said, however, that the user has to dismiss two security warnings before the malware could take.

The author of the article in the Spiegel voices concerns that in case Bluetooth marketing expands, more and more people would activate Bluetooth in their mobile phone to download information and afterwards forget to either switch Bluetooth off again or at least activate Bluetooth invisible mode again. Personally, I haven’t heard of any security issues with Bluetooth on phone models appearing on the market for a while. So the question is whether the media has just gone tired of the subject or if vendors have really learnt their lesson and fixed their Bluetooth implementations in newer models. After all, it’s not Bluetooth that’s insecure but flawed implementations.

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…
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?

Some interesting movement could definately be ’seen’ in the mobile image recognition space.

MOBILE IMAGE RECOGNITION

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!

MOBILE MUSIC

On the Mobile Music front 3GSM started already one week before the actual event with Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music meaning Digital Rights Management (DRM); DRM is a trigger for the Record Labels to control the sales of digital music. A great and surprising Open Letter by Steve, certainly with a strategy behind, I was thinking a week before the event, too busy preparing the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards (I want to come back on the Steve Jobs letter later here).

Surprise, surprise, on Day one of the event, Microsoft anounced the launch of its own Mobile DRM system ‘PlayReady‘ (!) that will allow the use of commercial content on multiple different devices for a single fee. Is this what the consumer is waiting for?

Two days later, at the opening session on Wednesday, the chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group Corp, Edgar Bronfman Jr. said “that buying digital music from a mobile phone is too difficult and the music and mobile phone industries need to improve the process to meet demand (…)”

A study last year found that only 8.5 percent of people who own a phone that can be used to download and purchase music actually did so. “Why? It’s expensive, it’s complicated and it’s slow,” he said. “It’s amazing that we’ve generated as much revenue as we have given how cumbersome the experience can be.”

For your info, personally I haven’t bought one single tune on my mobile phone(s), though I consider myself one of the 3% online (legal) PC music buyers Steve is mentioning in his open letter:

“Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.”

The 3% I bought on iTunes of course, so where do the other songs come from? Older Cd’s (of LP’s I bought already once before…) copied to my iTunes and to my phone.

I wonder if the US companies heard about OMA DRM from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)? Its mission is to provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals. Since its inception in June 2002, the Open Mobile Alliance has grown to more than 300 companies representing mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies, and content providers Members include traditional wireless industry players such as equipment and mobile systems manufacturers (Ericsson, Siemens, Nokia, Openwave, Sony Ericsson, Philips, Motorola,Samsung…) and mobile operators (Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile…), but also software vendors (Microsoft - hello?, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Symbian, Celltick…)

I don’t get it everyone was thinking Apple would show it’s iPhone at 3GSM. Why smart Steve would do such thing now when he announced previously the iPhone launch for Europe around Christmas 2007? Who else can say he has a product with 50,400,000 Google entries before it’s actual launch I haven’t seen any other phone brand model beat that! Oviously no big players are scared about the iPhone…

One thing gets clearer everyday, the iPhone has one big advantage: it’s Mac OS X and iTunes seamless integration; why would the iPhone need 3G? Everyone will buy its tunes on iTunes and beam or synchronize them to his iPhone, easily, with one-click buy activated… I dig.

Still, when I wanted to make a personalized mix for the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards networking party (no selling or re-distributing of the music I bought!) iTunes told me “You cannot copy 16 of the choosen songs to your CD”… come one guys, GET REAL! Next time I think I’m going to invite a band and offer their songs directly through a Futurlink-a-like interface…

THE MOBILISATION OF THE WEB

One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening and it’s happening everywhere!

Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vinton G. Cerf - also one of the founding fathers of the Internet, predicted Tuesday that mobile phones, not personal computers, will fuel growth of the worldwide Web, as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly.

There is definitely something to say about the title here and it was an important part of the discussions during 3GSM. Mike and Carlo mentioned something on this already, read also Michael’s interesting take on this subject.

The content hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo! Shozu won the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?

This 3GSM is definately too early for the many mobile 2.0 (web) companies, many of them need to work harder on their business models; one may try to go around the operators but I think the next couple of years start-ups need to combine their innovative ideas and technology to work with the network operators to deploy compelling new services, supposing these become available for the masses with affordable fees of course. In any case, this show didn’t had any grouped sign of mobile 2.0 companies yet, hopefully we can expect some changes next year.

The above gets an intriguing touch however knowing that operators seem to realise that the top down content models are not working - people need content to consume and to play with. Vodafone seems to have understood this - ahead of its competitors, and announced some remarkable breakthrough deals. With European markets fully saturated with mobile telephones, Vodafone sees India as a key area for potential growth - see Vodafone’s $11.1 billion acquisition of controlling interest in India’s Hutchinson Essar, on the services side Vodafone concluded deals with YouTube and MySpace. Nokia, on the other hand will offer YouTube content through a web browser and its new Nokia Video Centre, over mobile video RSS feeds. You can check all 20 Nokia press releases released during 3GSM thanks to Stefan at RingNokia.

3UK announced Windows Live Messenger is now provided as a rich instant messenger mobile software client, allows 3 customers to see the “presence” of their Messenger contacts and exchange messages when these contacts that are on their PC or on the move with 3 mobile.

