Bumping into Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish at MediaTech and Ajit again at the launch of MobileMonday, Germany this Monday, prompted me to finally get round to reviewing their book on Mobile Web 2.0, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages. No excuses for my tardiness, but I have been a little busy with one thing and another recently. 

Any book which quotes me can’t be all bad :-) and sure enough, Mobile Web 2.0 doesn’t disappoint. If you work in mobile (or want to work in mobile), you should read this as a fairly comprehensive view of the mobile industry, the value chain, trends and issues facing the main players. 

In my view, the purpose of a good business book is to provoke, as much to teach, and force you to come to your own opinions on the issues it raises. Mobile Web 2.0 certainly does this and while I don’t necessarily agree with some of Ajit and Tony’s conclusions and opinions, neither can it be argued that they’re conclusively wrong in absolute terms – we have to wait for history to take its course.
As an example, their confidence that Ajax will be of central importance on the mobile platform doesn’t seem reasonable to me given the current state of the industry, but hey, what do I know about technology? Ultimately, maybe, but it seems a distant vision right now. Equally, trying to apply Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to how we use mobile phones seems a little contrived. 

Where I do take issue with the chaps though is where they veer into areas they don’t know much about, especially mobile marketing/advertising. For instance, they blithely assert that a movie made for $5 million “could well be funded by advertising”. Could it?  Well, if we’re talking $20 CPM (which seems a high to medium number), to recoup $5 million, you’d have to get it seen by 250,000,000 people, which seems somewhat ambitious. Hope I’ve got my maths right on that one, but if I have and you’re busy producing a $5 million movie you want to get funded by advertising, I suggest you think again.

I know I always make the same observation with Ajit’s books and in fairness, this one is a considerable improvement on the last one. But it could really do with a damn good seeing to in the editing department. This book is relatively typo-free, but there’s more to the editing art than a manual spellcheck. How arguments are made and expressed could be considerably improved and essentially taking a bunch of blog posts and stitching them together with some more words, doesn’t make a great reading experience and detracts at times from the message the authors are trying to get across.

But these are niggles really. On the plus side, there’s loads of case studies and examples of what’s happening “in the wild” and simply loads of food for thought. 

Should you read it? Absolutely. Order your copy today and read it over the holidays. That’ll help you approach the New Year with some fresh thinking and better understanding of what this mobile thing is all about and where it might be going.

MobileMonday was launched in Germany last night, with over 120 people attending the spectacular venue high above the Duesseldorf evening skyline.

I was one of the speakers and uniquely, I was also a founder and a sponsor, so was very privileged! I spoke about what’s happening in the mobile web and Admob’s role in it, as well as running a live, global campaign, which is always impressive …. if it works. Despite the fact that live demos are less likely to work, the larger the audience, I’m pleased to say that web, browser and our plafform worked in perfect combination.

Other speakers included Ajit Jaokar and Carsten Schwertfeger of Vodafone, ably MC’d by Ossie Urchs.

Dr Alexander Lautz of T-Mobile also gave a speech and I was very encouraged about how quickly the German mobile web is growing and how much operators were open with information, in comparison to their UK counterparts. 43.1% of Germans browse the mobile web already (that’s distinct from those who use it to download content). Both Vodafone and T-Mobile have over 1,000,000 subscribers to their fixed price browsing packages already, which range from €5 to a more hefty €50 for unlimited data to your PC and mobile.

T-Mobile have also launched a multiple SIM card product recently, which I’ve wondered for a long time why no one does this. This allows you to put a duplicate SIM in several phones, PDAs, Blackberries etc and to answer calls on whichever device you have that’s convenient. Obviously, if you answer a call on one device, the others stop ringing. You also get one bill for all your mobile usage. 

This seems to be catering for exactly what consumers want, rather than what’s easy for the operator to deliver and I’m sure this kind of package will be more widespread soon.

T-Mobile also made available a full list of top mobile web sites, which is a distinct contrast to what the MDA supplies on its website, as we discussed a few weeks back.

So, the state of German mobility is very healthy, vibrant and exciting and I’m looking forward to the next event in Munich on 5^th February. Book now, or you won’t get in.
 

One of the other speeches I enjoyed at the Visiongain Mobile Advertising Conference was Martin Copus’s of NeoMedia. NeoMedia are a kind of mini-conglomerate focusing on mobile and have made acquisitions in mobile agencies (including 12Snap) and technology.
 

