I’ve been a T-Mobile subscriber for a long time. Can’t remember how long, but long enough that every time I call in their great customer service people, they give me the usual “thanks for being a T-Mobile customer since…” business and are surprised at the duration. I’ve remained loyal because of their generally great service, low prices and lack of funny business. And in spite of their truly horrible handset selection and their perennial position at the back of the pack in terms of network upgrades.

So I was pretty excited this morning when I saw over on Engadget that T-Mobile was FINALLY launching their 3G network tomorrow, and sweet ol’ Las Vegas was third on the list. Finally. Finally! (Yeah, yeah, it’s that funky 1700 MHz spectrum, I know. Baby steps.)

Things took a turn for the worse in the afternoon as Liverpool screwed things up… but no matter, soon I’ll have 3G, right?

Yeah. FOR VOICE ONLY.

You didn’t misread. Once again, that’s FOR VOICE ONLY. 3G. That high-speed _data_ technology that any operator worth a damn rolled out yonks ago.

Voice. Voice. Voice.

In the interest of domestic tranquility, I’m not going to make any threats I might later have to make good on, such as “if T-Mobile rolls out 3G in Vegas and it’s voice-only, I’ll jump to a real operator.” But come on. Please stop making me feel like such a sucker, T-Mobile.

Update: You might have 3G data, you might not.

Clay Shirky teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and recent wrote of Here Comes Everybody. He gave one of the most thought provoking speeches at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo - and the competition was tough.

The basic idea is that at times of great change, the human mind seeks escape. In the industrial revolution, it was gin that became the coping mechanism, with a whole generation seeking oblivion through drink. It was only after this that people began to turn the assets of industrialisation into something useful - from elected leaders to public libraries.

In the late 20th century, similarly dramatic changes were occurring and the narcotic of choice in those days was mindless TV. It was used to numb the pain of leisure hours that people weren’t used to having and frankly, didn’t know how to fill.

But as we enter the 21st Century, there are a lot more options and we’re used to the idea of leisure in our society. So we can turn this mindless and passive consumption into something active and positive. Clay calls this energy a “Social Surplus” and it allows mass social projects like the Wikipedia to develop.

To quantify this potential social surplus, the US alone spends 200 billion hours a year watching TV, or perhaps more shockingly and comprehensible, 100 million hours every weekend just watching the ads on TV. This could be used in thousands of constructive ways that we haven’t even begun to experiment with.

Take something as trivial as playing World of Warcraft, which might be perceived by many as “”Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.” But Clay’s point is that at least players are active, engaged and participating.

“However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann [of TV programme Gilligan's Island] is cuter”

But if even a tiny part of the Social Surplus can be used for more creative works, ranging from blogging, to twittering, to photography to Wikipedia contributing (to name just a few), think what a radical effect this might have on society. So next time you’re tempted to kick back and watch the TV - just think if this is a remotely useful thing to be doing with your most valuable asset, your time. I last watched TV in 2006, by the way and then only rarely, so this isn’t a pot calling you black exercise.

I’ll leave the last word to Clay himself, in a nice little anecdote that I agree gives a glimpse into the future:

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”

So maybe passive consumption won’t even be on the menu in the media of the future.

If you’d like to read his lightly edited transcript, it’s here.

After the huge hopes for MMS around its launch back in 2001, interest quietly waned as the market failed to deliver. This is pretty much what often happens with a new technology and it’s well described by the Gartner Hype Cycle. Essentially, this says that when a new technology is introduced it gets overhyped by vendors, but users don’t really take much notice. After a period of time though, it finally takes off, while vendors have move on to the new, new thing to hype, with predictably disappointing short-term results.

This has certainly been true of WAP, MMS and MP3 players within phones.

However, around 30% of people in Europe currently use MMS, according to M:Metrics, so it’s certainly passed its tipping point.

In my view, there have been a few problems with MMS in the past, if we ignore the blindingly obvious interoperability issue. I remember attending the launch of MMS by O2 and the marketing manager showing research that clearly indicated that being able to send MMS between different operators was a “must have”. Of course, it was - blindingly obvious really - but that didn’t stop the launch going ahead without it.

Cost was also a cause for concern initially, but pricing has got much more reasonable, usability much improved, interoperability cracked and finally, people started to use it.

These factors are pretty obvious really. Make the technology easy to use and reasonably priced and lo and behold, it gets used.

But there’s still a missing piece of the jigsaw if MMS is to really reach its potential. Today, most MMS is used to send and share photos. A quick snap and maybe a caption, hit send and there you have it.

