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.

Blyk's journey from MVNO to network service

UPDATE2: It now turns out that the previous story may have been more late than wrong, at least so says NMA and telecoms.com. This is also obliquely supported by Jonathan MacDonald's latest blog on the subject!
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UPDATE: Looks like New Media Age might have got it a bit wrong in their article that kicked all this off! According to Mobile Marketing magazine the original story is a lot of tosh. This is backed by a blog post by Jonathan MacDonald on the subject. Perhaps, following along some of the lines of thought below, it is what they should be doing though?
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Was interested to read this morning that Blyk had taken the second step in what has become their transition from an MVNO to a network service provider. When they announced their last round of investment part of the story was a new "partnering strategy" - one aspect of which was direct partnering with MNOs.

They have now taken the next step down this road and announced that they will no longer operate as a consumer facing MVNO, and will rely entirely on partnership arrangements with operators to get to the consumer.

From an extreme helicopter level view the overall pattern of relationships remains the same. The MNO provides access to the consumers to Blyk who then partners with brands to engage those consumers. The brand pays for this engagement and the consumer is rewarded by call credits etc.

That said there are obviously a large number of practical differences between the two shapes:

• Blyk end up with a massively reduced operational overhead - being a small MVNO is not cheap - as many have found to their cost before.
  
• the users now "belong" to the operator, not to Blyk. This shifts the balance of power, but also makes the partnering concept a more appealing one to the operators since it increases their number of subscribers, and for subscribers in Blyk's current demographic likely increases ARPU.
• Blyk are now much more dependent on the operator for effective communication with the customers - but then conversely the operator is now more of a partner than simply a paid conduit.
• Blyk can now offer their service to any operator who is willing to take it worldwide - much more flexible.
  

Looking at all of this retrospectively (or using "post rationalisation" as Russell put it ;-) using an initial MVNO phase to prove the model works - and with 25% response rates to show to brands and healthy ARPUs to show to operators they have certainly done that - might have always been the plan.

One small fly in the ointment is that now Blyk have spent a large amount of their investors money proving their model works, other players might start muscling in and taking market share from them. It is early days yet but Russell Buckley recently blogged about a Croatian company Out There Media which had launched a comparable service called Tomato Plus with some success.

On one hand you might ask if giving up the MVNO angle has reduced Blyk's differentiation and thus made them more vulnerable to smaller newcomers, but on the other perhaps it was never a sustainable mode of operation but it has given them first mover advantage (which they must now maintain) and an established brand identity. Only time will tell!

PS. Very pleased to have got a mention in the latest Carnival which is up over at VoIP Survivor.

3's brave new world!

3 in the UK are heavily promoting that they are changing mobile forever by offering unlimited free calls. At a slightly closer glance this is all based around their relationship with Skype - and what they are really saying is that people on a 3 contract or on PAYG for 90 days after activating a top-up, will be able to make unlimited free Skype calls to other skype users and landlines and mobiles abroad.

There are some small flies in the ointment however:

• you need a handset that can run the three Skype client. My E61i I use on 3 isn't supported which is a pity, especially snce other equivalent handsets are. All the current handsets being sold are compatible which is good.
  
• you must use the special 3 skype client. If you use some other skype clinet (e.g. Fring) you will rack up significant data traffic which could end up costing you a lot. Can't help feeling that this is going to be confusing for the normob and will lead to a Daily Mail headline or two. Usual mobile industry problem of lack of simple predictability of cost.
  
• According to the support site "3 doesn’t support Skype video calling (known as SkypeIn), Skype SMS (texting) or Skype voicemail" (sic) so if you use anything beyond the basics of Skype you are out of luck.
• SkypeOut only works outside the UK - if you want to make calls to UK numbers you have to use a conventional mobile voice call.
  

While it would be easy to throw our hands up in horror at some of these restrictions they do make some sense in terms of making it possible for 3 to do it at all - and provide a usefully different view on mobile service provision in the process. Distinctly disruptive!

At a more strategic level this is one one hand fairly brave and on the other playing to their strengths. The obvious risk of any operator doing this sort of thing is that they canibalise their voice revenues, but given 3's demographic are not likely to be massively voice-centric this is far less of a risk for them than it would be for the likes of Vodafone - who are thus unlikely to feel able to follow giving 3 a useful point of differentiation.

Three have been doing this for a while now - since the X series came out - but they seem to be now pushing it as the defining difference of being with 3. Will be interesting to see how the other operators respond!

PS. This week's carnival is up over at mobilestance.

BarCamp Scotland 2009

I spent a fun day on Saturday at BarCamp Scotland meeting lots of interesting people (old and new) from the software community in Scotland. After a very amusing and typically Scottish first 20 mins with everybody milling around a safe few paces away from the sign-up boards not wishing to be first, an excellent program of talks and discussions came into being which kept the six presentation zones running for the vast majority of the day.

One of the early speakers was Ewan Mcintosh from 4IP, a major sponsor of the event, who gave an interesting 30 minute outline of what 4IP was supporting and some key tips on how to effectively engage with them. He described how he sees media being divided into a series of spaces: watching, participating, performing, publishing, group, and secret.

The next talk I saw, and at the other end of the corporate scale, was by Cole Henley who in his spare time has created tinyadr, a system for effectively publishing contact details over the web in place of traditional printed and static business cards. It uses the hCard HTML microformat to embed semantic information into the markup which was new to me.

The ever entertaining Mike Masnick of Floor64 and Techdirt fame was in town for the week visiting Informatics and the Business School. On previous days I had heard him speak on the history of Silicon Valley and how they had created floor64. This time he spoke about one of his pet subjects - the danger of protectionism and why giving things away for free can make sense.

