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The Mobile Jam Session event - focused on developers - I’m organizing with Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) during the Mobile World Congress, is taking its’ final shape. Hosted by MyStrands in their new MyStrands offices, the event takes place on Tuesday, February 12, 2008. It is a day to inspire new ideas and innovate solutions to existing challenges.

The event is free of charge for all participants, coffee breaks, lunch and networking cocktail included. Check the attendants list, we’re quite surprised and happy with the enthusiastic reactions and feedback we got so far!

Attendants include developers from companies like Admob, Accenture, Access, Bango, Vodafone Betavine, Bebo, Kyte.tv, Dell Mobile, Facebook , Future Platforms, GetJar, Google Inc., Idean, Intrinsyc, Kimia, LemonQuest, mBricks, Mippin, Mobile Complete, Mobile Distillery, MyStrands, Nokia, OpenID, Peperoni, PixSense Inc, Qualcomm, Reuters, scanR , Seesmic, Six Apart, Shozu , Skyhook Wireless, Sun Microsystems, Telecom Italia, Telefonica I+D, Truphone, Trutap, UIQ Technology, Vertu, Vodafone, W3C, Wavefront, WURFL and Yahoo! to name the most prominent. It’s a great combination of big and small companies; carriers/operators, device manufacturers, content aggregators, platform and developer programs reps and some great start-up companies with a lot of experience in mobile and web convergence.

You can still sign up here if you’d like to attend the morning and/or afternoon sessions or want to join us for our closing networking cocktail.

Check out the Speakers and Topics designed on feedback we received by participants:

• OPENING PANEL
• IMPROV SESSIONS
• CLOSING ENCORE PANEL

Check out the Topics and Speakers:

1. Open ID
2. Mobile Web Development Frameworks – Widgets/Ajax etc
3. Mobile OS / Platforms
4. Usability / UI / Localization / Mobile Interfaces
5. Mobile media / Web Convergence
6. Open Source in Handsets

10:30am – 12:00 noon
Pre-Session for Developers Only

Come early to grab some talk time, croissant and coffee with your peers about what you are developing and your important issues. These will then be brought forward for the rest of the day.

12:00 Noon – 1:00pm
Registration, Lunch, Networking

OPENING PANEL – 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
We have a complete line-up of players to open up our Mobile Jam session. A great combination of big and small companies; a carrier, a device manufacturer, an aggregator, a platform, reps from developer programs and two great small companies with BIG experience. What a great way to get started – don’t miss this one!

The Players:

• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist at Vodafone Group
• Carl Uminski, CTO, Trutap and formerly of Yahoo!
• Souheil Gallouzi, CTO, Intrinsyc and formerly of Qualcomm
• Terrence Barr, Technical Evangelist, SUN Microsystems
• Tom Libretto, VP of Forum Nokia
• Ray Anderson, CEO, Bango

IMPROV SESSIONS 2:30pm – 4:30 pm

The Six (6) Improv discussions are designed for more one-on-one discussions and a deeper dive on topics. Also a better way for you to meet the speakers and your fellow participants.

Note: As this is about improv and flexilbity, so the speaker list still has room for some last minute additions!

1. OpenID
Discussion Leaders:

TBC

2. Mobile Web Development Frameworks – Widgets/Ajax
Discussion Leaders:

• Representative from Forum Nokia
• Dominique Hazael-Massieux, W3C

3. Mobile OS / Platforms
Discussion Leaders:

• Vincent Berge, Co-Founder & General Manager, Mobile Distillery
• Rich Killmer, Sr. Sales Director, Mobile Complete
• Oscar Gutierrez, Vodafone Betavine
• Terrence Barr, Technical Evangelist, SUN Microsystems

About this topic:
From Mobile Java to other platforms like Symbian, BREW, FlashLite, Android, PalmOS, Access Garnet and Windows Mobile.

4. Usability / UI / Localization / Mobile Interfaces
Discussion Leaders:

• Mikko-Pekka Hanski, Idean
• David Mery, Editor - Developer Program, UIQ Technology
• Morten Hjerde, Senior Interaction Designer at mBricks

5. Mobile Media / Web Convergence
Discussion Leaders:

• Carmen Sales - Product Development Coordinator, Kimia
• Jakub Danilewicz - Alembik project architect

About this topic:
Return of Prometheus: bringing the web to mobile devices. Giving the power of free media transcoding and web rendering to the mortals.

6. Open Source in Handsets
Discussion Leaders:

• Bill Lee, Developer Relations, ACCESS
• Luca Pasani, Admob and founder of WURFL

CLOSING PANEL: MOBILE JAM SESSION - ENCORE 4:45pm – 5:30pm
We’ll start off with some closing remarks from our panelists and then add in other players from the audience to ‘jam’ with them.

