Predictions for 2010

The first Mobile Monday Edinburgh of the year focussed on the attendees' predictions for the key trends, opportunities and issues affecting mobile in 2010 - and in some cases beyond! This was in part inspired by Rudy De Waele's excellent Mobile Trends 2020 compilation.

• Garry Irvine of Connected Day started us off by a simple prediction that the iPad will have a disruptive effect on the marketplace.
  
• Richard Marshall of Rapid Mobile noted that there is an ongoing huge increase in smartphones in the market in Europe, but that the entrenched nature of the platforms means that this will lead to more fragmentation, not less.
• Alisdair Gunn of Wireless Innovation views the education sector together with the move of traditional print publishing into mobile as being a key combination - with the children in the schools very much leading the way driving the uptake of new approaches and models.
• Ben Hounsell of nio predicted the continued rise of web based platforms (e.g. Palm WebOS, HTML5 widgets, etc) as developers seek to avoid the fragmentation predicted by Richard.
• Rachel Lane of Blonde optimistically predicted an increased understanding of the mobile usage characteristics of the actual audience of mobile apps and services, as well as noting that mobile is simply an extension of the user's existing digital activity.
• Jessica Williamson of nio and StartupCafe predicted an increased prevalence of and more sophisticated use of sensors to allow the phone to detect its environment and thus provide context sensitive behaviour. In particular she hopes by years end that her phone will be able to tell when she is in a bad mood and warn her friends to avoid her ...
• Alan Paxton of Isomaly succinctly stated that in 2010 mobile is now in the mainstream - not a niche any more.
• Gordon Povey of Artillium noted that in Benelux in particular there is an upswing in the number of MVNOs, and that they are more open to taking risks with cool and innovative new services than the traditional telcos - though he conceded that this isn't currently happening in the UK. He also predicted that more sophisticated mobile app revenue models will start to become truly viable this year - e.g. freemium etc
  
• David Richardson of Edinburgh University Informatics expressed a frustration with the large number of companies who want to engage with mobile but don't understand it - an iPhone app is not always the answer - needs to address the mainstream.
• Ronnie Forbes of Mobiqa felt that geolocation will be a key trend this year. He also stated that it is ridiculous that you need to buy apps from the company who sells you the device - and somewhat contentiously stated that App Stores are a passing fad.
• Graham West of Mobiqa stated that mobile web will overtake J2ME this year, with web tech used to create an app like experience for the end user. He also predicted that this will not be the year for NFC.
• Adrian Williamson predicted that this will be the year that end users start to volunteer to pay for content they really want - shaking up the publishing value chain and freeing the industry from the "everything is free" days of the internet.
• Annette Leonhard of Edinburgh University Informatics noted that for many of the big ideas in mobile to succeed data coverage needs to be ubiquitous, reliable, and affordable, including international roaming.
• Paul Wilson of Edgecase will be interested to see how the iPad blurs the distinctions between mobile and personal computing, and between the traditional and mobile web.
  
• Adrian Astley-Jones of Reality Gap agreed with Ben and Graham that this will be a key year for growing mass market acceptance of the mobile Internet.
• Jim Wolff of the Leith Agency predicted a massive rise in the number of "personal apps" based on tech such as iSites. In digital marketing he predicted a move away from simple gimmicks such as iPint, into branded utility apps that will have longer term traction.
• Anthony Ashbrook of Mobile Acuity notes the start of a trend away from simple textual search and towards visual search on mobile - with many examples ranging from simple barcodes, through AR, into Google Goggles, Amazon remembers, and Nokia Point and Find.
  

My own prediction is rather more general and is about how real people (normob - not promob) perceive their mobile devices. I see this as moving away from being about simple communications towards being pervasive connected computing - perhaps towards the form predicted by Ian M Banks in his Culture SF novels.

Interestingly the reaction from the majority promob in the room was one of "so what, that is already here". My observation would be that isn't yet true for the majority, but perhaps by the end of the year we will see the same reaction there too? Only time will tell!

PS. Carnival #209 is up over at WAP Review.

Visual Interactivity at Over The Air 2009

An excellent first day at OTA09 - great to see many of the usual suspects as well as a number of interesting new people! Had a fun hour this afternoon hopefully convincing a roomful of people of the benefits of Mobile Visual Interactivity and Search and as promised here is the presentation:

Visual Interactivity

View more presentations from Geoff Ballinger.

I also showed a number of groups of videos during the presentation. The first set were focused on visual interaction in brand marketing campaigns:







The second group were to do with automatic blue screening and face extraction:





And finally the last group are AR:





Thanks to those who came along and listened.

OMTP coming to Mobile Monday Edinburgh

Am delighted that we will be having our first external speakers at Mobile Monday Edinburgh at our next event on 31st August.