But MMS is capable of a lot more - think a little slide show, with the option of graphics, video and audio. The problem with this from a usability point of view is that it requires some investment in time and commitment, as well as an element of skill, to produce something that looks great. It’s just far easier to snap a photo and send it off - or not bother at all.

I’ve long argued that templates might be a key to unlocking more sophisticated usage of MMS and significantly boosting usage. But one company I met in San Francisco, Hook Mobile, has come up with another elegant solution and one that appears to be working really well.

Hook are a technology enabler, rather than a brand, so work with social network applications and media owners to power MMS services. It’s a complete solution, including interfaces and prices for all the US (currently) carriers, which means that it’s a complete out-of-the-box solution.

An example of a service that they enable is Pic2Phone, running on Facebook. People currently upload their photos to Facebook anyway. So Pic2Phone allows them to create a little slideshow of the latest photos and send them via MMS to their invited friends’ mobiles.

Similarly, VooZoo allows people to send clips from favourite Paramount Pictures’ movies, like Braveheart and Clueless, on a subscription basis - $3.99 a month for unlimited usage and messages.

Once you start thinking about the possibilities offered by Hook’s service, it’s pretty easy to identify loads of potential uses, with Hook doing all the heavy lifting in the background.

If MMS is to start to be anything more that the odd P2P photo sharing message, similar enabling services need to emerge and receive the support of the carrier community in the way of promotion and publicity. Which will mean that MMS will finally come of age and start to generate real revenue for the mobile ecosystem.

Back in 2001, I wrote a book on MMS with Open Garden’s Ajit Jaokar - years ahead of my time, which you might notice is a recurring theme for me. It’s a bad thing, incidentally, as great timing is one of the most important, as well as underestimated, business skills around.

The book unsurprisingly didn’t sell well and would now be hopelessly out of date, so don’t buy it! But maybe we should update and revise it to take advantage of the renewed interest in this area. Having said that, it would be doubly depressing to invest more time and effort, only to have a renewed failure on our hands!

This week saw me in San Francisco for the mega Web 2.0 event - I’m actually on my way back now.

It’s a huge event, with thousands of people in the cavernous Moscone Center (sic) in San Francisco. I’ll be posting again when I’ve been through notes and caught up with jet lag, but just wanted to get a few impressions down, while they’re relatively fresh.

While I was there, I took time to visit a few MobHappy readers and find out what they were doing. It’s always a little surreal for me to meet people who actually read what I write. Obviously, I know from the stats that there are rather a lot of you, but meeting in the flesh is always a little weird, though hugely enjoyable.

One such company was Punchcut, an SF based mobile design and UI company. We didn’t get round to talking too much about what they did when we met, but check out their site for a deeply groovy website and an impressive list of previous projects. One thing about the Valley is that it’s still deeply webcentric, with mobile generally thought to be something to do with the iPhone or sms. Obviously, there are lots of exceptions to this generalisation, but even so, it’s nice to see some people who obviously “get” mobile ensconced in San Francisco.

I was doing a panel at Web 2.0 and the turnout was pretty small in comparison to some of the others I attended myself. I think that’s a reflection of the role mobile plays in The Valley today - see my comments above. Little do they realise that their beloved PCs are going to be squished into obscurity by the mighty mobile.

However, what the audience lacked in quantity, they more than made up in quality and lots came forward to have a chat afterwards. Many requested my (free) White Paper on Location Based Marketing and if you were one of them and I haven’t emailed you a copy, drop me a reminder email. Or if you’d like it and weren’t at the conference, just let me know.

One of the strangest panels I attended as a member of the audience was the one on micro-blogging, which in reality means Twitter, which has become the generic platform in this space. It was weird because as the panel spouted their words of wisdom, the audience was tweeting the screens behind them. Often the audience was laughing at a tweet (”the man next to me smells a bit”), which was totally out of synch with what the panel was saying. This must have been hard to cope with for the panelists.

One of the consistent questions from the “backchannel” was about Twitter’s business model, which the panel ignored. It’s not a very Web 2.0 question in some ways - received wisdom is scale first, then worry about making money. Having said that, Twitter does seem to have users now, so the question gets more relevant and legitimate with every passing day.

Do you use Twitter? Do you find it useful? What do you use it for? If you live in The Valley, feel free to respond, but I’m actually more interested in people living in the “real” world.

I’m a little undecided if it’s a fad or here to stay, to be honest. I’m definitely a fan of long-form blogging (you may have noticed) and I totally get other media, such as IM. But I only follow one Twitterer I found remotely interesting on the Twitter channel and that’s Dave Winer. Other big name bloggers might be great as bloggers, but they don’t cut the mustard in micro-blogging, in my experience.

