I was perfectly happy to largely ignore the iPhone and just find somebody else’s to play with, until a day or two ago. As Friday’s launch has neared, I’ve felt more and more inclind to get one — though the prospect of dropping $500 and being tied to AT&T for two years isn’t appealing at all. Despite my long-held skepticism over the device, I’m genuinely curious to get one and be able to check it out for a while.

As I said, being an AT&T customer for two years is not an exciting prospect for me. I was a customer of the old AT&T Wireless, and bolted within days of the US launch of mobile number portability. So that’s a big stumbling block. But the fact that the iPhone only has an EDGE connection (even though that’s what I trudge along with on T-Mobile) is, for me, the biggest problem. For such a supposedly ground-breaking device, particularly one that makes such a big deal of its “full” web browser, EDGE isn’t excusable, and certainly isn’t worth hanging on to for the duration of a two-year contract.

With that in mind, check out this WSJ interview with Steve Jobs and Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T. It’s worth a read, but the part I’ve highlighted here — Jobs’ defense of only using EDGE — really makes me wonder if he, and Apple understand mobile very well:

Mr. Jobs: You know every (AT&T) Blackberry gets its mail over EDGE. It turns out EDGE is great for mail, and it works well for maps and a whole bunch of other stuff. Where you wish you had faster speed is…on a Web browser. It’s good enough, but you wish it was a little faster. That’s where sandwiching EDGE with Wi-Fi really makes sense because Wi-Fi is much faster than any 3G network.

What we’ve done with the iPhone is we’ve made it so that it will automatically switch to a known Wi-Fi network whenever it finds it. So you don’t have to go hunting around, resetting the phone, flipping a switch or doing anything. Most of us have Wi-Fi networks around us most of the time at home and at work. There’s often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you’re sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody’s home Wi-Fi network. What we found is the combination is working really well.

When we looked at 3G, the chipsets are not quite mature, in the sense that they’re not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I’m sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.

It’s lovely that the iPhone has Wi-Fi; fantastic that it will find and connect to networks on its own. But the fact remains that Wi-Fi is not a mobile technology. As Jobs says, it’s great for when you’re in a home, office or someplace with a hotspot. But we’re talking about a mobile device here, not a portable or nomadic one. The user experience — particularly for a device that Apple’s relentlessly hyped as the best thing ever — shouldn’t take such a hit when you’re on the mobile network. The point of mobile devices is that they cut geographic ties to networks. A heavy reliance on WiFi really doesn’t do this.

Furthermore, Jobs’ excuse that 3G chipsets “are not quite mature”, particularly in terms of power consumption and physical size, isn’t particularly compelling. This trade-off (taking his comment at face value) would seem to reflect that it’s more important for Apple to deliver a device that’s built around the media playback experience, rather than the mobile user experience, by putting heavy battery-life demands ahead of data speeds.

So what’s the deal? Are Steve’s excuses just a lame attempt to cover up some other motivation for not including 3G, financial or otherwise? Or does it simply reflect a really poor understanding of mobile?

Update: Apparently AT&T has goosed the speeds of its EDGE network, with some users reporting a significant increase in speeds, up closer to 200 kbps.

Rutberg & Co are an investment bank, who have a famously research-centric approach to life and put on great, small, intimate invitation-only conferences where networking is a major part of the agenda.

I was lucky enough to be invited to today’s event in London to hear two panels speak about mobile convergence and UGC, respectively. And very interesting it was too - if a little weighted too much to operator panelists and maybe not enough to smaller innovators for my tastes. But that’s a minor criticism and all the operators had interesting things to say, so I wouldn’t know who to drop in the interests of balance.

I can’t possibly condense the discussions here (both panels were 1 1/2 hours each), but there were some interesting snippets you might enjoy. In no particular order:

Vodafone saying that they were being more creative in how they work with start-ups - by arranging development loans in one instance, so that their little partners could take on additional staff to service their business. As someone who has long called for operators to reassess how they deal with little companies, this is great news and I hope not a one-off.

Vodafone (again) giving a great example of an ad-funded service. South Africans are mad on mobiles (it’s a major market for mobile browsing as I know from AdMob stats), but in a relatively poor country, a major proportion of PAYG customers are always out of credit - I think he said about 6 million at any one time. But Vodacom have launched a service that allows creditless customers to sms a friend with the message “Please call me”. It’s free to both parties and ad-funded. Nice, creative and everyone wins.