The Players:

• Fabio Ricciato, Mobile Handset Evolution, Telecom Italia, Mobile (TIM) Access and Terminals in Technology Division
• Bill Lee, Developer Relations, ACCESS
• Karel De Beule - co-Founder, Kimia
• Open seats to rotate audience members.

Jam - gather and play without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements.

5:30pm – 7:30pm
Reception
Let’s end the day raising a toast – Salut! Other player’s will join us.

Rudy and Caroline will choose their favorite Jazz picks for a perfect cocktail mood.

3GSM, access, Announcements, barcamp, Barcelona, betavine, community, convergence, Conversations, Cool Devices, developer, Developers, dotopen, events, Experience Design, forum nokia, Fun, Games, innovation, kimia, location based, mobile, Mobile Apps, Mobile Events, mobile jam session, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, Mobile Search, mobile web, Mobile Web Server, mobile world congress, mobilejamsession, mobilemonday, mtrends, Multi Touch Screen, mwc2008, mystrands, NFC, Operators, rudydewaele, social media, startups, usability, user experience, wip connector, wireless industry partnership, Workshop

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at Torre Mapfre in Barcelona.

Infused with the spirit of the early days of Jazz, the Mobile Jam Session is a day to inspire new ideas and innovate solutions to existing challenges. The purpose is focused, but the agenda is improvised along the way.

Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) and myself are ‘jazzed’ about working together to bring you the first of - hopefully - many Mobile Jam Sessions. The idea emerged to open up the mobile ecosystem and connect experienced and talented developers, with industry experts and decision makers.

Most importantly we want this event to be driven by developers – what they want to hear, who they want to talk to, what they want to say… Any mobile developer can propose a hot topic he would like to to discuss with other mobile value chain players in a workshop and productive environment, simply add your name and topic to invitation list. Be prepared to be an active participant in the sessions.

The event is free of charge for all participants, coffee breaks, lunch and networking cocktail included. We’re looking for passionate, exciting and talented developers. We have confirmed participations from Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Telecom Italia, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Mystrands, Mobile Distillery, Trutap, Kimia, …

The event is hosted in the new MyStrands Barcelona offices in the Torre Mapfre at the Villa Olympica. MyStrands generously offers us the superb 350 square meter space on the 20th Floor of the building with a breathtaking view on all Barcelona, the city, the Olympic port and its beaches.

New tunes often come from unlikely associations, so… Jam on!

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What I like most in Nokia’s strategy is its constant ability to look forward and move ahead with the changes. Nokia Flagship Store announcements already positioned Nokia with an independant retail strategy, it’s obvious that once there, there’s a different world on top of selling devices…

There has been a lot of fingertip heating since Nokia launched its Ovi Internet Services, a predictable, but smart move by Nokia for regular mTrends readers The idea is to pull the Nokia Music Store, N-Gage, Nokia Maps, and all future Nokia services into a single gateway of integrated service offerings. You can view yesterdays’ webcast anouncements here.

Nokia has been very active in the convergent area’s of internet and mobility services. With a solid 38% marketshare (some 900 million active customers!), the company has always played a leading role in the mobile value chain and knows a lot about its consumer habits. Nokia also has been releasing some really great N-Series devices since last year, the experiences gathered from those popular high-end devices are now finetuned and sharpened resulting in 4 new mobile devices (to be released before year-end).

I have been lucky to be able to experiment with Nokia Maps and I like the service a lot, it’s actually an awesome experience available on a mobile phone. The N95 with its build-in GPS makes geographical search really context relevant and opens the path for a lot of new kinds of services linked to locations. Personally I believe more in a user-driven community services and tools build model for the future such as Plazes and Dopplr build on Google Maps api’s but time will tell which services consumers will finally choose for and use.

The N-Gage portal is all about Nokia’s next-gen games (reserve your player name now!) where game fans will have more and more options to play multiplayer games in a constantly connected world - Instant Media Now! Web 2.0 has had a huge influence on the game development with regards to user-generated content, social networking and general connectivity. Watch Digital Chocolate in this next-gen game content space, not to underestimate the - also yesterday anounced - Sony-Ericsson Playstation Phone, yes… real device convergence is happening!

Another great move into internet service offerings is that Nokia and Microsoft have joined forces to provide customers with a new suite of Windows Live services specifically designed for Nokia devices. Starting today Nokia customers in eleven countries with compatible S60 devices can download the new suite enabling access to Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Spaces. Smart move knowing there’s some 465 million Microsoft Messenger clients today!

