The 34th Carnival is at the World Wireless Forum, so hop over and have a read.

In particular, don’t forget to vote for the best post of the month on the Carnival of the Mobilists Website. Go on, make a blogger’s day and they’ll win $250, courtesy of the nice people at Khosla Ventures.

If you’re a previous Carnival host, you get to vote on the best host of the month too - a choice between Darla, Rafe, Carlo, Rudy and Jan. Drop me an email, using the link on the right and tell me your choice.

I wrote about Orb back in April after CTIA, so it was good to catch up with Ian McCarthy, Orb’s VP, Product Marketing today.

If you don’t remember the original post, Orb make a free app that sits on your PC that then enables you to stream anything you have on it to your mobile. This could be TV (if you have a tuner), audio or files. Think Slingbow without the box and the $249.99 price, plus the $29.99 mobile software. Or as I wrote back then:

For me though, the Orb solution is simply way superior. You don’t need hardware, it’s free (or significantly cheaper if you need to buy a Tuner) and by hooking up my mobile with my computer, as opposed to my computer/mobile with my TV, offers far more potential uses.

The big news in Orb’s world and strategically significant for all of us mobile watchers is their deal with Vodafone Germany, called Mein PC (or My PC, if you need the translation!). I think it’s fair to say that Vodafone are nearer the walled garden model than many and this deal is important as they’d just knocked a very big hole in the wall, albeit not demolished it entirely quite yet. It’s a tacit agreement that they aren’t best placed to decide what content that the user sees on the mobile - the user is.

Of course, the big issue of Data Pillage still exists, where the user is faced with an unfeasibly large bill if they start using services like Orb regularly. But looking at this optimistically, if the trial is successful, it’s going to be the driver for some all-you-can-eat data plans which we’re crying out for in Europe. In the US, where operators are slightly more enlightened about data, some users are Orbing for 45 minute sessions 3 times a week, which clearly points to a latent demand for this kind of thing.

The other interesting piece of news for me was that YouTube could now be Orbed to your phone. An awful lot of YouTube content is generated by video phones, so this closes the loop and lets the phone become both creator and consumer of mobile content. If this takes off it’ll be bad news for the likes if SeeMeTV, as you just won’t need that channel any more and certainly won’t need to pay 50p to upload your video, unless you’re convinced that thousands will download it, earning you 1p at a time.

Finally, much of the focus of these types of services is on TV and certainly Orb has the potential to be truly disruptive in this market. But as I’ve been saying for a long time, I think the perfect marriage for mobile is actually audio - or radio, in the loosest possible use of the term. Mobile is all about movement and while TV is good sometimes, it’ll make you bump into a lot of lamposts when you’re walking down the street.

Mobile, then, could presage the Golden Age for radio and certainly the ability to stream music straight from your PC to your phone to create your own personal radio station is here now. But it also opens up the niche of user generated content radio, or Podcasts, to the true mass market of all of us who own a PC and a mobile.

This creates many opportunities. Producing our own “newspaper” has proven incredibly powerful, as blogs have shown. Now the opportunity to creating your own radio station exists and more importantly, the means to broadcast it to a mass market audience.

Watch this space.

Since Carlo is off taking a well earned break at the moment, I thought I’d take over as our resident Gizmondo/Xero correspondent to announce that the SEC is already investigating Xero, according to Moco News.

Xero, in case you missed it, is the semi-pheonix operation that rose out of the insane Gizmondo company that was wound up earlier this year. Many of the execs seem to be the same and the idea is to take the concept of subsidising handsets via advertising and this time run a free mobile service by running ads. This concept sounds great, but a couple of minutes and the back of an envelope proves that the model just doesn’t work.

As Carlo wrote back in April, it really does look like Xero will turn into Gizmondo, complete with financial shennanigans and an ingnominious end. And if history really repeats itself, the same team will reappear with another ridiculous amount of money to launch another hare-brained scheme.

One thing that does impress me though is their ability to raise money, despite dubious track records and a business concept as sensible as selling $5 notes for $10 each. Wow, think how much money you could make if you do a million transactions a year! Count me in.

What would you think about a company in 1960 that decided to withdraw from the colour television market and focus on black & white TVs? Or a software company in 1997 that decided that this internet thing really wasn’t worth pursuing?

Well, I think we’ll look back at Intel’s remarkable decision today in the same light. They have announced the sale of its communications chip business to Marvell Technology Group for a paltry $600 million, intending to focus on “chips for personal computers and servers amid stiffer competition”. The communications chip business supplies BlackBerries, Treos and Motorola’s Q Phone, among others.

It’s certainly true to say that Intel haven’t managed to get a lot of traction in the phone market, despite investing nearly $10 billion, to date. But giving up is more short sighted than Mr McGoo. The future of personal computing IS about the mobile phone and the only question is when, not if, the phone takes over as the most important device to access the digital world.