Three saying that 250 million of their customer base had signed up to use MSN on mobile and send 110 million messages a month. Actually, this seems low per user, but then it’s very, very early days. It also doesn’t seem to be cannibalising sms revenues, which has always been a big worry about IM for operators.

The panel was also asked about what percentage of their revenues would come from advertising in the next 5 years - a very nasty question to be put on the spot publicly with! Orange and Three sensibly ducked it, but our man from Vodafone hazarded somewhere between 2% and 50% “which doesn’t mean 20% either!”. As I say, horrid question, but the really interesting thing is that even at 2%, this would be around $12 billion for Vodafone alone and they are far from operational in every market and only have a part of each market they are in. In fairness, this is probably over-analysing what he was trying to communicate, which is that Vodafone at least are betting that mobile advertising will be a very significant market for operators.

Three said that since it introduced flat rate data pricing on the X Series, that mobile internet usage was up by 50%. Well done for Three for introducing the tariff, but then a lot of us have been saying for years that this will happen when fair pricing comes along.

Orange saying that big media agencies were the laggards in the mobile advertising chain. Hmmm…in fairness, I think that this is a little harsh. Most big agencies are certainly open to the proposition, certainly if the ad partner has enough reach and scale. But the main thing holding them back in my experience is that brands don’t have much of a mobile presence today. This is changing fast and I think that in the next 18 months, brands without a mobile website will be the laggards and once that happens, mobile advertising will truly explode. After all, the best way to promote a mobile website is via mobile advertising and then we’ll see some serious budget start to flow - not that the current revenue flow is exactly trivial even at this point.

So, many thanks to Rutberg for a very interesting afternoon and to TLcom Capital for sponsoring it.

eMarketer has an analysis of how User Generated Content (UGC) creators stack up numberwise to those of us who merely passively consume the content.

They’re obviously really only talking about the web at this stage, but since UGC is HOT for mobile too, it’s interesting to look at the overall trends, as an indicator of things to come for us mobilists.

Firstly, not surprisingly, both creators and consumers are growing fast and this trend is accelerating into the future. By 2011, the number of consumers will have risen worldwide to 254 million - up from 128 million in 2006. In the same timescale, creators rise from 118 million to 237 million.

So what does this tell us? Well, no surprises that there’s more consumers than creators. After all, there’s far fewer people who leave comments on this blog (creators) than there are readers (consumers), as an example. In this case, about 1% might leave a comment and in my experience, that’s a pretty common rule.

But hang on. These stats indicate that there are nearly as many creators as consumers and that is new. In fact, consumers account for around 92% of creators, which is a pretty major shift.

Let’s admittedly be wary about this as the definition of UGC is very broad (people who post videos, photos, music, blogs, wikis, personal profiles - does this include, say creating a profile in Facebook or MySpace? - and personal Web sites). There’s a major difference, for instance, in posting a couple of pics to Flickr and creating a blog, as an ongoing, long-lived project.

But it does raise the intriguing idea (even taking this broad definition) that the vast majority of UGC is actually created for an audience of less than 1 person on average, if we factor the UGC with largish audiences. So the Significant Other in our lives seems to have become the audience for most of our UGC.

Which actually is not such a shift away from traditional media if you think about it. The audience for most photos in the old days was probably a handful. And many a long suffering group of friends have had to read through the scribblings of a prospective poet or novelist. So maybe the result of the ability to create content more easily has simply resulted in a glut of the stuff and the overall consumption per creation has decreased for most people.

Something to think about.

While we wait to get things back in order here, you might want to have a look at the new blog set up by our friends at Phone Scoop. While their main site stays focused on the US handset market, they’re dialing up the introspection and opinion on the blog. Good stuff.

Do not adjust your set, things are looking very funny on MobHappy, thanks to a Wordpress upgrade gone awry (well, thanks to an idiot performing a Wordpress upgrade, really…). Anyhow, things will hopefully be back to normal soon.

Of course, if you’re reading this in the RSS, you’re probably just scratching your head wondering what I’m talking about, which is fine too.

Update: Everything appears to be back to normal now.

There have been a handful of new service launches in the last week or so that are worth noting, if you’ve not seen them already.

MyStrands, the music recommendation and personalization company I’ve covered before, has just announced that it’s raised a $25 million investment round — a pretty hefty sum, and one that should help it continue to build and grow. I find MyStrands to be one of the more interesting companies in the growing recommendation space because mobile has been a key part of its platform since the beginning (a point that seems to be lost on some commentators).

