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

The title was originally a tweet of which I decided to write a short blogpost about. I don’t know why it took so long for Nokia to figure out that their Nseries users are most probably in majority Mac users, at least from my own experience - hint: it would be great to have this statistic somewhere.

With the PR heath of the iPhone in its neck, Nokia (finally!) released yesterday another part of its Mac OS connectivity strategy, with the release of Nokia Media Transfer 1.0 beta:

The Nokia Media Transfer application enables you to transfer pictures, videos, podcasts, music, and files between your Nokia mobile device and your Mac.

The application makes it easier to transfer and synchronise music from iTunes to your phone. It also works with the iPhoto app for image and video transfers. I played with it and this is finally an application where the word seamless is not overkill to describe the experience to synchronise files between your Mac and Nokia Nseries device.

Old iTunes DRM protected files will not work on the Nokia of course but with the new EMI DRM files (buy once, play everywhere) it works! This is the way to go, both for Nokia and Apple, leave the freedom for the user to beam his legally bought tunes to his possible many different devices, this openess might in the end create more revenue and more happy consumers.

BTW Steve, really looking forward for the iTunes one-click option to easily upgrade my entire library of all previously purchased iTunes Store content to the higher quality DRM-free format

Now still, as Charlie suggests, some smooth synching needed for to-do’s, notes and iCal!

On May 31st I will be participating in a debate on the Future of Mobile Music at the Digital Music 2.0 Conference in Barcelona, organised by the Catalan Institute for Cultural Industries during the Primavera Sound Festival. I’m looking forward to this debate, specifically to better understand how the music industry and the mobile operators are dealing with the dramatic changes the industry is going through to adapt towards a Long Tail economy.

I have been presenting my ideas on this topic during the MuLiMob project in 2005, it’s always interesting to doublecheck vision and reality regularely, things are really changing at an incredible fast pace in our industry.

The panel will be moderated by Ramón Castán, CEO of Creative Associates and is composed of speakers from Movistar, Orange, Carles Campdelacreu, CEO of Acquamedia, Mario Fernández of IMI Mobile and myself.

Here’s the thematic and some questions set forth for the panel:

Can Mobile Save the Industry? Focus on the Growing Importance of Mobile Phones for Buying, Storing and Listening to Music. Is the mobile phone only a passing hype when it comes to music services? Are the telecom’s walled gardens working? Is the mobile just another data pipeline at the end of the day? Why is a song so expensive when purchased on a mobile? Is mobile technology vulnerable to piracy? Is the personalization to music fans the main reason for mobile products success?

The conference hosts many other sessions and speakers like Isaac Monclús, Director of cultural programmes, FNAC Barcelona; Richard Gottehrer, founder and chairman, The Orchard; Shira Perlmutter, executive VP, Global Legal Policy, IFPI-International Federation of the Phonographic Industry; Shelley Taylor, CEO, All Dig Down; Horst Weidenmüller, Impala’s and VUT’s VP, member of Merlin interims board, and CEO of !K7 Records; Clair Levy, head of business development, Last.fm. Javier Lorente, Portal and Applications Development Manager, General Manager of Technology and Services, Telefónica España; Alex Murray-Leslie, musician, Chicks On Speed; Kevin Arnold, founder and CEO, IODA – Independent Online Distribution Alliance; and many others, really interesting program, check it out!

For people like me swamped everyday in convergence (if you might wonder, it’s still happening), I suggest to read Convergence Culture (where old and new media collide) by Henry Jenkins. You might start twinkling hearing the word ‘convergence’ over and over again but this book describes, in a very clear way, the complexity of the process of convergence in media, technology and culture surrounding us. If you might doubt, here’s what Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution writes on this book:

“Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I’ve been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins’ clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of ‘electric media’ has become immensely more complicated in today’s many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins.”

Probably the best book I read on media, culture and technology changes since Smart Mobs.