Martin focused really on the technology end of things with some really interesting stuff from Japan, where the future seems to have already happened.
 

In particular, he looked at Smart Codes, which are essentially ways for a mobile to read and therefore interact with a 2D barcode. Examples are QR codes and Shot Codes, that I’ve written about before, but there seem to be quite a few brands playing in this sector today.
 

In Japan, 75% of people have interacted via a Smart Code and 90% of the under 20’s – bear in mind that these codes weren’t launched just 3 years ago!
 

Some great examples of codes were used, including one giant poster from Northwest Airlines (pictured, courtesy of Scott Fisher’s blog), which only featured a code to click on, and some people using temporary tattoos consisting of clickable codes.
 

I find this type of technology fascinating and have predicted that it’s going to become very, very important in the future. Using codes like this allows us to turn our mobiles into a kind of virtual mouse – click on a code and your mobile can take you to a mobile web page to complete a transaction, engage with a brand, find out more information about something (a real world Wikipedia) or leave a message or feedback.

One of the key issues holding things back in the West are a lack of standards and the fact that most vendors use proprietary technology, so what the industry really seems to need is some kind of open source solution. 

Smart Codes literally open up a whole new world for technology, communication and marketing and while they’ll be slower to catch on in the West, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be clicking as frequently as a Japanese teenager.

There was much chatter last week about Verizon’s new deal with YouTube, which boils down to a highly sanitized service offering a small selection of videos chosen as “safe” by a highly conservative corporation - and all for $15 a month.
 

Nice try People, but I don’t think you’ll see much of an uptake, despite the headlines. The value in YouTube lies in lots of areas, but having the equivalent of your Grandma selecting the “best” for you to look at on your phone and charging a significant premium for the privilege is not part of the winning proposition.
 

In the meantime, our friends at Orb have cracked the problem for those that need a YouTube fix (and have a fixed price data plan, it goes without saying). As you’ll probably remember, Orb are the people who allow you to view content that’s already on your PC, on your mobile by downloading a free application onto your computer. They’re a kind of Slingbox, without the box, which is pretty cool.
 

Orb’s new interface will allow you to search video on YouTube, Daily Motion, Google and Yahoo from your mobile, including by meta tag, top rated, most viewed, recently added, user name and user name favorites. In other words, you can find stuff you and your mates like, unedited and independently of what Granny might think you should be looking at.

As for Verizon, the days of the walled garden are over and trying to extend this kind of thinking to other new products is doomed, I’m afraid. You can change now, or wait for market forces to make you act. And I’d always recommend companies lead rather than follow.

At the end of October, the .mobi folks touted the success of their first domain auctions — the auctions that are supposed to be an equitable way of distributing domain names, and keep them out of the hands of “parties who would only sell them on the aftermarket”. They managed to sell flowers.mobi for $200,000 to the self-anointed “Domain King”, but an mTLD representative assured us in the comments that the domainer wanted to “develop a mobile site for flowers”, before again trying to deflect the criticism that all mTLD is doing is a moneygrab, and that their claims about advancing the mobile internet are nothing more than a smokescreen. Well, flowers.mobi has gone live, and — wouldn’t you know it — it’s not a “mobile site for flowers”, it’s just a typical parked domain filled with ads.

Better still, it doesn’t even follow .mobi’s much-touted rules that are supposed to ensure all the content on the domains is mobile-friendly. It fails the W3C Best Practices checker, and it doesn’t even pass .mobi’s “Mobi Ready Report”, since it (of course) isn’t XHTML-MP. .mobi has all sorts of compliance policies users of the domain are supposed to follow, and if they don’t eventually the domain will get suspended. Wonder if that process has yet started for flowers.mobi, or if a $200,000 payment gets you out of that sort of thing, because after all, that’s what’s really important here, isn’t it?

Forget everything about helping the mobile user — it’s all about the money. The folks from mTLD can talk about their altruism until they’re blue in the face, but their claims still ring hollow. Their implementation of .mobi does nothing for the mobile web, it just lines their pockets. Why else would they auction sites off to a bunch of domainers, then have the audacity to claim with a straight face that they’re actually going to use the sites for relevant mobile content, not for their usual tricks like domain parking. But as long as mTLD gets the $200K, who cares?

