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

“Understanding Consumers and delivering exceptional customer service is just as important a part of the mobile experience as the latest technology and the size of the marketing budget, it can be a key differentiator for a business”… was a perfect kick-off quote in the presentation of Cliff Crosbie (see image left) at the MEX: the Mobile User Experience conference some weeks ago in London.

The report and all presentations of this unique and excellent conference are now available here (buy on-line for GBP 795). The report harnesses the combined knowledge of some 100 leading mobile executives who attended the MEX conference in May 2007. Delegates participated in a series of keynote presentations, panel discussions and breakout groups to define a response to the MEX manifesto. From this rich pool of creativity and exclusive research notes, Marek Pawlowski and his team have produced a detailed analysis of the industry’s approach to mobile user experience, a must have for anyone working in the mobile industry or for any internet, content or media company who has plans going mobile in the near future - if you haven’t, start asking yourself some questions

The report includes detailed info on each of the 10 topics covered:

• MEX Maps: graphical brainstorm of the conference’s response to the manifesto.
• Speaker’s response: written summary of the keynote presentation.
• Presentation slides: copy of the keynote slides.
• Discussion summary: written summary of the panel discussions and responses from the breakout groups.
• Research notes: thought-provoking articles and detailed research from PMN’s analysts.
• Stat Spot: selection of metrics relating to the manifesto topic.

For me personally, the conference was a really good experience, not only because of the zen environment the conference was held at (Wallaspace) but above all Marek and his team have done a great job in preparing this conference with a unique feel for detail and attention to create a good athmosphere, ideal to foster collaboration amongst the delegates - an exceptional mix of mobile telecoms industry people, design and other industry experts, startups, etc. A lot of interesting people with different ideas to share and open-minded to think about the challenges this industry is facing: to cope with a rapid and huge shift from ‘voice & text’ devices (mobile 1.0) to truly multimedia devices, soon always connected to the internet (mobile 2.0), to shift from walled gardens business models to open connectivity and services acces.

I’m not going to write down all my notes here from the conference, I enjoyed the interesting and thought provoking presentations from Cliff Crosbie (Nokia), Christian Lindholm, Antti Öhrling, Co-founder of Blyk, Mark Rolston (Frog Design) and the insiders view from Paul Nerger (Argogroup) and Al Russell (Vodafone).

The size of the conference also left enough room to meet and discuss with the other delegates, I met a lot of great new people! The idea of bringing all delegates together in smaller groups to discuss the manifesto and presented topics was a good idea too, this brought extra dynamics and conversations to the overall conference, an idea to continue exploring further in the future.

The 10 MEX Manifesto topics covered and the keynote speaker who inspired the discussions and research:

Download a sample of the MEX 2007 Report

This extract from the MEX 2007 report covers 1 of the 10 issues discussed in the full version: “Understanding the extent of the user experience, from retail environment to customer service.”

For more details and purchase, please contact Marek Pawlowski (marekpawlowski@pmn.co.uk or +44 7767 622957)
Here you can view my Flickr Set of the conference.

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.