As a Twitterer myself, I don’t think I have enough followers for it to be truly useful as a way of broadcasting messages to a whole bunch of people all at once, but maybe I just need to invest some more time with it.

I’ve been skeptical of Blyk, the youth-focused, free, ad-supported mobile service, in the past; I’ve also been impressed by the response rates they’re seeing from the ads they send out to their members. In any case, some congrats to the Blyk team are in order as they’ve grabbed 100,000 members some five months ahead of schedule. Nice — it certainly shows there is interest in this sort of business model.

I still think there are some wrinkles to be ironed out, and as Ewan over at SMS Text News says, the amount of free airtime and texts users get means that for many of them, their Blyk SIM is a secondary account. Two ways to look at that: first, sure, selling students on some free minutes and SMS every month means it should be pretty easy to rack up 100,000 users. But second, if they’re still getting 30% or so response rates from people on these “secondary” accounts, that’s pretty fantastic.

The number of minutes and texts that users get can obviously change and be tinkered with, and I’d expect it to grow alongside the number of users and advertisers. But perhaps more important at this point is the insight Blyk’s gathering into its users and the business model, which I’d imagine is greatly disproportionate to its relatively small number of subscribers.

Last May, I went to the UIQ Fast Track event in San Francisco and had a pretty great time. If you’re looking to get into mobile development, whether on UIQ or another platform, you should be there. If you’re already developing, you’ll get a lot out of it as well. As last year, everybody attending will get a starter kit — including a UIQ phone — to get going down the road of developing for UIQ.

The good people from UIQ’s developer team are venturing back to this side of the Atlantic for another pair of Fast Track events, hitting Boston on May 15-16 and San Francisco May 19-20. You can find more info at http://fasttrack.uiq.com/, and you can register there, too, for the great price of just $199.

Vodafone Sets Up “innovation Lab” with China Mobile & Softbank:

China Mobile, Japan’s Softbank and Vodafone have agreed to establish a Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) to promote the development of new mobile technologies, applications and services. The three companies expect the initiative will help to accelerate the commercial deployment of mobile internet services.

The JIL will launch projects based on emerging technologies and market demand.

The JIL will focus on the rapidly growing areas of mobile internet services, such as mobile widgets. Initially, the JIL plans to develop a platform for mobile widgets to encourage the development of innovative new services that can leverage mobile operators’ unique capabilities.

Vodafone: 200m or so subs. China Mobile: 400m or so. Given that there are already scads of mobile widget platforms out there, why is there a need for another? Because none of the existing ones were developed by operators? The implication here is that operators control innovation — they get to decide where it happens, who can innovate, and what. Plus ça change…

But hey, WIDGETS WIDGETS WIDGETS! Right?

Luca Passani is a mobile tech guru and the guy behind WURFL - if you don’t know, WURFL is an open source project that allows mobile developers to identify which mobile phone a mobile web page is being viewed on. In layman’s terms (the only way I understand it), this allows developers to optimise the user’s viewing experience.

WURFL works by reading the headers in the mobile web page.

Some operators have recently decided to transcode web pages viewed on their networks by a mobile phone. Their motivations for transcoding might range from pure - genuinely believing that this creates a better user experience, to frankly, rather sinister if you’re a publisher. In other words, they want to serve ads around other people’s content. Actually, this is naive as it’ll just lead to a deluge of legal cases for many years to come. Publishers believe that only they have the right to sell and benefit from advertising revenue around content they have paid to create. If you think no one could be this dim, TeliaSonera recently ran headlong into a whole bunch of trouble in Sweden for trying this very naivety.

When companies transcode, they normally use a a third party technology. And these vendors make the decision whether or not to remove the headers, upon which WURFL and thousands of developers rely. It’s not necessary to do so - it’s a choice. I believe that removing the information must make the transcoding less challenging technically, otherwise what’s the motivation, assuming you’re not going to try packaging your own ads around others’ content?

When Vodafone deployed Novarra’s transcoding technology, they did remove the headers, although there’s no suggestion that Vodafone were thinking about placing their own advertising on other people’s content at this time. Luca flipped and published a very angry rant in various public forums. He also drew up a petition “Rules for Ethical Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto” and demanded very aggressively and vociferously that the main transcoding vendors signed up and pledged themselves to his rules.

Luca attracted a lot of criticism within the mobile community. Many felt that his passion was going to backfire and that appeasement, gentle negotiation or even just resignation to fate was required. After all, that’s the approach people usually tried and if it didn’t work so well historically, maybe it would this time. Luca was told to back off and let other more moderate voices try to persuade these giant companies that they were wrong.

