I’m off on holiday (vacation to our American friends) for a couple of weeks, so I’ll leave you in Carlo’s very capable hands.

I look forward to more blogging on my return, but in the meantime I’ve got some serious chillin’ to do.

Toodle pip.

Russell

The overwhelming impression that you get when attending any mobile event is that everyone there is a bloke wearing either a grey suit or a blazer/chinos combo. In fact, at a recent event, I had to smile as I overheard someone arranging to meet someone they didn’t know when they said

“I’m wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt and chinos” as if this would help identify him in some way.

But there are a whole bunch of talented non-blokes out there and Mobile Entertainment runs a feature today in which the Top 50 Women in Mobile are profiled.

Congratulations to Mobile Entertainment for the initiative and to all the women on the list, especially the ones I nominated. I just hope they still speak to us lesser mortals from now on - by which I obviously mean, men.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is at Andrew Grill’s blog, so make sure you check out the best writing about mobile and mobile technology of the last 7 days.

Andrew recently asked a question from the floor at a conference in which he called me the “Grandfather of Mobile Marketing”. While I appreciated the sentiment, I told the assembled delegates that in fact, I was the Godfather

Anyway, don’t forget to stop by and take a look.

I was speaking yesterday at the Broadband Connect conference in London. I couldn’t stay and mix as much as I’d have liked, but it was full of delegates and speakers who don’t often collide with the pure mobile technology and advertising worlds that I normally inhabit. This is interesting, as it gives some new perspectives that I hadn’t necessarily thought about before.

The biggest such perspective is that the destruction of the walled gardens of TV broadcast are going to tumble down in the same way that it happened on the web and more latterly on the mobile web. I guess it’ll also happen eventually in mobile access as we get more choice over how we connect to The Cloud for our voice and data needs.

I was obviously peripherally aware of the walled gardens of broadcast being threatened eventually. After all, just as in nature, the walled gardens always decay and fall down at some point, allowing a natural habitat to return and dominate over the artificial and controlled environment. However, I didn’t realise that it was quite this imminent in broadcast TV. Already you can get some Sky programmes without a subscription and if you’re prepared to go illegal and Bit Torrent, you can get pretty much anything you want.

Also, as the great and remarkably geeky, Stephen Fry pointed out in his latest Podgram, the BBC’s iPlayer has accelerated this process by liberating their content. Sure, it can only be accessed by UK residents currently, but as any 15 year old will show you, getting around this restriction is trivial for a screen ager.

There’s lots of chaos coming down the line in the next decade - and possibly chaos is the natural order of things in the future. But chaos leads to lots of opportunities for the brave and the fast. There’s simply never been a better time to be a fledgling entrepreneur. What’s your idea and what are you going to do about it?

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s announcement from Google that the launch of Android would be delayed from the second quarter to the fourth, is a potentially huge one from Symbian that could make Android completely irrelevant when devices eventually do start to ship.

It’s too early to see exactly how the Symbian news will play out. But the bottom line is that Nokia are buying all their partners out (including Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens), while simultaneously establishing the Symbian Foundation, an open source, royalty-free platform in conjunction with industry giants, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

According to AdMob Metrics, Symbian already has a 55% share in the market globally [added to clarify: of the Smartphone sector] and considerably higher in some markets. These stats are skewed towards mobile web users obviously, but I don’t think that’s misrepresenting anything in this case. But trying to play catchup in a market where Google is still very much a novice, is going to be very hard.

Of course, even if Android doesn’t work at all for Google, they don’t really care in the wider scheme of things, provided that more and more people come to the mobile web via an Android-like experience, Google will still benefit by being able to serve up ads. At least that’s the theory posited in a new Wired article today, for which Chetan Sharma (buy his book) was interviewed.

And if they don’t? Not much downside. If the only thing Android achieves — as Page knew before Rubin walked into Google three years ago — is getting more people to spend more time online, then Google still profits. More users mean more people viewing pages with Google ads. If they’re doing that from an Android phone, great. If not, but they’re on a phone made more Web-friendly thanks to competitive pressure from Google, that’s also fine. “I hope it’s Android,” Page says. But either way, Google wins.

Of course, it’s not quite as black and white as that. Android doesn’t really need to apply this type of pressure anymore - now we have the iPhone. Android doesn’t need to provide an open source alternative - we have Symbian and Linux. And there’s also an implicit assumption that all these ads in the new mobile world will be Google’s.

We’ll see, I guess.

Time has a great photo essay on the history of the mobile phone, which is worth checking out.

This one shows Martin Cooper, widely regarded as the Father of the Mobile. The photo was taken back in 1983, although the mobile looks much smaller and sleeker than I remember them being in those days.

It’s not a new idea though as the first working prototype was deployed in 1922 in Chicago, as a radio telephone used by the police. I had no idea that Sting was that old.

Story via Alfie’s Blog, Father of the pioneering Moblog UK.

I just thought that I’d let you all know that it was announced last week that I’ve been made Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association. I think a lot of people missed the announcement as it followed hard on the heels of the one about Chairing EMEA.

For me personally, this is huge - and validation of sticking with the mobile marketing industry through the dark, grim years of the early part of this century when we all wondered if it was ever going to take off.

The MMA today comprises all the leading players in mobile marketing, with over 600 members in 40 countries, including the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, Procter & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch, digital giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, as well as many of the world’s more visionary agencies. So I really feel incredibly flattered that I’ve been elected to lead the whole thing.

What’s actually really interesting though, is that it’s quite honestly all down to blogging. This isn’t some kind of false humility, but a fact. If I hadn’t been a fairly well known blogger, I’d never have joined AdMob - or certainly not as the first employee in the world - because Omar, AdMob’s founder would never have heard of me. We met simply because some of the VCs he was talking to suggested we should get together, as they read my blog.

Then when it came to MMA Board elections, blogging gave me the edge over some very tough competition as people had heard of me and I’m convinced that you, our MobHappy readers helped spread the word in your organisations too.

So a heartfelt Thank You to all MobHappy readers - I really, really couldn’t have done it without you. I owe every single one of you a huge favour.

I hope that my short year as Chairman will be a pivotal one for the MMA and there’s already some exciting initiatives underway. But I’d like to be judged by action on this, so watch this space.

Finally, huge kudos to the Board members and previous Chairmen before me (no women, sadly) and of course, the dedicated permanent staff at the MMA. It makes my job so much easier with this huge momentum.

I’ve been saying for a while now that MMS is slowly starting to happen, 8 long years after its launch and 7 years after the book wot I wrote and that no one bought. So it’s great to see a mega-brand getting stuck in and launching an idea that makes the most of MMS and mobile, while mixing in personalisation and user-generated-content memes. What more could we want?

Produced by my pals at AKQA, the idea is that you snap a photo containing a couple of colours that inspire or attract you. You then MMS the photo to Nike, who use the colourways to produce a personalised pair of classic 1985 Dunk high-top basketball sneakers.

You can’t get much cooler than that.

Watch the video

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…”