Like Rudy, it took me a couple of days to recover from 3GSM and gather my thoughts. Pictures still fly by whenever I close my eyes about what I’ve seen and what I’ve done the last week. But that’s for another post. Apart of the adventures, this years 3GSM congress was the perfect opportunity to be a pure mobile Internet guy for a whole week. In practice, this meant not to touch the notebook for a week, leave it at the hotel, and do all my blogging, emailing, picture uploading, podcast downloading, web surfing, etc. from the mobile phone.

Well equipped with a Nokia N93 and a Bluetooth keyboard I kept uploading pictures to flickr and blog entries to my mobilesociety blog on a daily basis. Uploading pictures via 3G was out of the question due to still horrendous roaming prices. Fortunately, the N93 is also Wifi capable and Barcelona has a lot of open Wifi hotspots. So thanks to open hearted folks in Barcelona I uploaded pictures while coming or going to the congress. Also, Nokia had an open access point at their booth despite not even Nokia people themselves knew about it. Another convenient way to upload pictures over lunch. Thanks Nokia! Using Wifi hotspots was more of a necessity rather than comfort as it has one big disadvantage: You have to stay where you are while data is transfered due to the short range of the Wifi.

Sending and receiving my eMail and sending my blog entries on the other hand was much more comfortable as I used the 3G network for it. Anytime, anywhere, much better than the Wifi experience but also a bit more costly. A reprimand goes to Typepad, as they still haven’t fixed their blog upload via eMail service. Half the time my uploads were rejected and I had to try twice. Hey guys over at Typepad, is this really so difficult?

To stay up to date what is happening in the rest of the world during the week, I used the browser on the phone and mobile optimized versions of my favourite news pages (BBC, Tagesschau, Heise, Teltarif) over either Wifi if available or the 3G network. I also do this quite often at home while sitting on the couch, so I was already used to this part of my “mobile only week” experience.

I have to admit that especially for blogging I missed my notebook. I found that mo-blogging is still severely restrictive. In particular I wasn’t able to link to other pages, like my flickr page and other interesting info which is really a great disadvantage (hello Typepad…). Also, not having other web pages open simultaneously in different tabs restricts the ability to quote from other sources. Inserting pictures to be presented as thumbnails is also a pain. Thus, my blog entries of last week contained no links and no pictures. The links which are there today were inserted later.

All in all, I didn’t miss the notebook a lot, but quite frankly, I was still happy returning to the bigger screen and to use both the mobile and the notebook depending on the situation. Here are my humble wishes for next year to further improve my mobile experience: Lower 3G data roaming fees and an improved mo-blogging interface. Too modest?

People are consuming music on their mobile phones in an increasing way. The way most people do this now is through their operator, downloading realtunes straight to their phones. Innovative companies like Futurlink have a different idea how people will do this in the (very) near future, using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and soon NFC, I wrote on this before in my Proximity Marketing post.

At 3GSM, Futurlink presents Wili-co-ITS, a new technology to distribute and sell content on the point of sales directly to the end consumers mobile phones using an interactive touch screen with an advanced Bluetooth and Wi-Fi application platform. Dig?

Wilico-ITS includes an advanced software called Suite which permits the creation of flash movies on the touch-screen and advanced interactive mobile music catalogues to be downloaded in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi mobile phones (all versions of Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc.), all in an automatic way without the necessity of having advanced programming skills. Wilico Suite permits to personalise the design of mobile phone music catalogues incorporating multimedia content (images, texts, music, videos, etc.). The solution allows obtaining real time statistics remotely through an Internet connexion or GPRS/UMTS.

Just think about putting this kind of screens in a MacDonald or other FMCG POS and the possibilities of uploading and downloading content within proximity through mobile phones; think a YouTube+MySpace+Wilico-ITS combination scenario for example… get the picture?

CEO David Masó showed me a demo this week, very impressive! Make sure you check them out at stand Hall 2 - 1A05, if not I’m sure you’ll hear more about this innovative start-up this year.

Following the response and feedback I got on the “Understanding Mobile 2.0” article I wrote at Read/WriteWeb a couple of weeks ago, I created a wiki space to start categorizing the so-called Mobile 2.0 companies.

