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

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Vegas for the CTIA Wireless. Some intense days ahead, lots of people and companies to catch up with. Monday I’ll be at the Mobile Jam Session, another fully booked event organised by Caroline and me. Check the agenda and speakers here.

I’ll be checking out the Showstoppers event to check out some new US startups, the new stuff at Nokia, a Buzzd dinner, the MM2 Roundtable discussion, a couple of other dinners and many networking cocktails…. will definately try to catch the mobile girls at the GoMo News Party. You can check a complete CTIA Party List here by Eric Chan.

Looking forward to meet with the industry collegues and friends, the start-ups, the carriers / operators and VC’s, especially in the Mobile 2.0 area. Anyone who wants to catch up with me, send me a note or send me a direct message on Twitter.

I must be one of those ‘kinetic elitists’ described by Yasmine in an earlier post. I don’t like the word elitist a lot and I also haven’t received a lot of airport privileges yet. A desk, a chair and a power socket would already suffice while waiting for a plane. In the past two weeks I’ve traveled from Germany to Nice and further on to Paris and my suitcase is packed again and ready to leave with me to Milano, Italy in the early morning and further on to Erfurt in the east of Germany next week.

In the past couple of years, my live as a traveler has changed a lot as wireless networks now keep me connected to the rest of the world more than ever no matter where I am. Sometimes I have to admit that it seems I am now better connected at the airport waiting for a plane than at home just a couple of years ago. This is important to me and it reduces the effect that traveling has on me as no matter where I am, the Internet is there. I now (almost) have the same possibilities I have at home to communicate, to be creative and to consume information. No longer do I have to wait with some tasks until I get back home, I can do them anywhere instead of killing time. Just now I am thinking back of how it was 10 years ago (1997): No mobile phone, no mobile Internet, no wifi, 3G not even on the horizon, completely disconnected the second I left home… No way I ever want to go back.

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 recently read a great paper by Timo Smura of the Networking Lab of the Helsinki University of Technology called „Competition Between Emerging Wireless Network Technologies: Case HSPA vs. WiMAX in Europe“. In the paper, Timo has analyzed which factors influence the success of a wireless product. I think the general approach described in the first part of the paper is a great model to describe if new products compete or complement others and how one can look at a product from different angles:

• User View: Users prefer different kind of devices/networks for an application depending on their current physical location. Devices among each other compete to be the preferred one in as many situations as possible. Some devices are complementing each other, some directly compete. Most devices do a bit of both. A notebook with a wifi adapter and a smartphone for example complement each other in many areas but also compete (e.g. you can read your eMail with both of them).
  
  
• Technology View: Some network technologies complement each other (e.g. Bluetooth and UMTS), others are in direct competition with each other (e.g. UMTS and WiMAX). Both competing and complementing network technologies have to find acceptance on all levels of the value network (described) to be successful.
  
  
• Industry View: A product/network has to establish a value network to become successful. A value network consists among other things of network/network coverage, terminals, applications and content.
  
  
• External View: Licenses and national regulations are not discussed very often in the blogsphere. Nevertheless, regulatory politics concerning availability and sale of frequencies and the types of networks the frequencies are sold for has a profound impact on the development of new technologies.

This multi-dimensional approach describes very well why Rudy, Yasmine and I have decided to join forces at m-trends. On my private blog I focus mostly on the technology aspect of wireless systems and I will of course continue to do so. Here on m-trends on the other hand I will expand my writing to discuss operator, user and external views as well, with my technical/network background in mind. Rudy and Yasmine have in the past blogged on the same topics but from a different angle and a different view. Combining our angles should thus be an exciting and interesting undertaking and should nicely cover all four views on topics we have something to say.

I have been writing and reporting for quite some time now on the convergence of networks, the introduction of hybrid devices and media becoming accessible on mobile devices, lately all connecting easily to the web. With game devices such as the PSP accessing the Internet over wifi and the introduction of the iPhone, we now embrace the era of ubiquitous mobility and nomadic computing. This will have a far-reaching impact on the way we access products/services, and the way we communicate with humans and machines. It will change our mobile lifestyle and the way we consume media and advertising.

m-trends.org started as a personal opinion blog on mobile media lifestyle trends and continues doing this with a framed focus, critical opinions and analytical thinking going beyond the hype. To create a broader view and opinion, I invited Yasmine Abbas and Martin Sauter, two personalities I highly respect for their opinion and work, to join me and write regularly at m-trends.org on subjects that are in the air, things we have in common or like to discuss and write about, to start conversations on topics, each from his own perspective and experience.

Yasmine Abbas, is a French DPLG architect, holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS 2001) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Design (DDes 2006) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At Harvard she focused on how neo-nomads, digitally geared people on the move, reclaim a sense of belonging to places in the age of multiple mobilities and digital technologies. She does that too: research and problem solving to design environments, products and services that work for people and drive business results! Yasmine will bring her design/cultural/social context and sensibility to m-trends.org. I interviewed her earlier this year in the Women in Mobile series. Do checkout Yasmine’s personal blog neo-nomad.