The core of his argument is that goods are broken down into two groups - those which can be reproduced at no cost which he describes as "infinite", and those which have real costs to reproduce/create and are thus "scarce". He states that to maximise your market you should give infinite goods away for free and seek to monetize based on associated scarce goods. Creating artificial scarcity in infinite goods - i.e. protectionism of various sorts simply inhibits growth of the overall market.

Next up Michael Clauser of Gadder (amongst many other places!) talked a little about their automatic prospect data-mining solution, which combines automated search of the public internet with sophisticated natural language analysis in order to assist researchers find relevant background on individual prospective partners quickly and effectively.

I then had my turn to speak. The Appleton Tower lecture theatres have great projectors for doing demos of mobile apps which is nice. My slideset is on slideshare:

BarcampScotland: What Is Visual Interactivity?

View more presentations from Geoff Ballinger.

After a coffee to recover I listened to Fred Howell of Textensor present their new A.nnotate.com cooperative document review/annotation system. This web based system allows users to upload documents in a number of standard formats. Representations of the document can then be viewed by the user as well as any other users they choose to invite and comments and discussions can be attached to sections of the text using a postIt like metaphor.

Finally Jonathan Brown of Blue Droplet Media presented on his Drupal Openpackage Video module - which handles upload, transoding and serving video within Drupal based web applications.

The day finished in the Library Bar in Edinburgh University's Teviot House where I had an interesting chat with Andrew Williams about the progress and direction of Maven in general, and his own headsupdevelopment project in particular.

All in all it was an excellent event - and look forward to going again next year!

ps. The latest carnival is up over at Vision Mobile.

Technical, Internet and mobile events in Scotland

There are a wide range of interesting events being hosted in Scotland at the moment, and on Saturday I went along to the annual Barcamp Scotland hosted by Edinburgh University Informatics Ventures and 4IP.

I will write up what caught my eye at Barcamp in my next post, but there are many other events worth going to in Scotland:

• A series of interesting speakers visit the Business School and/or Informatics, and their events are incorporated into The Edinburgh Internet Marketing Meetup etc.
• On more of a technical theme there is the techmeetup which provides that unbeatable mix of a strong technical theme along with free beer and pizza!
• On a wireless/mobile theme Wireless Innovation run a series of interesting events at Hillington Park Innovation Centre.
  
• For the Rubyists there is the wonderfully successful (and now sold out!) Scotland on Rails at the end of the month. I understand there are still places for the charity tutorial day - learn Ruby and Rails from Chad Fowler and Marcel Molina no less!
  
• There are various rumblings about a new mobile group starting up picking up the baton from where I left off with MX Techtalk, possible under the Mobile Monday banner.
• And finally for those in need of caffeine in less formal circumstances a new Edinburgh OpenCoffee series is kicking off these week (pity about the slightly impractical timing :-<) to join the existing Edinburgh Coffee Morning.
  

The latest carnival is up over at Ubiquitous Thought. There should be a new one later today over at Vision Mobile but it isn't up at the time of writing.

UPDATE: Mike Coulter has posted an excellent video montage about what goes on at the Edinburgh Coffee Morning.

Eclipse Pulsar: Defragmenting fragmented development???

Read an interesting story on el reg this morning about the Pulsar project which is slated to be part of the next major release of Eclipse. This is the new name for the Mobile Application Development Kit project from the Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group.

The core idea seems to be a cross manufacturer development environment for J2ME incorporating the SDK tooling from all the supporting manufacturers in a single environment which is a welcome improvement.

Interestingly Sun don't seem to be welcome at this party - with JavaFX specifically not a part of the roadmap.

Of course while this does help a little in reducing the fragmentation of development tools when developing J2ME it doesn't reduce the inherent fragmentation of the platform itself - the phones themselves are as diverse as ever!

From this focussed and pretty sensible core idea things start to smack of design by committee with stated intentions to incorporate mobile webapp and native app development within the same environment.

Unsurprisingly there is no sign of iPhone, Android or Palm WebOS support!

metaTXT: Aiming for one web and gaining discoverability!

One particularly interesting new contact I made at MWC last week was Sinead Quealy of visibility mobile - the mobile SEO company founded by Bena Roberts. As well as telling me about their work on mobile SEO she mentioned they were involved with pushing the "metaTXT" spec through W3C in order to improve discoverability of mobile sites.

Now I have got back and the dust has settled I have had a look at the metaTXT white paper and it seems to be promising stuff. Fundamentally it is an attempt to solve the problem of supporting multiple versions of a site for different classes of device in a way that is transparent to the user - creating a practical step towards the one web ideal I have blogged about before.

What is interesting is it does this by adding a small file (meta.txt) alongside the existing robots.txt at the top of the site providing metainformation about the site. The primary use of this is to provide different paths for the root page for various different device classes - which is all well and good though one webbers may quibble about not driving them via the same markup.

Perhaps more interesting is the ability to provide further meta information about the site within meta.txt - in a standard form independent of any device and/or markup specifics. This can include the usual title and keywords, and intriguingly things like the location the site is related to which opens interesting possibilities for the return of context specific results for the mobile user.

The primary challange they will face with all this is obviously the usual chicken and egg one of convincing sites to publish meta.txt files, and convincing search engines to look for and use them. That said they have already got a couple of mobile search providers deeply involved in the associated working group which is a good sign.

Discovery is one of the key problems that needs to be solved in mobile and this may be one part of the solution to that problem.