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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)

Related: previous 3GSM wrap-ups (1) and (2) and thoughts on Mobile Image Recognition, more M-Trends thoughts on 3GSM next week.

You can view my 3GSM Flickr Photoset here.

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…

More M-Trends thoughts on 3GSM here soon including mobile trend stuff such as IMS, IPTV, the mobilisation of Web 2.0, mobile search, the awards and the networking parties of course!

You can view my 3GSM Flickr Photoset here.

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.

Just recovering from 3GSM this weekend and slowly starting to sort my emails, impressions and ideas (I voluntarily did not connect to the internet this week), will write a wrap-up soon here. Many people asked if I’d won the Carnival of the Mobilists “Host of the Year” award… Yes, I did! (Russell announced it here). Thanks to all the ones who voted for me, this really means a lot to me!

There is still another Khosla contest running for best “Post of the Year” (best on blogging on mobility related stuff). You can still vote here (password mobilists) for my best post selected for 2006.

Just a short anouncement on The Global Peer Award winners, I will come back in detail on the event later on. Catalan friend Josep Ganyet has a great series of pictures of the event here. Martin, occassional blogger at m-trends.org has some images here.  Comvu promised to put the webcast backup of the event here soon.
The Winners Are:

Jury Award: MoMo Paris — Realeyes3D

Audience Award: MoMo Geneva — Plazes

MobileMonday Chapter Award: Silicon Valley — Mobile Complete

The Carnival of the Mobilists “Host of the Year Award” went to m-trends.org, thanks to all for your support!

Russell Buckley finally posted his long awaited Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year nominations. He has been extremely busy lately counting the ads coming in at AdMob, undoubtly one of ‘the’ mobile succes stories from last year. Next to that Russell says it was a really, really hard post to write: “I’ve been chopping and changing things for a month now and it’s finally time to get it posted before we embark on 3GSM madness.” And more:

As you (hopefully) know, the Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly celebration of the best writing about mobile from around the world. This post brings you the best writing of the year and is therefore definitely worth reading in full and voting on your favourite one. Voting details at the end, but please don’t forget to vote.

Our finalists are chosen, by firstly nominating their own favourite writing over the year and sending them to me. Then, utterly ruthlessly, I whittle them down to 10 which I present here for your delight and edification. Over 50 entries were received, so what we have here is the creme de la creme for you to enjoy. This also means that if you entered and didn’t get this far, I’m sorry, but the standard was very high and I hope we can still be pals.

My post Nokia N91 Kills the iPod * got selected amongst the 10 best Posts of the Year. As Russell indicates, the post might not be the best I wrote this year but I choose it because it’s a very spontaneaous post on what is currently possible to do with a mobile phone, all the features and functionalities experienced in a relaxed environment with friends during a 2-week holiday. Away from the daily PC/laptop professional environment, being able to fully experiment the potential of what we write about nearly every day, not always having the ability to test all devices and applications in depth. I believe devices more and more have to be tested in real environments and situations, not only on their technical potential, it’s not about what a phone can do but about what one does with it!

Also, after all the hype we have been reading the last 2 years on music- and ipod-phones - I have been writing about it myself quite a lot here - it was pure excitement to experience the real stuff in real life in real situations.

That for me is what it’s all about: writing stories on experiences, sense, analyse, test and predict through my field experience the “when, why, where and how” of people using mobile phones.

Sometime the definitions of words get a complete different meaning, as for example with the word ’sharing’: it got a complete negative different meaning the last years with the digitalization of music, while ’sharing’ for me is a POSITIVE word: it’s all about the experience to ’share’ nice music while listening to it, the discovery, the excitement and the fun of ’sharing’ a listening experience with friends, like I used to do on Saturday afternoons when I was a teenager, going to your friends’ place with a pile of new discovered records and ’share’ some nice moments together, listening to music. Double-think this one for a minute

But let’s get back to the Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year and Host of the Year nominations and votings for the final winners. Winners will be anounced at the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards in Barcelona next Monday.

Thanks to the nice folks at Khosla Ventures - who will give the winner some cash, you can complete the Post of the Year vote here (password is “mobilists”), and the winner will get $1,000 and the runner up a very respectable $500. Finally, if you’re a host of the Carnival, click here to vote for the Host of the Year, the winner gets a FREE TRIP TO HELSINKI to the next MobileMonday Global Summit.

If you like my writing and would like me to have a chance to win one of these prizes, take your chance and don’t wait any longer to vote me on stage, the show will be live webcasted!

BTW: if you would like to meet some of the mobilists, come to MobileSundayBarcelona tomorrow!

This year will be the sixth time I set out to got to the 3GSMWorldCongress for a week packed with excitement and new wireless impressions and thoughts. Since Web 2.0 grew up and I started blogging, my 3GSM experience has changed dramatically. Before, I mainly went to the congress to listen to presentations and to discover new things. I rarely met new people and if at all, conversations where short and usually revolved around the product the person’s company was working. In many ways my real live behavior reflected the static web at the time, where information was mainly flowing in one direction, i.e. from big news web sites to people.In the meantime, the web has changed a lot and so has my 3GSM congress experience. I think I am quite well anchored in the Web 2.0 these days with my blogging activities. Over time, these activities have brought me together with quite a number of extraordinary people, mostly bloggers and information has started to flow both ways. My web experience has changed completely and instead of 1 to many broadcast communication I am now much more involved in many to many conversations. Web 2.0 at it’s best!