OMTP's BONDI has been quietly making progress for a few years now towards defining a standard interface for providing secure access to handset features from inside web apps and widgets. They have suffered from the usual chicken-and-egg problem for such new standards with low developer interest due to small number of supported devices, and low support due to lack of apps, so I was pleased to see recently that a swath of new LIMO devices have been launched with BONDI support, to add to their existing Windows Mobile footprint.

Looking forward to hearing more about their work both at MoMoEdi, and at the mobile barcamp they are running on 3rd September.

Carnival of the Mobilists #179

Following on from Volker's excellent carnival #178 last week, I am delighted to host this week's Carnival of the Mobilists.

I will kick off with a post by a fellow Scottish mobilist, Richard Marshall, who asks who will be the Railroad Barons of Mobile? He considers the development of the mobile apps business and draws an interesting parallel between the opening of the American west during the gold rush and the recent rollout of the mobile app stores. A thought provoking read and my post of the week.

Equally thought provokingly, Mark Kramer on Smart Mobs has posted a link inspired by one of the presentations at Mobile 2.0 on Participatory Sensing, including a link to an excellent video on the subject.

Alternative Reality (AR) is a theme that crops up a number of times this week. Anthony Ashbrook of the Mobile Visual Interactivity blog, carnival newcomer and another Scottish mobilist, starts at a high level and asks So what is augmented reality? Next up is an interesting overview of the use of AR in mobile marketing and apps from Andy Favell on the mobiThinking blog- though he seems to include general visual search within the definition of AR which I am not sure I would agree with.

AR is an interesting area for the technophile due to the sheer range of technologies used to underpin the various services - from image recognition through to location and digital compass. It is also an excellent way to bridge the gap between digital media and the physical world - definitely a technology whose time has come. By way of disclosure I should point out that I work for Mobile Acuity Ltd. and one of our areas of expertise is AR.

Taking a bit of a step back Tomi Ahonen at Communities Dominate Brands has added two more to the list of C's of cellphones - Cyber and Context. The former covers everything from AR on one hand to connected pets and plants the other. He defines the latter as being to do with the "human need to let people know our status" - rather than more technical things such as location, though I am not entirely convinced by that distinction.

One of the key services based on Tomi's definition of Context is obviously twitter, which is also the subject of Ajit Jaokar's contribution from Opengardens this week on The Twitterphone, where he describes a "pure social media co-creation phone", in fact taking it to a point where it is interesting to question whether it is still a phone ...

Looking a little further forward Russell Buckley at MobHappy speculates about Mobile Phones in 10 Year's Time - leading to a conclusion that many of us oldies who can't cope with such a closely integrated future will end up in "sheltered accommodation, which offer largely tech free environments" - nice one to look forward to Russell!

For stat-o-philes there have been a couple of interesting posts this week. Peggy Salz of MSearchGroove expands on a presentation given at Mobile Advertising UK in London last week describing the key findings of a survey of 1000 UK mobile users. This will provide the basis for a Mobile Advertising UK report due in July. She follows this up with an audio interview on the implications with Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy UK. Looking further afield Phil Barrett provides a presentation he gave at Marketing Magazine's Mobile 2.0 conference in Toronto in which he compares the relative merits of downloaded and web applications on mobile based on the stats in the Canadian market.

Thanks to everybody for providing such an interesting and stimulating collection of thoughts and ideas. Next week's carnival will be hosted by Rudy de Waele over at mTrends.

Why would anybody ever use iPhone tethering?

Following the live feed from WWDC provided by Mac Rumors I was delighted to see that the new iPhone would allow tethering on O2 in the UK. I was less pleased to find out, when looking at the details on the O2 site the next day, that users will have to pay an *extra* £15pm for the privilege of using it!

I have been tethering on various Nokia S60 handsets first on T-mobile and then on 3 for the last 3 years. It is not something I do very regularly - more a fallback - and relatively low volumes of data involved, but it is an important safety net.

While I am still very tempted to go for the new iPhone for other reasons, though still intrigued by the Android based Samsung i7500 if they would get on and launch it, I am now seriously questioning whether tethering will be part of my future at all.

All of the handsets I am now looking at provide pretty good access to web and email, and have a wide selection of apps which can handle a lot of the tasks I used to use my laptop for, but there will still be times when I need to get online with my laptop urgently so what to do?

This has led to me having a look round at the various PAYG 3G dongle options available. I had expected them to be fairly similar to each other give or take the usual demographic differences in the operators typical users, but I was pleasantly surprised by the range of options out there:

• Vodafone. £39 upfront with 1Gb data included. Dongle doubles as 4Gb memory stick. No time limits on using the data at all - but need to use once every 180 days to keep live. Once it runs out £15 to topup with another 1GB. Possible to use on a Mac at a push but not yet officially or well supported which is a pity!
• T-Mobile. £24.46 for the dongle. Pay to use: £2 per day, £7 per week, or £15 per month. 3Gb per month fair use policy. Mac is supported.
• O2. Dongle costs £29.99. Pay to use: £2 per day (500Mb), £7 per week (1Gb), £15 per month (3Gb). Unlimited wifi use via the Cloud - assume during usage periods! Mac is supported.
  
