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Off to Madrid for this evening’s Mobile Monday Madrid that will cover Mobile Advertising. The topic was on everybody’s lips in 2007 and was put forward by many mobile start-ups as THE revenue model of the future. Mobile Marketing and Advertising was previously covered at MobileMonday Barcelona in July 2006. Fast forward 2008 where we’ll focus on a reality check on the status of Mobile Advertising concretely today.

Speakers’ this evening include:

Philip Gontier, Sales Director EMEA, JumpTap Europe
Jefferson Wright Chandler, European Business Development Director at ShoZu Ltd
Juan Antonio Muñoz, Founder of Unkasoft
Iñaki Cabrera, Director of the Mobile Marketing Business Unit of Vodafone Spain
David Purón, Research and Development Engineer, Telefonica R+D. Open Mobile Alliance Requirements Development Working Group Chairman.

Manuel Alonso Coto, Dir. of the Master on Digital Advertising and Communications of the IE Business School will be the moderator.

I am really looking forward for the start-up presentations this evening, and also to Iñaki’s presentation on Vodafone’s Discovery Program, and David who leads the development of the Mobile Advertising 1.0 standards for Telefonica. We’re also going to launch a MobileMonday Madrid Kyte.tv channel tonight, more on that later here.

The event is fully booked!

Not sure who ever organised 3 MobileMondays in 3 weeks - no I won’t advice it, unless it is to come and watch of course but it’s the way we had to get our act together to start the events in Madrid and get the rhythm right. All in all, I think we were able of keeping the right quality level we’re aiming at for every event…

After the succesful opening event of MobileMonday Madrid and the Mobile Web Applications topic covered in Barcelona, the next MobileMonday Madrid event on November 12 covers experiences from the UK Mobile Market. The UK has one of the most active emerging markets in next generation mobile data services, together with France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We want to learn about the experiences from some of the best positioned people in the UK Mobile industry and explore new market opportunities.

For this event we brought together Mike Short, VP Research and Development at O2 - Telefonica, Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango and Christopher Moisan of Taptu to share with us about their experiences and new business opportunities. The panel will be moderated by Ricardo Pérez from IE Business School.

All details and speakers’ bios at MobileMonday Madrid website. If you’re in the neighborhood, don’t wait to book your seat, the opening event was fully booked after 2 days only.

I’m delighted to announce our next MobileMonday Barcelona event, on July 2: we are celebrating our first MoMoBCN anniversary at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). For this occasion we chose one of my favorite topics at the moment: Mobile Web 2.0.

I’m looking forward to finally meet Ajit Jaokar, co-author of the Mobile Web 2.0 book in a session together with Lucia Garate from Vodafone Group Research and Development - to talk about the recently launched Betavine platform; Patrick Lord from Mobiluck, and Carlos Domingo, General Director of Telefonica I+D to present and discuss their ideas on this topic. I will moderate a short panel discussion afterwards.

This next event will be held at the CCCB Auditorium and there’s a celebration drink at the wonderful “Pati de les Dones” inside the CCCB complex.

Check the MobileMonday Barcelona website for all details on place, timings and bio’s of the speakers. NOTE the new event place and timings!

After Nokia’s Maemo - Linux based - open source development platform launch to create applications for Nokia Internet Tablet products, Vodafone is lauching a new new open source community portal, called Betavine. It aims to encourage collaboration in the area of mobile and internet communications.

I think this is a great idea from Vodafone to ‘open’ up to the open-source communities out there and to create more opportunities for startups and developers. Don’t forget the current business models are still within operators’ range - means you need to partner with them if you want to make some money I also believe that there is a lot of open ground for experimenting with new business models, combining existing operator controlled revenue-models with the more open-source ideas and web community building approach.

Inspired by the discussion around Web 2.0, Vodafone Betavine applies some of the principles of Web 2.0 to R&D in the mobile and Internet communications space, in particular, openness, collaboration and collective intelligence. The first phase of the site focusses on application upload and download, we hope to encourage anyone with an interest in mobile and Internet communications to share their ideas and applications with the community, to test and refine those ideas and applications.

Vodafone plans to offer student competitions, an open source zone via Vodafone Betavine Forge, and a set of development APIs to communications functionality like text and picture messaging.

General visitors to the site can see the projects, downloads and forum discussions that are happening in the Vodafone Betavine community. Registered users can access the application downloads, play with them and join in with the general discussions on the website and help shape the application development. Developers can create their own project space, describe and blog about their concept and upload applications.

Vodafone’s receiver #17 is out and it’s another interesting issue with various great contributions. This online-only magazine is a neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting, future-oriented aspects of communications technologies.