Martin Sauter has a special twist on Web 2.0. His professional focus is on mobile network technology and services and he consults mobile network operators for Nortel, one of the major network infrastructure vendors for 2G and 3G networks. His quality time activities include his mobile network blog and book writing. His latest book, “Communication Systems for the Mobile Information Society“, discusses the how’s and why’s of GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Wifi, WiMAX and Bluetooth. On the academic side, Martin holds a Dipl. Ing. (FH) degree from the University of Applied Sciences in Ravensburg, Germany and when not busy travelling enjoys lecturing and discussing today’s and tomorrows mobile networks. This is also the area that Martin is going to cover at m-trends.org. Check Martin’s Mobile Technology Page, his personal blog about his thoughts on the evolution of GSM, UMTS, WLAN, Bluetooth, and WiMAX.

A French girl living in the Boston, US, a German living in Paris, France and a Belgian living in Barcelona, Spain, this looks like other kinds of hybrids: different opinions on various topics in a ubiquitous mobility era with views from different angles, written from different locations, by people who are always on the move… This will definately create more value to m-trends.org; if there are any subjects you would like to have covered here, please suggest or contact me by email.

Expect some diverse and interesting subjects covered soon here, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do, initiating this kind of projects together.

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.

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

It’s another honour for me to welcome you to number 33 of the Carnival of The Mobilists. At 33, “L’âge du Christ”, as we say in Belgium, it doesn’t hurt to spend a bit of time on reflexion, so I hope you don’t mind taking the next two paragraphs for this cause.

The thing I like about the Carnival when looking back at the previous issues is the learning curve we all seem to go through with our personal opinion on mobile related stuff but more important is that thanks to this open-source community and collaborative writing, we all learn from each other from wherever we are and in whatever mobile connected environment we might be, since technology and the networks don’t evolve at the same speed in different places.

Different business models are applied in different countries but whether we communicate over voice, by sms, mms, moblog our camera pictures, read our feeds on the mobile, or listen to podcasts on our cell, it’s all about communication and at the Carnival of the Mobilists we find all sorts of people writing their thoughts, experiences and ideas on mobile and wireless: techies, designers, developers, philosophers, journalists, marketers, there’s always something interesting to read (or now also to listen to), that’s the great thing about the Carnival of the Mobilists: it’s all about collective and intuitive intelligence, experiences, sharing ideas, discussion, the joy of writing and reading, the passion for anything mobile and last but not least the fun to enjoy it when bringing all this elements together.

This weeks’ Carnival of the Mobilists has all of this again with a solid dose of quality! Thanks to our sponsor Khosla Ventures for supporting us. And now enough reflexion, let’s get back to action!

This week there’s more then just tech and testosterone, we have no less then 5 female contributions - regulars Darla, Emily, Keren, Judy and Xen were not even in this week - a missed opportunity to take over, girls but I’m really happy to see that this group seems to be setting the tone for more balance of the sexes in our sector. Bringing in more female experience, intuition, diversity and fun can never harm, so ‘noblesse oblige’ for a gentlemen like me, let’s start with the women

Newcomer and psychologist Dr. Deborah Serani has an entry on Ringxiety: The Next New Disorder. “Do you have the sensation that your cell phone is ringing or vibrating when it’s not?” Check out yourself I would say…

Kelly Goto writes about the introduction of LBS into personal and family life and put some interesting thoughts forward whether this is an interesting move forward: “… are families ready for the shift? Is this considered a luxury to be able to track, or is it an invasion of privacy? Is the tracking accurate enough in urban areas and are their kids going to be OK with the lack of privacy in return for the liberty of having a mobile device of their own?” Kelly talked to actual parents and reveals some interesting insights in this post.

Other newcomer BiBi Cambridge comes in with a surprising sociological input on how the London’s’ underground gay scene is using Bluetooth to get together: “Yes, these days if you make sure you’re on the last carriage of any tube train in London and you whack on your Bluetooth (it works underground you see) you may be surprised to find that the paired devices to be found all around you have names like …” I won’t tell you where she got off the next stop but it’s definitely not a usual spot here at the CotM. Satisfaction guaranteed?

Stefanie Rieger gives us her insights on mobile games in Casual Mobile Snacks For Everyone: “Do current mobile games allow for quiet time, playful time, competitive time, learning time, contemplative time, silly time? We have a unique opportunity with mobile devices in that they can be insanely personal and private while being incredibly social and contextual (presence, location etc.) They can offer small moments of quiet play or learning—no peers, no pressure—or small moments of highly networked interaction and competition. Not to mention hybrids of the two.” Refreshing blog, and my favourite post of this week! Do check also her selection of June’s Best Industry Podcasts. Excellent choice if you ask me.