• 3. £29.99 for the dongle. Buy and convert a topup into a mobile broadband addon for a months access: £10 for 1Gb, £15 for 3Gb, or £25 for 7Gb. Mac is supported.
  

Quite a few different takes on how to price this sort of thing here - with the "right" choice very much dependent on your pattern of use. Of course for higher volume and/or regular use a contract makes more sense.

So in summary the pricing offered by O2 would only potentially make sense for people who need high volume data access while out and about very regularly, and it has to be said that in simple usability terms a seperate contract 3G dongle would make a *lot* more sense for that sort of user as opposed to having to wire their handset to their laptop all the time.

The way O2 have priced tethering simply doesn't make sense - but perhaps that is their intention. Doing it as they have they have the headline feature (unlike AT&T!) but won't have to support any large scale use of it.

PS. The latest carnival is up over at a consuming experience.

MoMo Edinburgh: App stores and mobile payment

An excellent turnout of 18 people (causing issues with getting extra tables - but a nice problem to have ;-) gathered in the downstairs private room of Centotre in Edinburgh last Monday for a pleasant lunch with lots of mobile chat. Some more photos were taken were taken to add to the MoMo Edinburgh group on flickr.

Richard Marshall of Rapid Mobile kicked off an interesting discussion about mobile App stores, initially looking for thoughts about the Nokia Ovi store. This broadened into a more general debate about whether the other stores could replicate Apple's success, supported as it is by the public trust in their brand, the existing billing relationship created by iTunes, and the advantage of minimal hardware fragmentation.

It was noted that the rash of new store launches has created a conflict between operator focused stores on one hand, and platform focused stores on the other. Also, while fragmentation is still a hard problem, the huge numbers of Nokia java phones in the market, addressable via Ovi, represent a huge commercial opportunity.

Gavin Dutch of Hedout then moved the discussion on to the problems of taking conventional credit card payments in mobile apps and web services. It was noted that APIs intended for webapps, e.g. from paypal and the like, could often be used, though security systems like 3D secure can be a problem in some cases.

Discussion then moved on to contactless and mobile payments, and it was noted that the major credit card networks are now rolling out NFC readers in the UK.

The next event is planned for the 6th of July and anybody interested should make sure they are signed up to the google group.

PS. Thanks to Vero at Taptu for giving a mention of my previous post about MoMo Edinburgh in her recent carnival of the mobilists.

Mobile Monday Edinburgh

Way back in Autumn 2005 I sat in a pub with Jim Black of MX Alliance and Michael Ewins of I-Play chatting about the lack of a technical focused gathering for the mobile and wireless folks in Scotland, and came up with the MX Techtalk event.

These ran with moderate success from then until the end of 2007 by which time they more or less fizzled out. Key learning from it was that the initial focus had been a little too narrow, and that the best events had been when the focus was a little less exclusively technical, more about what we can do with it as opposed to just what we can do and how.

Since then I have been humming and hawing about kicking off something new, and after a number of visits to the excellent Mobile Monday London specifically about running something under the Mobile Monday banner up here, but as often happens it never quite made it to the top of the heap!

During February I became aware of several other folks who were thinking along similar lines. Two of the regular attendees of the techtalks, Steve Brown and Justfone and Gary Irvine of ConnectedDay, the latter also one of the original founders of MX Alliance, were talking to the MoMo London committee about starting up a Scottish satalite of that event. In addition Ben Hounsell of Tenbu was talking to the Wireless Innovation team at Hillington about a mobile focussed event for Scotland.

This all resulted in a group of us getting together in the ETTC conference room to chat about what form of event would make sense, both in terms of appeal and sustainability, and also simply fitting into the existing landscape of technical and business events in Edinburgh which has become considerably more crowded since I started the techtalks in 2005! Present were:

• Adrian Astley-Jones, Wireless Innovation
• Ben Hounsell, Tenbu
• Gary Irvine, Connected Day
• Ronnie Forbes, Mobiqa
• Richard Marshall, Rapid Mobile

The formula we decided to run with (taking seeds of inspiration from Mike Coulter's excellent new media coffee morning - see pages on facebook and 38minutes) initially at least is a gathering around an inexpensive and informal networking lunch at Centotre on George Street in Edinburgh on the first working Monday of each month, with mainly informal discussion around topics provided by the attendees, but with the potential for specific after lunch speakers as well in due course. This will almost certainly develop over time!

Our first event on 11th May was semi-closed, with each of us inviting a couple of guests. In the end 12 of us got together in the downstairs boardroom at Centotre and a good lunch and even better discussion was had - and photographed by Richard.

We have now created a google group in support of the event so please do join that to keep in touch with what we are doing! The next meet on 1st June will be open to all - with booking via Amiando by Wednesday 27th. I am looking forward to it!

PS. The latest Carnival is up over at the Mobile Broadband Blog.