But conventional wisdom has proved emphatically wrong. Two of the major players, OpenWave and InfoGin, to their great credit and vision, listened to the argument, did the right thing and have actually signed the manifesto. This puts the other players, namely Novarra and ByteMobile in a very unenviable position indeed. They can either try to fight the whole developer community and explain why they take this stance to future potential purchasers of their technology. Or they can do the right thing in turn - albeit every day they delay, the more embarrassing it will be when they have to admit that they’re wrong.

While the mobile tech angle is important, it illustrates for me a very human lesson. If you really believe in something, you can change the apparently impossible. As Tim O’Reilly reminded us in an inspiring keynote at Web 2.0 today, we should all be going after the big hard problems and not settle for second best and compromises.

Declaration of interest: AdMob uses WURFL to help us serve and target advertising.

I’ve written a few posts about the Mobile Marketing Forum, but I just wanted to close with a few thoughts and quotes from presentations that didn’t really justify a complete post devoted to them.

I thought that the best answer to a (fairly aggressive, if very fair) question came from Scott Seaborn, whose company I have written about before. Scott presented some of the work he’s been doing for the likes on Universal Pictures and Borders (the book store). Essentially, this involves using the mobile as kind of digital mouse, to bridge the real world and the digital one - a space I’ve been hot on for 5+ years now.

Bena asked (edgily) what was the difference between Scott’s company and the rash of startups and established companies who were now in this space. Scott replied that “there were lots of garage bands” but he was the only DJ with a string of hits. Yes, it’s about execution, not the idea - lest we forget.

There was a cool case study, by Sweden’s Crossmedia Avenue’s Stina Akesson. It illustratrated very well how creativity can can be mixed with a dull product like insurance, popped into a mobile medium, and shaken vigorously to make the perfect mobile marketing cocktail.

The insurance company had been running an ad campaign for a while, inviting people to imagine their 70 year old selves in the future - with the not so subtle message that they’d better start saving for that future today. Using some proprietary software, consumers could live the concept by taking a photo of themselves and MMSing it in. Once received, the photo was then aged appropriately.

Sweden has a population of only 9 million. Yet within a month, they had 323,000 entries - pretty amazing! And while there was a free web-based entry mechanism, 80% of people sent their pic in via MMS that they paid for.

A couple of things to note. 1. MMS has quietly been crossing the chasm and going mainstream, while operators have mainly been focusing on the new, new thing. 2. People will use it, if there’s a tangible benefit. 3. I’ve been saying since I wrote the book on MMS (with Ajit Jaokar) back in 2001 that MMS needs to be easier to use from a creativity point of view - as opposed to usability. An example might be the use of templates or this kind of promotion. 4. The face-changing technology could be used in other contexts - for instance, finding which celebrity you most resemble, or morphing you into your animal self.

M:Metrics gave their normal rocking presention, packed full of goodies. One curiosity was that Italy has about twice as many Smartphones as the UK (20% v 9.9%). Is this about style, substance or some other explanation?

M:Metrics are rumoured to be about to sell to WPP, by the way. Spend it wisely, fellas, if it’s true.

Google said search for “adult” content is trending down, but is still the most searched for term at 21% of all mobile searches. This is followed by “entertainment” at 18%, “computers and electronics” at 12% and followed rather later in the list by a rather peculiar “sensitive subjects”. “Errr, I’ve been been meaning to tell you me old pal, but hell, your kids are ugly. They must take after your wife.”?

Steve Ricketts of Orange UK gave a fascinating presentation that packed so many facts into his short session that it was impossible to write things down without resorting to a combination of highly competent shorthand and illegal drugs - neither of which are ever in my possession, just in case you wondered.

But one factoid that had me thinking was that mobile is the primary medium for most people between 12 and 6 pm. Yes, I suppose it would be. But I’d never thought of it in quite that way.

So, a great conference and looking forward to the next one already.

The team over at Mippin (check out my old post for background) are bouncing from strength to strength lately. They’ve launched Mippin Maker for publishers, which lets them easily create Mippsites for their publications; they’ve launched free ad-supported mobile games; they’ve enhanced the Mippin Today feature so users can get it via email and easily access new stories and posts from their favorite sites; and to cap it off, they’ve won a Red Herring award as one of Europe’s top 100 tech startups. Congrats!

I set MH up on Mippin with the Mippin Maker a few moments ago. It took me about 5 minutes — all I needed to do was upload a banner graphic, pick a site name and some colors, then fill in our AdMob ID, and boom, it’s done. If you have a site with an Atom or RSS, feed, head on over and get things going. Chances are somebody’s already looking at your site with Mippin anyway, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And if you want to see MobHappy on Mippin, you can visit mippin.com/mobhappy.