You can acces the directory at mobile2companies.com.

I decided to use a wiki tool, called Wepaint, so companies can add their own information and keep it updated. You just need to sign-up to add your Mobile 2.0 company info page, you can add images, slideshows, video’s, and RSS feeds as well, and tag your page(s).

Companies can use the tool to keep the web community updated with latest news, elevator pitches, presentations of new products/services, etc. You can browse the wiki by category, by keywords, subscribe to the wiki feeds on new pages added or updated, comments and news, a lot of other stuff out there yet to discover.

The directory is far from complete, I just gave it an initial injection and added some companies I know to start with, so the best thing to do is add your page if you don’t find your company in there and update your page if you don’t like what I added, it’s a wiki, you know

Kudos to Carlo for helping me with the introduction texts.

Contact me if you would like to contribute to this project, to become a writer/moderator, to help develop the wiki, and for any suggestion and comments. I hope these pages will be usefull for the entire mobile value chain, spread the word!

I had the pleasure to test some of the Nokia Nseries phones: the N80i (Internet Edition), the N73, the N91 and the N93. This post as a resume of my experiences the last weeks using the phones on various occasions, trying out different functionalities on all of them.

Nokia announced in 2005 a new sub-brand called Nokia Nseries. It is a product family consisting mobile, multimedia computers. These devices support digital media services from the area of music, video, photography, games and Internet. They all connect to internet using high-speed wireless technologies being ideal for people who spend lot of time on the Internet.

What makes Nokia Nseries different from many other devices is the fact they all are multi-functional. Every device brings quite advanced features like high-resolution camera sensors, powerful music codec’s, FM radio and 3D graphic support for games. To differentiate products within the product family, devices can carry unique experiences like digital TV reception to device, optical zoom for camera, or hard disk drive to store large number of songs on device.

I am not going to focus on the technical specifications and capabilities of the phones, there have been a lot of other sites and blogs doing that before, instead I’m going to focus how I use the phones and which functionalities I particularly like about the Nseries phones. In general, believe me, the overal capabilities and quality of the phones is just remarkable and impressive; Nokia is without a doubt the undisputed leader of the next generation of phones to come; in any case I haven’t seen anyone coming closer lately.

The basic Nokia functionalities I use daily on all 4 devices are:

• Contacts/Calendar
• Messaging/Email
• Web Browsing
• RSS Feed Reader
• Podcasting tool
• Camera for Pictures and/or Video
• Music Player
• FM Radio

The Symbian OS on all S60 phones is now regularly updated and can be easily downloaded and installed OTA directly to your phone or using a USB connection to your PC. A lot of additional and functional software is available too. I have been playing around with various 3rd party mobile apps, tools and software without problems.

I haven’t been going into details on the office tools available like Quick Office but I have been playing beaming PDF documents to the phones and use them as on-the-spot mini presentations to show something quickly while on the road, always handy I must say… There’s definitely a lot more to check and tryout in this area but I’ll focus on this later.

Richard just published an article I wrote on the N80 (Internet Edition) and Nokia’s Gizmo Project: Phone-to-Phone VoIP. You can read about my latest experiences making international internet calls with the Nokia N80i at Read/WriteWeb.

Since my holidays in August, I use the N91 as my all-in-one multimedia machine carrying my favourite music everywhere and plug it into whatever sound system available; I was sceptical at first (I was one of those iPod die-hards!) but the N91 has become much more than just an iPod replacement for me. Some might found the phone heavy and big (it is!) but for me as of now, it is my favourite phone - I like when them toys are solid I can do anything I want to do with it and I can easily do it. You can read more about my N91 holiday experiences here.

For the Nokia music and podcasting fans, check out the Nokia Podcasting blog with lots of useful tips and fresh info on the podcasting application for your mobile phone.

