- Social Networking Goes Mobile (BusinessWeek)

- Is .mobi a good idea? (Telephony)

- 911 Cell Phone Bank takes old phones, postage paid (Engadget Mobile)

- Camera Phones Kill Memories (Picturephoning.com)

- Mobile Phones Can Become A Tool To Help Fight Spread Of Avian Flu (IBD)

- Motorola needs an heir to the RAZR -Gartner (Reuters)

If you look past Vodafone’s huge paper loss last year, and take a look at their otherwise fairly satisfying results, you’ll see that data, excluding SMS, accounts for less than four percent of its revenues. Also note the semi-regular stories saying people don’t want advanced features on their handsets, and those that have them don’t use them. 3G growth has been somewhat anemic, with 3G users appearing to deliver negligible ARPU boosts. Meanwhile, people keep on talking and texting like crazy, while mobile data lags and content beyond ringtones and Java games crawls along.

So should we all just accept that people aren’t interested in mobile data and content, and just move on?

Of course not. But the industry, and operators in particular, need to heed this stinging indictment of the current system and institute some major changes if mobile data is ever to amount to more than just a small chunk of the overall picture. Here’s what needs to happen:

• Embrace and encourage innovation. For a start, operators need to realize that they’re not, and never will be, the key innovators in mobile data. Nor should they be. What they should be is empowering other people to innovate for the market, whether it’s by sponsoring third-party developers, giving smart kids and trendsetters access to new devices and services and seeing what they can come up with or supporting user-generated content. These efforts should extend beyond just applications and services, and reach into all aspects of how operators work. Forget thinking you have all the answers; quit throwing money at expensive consultants, just buy some sandwiches and talk to people that are excited about this stuff. Building demand for mobile data is predicated on the availability of cool services and content. Without this, it’s going nowhere.
• Build the ecosystem. Too many parts of the mobile industry are set up to ensure that one party benefits more than any other. This isn’t just annoying, it’s unsustainable. Everyone has to benefit — operators, device manufacturers developers, content providers and especially users — and needs to be compensated for their role in the value chain. This calls for equitable revenue shares, access to billing and support systems, open devices and networks that give users access to the content they want, support for mobile advertising, and so on.
• Think platforms, not products. Mobile devices and networks should be platforms, not products. For instance, mobile TV shouldn’t just be a product in itself, it should be a platform that supports other services and applications that build on its base functionality. For examples of this, see FeliCa in Japan — a mobile transaction platform that handles mobile payments, as well as plenty of other applications — or witness how MMS has flourished as a content-delivery platform after failing miserably as a person-to-person communications product.
• Revamp marketing. The way mobile data services and content are presented to people is totally flawed. So much of it is (and always has been) based on the idea of “what is it?”: WAP is the web on your mobile. MMS is like SMS, but with a picture. 3G is fast data. The average consumer’s reaction to that: “So what?” Stop trying to sell people on what something is, and focus on what it can do — that is, of course, if the marketers have any idea. So what if HSDPA makes data fast? What can I do with that fast data? Technology doesn’t sell devices and mobile connectivity — services, applications and content do.

What else needs to change to get people more interested in mobile data? I realize this is basically the same question we’ve been asking since, oh, 2000 or so, but at some point, people will start listening. This isn’t intended to set off an operator-bashing festival, because they’re not the only ones that need to evolve here, and any use of the term “killer app” will get you slapped with a decent-sized fish. But let’s spell it out here — what else has to change, where am I wrong, and who’s already doing it?

[tags]mobile, mobile data, mobile content, mms, wap, 3g, hsdpa, sms[/tags]

User generated content is the new new thing at the moment - both online and in mobile - and unless you’ve been living under a stone, you can’t fail to have noticed the buzz.

I’ve been looking at Tocmag recently, which allows you to create your own Java magazine for friends, family and colleagues to download to their mobile and browse offline.

We’ve already seen big name publishers with Java versions in partnership with Refresh Mobile’s Mobizines. But this is the first time that I’ve seen this offered to the ordinary punter.