Which brings me to another podcast this week: Debi Jones did a really interesting interview with other mobilist Martin Sauter available as podcast on Media Slaves. They discuss mobile network capacity as it relates to mobile social media. Must hear!

Back to the boys brings us as usual some very excellent tech related reflexion from regulars such as Daniel Taylor on “Multiple Architectures for Mobility“, Tom Soft on “Another Flash from J2ME Developer Perspective“, Anders Borg on “Java ME, still not Write One, Run Anywhere“, Tam Hanna on “Investition security in the 3G content business“, David Beers on “How wireless becomes free“. Dennis Bournique - finally got his family name, from Wap Review does a review of the mobile edition of Yes.com, a site that tells you what song’s playing on the radio. Hello?

Jim Downing over at Smart Mobs reports on the mobile Linux-based platform independent foundation of some big mobile handset manufacturers (Motorola, NEC, Panasonic Mobile Communications and Samsung Electronics), along with mobile operators NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone.

Justin Oberman at MOpocket stumbled upon - not the web 2.0 social bookmarks site - a giant interactive digital billboard on the corner of 50th and Broadway. Kind of a surprise for a New Yorker it seems, especially when the campaign is to celebrate BBC World’s entry to the USA.

Italian newcomer Fabrizio Errante asks “What do we do with our old phones?” and urges organizations to start thinking about the number of soaring devices, month by month.

C. Enrique Ortiz gives his opinions and analysis on the Future of Messaging: “The next level of messaging is about enhanced messaging that is always on, messaging that can be active or passive based on user preferences, messaging that leverages many media channels, where presence, personal data, and social aspects are all integrated. The next level of messaging is about understanding and maximizing the mobile context and thus the messaging experience.” How about that?

And last but not least I recommend you read the latest ponderings of Scott Shaffer on the relation between mobile search and the physical hyper linking of things: “There will come a point when there is more Internet traffic from mobile devices than PCs. What happens to search engines then?” And “What happens when every can of Coke can be hyper-linked to the net? Or every Elton John CD, or every menu, concert ticket, street sign, business card, bag of Pringles.” This is definitely one of THE hot topics for the coming months. Be sure you’re going to read about it somewhere at the Carnival of the Mobilists!

So, that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, if you got until here, and thanks to all the participants this week for their great contributions. Again, another goldmine of valuable information on anything mobile; please head over and read their posts!

Next week the Carnival is hosted by the Wireless World Forum. If you’re not a member yet, why not become a Carnival of the Mobilists host and get your free subscription (worth GBP 200 to join). For details check the mobili.st website.

* image by Andrew Berglund

I got this one from Fabien Girardin who’s currently writing his Ph.D. thesis on collaborative work in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments. Check his 7.5th Floor blog, loads of interesting stuff in there… makes you wonder quite often - shouldn’t we all do this a bit more?

Fabien pointed me out to a presentation he saw at reboot8, one of the interesting conferences out there “for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change.” The presentation is from Chris Heathcote, a user experience manager who got inspired on the Nokia Mobile Web Server project.

If you hadn’t heard from the project yet, this is where mobile is heading soon, just consider:

“For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of servers of the early web, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.”

The presentation called “Mobile 2.0, A Mobile Internet Manifesto - A provocative vision of mobile phones and other portable devices as true connected members of the Internet.” is definately original and interesting but need probably some more (speaking) input to understand all logic behind but it reveals different thinking, the one I have been waiting to see more of it. You can download a copy of the presentation at his anti-mega blog here.

Man, this is going to occupy my brain cells for some days at least… Keep rockin’ Chris!

As predicted and in a - everything sooner then expected - mood, Maloney last week disclosed for the first time details of the next–generation Intel® Centrino® mobile technology–based platform, as well as a single chip Wi–Fi/WiMAX radio and an Intel–branded mobile WiMAX PCMCIA card. He also provided details about the next generation dual–core mobile processor based on Intel’s Core™ microarchitecture and Intel’s next–generation applications processor for handheld devices. These innovations are designed help make the Internet a more personal and mobile experience for people worldwide.

“The Internet is increasingly the central medium in people’s lives, the place where we go for news, entertainment and education, and to extend our social lives,” said Maloney. “Emerging applications such as mashups, blogs, podcasts and RSS make the Internet an even more personal and interactive experience, and people want to carry those experiences with them. The next stage of Internet growth is to make this ‘real Internet’ mobile.”

WiMAX Industry reports “that most regulators have not kept pace with the progress of technology that makes fixed-mobile convergence a reality. Whether it is fixed applications with CDMA technology or mobile applications with WiMAX, the two fields are converging and will be competing for a shre of the one billion mobile subscribers market.”