The downside of that deal (and biggest surprise to me yesterday) was not the anouncement of the Nokia Music Store itself but the decision that Nokia will use Microsoft PlayReady technology for “flexible access to digital entertainment“. Flexible? How flexible is the next question to me then, while Apple unveiled a higher quality DRM-Free Music with EMI on iTunes in April, Nokia goes the opposite direction with Microsoft?

I tried to find more detailed information on how restrictive the DRM will be but couldn’t find anything relevant but this Microsoft PlayReady White Paper, despite the many anouncements yesterday. BoingBoing reported the new music store will allow for over-the-air downloads,

“currently priced at 1 Euro a song and 10 Euro-a-month all-you-can-eat subscriptions that will work on your PC. (It’s not entirely clear if you’ll be able to download songs to your PC on the all-you-can-eat and also sync them to your Ovi-compatible phone. The verbiage I’m seeing is “streaming,” so it seems unlikely.)”

Most probably Nokia will decide on a country-per-country basis, depending on the distributor. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to sound as a pirate protecter but I’m just worried as a consumer. mTrends readers know about my rants and experiences with this topic (for an overview check my DRM Free At Last! post).

I’m completely in favour of the OPEN DRM model (buy once, use everywhere!): I buy the digital content once but I am able to carry and transfer the song/video/movie everywhere on my different devices and pc’s and share it with my family and friends. Companies really need to learn to TRUST the consumers, illegal downloading always existed and will always exist in a minor form but as a consumer I can only urge to give us a fair DRM, especially for those consumers who want to buy digital content.

One more example here below of how DRM-restrictive content works for the consumer - and then I really hope I don’t have to write on this anymore

On my summer holidays, besides my fully stored N95, I took a 2GB USB-stick with me with full of music (legally bought CD’s imported as mp3’s) to be played wherever the occasion appeared. Now when compiling my summer music collection, I mixed up with some songs I bought on iTunes… At a certain moment, at a party, someone was asking for some kind of artist I had on my music-stick, we copied it to the iBook available connected to the speakers, when everybody around the pool was excited to hear that song, the machine responded “need permission to play this song, please fill-in your password” - hell, we weren’t even connected to the internet. Now, you think this is fair? Flexible? Helping the artists? Create more business? Come on (big) guys, please get real!

NOTE: it would be great if any Nokia or Microsoft rep could provide some details on the DRM restrictions that will be used (or not) using PlayReady

5310, 5610, Analysis, convergence, Cool Devices, devices, Entertainment, Games, Internet services, location, maps, mobile cell, Mobile Games, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, mobile web, Music, music phone, N Series, N81, n95, nokia, Nokia Music Store, Operators, ovi, phones, s60, series, social media, Trends, usability, XpressMusic

Got invited last week by Nokia for their new mobile sharing community platform called MOSH. I must admit it’s great to be invited to all exciting Alpha and Beta mobile testing, still it’s quite difficult to test them all in-depth with a lot of workload on the shelves these days. However, as with anything good in life… quality, curiosity and surprise always make a good cocktail and make you want to try out things immediately before others.

MobSharing, a term originally coined by Mike Evans in September 2005, didn’t figure in my 2007 predictions but was already mentioned as a future trend in my 2006 predictions and now it’s finally here from Nokia Still in closed Alpha, but with the advantage we won’t have to wait another couple of years for it to get a critical mass…

“Create, Upload and Share all of your mobile content”:

MOSH is a content sharing site where community members upload, distribute and manage content to be viewed and enjoyed on mobile devices. With MOSH, anything from applications like mobile games, to videos, blogs, songs or photos are now accessible and distributable on your mobile device.

How does it work?

There are three key elements to MOSH:

1. A website
2. A mobile website
3. An application for mobile devices (available for download on Nokia devices only)

The website is your main source for accessing the wide range of content available through MOSH. It is here where you can create your profile, upload content, manage your collections and specify which selects to send to your mobile device as mobile feeds.

The mobile website is where users with both Nokia and non-Nokia devices can access mobile feeds and view the MOSH service.

I played with it for the first time today and the interface looks simple & smart, ideally for the creation of mobile social media: users can create ‘collections’ around topics, tags or keywords to organize content which can be ranked, ‘raved’, filtered and shared.

While the service is optimized for use on Nokia devices, the service is compatible with all mobile handsets, provided they support the kind of content you are downloading and that you are able to access the Internet.

One quick remark: how do I know the content or apps I’m uploading is compatible with what kind of devices? Creating some groups of phone categories might be handy for the users here.

I’ll keep you posted with more feedback and mosh moves of course.