This is like betting that George W Bush won’t win the 2004 election - in 2006.

[tags] intel [/tags]

UPDATE: Very funny video on the same lines here. Thanks, Mark.

Please forgive this slightly off-topic post, but I think it has important lessons for any organisation with customers, and is therefore worthy of consideration.

I came back from a week in Silicon Valley on Saturday morning, flying with Delta via Atlanta to Munich. A 5 hour delay at San Francisco caused me to miss my connection and forced a 24 delay in Atlanta - not to mention another 3 hours delay on that leg too.

Now, shit happens in any organisation. In this case, the first delay was caused by mechanical problems which I’m sure everyone did their best to resolve. The flight crew were charming, helpful and apologetic and the passengers, from what I saw, were resigned and understanding.

We were also told that a massive operation was underway as soon as our plane did take off (and therefore they knew what time we would arrive) to rebook us all on new flights.

When I landed in Atlanta there were a whole bunch of Delta ground crew there to meet us, who had been mobilised in the last 5 hours. They smilingly apologised, gave us new tickets and for those who had spend the night, arranged a hotel and vouchers to get a decent meal. Oops - sorry - that is what SHOULD have happened at an absolute minimum if Delta were serious about wanting my business in the future. Let alone wanted to turn me into any kind of brand advocate.

What actually happened was that we were directed to another terminal in a peremptory way - the one actually the furthest we could possibly go and thus the most inconvenient for us, the already inconvenienced passengers. There, we had to queue for at least an hour as a clearly understaffed bunch of agents worked to rebook us.

Clearly, absolutely no attempt had been made to pre-empt this situation by trying to rebook in advance, so each passenger had to wait at least 15 minutes while the agents searched for new routes and flights.

This was interspersed by completely uncalled-for and regular lectures by militant and aggressive ground staff about how “we were all facing the same problem” and we must be patient. This was in spite of the absence of complaints from passengers, who by that time had already been travelling for 12 hours and more, not counting travel to the airport in San Francisco. Some of these people were also elderly and infirm.

When we finally got sorted out, we were given hotel vouchers and left to make our own way to the courtesy shuttle. This meant retracing our steps to the original terminal we landed at. And we were also given a voucher for a meal of $7 - whoopdeedoop. Out of interest, I tried to find anything on the menu at the hotel for that price and failed miserably.

And the next day, another militant ground crew operative started making snide jokes about the new delay we were facing and stroppily demanded 5 times over the tannoy that we mustn’t hold boarding up by forgetting to keep our passports open at the picture page. WE mustn’t hold up baording, please note.

Delta’s service is (as Tom Peter’s says) ho-f***ing-hum at best, a kind of Greyhound bus of the skies, making BA or Virgin look truly luxurious, even in the back of the plane. Even little things like the veggie meal that I’d ordered proved to be beyond their ability to organise.

But when they squander an opportunity like this, you wonder if they wouldn’t be better shutting down. ANY customer interaction is an opportunity to impress and turn that customer into an advocate. And this applies as much - if not more - to a complaint resolution process. Take note, our friends, the mobile operators.

But it’s even more important that this, as if you fail to satisfy a customer, they become the opposite of an advocate. In this case, some 30,000 people will read quite what a shitty experience flying Delta is.

The final lesson is that a company like this must pull together - everyone must shine when dealing with customers as it only takes one part of an organisation to fail, to bring down the whole damn thing. The flight crew were badly let down by the ground crew, management and workers alike, undoing all the excellent and committed work that had happened earlier to keep the passengers understanding and forgiving.

I’ve going the The Valley again in August and guess which airline won’t even be on the short list? And the sad thing is that it wouldn’t have been hard to get me to at least consider them again.

[tags] Delta airlines, tom peters, customer service, community [/tags]

I had a great chat yesterday with the LBS team at Openwave here in California. They read MobHappy and invited me in for an exchange of views while I was here. It’s nice to meet other people who are still true believers in the success of LBS, albeit with a realistic view of the market mixed with their evangelism.

In case you don’t know, Openwave make a lot of the midddleware/enabling technologies that carriers need to deploy LBS - the secret sauce that makes things happen, to employ a cliche common in Silicon Valley.

One very interesting snippet I learned that did surprise me, despite my own evangelism is that this year will see revenue from LBS outstrip investment. This is a really exciting milestone.

My own experience of LBS shows that there’s a lot of scepticism at operator level about the potential, particularly in the UK. There is a feeling that because early experiments didn’t work, future applications won’t either. However, the early stuff tended to polarise around local search - find my nearest ATM, for example - and as I’ve written before, most people spend most of their time in environments where they know this information anyway. And on the odd occasion that they need to know this kind of thing, they’ve forgotten all about that potentially useful application.