This receiver issue is a truly playful one. While the urge to play is a human universal, gaming cultures differ widely across different societies – that goes for the games people enjoy as well as how they enjoy them. You can play with interactive media alone or to socialise, to compete or to relax, at home or in the street. What is play and what’s in a game? Here are nine answers.

It was good to read the contribution of Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, Games in spite of themselves on Tale of Tales, the design studio they run together in Belgium and their latest game concept development The Endless Forest:

Many games that call themselves multiplayer are in fact glorified single player games. Most of the activities (gathering objects and exterminating monsters) are single player activities at their core. Sometimes the designers make the tasks so huge that practical reasons force the players to collaborate, but the tasks and the motivation remain egocentric. The common exception seems to be games in which players directly confront each other. Instead of killing monsters, they kill each other. With The Endless Forest, we try not only to offer players less aggressive activities to engage in, but also non-competitive forms of playing together.

Michael and me have been pioneering together the early days of the internet in Belgium end of ‘94, early ‘95… waw time flies! Michael still kept some traces of that period here and here; for fans, you can check out his impressive entire portfolio. Michael is a truely original and great designer and artist and his work since he met Auriea has been always amazing and inspiring, together they won the Webby Award Prize for Excellence in Online Art in 2000.

This makes me curious about how they would conceptualize a great mobile game, do check them out!

I wrote an article on Connecting cultures through music for edition #16 of the Vodafone Receiver magazine. The main topic was ‘A Night Out’, interesting challenge and braintwister to write. This issue is covered with some excellent articles by authors like Charlie Schick, Mark Curtis, Lee Humphreys, Tim Cole, Karenza Moore, Frank Lantz, and Antony Bruno (sorry Bruno could not find your link). Definately worth a read, check out the Receiver archives too!

“This receiver issue wants to spark off some ideas about social networking the mobile way: clubbing, seeing your favourite band, sharing memories of a night out or playfully exploring the city, getting to know and experiencing, even creating, music – can mobile add to all these? And how does it affect how we get our friends together for joint action? Does it trigger emergent behaviour? Or is it the ideal means to pull it all together? What do *you* think?”

There is room for discussion on the website, needless to say it would be great to get some of your comments, thoughts and ideas on the evolution of music culture from our mobile lifestyle perspective.

The Artwork for receiver #16 is done by Zaza+Crusher, illustrations by students from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Essen, Germany).

Analysis, Announcements, Art Culture, ethnographics, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Predictions, receiver, vodafone, vodafone receiver

Two weeks have passed now since I posted my Open Letter To Vodafone and still no sign from Vodafone itself, not that I had any illusions… They definately have other priorities than to worry about my flat rate dataplan of course.

The good thing about my concern was that my original post initiated a lot of reactions and comments, not only on my blog but other blogs too and specifically at the Oxford University Next Generation Mobile Applications Panel forum moderated by Tomi Ahonen and Ajit Ajokar where some comments on the complexity for operators to manage 3G and voice where really instructive and insightfull.

Apparently Vodafone is completely abscent in the blogosphere or maybe it’s just better for them not to react and initiate more reactions about the topic.

Today I got some surprising little help on this case to aim for flat rate data plans from Russell Beattie in a post he published yesterday on the same issue. In $1,154.99 in Mobile Data… Ouch he explains about the Cingular bill (yes you’re reading the numbers right!) his coworker Jonathan Strauss received after having spend a couple of weeks in Europe for 3GSM:

“Check out his blog for the details, but essentially something happened when he swapped over from Cingular Blue to normal Cingular a month or so ago, and they, um, forgot to move his unlimited data plan with him, so he was off in Europe for several weeks and using Yahoo! Go Mobile the entire time, paying per kilobyte of data.”

It really seems it’s about time operators change their attitude towards heavy mobile web users like us, no? Russ continues:

“But imagine you’re just some Joe who just got a new phone and didn’t bother with the data plan because, hey, what’s one cent a kilobyte, right? Or maybe they think they’ll never bother with that stuff. Then they end up using the phone for something and start racking up a huge bill, and the operators do nothing about it. It’s outright negligence and fraud if you ask me, and every operator in every country does it. The worst thing is that once this happens to a normal person, they are pretty much sworn off mobile data for life and will try to make sure everyone they know is as well. So not only did the carrier screw their customer, they screwed everyone in the Mobile Internet business as well. Nice, huh?”

Is this really the way we want to push mobile business forward?

Tags: mobile web mobile+web 3G openletter vodafone

3G, Analysis, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile web, Operators, vodafone