On the Mobile Search field I missed a panel with Daniel Appelquist - one of the real mobile illuminates I met during 3GSM but you can read a good review here at MoCoNews. Another session I had to miss due to the many meetings was the Technology Breakout session on Mobile Web 2.0 moderated by Ajit Jaokar with Jon von Tetzchner - CEO Opera Software, Alex Kummerman - CEO Clicmobile and David Wood - VP Research at Symbian. Alex sended me a link where you can view the session presentations, thanks! Interesting notice is also the transcription of Tim Berners Lee keynote at 3GSM by Ajit.

To close this part, a note that Second Life gets soon accessible from your mobile phone. According to MarketingVox and Reuters’ Second Life bureau Software from Comverse Technology will enable Second Life residents to visit the virtual world from their Java-enabled mobile devices.The software was developed over the last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. Comverse has also created an application that allows Second Life to run on IPTV platforms. (picture © Reuters)

AWARDS

The GSM Association Announced on Tuesday its 2007 Global Mobile Awards Winners, an Oscar-a-like ceremony to celebrate the best in telecom industry. I was not there so I cannot really say anything about this show, apart from Shozu - which I mentioned yesterday, there are 2 winners I think deserve some more attention.

Most Innovative Technology Award went to Polymer Vision for its Rollable Displays. Polymer Vision has developed the world’s first rollable electronic display. For the first time in history a display can be rolled out to a greater size than the actual mobile device itself. It is easy to view, even in bright sunlight, and has significantly lower power requirements than an LCD display with backlight. Once the user has finished, the display can simply be rolled back into the device. This makes the rollable display the ideal solution for large displays in all types of mobile devices, without sacrificing device size or convenience.

Best Use of Mobile for Social & Economic Development Award went to GrameenPhone Ltd with its Healthline project. The “HealthLine” project is providing an opportunity for an interactive teleconference between any Grameenphone subscriber and a licensed physician, who is available round the clock and seven days of the week. Though emergency hotlines in many countries do exist, such a medical hotline (as HealthLine789), to a registered physician for advice for emergency, non-emergency or regular medical needs of a caller, is unique. Our record short shows that people have called from all parts of Bangladesh. So far the doctors received and answered a total of about 120,000 calls on as many as 79 many different medical complaints. Callers range from the common citizens, professionals, men from all walks of life and village doctors, etc.

You can view all GSM Award winners here.

MobileMonday, during 3GSM organised its Global Mobile Start-Up Peer Awards in Espacio Movistar, you can view the finalists and winners here.

A personal award I would like to give to the SUNDANCE Shorts as Most Efficient Service of the 3GSM Exhibition. The Sundance Film Festival unveiled five short films shot especially for mobile, which were immediately made available for download to mobile users, I just had to give my ScanDisk Memory Stick to the booth, and a couple of seconds later I had the shorts on my mobile phone, cool!

Some of the best demo’s I have seen came from unexpected corners, like the Alcatel-Lucent stand where - thanks to José Luis, I could view some of the best demo’s I have seen. Very promising stuff coming up the next years with IPTV, managed from your phone and/or PC to your TV-set. IN 2004 I heard the first time about IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) when researching for the MuLiMob project:

“The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a standardised Next Generation Networking (NGN) architecture for telecommunication operators that want to provide mobile and fixed multimedia services. It uses a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) implementation based on a 3GPP standardised implementation of SIP, and runs over the standard Internet Protocol (IP). Existing phone systems (both packet-switched and circuit-switched) are supported.”

Think about a lot of new services that are build around your SIP-client, when talking on the phone, you will be able to be in another IM chat, show a video, transfer files and discuss them while in your call or conference, etc. For me, one of the best advantages is to be able to have ONE ID based on your phone number or SIP-client to access all the services you need to access through applications or mobile web. OpenID is also working on this. A lot of new mobile services are to come in this area, I’ll be writing on this here later more in detail.

NETWORKING PARTIES

The best part of 3GSM for many people as it is a chance to meet new people and discuss off-topic on anything mobile MobileSunday Barcelona was relaxed and perfect to meet old and new pals to learn about insiders’ news before the event started. Thanks to Stuart for his participation to the wiki and for influencing partyStrands music live from Paris (!)

Best networking party was undoubtedly for many people at the Global Peer Awards since it was at the same time a gathering of many MobileMonday chapter organizers and Mobilists present, combined with a lot of fresh mobile start-ups, VC’s and other people form the industry. The dinner that followed was a great way to learn about anything mobile from a global MobileMonday point of view, lots of great people with great ideas!

Interacting with screens from your mobile phone might seem still seem a futuristic thought for many of you, yet during 3GSM this was already happening at many cool networking spots this year thanks to partyStrands. Another excellent networking party was the Swedish Beers UK, organised by blogging colleague Helen Keegan at bar BelChica. partyStrands was running in the background and ZDF TV thought this was all very cool to be broadcasted in homeland Germany. You can view the reportage they made here.

Afterwards partyStrands run at the Ericsson VIP party, a super cool DJ but she seemed to be the only lively female around amongst the senior Ericsson audience

On Wednesday I was at the 3GSM Mobile Mixer Party at Camp Nou (Barcelona Football Stadium), hosted by Wireless World Forum Group and IHollywoodForum… It was a real a bummer, not enough people showed up for the conference thus few people stayed for the networking cocktail, too bad… Luckily there was the MTV Party at Bar13 which was loaded with people (what can you expect?) but it was real good fun, far away from the more boring conference stuff. MyStrands blog has some pictures of that evening.

Thursday closing night we met up with some friends and collegues for dinner, drinks and dancing afterwards… Now this one was really private

All in all, it’s great to have 3GSM in Barcelona; I’m looking forward to the one next year again!

You can view my 3GSM Flickr Photoset here.