Despite the hype, fixed-mobile convergence hasn’t made huge inroads in the market, for a variety of reasons. But when I was at my local Target store yesterday, I noticed these:

It’s a little unit from GE that you plug your standard home phone into, and connect to your mobile via Bluetooth, turning your mobile connection into a de facto home fixed line. Mildly interesting, I think, as it gives people who want to keep a home phone yet another way to give up their traditional landline. In the US market, the ability to add a line to an existing family plan, then keep it hooked up to this sort of machine for home use, could be compelling for some users. I’m a little hard pressed to think of too many other use cases… perhaps another would be if you get bad reception in your home or another location, you could place the device and your phone wherever the signal’s strongest, then use your cordless phone to roam around the house.

In either case, these sorts of applications aren’t things that people are going to be willing to pay an ongoing monthly charge for, particularly if fairly cheap one-off solutions like this device exist. And that, in the long run, may be the real issue for operator-based FMC services.

I don’t really like to blog about copyright and whatnot much as I think it gets pretty tedious. That said, this stuff the Associated Press is trying to pull is a bit much. Last week it got pissed off that a site called the Drudge Retort was posting links to AP stories with a cut-and-pasted snippet of text, as is perfectly acceptable under the copyright doctrine of fair use. (See Techdirt for more background on the story.) Not really anything too surprising from such a stalwart of the MSM.

Now the AP plans to, according to the New York Times, “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.” The AP wants to set some sort of guidelines that bloggers and others should follow when it comes to quoting its material, and will apparently attempt to define fair use — in such a way as to fit its means and motives, of course.

The thing is, though, AP, you don’t get to make these rules. Fair use is an already established doctrine in the Copyright Act of 1976, and specifically doesn’t let the copyright holder make the determination about what is and isn’t fair use. It specifically doesn’t involve the holder.

The arrogance of this move aside, it would also seem the AP doesn’t really like people linking to its stories (see Belgian newspapers v Google). Fair enough. I’ll join all the other folks in actively not linking to it.

New Media Age carries a story about a survey that found that 63% of young people (14 - 24 year olds) ‘fessed up to downloading music illegally.

Apart from almost certainly proving that the other 37% are lying, it does demonstrate pretty well that the music industry’s problems are ongoing and will almost certainly get worse. It’s amazing to me that in 2008, so many record execs are still in denial.

Last week, I met a fellow Mobile Marketing Association Board member for the first time, Gene Keenan of West Coast ad agency, Isobar. In a former life, Gene was (believe it or not) the personal chef to the iconic band The Grateful Dead. Which is a pretty cool thing to be able to just drop into the conversation.

The Dead actually provide a clue to the impasse faced today. For years they allowed people to freely record their live music and share it with their friends. As a result, their albums never sold in big quantities, but they still earned a very nice living indeed (with personal chef!) from their nearly constant touring. Thus the music became a sampling mechanism for the touring and merchandise and a way to recruit more and more fanatical fanboys aka Deadheads.

This isn’t a new idea and many performers have already cotttoned on to this - like Prince’s decision to give away his last album with a newspaper as a way of pocketing millions from his subsequent sell-out tour. But it amazes me that the record industry as a whole is still hoping that their ailing and aged golden goose will miraculously get better and starting laying those CD things again. It’s not going to happen, so accept it and move on, fellas.

Another interesting factoid is that the survey was commissioned by British Music Rights (BMR), an organisation dedicated to promoting and protecting creative people in the music industry. Their CEO, Feargal Sharkey, used to front The Undertones, who sang the near perfect (according to the best DJ ever, John Peel) Teenage Kicks. Interestingly, Feargal’s quote accompanying the survey tacitly accepts that he’d be illegally downloading today to get his teenage kicks:

“I was one of those people who went around the back of the bike shed with songs I had taped off the radio the night before…..”

I hope the record industry don’t come after him after all this time.

One of my speaking gigs last week was EDM08 in London. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for long, but I did catch a very interesting presentation by O2’s Mike Short, currently VP of R&D. I first met Mike back in ZagMe days and he’s always good value.

In his presentation, he showed a couple of really fascinating slides, which had been produced by O2 back in 2000. While I’m sure you can do the math(s), it’s worth emphasising that this was only 8 years ago, which is a gnat’s heartbeat in historical terms. And yet, they demonstrate all too well just how difficult it is to predict the future. Just to be clear, this isn’t a reflection on O2’s forecasting ability in any way and I think that it’s great that Mike was prepared to share them.

Here’s the first slide, which is O2’s remarkably prescient view of the future for mobile.

Apart from what they did get right, it’s interesting to see what they missed. The one that struck me most was, perhaps not surprisingly, advertising. Maps was another identified by the audience. Can you spot any more?

At the same time, this was O2’s view of how we’d need to be equipped to do all this new stuff.

Doubtless, this was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but remember that the Nokia 3310 was pretty much state-of-the-art, with its black-and-white screen and running Snake II. But casting my mind back, I reckon that most of us would have agreed with this vision and certainly, we could never have foreseen just how much conversion has happened into the tiny devices we carry around today.

Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead “People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years, and underestimate what will happen in the next ten” and this is a great example of that tendency.