Anyhow, congrats to MyStrands — and let’s see what cool stuff that $25 million can help churn out.

The new Bud ad

If only all advertising was as good as this.

I thought MobHappy readers could help spread the word about this high profile job in mobile marketing - Executive Director of the Mobile Marketing Association for the EMEA Region.

See below for the full description, which is really hot off the press, as I’m on the EMEA Board.

It’s a full time and competitively paid, senior role with a chance to influence the direction of mobile marketing into the future, including being a public face of the MMA in the region.

If you’re a mobile blogger, it would be great if you could help get the word out too. 

Executive Director, EMEA
Location:  Europe
The Mobile Marketing Association seeks talented and visionary leader to serve as the MMA’s Executive Director for the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region.  This is a senior level position requires a commitment to the organization’s mission, management and supervisory skills, and financial acumen.  The position requires strong communication skills, including writing and public speaking.  The Executive Director will be responsible for coordinating and ensuring consistency of programs and policies for the MMA EMEA, represent the association where appropriate in matters of public relations and report to the EMEA Board of Directors as to the activities of the association. 
The Mobile Marketing Association is a lean, innovative and high energy non-profit start up organization, so this individual must have high energy as well as practical hands-on capabilities to produce deliverables quickly and cost-effectively. 
Specific responsibilities include:
·         Manage the business and operations activities in EMEA for a not-for-profit industry trade association.
·         Responsible for expansion of membership and member services. 
·         Lead the committees and committee priorities and work product, in consultation with the Board of Directors, to ensure efficient time to market for key deliverables to enforce MMA leadership.
·         Provide representation to the industry, regulatory, vendor community, and other organizations.
·         Expand the reach of the MMA throughout the EMEA region.  Be one of the association spokespersons in the EMEA region.  Note: Position will require significant travel in order to increase the ‘visibility’ of the MMA across the region.
·         Provide leadership to the Association and EMEA Board of Directors in the development, management, and evaluation of programs to ensure proper alignment of staff and financial resources to meet goals and objectives within budget.
·         Manage volunteer and contract staff and oversee general administrative matters.
·         Work with MMA Global on strategic planning, financial planning and institutional development.
·         Liaise with global association on marketing communications including global events, website and publications. Provide leadership in member and board communications as well as other marketing materials.
 Qualifications
·         Bachelors degree.
·         Minimum 10 years marketing experience in telecommunications, advertising and/or marketing.  Understanding of mobile marketing and/or mobile ecosystem desirable.
·         Experience working in a global organization.
·         Must be able to work independently and with limited direct supervision.
·         Strong planning and management skills
·         Strong interpersonal skills and a collaborative management style
·         Demonstrate passion and commitment to the values, mission and goals of the MMA and show expertise in:  organizational management, fiscal responsibility, program development and management, staff management and communications.

·         Bachelors degree.·         Minimum 10 years marketing experience in telecommunications, advertising and/or marketing.  Understanding of mobile marketing and/or mobile ecosystem desirable.·         Experience working in a global organization.·         Must be able to work independently and with limited direct supervision.·         Strong planning and management skills·         Strong interpersonal skills and a collaborative management style·         Demonstrate passion and commitment to the values, mission and goals of the MMA and show expertise in:  organizational management, fiscal responsibility, program development and management, staff management and communications.The Executive Director, EMEA will report to the President of MMA Global and be subject to the direction of the Chairman of the EMEA Board of Directors.  The Executive Director, EMEA will serve as a member of the MMA management team.  
Please send resume and cover letter, along with compensation expectations, to Laura Marriott, President, Mobile Marketing Association (laura.marriott@mmaglobal.com).  No phone calls please.
 

It would appear that Novarra’s the vendor responsible for the cock-up that rendered many mobile web sites useless for Vodafone UK subscribers. The company’s put out a press release touting the wonders of its “Vision(TM) server version 6.5″, highlighting the “rich user experience” it offers, and how it “automatically transforms the web to fit handset specific capabilities”.

Of course, apparently by “automatically transforms the web to fit handset specific capabilities”, they mean they do a better job of it than individual developers and content providers ever could, so don’t bother. However, it “equally supports mass-market and high tier handsets”, which I guess means it makes sites that do their own content adaptation work equally poorly on all devices.