.mobi is a joke, in theory but especially in practice, and it’s getting ridiculous. But the fact that they’ve sold more than 260,000 domains means mTLD is laughing all the way to the bank. Once again, I’m left wondering why such reputable companies and industry leaders as Ericsson, the GSM Association, Nokia, T-Mobile, Telefonica and Vodafone can put their names on this and abide by it.

Some links have piled up, and here they are:

• Mojungle, a mobile media sharing service I reviewed and quite liked back in July, has put itself up for sale on eBay, starting at $60,000.
• Location-based social networking site Socialight has relaunched with a bunch of new features, and got a nice little right up in The Observer on Sunday.
• ScanR, one of the growing number of sites that turns your cameraphone into a copier or scanner, is looking for some help to get going with international users.
• Finally, I was flattered to get an email from one of my favorite bloggers, Jan Chipchase, pointing me to an excellent writeup on his site of a research study on how people use mobile TV in South Korea. It’s a great look at how people are using mobile devices with a TV function, and makes for the typically fascinating reading you can expect from Jan’s site.

Head on over to Mopocket, where Justin has done a great job putting together the 56th edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists, this week’s collection of the best writing on the web about mobile.

Of the four speaking slots I’m doing in four working days, three were mobile focused. MediaTech was more broadly attended by people in technology and the media (which kinda explains the name of the event!). Therefore it probably represented a good litmus test of where mobile fits in with tech generally – or how focused on the PC the rest of the world still is.
 

And frankly, I was completely underwhelmed by how most companies don’t get mobile or at best, see it something that’s bolted on as an afterthought – a sort of inferior computer than these tiresome consumers will insist on owning. This was by no means the view of everyone there – many delegates clearly “get” mobile – but it was common enough to be a noticeable phenomenon.
 

Culprits ranged from dear old Microsoft right down to many of the entrepreneurs.
 

Microsoft had a slide that showed their view of the universe, with “me” at the centre of a hub and spokes coming off it consisting of various (Microsoft) platforms – the PC, X Box, Media Centre etc. The idea being that Microsoft controls the platform whether we are at work, rest or play, though I guess they still need to figure out how to get to us while we sleep. Curiously, there was no TV there either, which seems somewhat premature.

This model is one step up from how they saw things a few years ago, where I’m sure that the PC would have been at the centre of the hub, rather than the more 21^st Century and Right-On “me”.
 

But I would argue that this thinking doesn’t go quite far enough. In this post-mobile world, the centre of the hub should be “Mobile Me”, as the concept of mobility and portability of data is absolutely central to how we must interpret the way we interact and use technology.
 

Microsoft did talk about how our favorites, settings and data will be available on which ever platform or machine we want to use. But, I believe that the mobile will be the digital key to give us access to this information. In other words, you’ll dock your mobile into a PC, X Box,  PSP or TV and your faves, settings and personal files and data delivered over the net, will instantly become available to you.
 

But Microsoft were by no means alone in their view of mobile. I don’t like to pick on entrepreneurs, especially apparently successful ones. But I will anyway. Boonty made a very convincing pitch to the VC community, with their casual gaming business. It’s a subscription based model, where for about £7 a month (or £12 for a premium service), punters get access to a whole bunch of high quality games.
 

We asked a question (via the sms system) about their mobile strategy and were assured that mobile gaming doesn’t work. They tried it once apparently and only got 4 downloads. To a company which gets 55 million downloads, I can see that this would be somewhat disappointing.
 

But surely a better interpretation, rather than dismissing the whole medium and the massive opportunity for casual gaming that mobile represents, would be to ask why it didn’t work, improve the proposition and positioning and to try again. And again. And again…until it does work – because it will.
 

Amusing quote from the French CEO “I don’t wish to be arro-gent, but I am French.” Don’t worry, Mon Ami, we know what you mean.
 

Anyway, Microsoft and Boonty were only two examples of many companies I spoke to who lacked any kind of mobile strategy, though I think that they are beginning at long last to be aware that this might not be a good thing exactly. Many VCs are also culpable in this regard, though again, attitudes seem to be changing pretty fast and I hope my presentation on the explosion of the mobile web played a small part in this.
 