A little known fact is that Mr Gates’s thought wasn’t entirely original (who would have thought it?) and was predated by something Joseph Licklider wrote back in 1965: “A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years…”

I’ve had a very busy couple of weeks, so apologies for the lack of blogging. Among other things, it feels like I’ve been commuting to the US, with a trip to the West Coast and another to New York.

In between, I was interviewed by Sky News, so if you’re curious to see what I look and sound like, take a look. I had problems getting the video to load, so what you’re looking for is June 16th Technofile.

Well done to Lucy and the Rainier PR team. Getting TV coverage of any kind is a hell of a coup.

It’s not just me that thinks Nokia’s a-bag-a-shite - SMS Text News:

I often feel that I am the only chap on the planet calling out Nokia for piss poor innovation and ridiculous, ridiculous lack of attention to really important elements %u2014 especially when I%u2019m regularly coming into contact with Symbian fanatics.

Ewan’s post about his ongoing love-hate relationship with Nokia reminded me that I wanted to tell you all about my Wednesday morning: two and a half hours spent installing the Nokia N-Series PC Suite and Software Updater, and using them to backup my phone, upgrade its firmware, and restore it. Good times!

I know that a very small number of Nokia users will ever undertake such a task, but is that any reason to design it to discourage them from ever using it again? I remain pretty ambivalent about the iPhone, but the simplicity and ease of use with its iTunes integration provides a pretty useful model to follow for that sort of thing. To be fair, PC Suite is far, far, FAR better than it used to be. Its level of annoyance is now at, eh, a poke in the eye, rather than being hit in the crotch with a hammer. But it’s still got a long way to go.

Some researchers from Northeastern University have been tracking the whereabouts of some 100,000 mobile users and found some interesting results. Many stories about the research have focused on the privacy implications, but we’ll ignore them for the time being, and focus instead on the main finding: that most people in the study (from what’s identified only as an industrialized nation somewhere in Europe) don’t move around much, and when they do, they tend to go to the same places.

The study found that nearly 75 percent of people stayed within a 20-mile circle for half the year, with the vast majority keeping to an even smaller one most of the time. Then, when they do travel — near or far — they tend to go to the same places again and again. There are potential implications for this data well beyond our industry, but what it’s mean for mobile services?

Russell’s made this basic point before, that most of us tend to spend most of our time in places we know best, and this study underlines that. So does this mean local search is a little misguided, that maybe we don’t need help finding places near us as search vendors would have us believe? I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of the local search market, mainly for this reason. That said, I think there’s still a lot of room in the market for services and applications that help us interact with our local area better. Think things like Socialight, Loopt, Buzzd, or Whrrl.

Conversely, when we do wander out of our usual haunts is when we most need the sort of help that local search or other LBS can provide. So what can be done to better recognize, or even predict, when users need some assistance or guidance? And how should the user experience change for LBS or local search when your users aren’t familiar with the area?

Interesting stuff to consider, I think. This is a space that hasn’t yet been cracked, and it’s still early days. But this sort of research can provide some particularly useful guidance to LBS developers.

The Mobile Marketing Association today announced Laura Marriott’s resignation as President, after 3 incredibly successful years at the helm of the organisation. While it’s a great shame, as she’s done a really fabulous job, I completely understand her decision to get a life back as the travel and demands of the role are really demanding.

The MMA is launching a search for a replacement, so if you fancy throwing your hat into the ring or just would like more information, drop me a line. It’s got to be one of the most exciting and high profile jobs in the industry.

As for Laura, she’s being kicked upstairs to take on the President Emeritus position on the MMA Global Board of Advisors and has agreed to remain actively involved while a replacement comes on board. Long may her contribution continue.

I’d like to wish her the best of luck with whatever role she takes on next and I’m sure she’ll be a great success. If you’re looking for a great talent to be based in Canada (OK, I know it’s a big place) please get in touch with her, or ask me for an intro.

A new report from ABI about mobile Linux is getting a decent amount of press today, claiming that nearly a quarter of smartphones will be running Linux in 2013. That’s great, but… first, there’s no indication of what ABI considers to constitute the smartphone market, nor how big it is or will be in 2013.

Second, big kudos to Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM, who points out that less than a year ago, ABI said that 31% of smartphones would be running Linux in 2012. What to make of that change, that 25.8% decrease in market share estimates?

Not sure what the explanation is, but that’s a pretty hefty change. Also, if all the various flavors of mobile Linux — Android, LiMo, Palm, etc — are going to be different enough so as to be incompatible, is there any value in lumping them all together as one cohesive mobile Linux group?

I noted last month the growing number of manufacturers that are developing their own UI to run on top of Windows Mobile. Today, IntoMobile pointed out another, Glide, from ASUS.

ASUS introduces its own Windows Mobile UI - Glide:

Let’s see, HTC has its own UI (TouchFLO and TouchFLO 3D) running on top of Windows Mobile, Gigabyte and Sony Ericsson are working on something similar, and now ASUS is joining the pack with its Glide — in its release ASUS doesn’t specifies on top of which mobile OS Glide will run, however all their handsets are using Windows Mobile.

Unveiled at Computex, the new user interface makes “multitasking easier than ever” allowing users to “interact seamlessly with their handhelds to obtain everything they require; in fun, style and simplicity.”