As I’ve also written before, the innovation needed to drive non-voice mobile usage forward is unlikely to come from the operators themselves and that’s as true for LBS as for anything. So it’s opportune to read that Berg Insight have published new research into LBS today, based on interviews with 200 people working in this area.

There’s not a lot of surpises in the research, though it’s very useful to have gut feel and snippets of the jigsaw validated by the big picture. However, of most interest was that 35% of operators are looking for “looking for more innovative LBS that really can catch the needs of the end-users” which I find encouraging in itself. Although you have to wonder at the 65% who aren’t looking for this. I wonder what they are looking for? More boring location based services that don’t catch the needs of the end user?

Among the vendors and consultancies interviewed, this figure rose to 48% who were looking for the innovative approach, although again I have to question the sanity of those questioned who didn’t recognise the need to innovate, rather than the same old, same old approach to this market.

The question I always ask at this stage though, is what are these hugely successful, cash-rich, profitable and innovative (in their own way) companies doing to stimulate innovation among the cash and profit poor, struggling entrepreneurs who will invent the applications that will kick start the market. The MoSoSo’s, the virtual graffiti deployers, location gamers and the local file sharing disrupters (to categorise a few of them) who will shape this new market.

I know it’s unlikely to happen, but it won’t stop me suggesting it. If operators diverted 5% of the their massive marketing or R&D budgets to Nurturing Grants for these bright young companies, we’d see a real fast-forward effect that would benefit the whole value chain immeasurably.

Head on over to Rudy de Waele’s m-trends for this week’s “L’âge du Christ” edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists.

Rudy’s done an excellent hosting job and there’s some very interesting stuff contributed by quite a few newbies, lots of women, which is cool, and some old hands too.

Your must-read of the week.

As the batteries in mobile handsets have improved, running out of power seems to have become less of a problem. But as battery-draining features like Wi-Fi and mobile TV proliferate, perhaps it will be a bigger issue. It’s interesting, then, to see companies announcing different products to give mobile users a boost when they’re low on juice.

Motorola this week announced the Portable Power P970, essentially a portable, rechargeable battery that can be used to charge devices with a mini-USB port. This follow Energizer’s announcement of its EnergiToGo product, which uses four AA batteries in a charger to power phones, as well as things like iPods, PSPs and Nintendo DS systems.

A little more interesting idea, though, comes from a company I met at CTIA, Medis Technologies, which has a disposable fuel-cell product that works in much the same way as the other two products. It’s a cool little box, really designed for sort of “emergency” use. It’s a self-contained fuel cell that will cost $20-25, and provide about 20 watt hours of power. It’s safe, “green”, and not combustible, and sounds like it would be pretty ideal to get and stick in your car’s glove box or something in case of emergency. The fuel cell’s not quite ready to displace the battery yet, but Medis says it is working on making its technology smaller and more powerful — the common goal of anybody in the field.

A bunch of MobHappy readers and Mobile Monday peeps are meeting up at about 7.00 at the upstairs barhere at the Blue Chalk.

Feel free to pop by if you’re in the area.

Regular readers will be familiar with my fondess for stupid analyst reports, but this latest one really takes the cake. Stupid topic, stupid theory and stupid all around:

Text-savvy Southerners may help explain why all five “American Idol” winners hail from south of the Mason Dixon line, according to figures from The NPD Group.

Cingular Wireless L.L.C., which sponsors Fox TV’s hit reality show, is based in Atlanta and claims 20 million subscribers in the South, the market research firm said. And half of the reported 18 million Cingular subscribers who actively use text messaging are from the carrier’s home region, more than doubling the number of Cingular text message users from any other region.

The 5-year-old show has crowned winners from Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and two from Alabama.

“Cingular has partnered with the show’s producers to provide text-message voting solely from Cingular phones, so it’s certainly possible that Southern subscribers might have more a voting edge than those in other regions in the U.S.,” said Drew Hull, wireless industry research director for NPD. “Had ‘American Idol’ partnered with another carrier with a higher percentage of their subscriber base in another region, the results might have been different.”

I’m left grasping for words by the sheer inanity of this, but I’ve been able to gather a few thoughts of my own:

1. As the kids say, WTF?

2. As Mike at Techdirt points out, if you can get over the stupidity of the subject matter, there are holes in this conspiracy theory big enough to drive a truck through. And never mind that anybody can vote by calling an 800 number, too.

3. Is this really going to make your firm look like it’s got a clue?

4. It bears repeating — WTF?

I’ve talked a fair bit of smack about some of these analysts and their rather useless reports and projections, so I won’t go into it all again. But how long can they continue to turn out tripe like this and sustain a business?

(Photo from The Ames Historical Society)