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Image © SENSEable city lab MIT - wikicity rome

After some hectic weeks, trying to get blogging back to normal…

The next MobileMonday Barcelona event on December 3 covers Location-Based Services. Since Nokia introduced the Nseries N95 with built in GPS, Location-Based Services are becoming exciting again. Google Maps API and flickr’s geotagged photo function shows we’re heading to really interesting services build on the location of the user. Next Monday event has a really c00l line-up:

speakers include Fabien Girardin - who will present WikiCity a MIT affiliated project that features innovative ways to understand and communicate the dynamics of the city; Börkur Sigurbjörnsson - who will talk about two research prototypes from Yahoo! Research Berkeley: ZoneTag and TagMaps; Andres Ribera of Spanish startup Hipoqih, a Google Maps mashup that aims to create a mobile social network with GPS geolocation and Ilja Goossens, of yoMedia (Netherlands), who will talk about their video content delivery platform linked to outdoor advertising. Don’t hesitate to register and/or confirm your presence for this event, only 150 seats available.

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

On November 16, 2006, IBDNetwork will host its sixth one-day Under the Radar event, which will feature 32 emerging startups in the mobile sector. Under the Radar will take place at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA.

You’ll see a collection of companies in areas such as mobile content/video; sms and messaging; location/presence; voice services; marketing and advertising services; and a host of enabling technologies. It’s always a steller line-up of stealth companies and certainly a gathering of leading industry insiders and top-tier press/bloggers, a great chance to learn about the future of mobility- it’s challenges and opportunities from consumer adoption to monetization of services. Other participants include CNET-Fox Interactive-Google-Microsoft-Motorola-MTV-Qualcomm-Orange-Yahoo! and more.

I’m going to the conference, together with Ignacio Mondine, who will present his company Daem Interactive at the conference. It’s going to be very interesting to see and meet all those startups innovating wthin the mobility area; I’m especially interested in the real innovative companies and how they deploy their market strategy in function from different markets such as US and Europe.

Companies currently confirmed are:

4info | Admob | BubbleMotion | CascadaMobile | ComVu | Daem Interactive | EQO | Flurry | GreyStripe | Juice Wireless | Loopt | MobiFusion | Mobileplay | Mobo | MotionDSP | Nexage | Ontela | PayWi | Pinger | Pixpulse | Pixsense | Plusmo | Rocketalk | Renzoo | ScanR | Sharpcast | TinyPictures | Veeker | Voxlib | Winksite

I haven’t seen such a bunch of startups working in mobile together for a while… How about you?

Now here come the goodies for my blog readers:

m-trends.org readers can submit the best “under the radar” mobility company not already on the currently confirmed company list (see above); in other words you can digg one of your favourite mobile startups into the conference! – the winner will get a ticket to the conference ($495 value) and will get mentioned on the “under the radar” blog, as well as a “profile” post on the winning company as well.

Debbie Landa, CEO and Founder of IBDNetwork (the organizers of the conference) will judge herself the best submission done here at m-trends.org. All you need to do is send me an email (click my name in the sidebar) with subject “Under The Radar” and mention the startup you think should be present at the conference. Deadline for contest entries is Wednesday November 8 at midnight (CET) - which will give the winner a week of lead time to make travel arrangements.

And for those who don’t win or participate to the contest, m-trends.org readers receive the discounted price of $425 (save $70) by registering here (just mention m-trends.org).

Oh btw: anyone who would like to meet me while in SF or Bay Area between November 15-21, drop me a line too