The same has happened for me at the congress. Last year was the first time I ever met some people at the congress (or at the Mobile Sunday to be precise) with whom I communicated before but never met in real life. It were only a few but during that week I made the acquaintance of many more who’s writings I’ve been following on the web since then. This year’s going to be even better. The mobile blogging sphere is well established by now and judging from the list of participants of the Mobile Sunday and the hundreds of people having registered for the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards, personal communication and meeting these people again have become almost more important than the congress itself.

For those of you being unable to come to Barcelona this year I expect the coverage of the congress and exhibition on the net to be as good as never before, thanks again to Web 2.0 and the Mobile Web 2.0. I’ll keep you posted about my thoughts and experiences here at m-trends and on my technology blog and will send the pictures I take directly from the mobile phone to flickr.

Russell Buckley just announced about the Carnival of the Mobilist “Host of the Year” award to be anounced at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards taking place during 3GSM in Barcelona.

The winner receives a sponsored trip (airfare and accommodation) to the Mobile Monday Summit in Helsinki later in the year and everlasting fame, respect and awe among the Mobilist community. And this is on top of any prize money they may have won from the nice folks at Khosla Ventures for Host of the Month.Here are the rules:

Only previous hosts are eligible to vote. Vote by dropping an email to Russell (russell AT mobhappy DOT com) with “Host of the Year” in the title. A list of hosts can be seen here, so you have to be on this list to vote and be eligible to be voted for.

Russell withdraws from the competition as an organiser, but in the event of a tie, he’ll cast the deciding vote, so be nice to him Cast your votes now before you forget.

You can vote for me of course, Carnival of the Mobilists #33, I previously got selected for best host of the month in the awards sponsored by Khosla Ventures for June. You can still vote for my post of the week from August in the 41th edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists of Justin Oberman at his MOpocket site. That post relates actually to the “Connecting cultures through Music” article I wrote for Vodafone Receiver.

Back to the Peer Awards, check also the list of nominated finalists presenting for the best mobile innovation in the last year, at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards. Each MobileMonday chapter nominated a local company and an expert jury gets to choose the best, there is an audience award and a MoMo chapter award, complete program here. If you haven’t registered yet, don’t wait any longer not to be left out, registration closes this Wednesday, only few seats left.

Many of you have been sending mails with questions related to 3GSM World Congress info, events and parties, MobileMonday and mobilists gatherings happening around. I tried to answer to everyone but sorry if you’d have been looked over, my mailbox looks pretty bold these these. If you want to know where the action is going to be, here’s where I will hang out during 3GSM, good chance you’ll find some other mobile bloggers or mobilists around

You can drop me an email of course if you want to get together at the conference or if you want to catch up with me somewhere around. Here is where you can find me during that busy week. I’m really looking forward to meet the real people behind the screens, meet friends and buddies and make new and interesting business contacts!

Sunday, February 11, at 6pm

MobileSunday Barcelona, an informal meet-up in Barcelona of mobile bloggers and anyone with an interest in mobility. If you like football (soccer!), Barcelona Football Club is playing that evening at 7pm and there will be screens for you to watch the game. Before and after the match, partyStrands will be running.

Where? Belchica; Sign up here!

Monday, February 12th, at 3pm

Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards 2007 . The event I have been organizing with
Carles Ferreiro and Barcelona Media for MoMo Barcelona. MoMo Italy, MoMo Helsinki, MoMo London and MoMo New York have also taken active roles setting up this project.

Check here for the finalists (list has grown to 23 now!), all of them exceptionally innovative companies in mobile from all over the globe who will present in front of a world-class jury including:

• Carlos Domingo, General Director, Telefonica R&D
• Carlo Longino, analyst, Techdirt Corporate Intelligence
• Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist and Program Manager, Vodafone Group Research & Development
• Kelly Goto, principal at gotomedia, LLC
• Michel Wendell, General Partner, Nexit Ventures
• Oliver Starr, serial entrepreneur, editor MobileCrunch
• Peter Vesterbacka, founder of Some Bazaar
• Russell Buckley, Managing Director, AdMob Europe

and moderated by Caroline Lewko from Wireles Industry Partnership, all this for FREE, can you digg?

Where: Espacio Movistar

Don’t wait any longer to register, seats are getting scarse and we’re closing subscription by Wednesday.

Tuesday, February 13th, from 6,30pm to 8,30pm

Swedish Beers. Swedish Beers is an ad-hoc London based mobile networking event run by Steve Flaherty of Keitai Culture and Helen Keegan of BeepMarketing. During 3GSM, the bar Belchica (just a stone’s throw from the Congress) will be the place to meet. partyStrands will be running here too!

More info: Swedish Beers

Tuesday, February 13th, from 8pm to 2am

Ericsson social event. Awaken your senses. Based around senses, guests will experience an exciting and stimulating multi-sensual evening with good food, drinks and entertainment. partyStrands here again with food for your eyes and music for your ears! This is a VIP party so don’t send mails for tickets, I cannot get any!

Wednesday, February 14th, evening

I will normally attend the Wireless World Forum / iHollywood networking party at Camp Nou but haven’t received latest details yet, I’ll update here asap I’ll receive them.