Mobile Magazine elected the Nokia N73 Phone of the Year in France. The phone has a lot of the same capabilities as the other phones in this post but it is lighter, thinner and has a big TFT screen (256K colours, 240 x 320 pixels, 36 x 48 mm) and a 3.2-mega-pixel camera. The quality of the pictures is quite impressive for a camera phone, even if you’re used taking pictures with a 5-mega-pixel Canon digital camera. I like this phone a lot, it’s has a very easy and simple way to flip the phone to take one-click pictures.

If you want to see the quality of the pictures I shot the last weeks, check here at my Flickr account - Flickr recently added a new feature to select pictures by device but unfortunately I could not select or organise my pictures yet taken by device, would have been great to have that possibility for this post

So this brings us last but not the least to the N93, the all-in-one video camera and viewer. I like the interface of this phone a lot too - the 4-ways to flip and use the phone - it’s heavy and big but the keypad and its keys are very easy to use, after all it’s a video camera. Only the side navigation joystick is a bit too small for my fingers to use easily the extra functions. The quality of the video is exceptional and unique for a camera phone - try to plug and watch your video footage on your TV monitor. Check for yourself the quality of this daylight short here below taken yesterday in Barcelona.

More video footage I took with the N93 can be viewed in my Under The Radar - Mobility Rules! post and at vpod.tv portal (use tag mtrends).

Some minor points I want to mention:

• low battery life of the N80 (couldn’t figure out why yet?)
• flash or quality of the evening and night pictures is not really acceptable enough
• the ticker noise the N93 camera makes when zooming in or out

But hey, these are still phones, aren’t they?

Nokia released some interesting statistics recently on how people really use new services on their S60 phones. On the predictable success of new tech objects, I’d like to close here and quote Steve Jobs in a Newsweek article from last year ‘Good for the Soul‘:

The way you can tell that you’re onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can’t wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one.

During the weeks I tested and carried the phones, anyone who saw one of the Nokia Nseries phones I used, wanted one, that’s a very good sign…

I wonder how many of them were sold during the christmas holidays… and what Nokia is going to show next at 3GSM World Congress… at least the N95 looks very promising yet!

Kudos to Richard MacManus who offered me his space today in an idea to write some articles around the Mobile 2.0 subject to intend bridge the web 2.0 and mobile 2.0 communities. I’m kicking-off a mini-series of posts on the topic of Mobile 2.0, which will be explored more in detail on Read/WriteWeb this week.

“On the eve of Le Web 3 in Paris - and one month after the Web 2.0 Summit concluded - it seems like an appropriate time to explore the world of the mobile Web, a.k.a. mobile 2.0. There has been a lot of discussion lately on this topic, a good deal of it inspired by the mobile 2.0 event - a one-day event held on 6 November 2006, organized by Daniel Appelquist and Mike Rowehl….”

Continue reading “Understanding Mobile 2.0“, in which I tried to give an overview of what I currently understand as Mobile 2.0 and I included some links to essential writing done on the topic by fellow mobilist bloggers.

The W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative just anounced the new service “Planet Mobile Web”, which goal is to reinforce the community building around the Mobile Web usage, create discussions across blogs, generate new ideas, etc. The Planet provides both an aggregated HTML view and aggregated RSS/Atom feeds.

Planet Mobile Web aggregates posts from various blogs that concern the Mobile Web. While it is hosted by the Mobile Web Initiative, the content of the individual entries represent only the opinion of their respective authors of course.

I think this is a great initiative to stimulate the discussion between the various mobile global value chain players in the field. I am happy I am included in the lists of blogs, I will definately keep contributing and writing on this topic in the future. Check it out!

Excellent Q&A with Steve Jobs in Newsweek: ‘Good for the Soul‘ on the cultural impact of the iPod the last years… Questioned if he’s worried since the anouncement of the iPod competitior, Microsoft’s Zune “…designed around the principles of sharing, discovery and community,…” Steve answered:

In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear.

Something that every mobile developer and mobile startup should bear in mind before starting developing products: keep it simple and make things usable with only a couple of clicks, there’s easily the one click too much for the mobile user…