To show exactly how easy this is, I created a magazine you can download onto your mobile from here www.tocmag.com/russ. Simply go there on your mobile, download it and you’ll see what I came up with in a few minutes. I am, it must be said, a little bit of a technical and design klutz. But my effort illustrates how incredibly easy it must be to use and hints at the potential of what could be done with someone with a little more skill and time.

If you can’t be bothered to check out my effort, I put together a 2 page mag, consisting text and images - my mug shot (sorry about that) uploaded from my phone and a post from MobHappy which I wrote on Monday.

So how much does this little lot cost then? It’s actually free to both create one (or a dozen) and free to download, with the normal caveat that your operator will probably charge you for the data unless you’re on a plan.

I think that this idea has the potential to be very big indeed - at least as big as “professionally” produced content. Like the Blogosphere, many of the magazines will probably be read by only one or two people - indeed, you can opt to make it private. So sending your partner a little love note or a post-match report from your sports team might be good examples of how it’ll be used. You can even include video, though the download cost might then start getting a little pricey.

A couple of final thoughts.

This is a real alternative to MMS, with the added advantage that it’s free. I’m pretty sure that the cost of download will be considerably cheaper than the cost of sending an MMS. But since the recipient is actually paying, it is economically possible to put together and promote a little micropublishing operation.

Finally, I do wonder where all this Java stuff will end up as faster connection speeds make the idea of off-line browsing redundant and presentation on the mobile web more sophisticated. Having said that, there’s a lot of potential in the short to medium term and perhaps the long term can look after itself for the meantime.

If you have a mobile phone product or service that you’d like us to have a look at, drop us an email, using the links on the right.

- Plazes Mobile Beta (Blethers.com)

- GCALSYNC: Operator Lockdown Strikes Again? (Matt Croydon)

- HMV to sell CDs by mobile (reg. req’d, The Guardian)

- Time’s Cameraphone Photographer of the Year Contest (Picturephoning.com)

- Virgin Mobile introduces ad-subsidized calls (Reuters)

- German operators start TV-to-mobile phones experiment (AFP)

If you’re in London on 14th June, come along to the Swedish Beers mobile networking event, an ancient institution, dating back about 5 years now.

It’s at the Nordic Bar from 6.30 and is very informal - no presentations or anything, just chance to meet, mingle and mix with other people from mobile, media and marketing.

AdMob (my employer) is sponsoring the event, which means the first few rounds will be on us.

Look forward to seeing you there.

I was interviewed yesterday by Keren Flavell for The Mobile Media Show - which was great as it’s one of my favourite podcasts.

You can hear the results here or subscribe at iTunes.

Let me know what you think. And be kind please.

Last August, I gave a speech at Wikimania (a conference for passionate Wikipedists) in which I envisioned a Real World Wikipedia. The idea I was promoting was that we could annotate our real world environment with a kind of virtual graffiti, which we could access via our mobile phones.

The graffiti could be factual (Wikipedia style), perhaps describing famous residents of a house you were walking past, or commercial - a local restaurant promoting their dish of the day. Clearly, commercial messages would be controversial, but provided they could be pull-based, or at least only served with the user’s prior explicit permission, they would probably be acceptable to most of us.

The factual annotations would have to be populated by a Wikipedia style operation, with volunteers inputting the text and tagging the locations. A commercial operation would simply never be able to deploy enough information to make the idea interesting or useful.

This world is coming closer though. Steve Rubel points us to Wikimapia, which allows us to leave annotations on Google Maps. Bizarrely, when I looked at the UK, one of the only annotations so far is JK Rowling’s grandmother’s house.

So, assuming that this takes off and people start tagging places with information, all we need now is a way of accessing this with our mobiles in a usable and useful way. This isn’t without its challenges as when there aren’t many tags out there, it’ll get very boring if you have to pull the information down as you’ll be forever searching for stuff that isn’t there. On the opposite side of the coin, if there was suddenly quite a lot of information and your phone bleeped every time there was something to discover, it would start to be very annoying indeed.

However, I think that this is the beginning of something very powerful indeed. The real world is colliding with the digital one and it’ll have profound implications for the way we live and work.