One of my other favourite quotes of the day was from Bob Dylan (obviously not actually present, but referred to by Ajay Chowdhury of Acacia Capital) “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying” quoth The Man. Substitute “born” with “mobile” and you have a succinct view of my take on media and technology. Take note before it’s too late.

When I was in London in October, I had the good fortune that my visit coincided with one of the Swedish Beers put on by the lovely Helen Keegan, and as expected, I met a great bunch of new people and caught up with some old friends, like the Future Platforms crew. I also met Ben Godfrey, who’s the brains behind MobMart a UK-based auction site. Let’s face it, it’s not going to knock off eBay anytime soon, but it does show how mobility can be better implemented into the online auction experience. Users can do pretty much everything from their handset — snapping a picture and sending it in is certainly an improvement over the somewhat lengthy process it takes to list an item on eBay.

Here’s Ben’s elevator pitch, and if you’re in the UK, check out Mobmart:

MobMart is the world’s first mobile-powered auction site. To sell something, just snap a picture, send it to 07720 11 00 22 and fill in the simple form. Selling is free.

MobMart is the first auction site to let you do everything from your mobile; sell, browse, bid and pay. Because you’re using your camera phone, you can post video clips too. Create your own TV ads! You can also do everything online at mobmart.com. We’ll send you texts when bids are placed on your items or when you’re out-bid. We’ve kept everything simple so it’s really easy for you to sell stuff and find a buyer quickly.

In case you’re wondering what to sell, we’re looking for the best item posted each day and giving the seller £50! That might be the biggest, the smallest, the craziest, the best video, or just the most well crafted sales pitch. Come and sell something, not only will you find a buyer, but you could also get £50!

To sell, snap a picture, send it to 07720 11 00 22 and fill in the simple form.
To browse and buy just text “MOBMART” to 80988 or go to http://mobmart.mobi/ on your phone.
To browse online, go to http://www.mobmart.com

The largest event I spoke at last week (by some margin) was Library House’s MediaTech, held at the IMAX cinema in London – great venue, by the way - and ably compared by Mark Littlewood and Richard Youngman.

I’m guessing about 200 people turned up, who were a great mix of entrepreneurs, VCs and other interested people like sponsors (Microsoft and Intel), lawyers, accountants and the like. Not to mention a bunch of bloggers as part of a “Meet the Bloggers” session.
 

Format for that day was some speeches (including mine on the mobile web - let me know if you want the slides), nicely chaired by Doug Richard, some panels and then a series of presentations by various entrepreneurs (7 minutes for the pres and 7 minutes for the Q & A). And furious networking in between, which was a chance to catch up with old friends (although judging from subsequent emails, I missed quite a few people) and make new ones.
 

If I had to pick one speaker of the day who stood out for me in the sense of really making me think, it was Michael Bayler of The Rights Marketing Company. Two points in particular are worth highlighting.
 

Firstly, he talked about measuring media effectiveness as Return on Attention. In other words, unless the consumer of the media is engaged and paying attention to the medium generally and your ad in particular, you’re wasting your money. An extreme example might be the TV that is switched on by habit and burbles quietly to itself in the corner of the room, or indeed is left alone while you make your cup of tea when the ads come on.
 

Therefore, the ideal medium is one which the consumer is focused on to the exclusion of the world around them. Not a bad decription of a mobile, in fact.

Michael called the study of Return on Attention, by the way Attentioneering and I think we’ll be hearing more about this concept.

Michael also referenced an interesting idea from media guru, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan has a concept that media is “an extension of man”. “What more powerful extension of man is there,” pondered Michael, “but a mobile phone?”.
 

More on MediaTech in due course. But I’ll leave with this final impression of the day.
 

Where were all the women? Women allegedly make up around 50% of the population and are also rumoured to consume media and use technology, not to mention be generally better managers (hey, Tom Peters agrees on this one) and nice to talk to. But less than 5% of the attendees were female by my estimation.
 

This isn’t a reflection on the good people of Library House, I’m sure. In fact, I’ve written before about the lack of women at big mobile events, like 3GSM, which is dominated by men in grey suits. So come on girls in tech and media (and there are many) – you must get out more.
 

And for the rest of us, let’s make a big effort to recruit more women into our industry – it’ll make us all better tuned into the marketplace *and* more successful.

[tags] mcluhan, mediatech, Library house, michael bayler, Rights Marketing Company, return on attention, attentioneering [/tags]