Announcements, convergence, Cool Devices, Friends, Fun, Games, innovation, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Culture, Mobile Games, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile RSS, mobile video, mobile web, mobsharing, mosh, nokia, Predictions, social media, Trends, Ubiquitous Devices, we media, web 2.0

I wanted to give you a short debrief on the excellent MobileMonday Barcelona sesssion we had on Mobile Gaming and Beyond. Despite Semana Santa (a lot of locals out of town) and the pouring rain, we had the auditorium nearly filled with mobile enthusiasts not wanting to miss a word from this months’ interesting line-up of speakers.

Nicolas Nova kicked-off straight with his presentation, titled “Sinking one’s teeth into new metaphors for mobile gaming” and was basically a critique of the current state of mobile gaming. Instead of describing 3D on cell phones, location-based gaming or augmented reality, he encourages mobile game designers to consider 3 other avenues to explore, such as the use of motion/mobility instead of immobile situations (see image).

David Camps from Intermón Oxfam presented a mobile game, called Refugee. The videogame has the objective of raising awareness on the lack of security and adequate aid suffered by millions of people trapped in forgotten crises such as Darfur. In it, Assia flees from the drought in her country and she must face up to violence and the lack of water and food. These are skill challenges, as in other games, but inspired from the real life of more than eight million refugees and close to 25 million displaced persons all over the world, of which 80 percent are women and children. The game ends giving you the opportunity to request more attention from the Spanish government to these crises. The funds raised with the downloads of the videogame – which costs 2.40 Euros – will go to humanitarian aid programs of Intermon Oxfam in the southeast of Sudan, concretely to the refugee camps of Djabal and Goz Amer.

Ignacio Cavero gave us a chronological overview of LemonQuest and its sucessful portfolio including the Ronaldinho Gaucho Street Soccer game. LemonQuest recently announced the acquisition of the Chinese company i4Game, an innovative developer of mobile games and is looking at other emerging mobile markets such as India.

Marta Vieira from the Portugese YDreams explained us about their experience and do’s and don’t of LocationBased-Gaming. Check out their stuff, it’s really cool!

The audience q&a participation was weaker then the MyMobileTV session we had last month, some issues like interoperability of games on other portable devices and the coming of web advergaming players into the mobile market space remained unanswered, as for now.

You can download most presentations of the Mobile Gaming and other sessions at the MobileMonday Barcelona website, you just need to register to the community and logon to the documents section to download the presentations.

Next months’ topic is on Mobile Search and promises another great sessions with confirmed speakers from JumpTap, Taptu, Yahoo! Mobile and Nokia Mobile Search.

Analysis, augmented reality, Barcelona, Experience Design, Fun, Games, ignacio cavero, innovation, intermon oxfam, lemonquest, marta vieira, Mobile Culture, Mobile Games, mobile gaming, Mobile Lifestyle, Mobile Monday, mobilemonday, momobcn, nicolas nova, refugee, spanish startups, startups, Trends, Ubiquitous Devices, usability, user experience, videojuegos, Viral, ydreams

The next MobileMonday Barcelona event on Monday, April 2, focuses on the current state of the mobile gaming industry.

Speakers include Nicolas Nova (Switzerland) - researcher at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), Maarten Noyons (France) - Managing Director, International Mobile Gaming Awards, Ignacio Cavero (Spain) - President and CEO, LemonQuest and a speaker from YDreams, Spain/Portugal.

(introduction below by Fabien Girardin from the Interactive Technologies Group, UPF University)

Currently, the mobile game market is highly dominated by games that have an easy gameplay, few simple rules and do not require special skills to enjoy. These games are mostly clones of successful casual games such as Minesweeper or Tetris.

However, the future of mobile gaming seems to rely on new types of gameplays that embed the new capabilities of mobile phones to sense their context. Like the newly released and successful Wiimote, mobile devices become sensitive to movements (e.g. Nokia N5500), engaging players to physically move as part of the gameplay. In addition, the emergence near-field communication (RFID, Bluetooth, QR codes) and location-aware technologies enable new types of scenarios that link virtual worlds with the players’ physical surroundings. For example, multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.

The increasing contextual and proximity awareness of mobile devices provide new opportunities for players to engage in collaborative or competitive game settings. In contrast to this pretty picture, many issues such as the operators walled gardens, the size of the screens, network quality and coverage as well as the processing power of the mobile phone challenge the development and deployment of these new types of games. Finally, the Economic future: who is going to pick up the fragmentation and the distribution challenge? Where is the 8 bn mobile gaming market?

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available.

More details at MobileMonday Barcelona website.

3G, Announcements, augmented reality, Awards, Barcelona, Experience Design, Fun, Games, gaming, lbs, lemonquest, mobile, Mobile Culture, Mobile Games, Mobile Lifestyle, Mobile Monday, mobilemonday, mobilemonday barcelona, momobcn, nicolas, nova, spanish startups, startups, Ubiquitous Devices, Viral, ydreams

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

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