Webaroo is a great application that allows you to download websites to your computer and your mobile, if you happen to be a Windows mobile user. If you use your lappy offline a lot - travelling or perhaps presenting to clients without web access - you can visit websites you use frequently and they’ll automatically be updated every day.

Even more impressive is that you can access links from the page to other pages on other websites. So if you stored MobHappy on your laptop, saw this link to the Carnival of the Mobilists site, you’d still be able to click and see it, even while you were offline. Marvellous! All the websites are also fully searchable through Webaroo too.

Of course, saving loads of pages is only half the story as it would be pretty useless if it just sucked up all your storage space. This would be impractical even for a powerful laptop and impossible for a mobile device. So they have some very clever compression and cacheing technology that squeezes even large sites into manageable chunks. I’ve got the whole of Wikipedia, for instance in 6 GB and MobHappy and all its links in 3 MB. More on the tech here if you’re interested.

From a usability point of view, it’s a free app you download to your PC (no Apple support, a familiar phrase for Mac users). You then choose one of their webpacks - a selection of sites they’ve chosen for you - or you specify some yourself. So I bagged Wikipedia (one of the packs) and AdMob and Mobhappy. As well as being able to visit them online, you can use Webaroo to visit the sites at blisteringly quick speeds. I’ve always found Wikipedia to be a tad slow, for instance, but with this, it’s instant.

Once the sites have downloaded, which takes a while the first time, they’re there to browse whether you are online or not. You can also set them to back uip every day, so even with regularly updated content, it’s still going to be pretty current.

I couldn’t try the mobile element, as what would I be doing with a Windows phone? But I assume it works well too.

My criticism is that they could significantly improve usability and I think running some one-on-one studies of users in the wild would reveal better ways of doing things. Like it’s not a default that the sites you download get updated - you have to play with the prefs to do this.

My idea for improvement would be to be able to run BlogLines and other RSS readers through the application. Currently, I can only get it to store the main site, not my feeds - offline RSS Reader access along with links to all the stories would be fantastic.

My worry is that their business model seems to involve taking other people’s content and putting ads around it. This is controversial for any content creator and rights owner and I’m sure that they’re going to run into big problems, unless they offer content owners some kind of revenue share. Even so, that’s not the whole answer as what happens if I, as a user, want say, The Wall Street Journal on my laptop and phone and the WSJ doesn’t want to give Webaroo permission? It kind of undermines the whole Webaroo user proposition, especially as the more popular the site, the less likely they’re going to want another company to profit from their content.

One for the lawyers certainly, which is never good news for anyone but the lawyers. Q. What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A. A good start.

So, Webaroo is a great tool. Grab it while you can. And let’s hope they come up with a business model that works for everyone; users, publishers and of course, Webaroo themselves.

Finally, I wonder, as tools like Webaroo get smarter and storage cheaper and better, will we be wondering around with the whole of the web stored in our pocket? I know that this is the antithesis of the thin client model that I believe in. But it’s an intriguing thought that the future could be a combination of the best of storage/caching and the best high speed network access.

I suspect that the network model will triumph in the end though. What do you think? Leave a comment.

Head on over to Ajit Jaokar’s Open Gardens blog for this week’s collection of best writing about mobile from around the web.

Ajit’s done a great job, as befits someone with whom I wrote a book once!

In case you missed it, the Carnival now has its own website and it’s sponsored by our friends at Khosla Ventures. This means you can win cash prizes for entering and hosting the Carnival every month.

So what are you waiting for? Get writing today!

You don’t even have to have your own blog. If you join mobile industry discussion group, The Oxford Forum (which is free) you can write there and we can link to it….if you make the cut.

Third Screen Media, the mobile advertising company I spoke to at CTIA, is reportedly in buyout talks with Microsoft’s MSN unit, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to already having a good client base, what impressed me about Third Screen was its understanding of what’s needed for ad-supported content to succeed, both in terms of a platform for media buyers and ad agencies to use, as well as the necessity of working in concert with operators.

The move also highlights Microsofts push to get a jump on Google in the online advertising market, and confirms that mobile will play a big part of it. Exciting times for ad-supported mobile content.

[tags]mobile, microsoft, third screen, mobile marketing, mobile advertising, mobile content[/tags]