Like many others though, I raised an inquisitorial eyebrow in surprise when Tomi forecast that MMS is going to be the next big success story to take a place on the mobile podium. Quick as a flash, Tomi wrote a follow up post specifically addressing this, pointing out it was already huge and was about to get even huger.

I’m no MMS sceptic – I was so excited at the start of it all that I wrote a book about it, along with Open Gardens’s Ajit Jaokar. You can see a copy here, though I’m not sure I would recommend it any more as it’s more than a little out of date.

MMS today is apparently a $30 Billion business already. By way of comparison, all global digital advertising is worth about $60 Billion, so this is not a trivial business. And Tomi’s main rationale for future growth is that while P2P is growing very nicely indeed, it’s MMS’s potential to deliver content, marketing and media that will see the hockey-stick growth.

I’ve long held the belief that MMS is being held back for P2P use by being hard to use to its true potential. Sure, it’s pretty easy to snap a photo and send it to a pal, especially these days – and that is indeed how it’s mainly being used. But it can do so much more, such as audio and video, as well as well laid out text and images. Think of it like a mini-slide show and you get the picture. No pun intended.

However, in the P2P world, building a slide show is not an easy thing to do in MMS and requires investment in both thinking about it and creation. It’s like HTML email, which is widely used by businesses to add impact to their email, but hardly ever used by consumers except for very rudimentary cut+paste or to create email sig templates.

So, first job on the P2P front to encourage more use would be to take a look at that whole UI and create some fun and easy-to-use templates that make MMS great to use, other than sending pics. I’ve been saying that for 8 years now and has anyone listened?

On the Business-to-Consumer front, I absolutely agree that MMS is potentially a very powerful tool for media and marketing. But the real challenge for explosive growth is about Reach and Cost and until these areas are addressed, it will still fail to achieve what it might do. That’s not to say it won’t continue to do well, but that dollars will be left on the table in comparison.

Let’s look at Reach first. If a business is going to start sending people MMSs, either on a one-off basis, or as part of an ongoing media communication (such as news) or marketing campaign, best practice (and the law in many markets) dictates that you need to get their permission first. It’s perhaps a little surprising that I still feel the need to write this today, but it’s equally surprising that many marketers haven’t got this message yet.

However, getting people to opt-in isn’t as easy as it sounds, even if you’re offering free stuff, let alone if you’ll be charging them for the service, as say, a newspaper might be tempted to do. This means that you’ll probably only get relatively small numbers on board. If you’re a Brand Manager and looking to create ongoing dialogue, many would turn down the opportunity to communicate with just 1% or 2% of their customer base. I’m not suggesting that this is a sensible approach, but simply reporting on how the world is. You can either accept that or try and change the way the world works – but that’s not so easy.

Perhaps more relevantly, if you’re trying to build a list or channel for use by third parties – essentially the approach employed by Blyk – you run into an even bigger issue over Reach. If brand managers can be picky about small numbers (even if incredibly well targeted), ad agencies who typically buy these campaigns are even more into the Reach thing. When any business fails to gain traction, there can be any numbers of reasons for it. But simplistically, Blyk gave up in the UK as it claimed to get great results, but could only offer contact with a relatively small number of people. Advertisers buy Reach, then Targeting, not vice versa.

But as Tomi points out, if the service offers enough value, you can overcome the Reach argument in certain markets like China. Though I’d be sceptical if you could replicate this particular model in more developed markets for lots of reasons, not the least is access to free news via other media.

So then we’re back to the cost. It still costs about 25p (US 35 cents) in the UK to send a P2P MMS, but I believe you could get a bulk wholesale price for 15p. That’s just the delivery cost and before you charge the consumer anything, if that’s your planned model. If you’re a newspaper, as an example, that’s a very significant cost in comparison to other digital channels such as PC (free), mobile web (free) or mobile apps (free). So, why would you bother? And if you do plan to charge for subscription, you’ll be back to relatively small numbers again.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have marketing campaigns and again, MMS is very expensive. 15p equates to £150 CPM (Cost Per Thousand), or an unheard of $215 CPM. Or certainly unheard of in digital marketing terms – old skool paper and phone Direct Marketing is more expensive for sure in terms of delivery and production, so maybe the hope lies in that direction. But when mobile web advertising costs £20 CPM maximum, MMS is expensive.

If traditional Direct Marketing spenders are the core target market for advertisers, even this market is switching to more cost-efficient forms of digital marketing these days. Furthermore, it considerably narrows the possible sectors which might consider, let alone trial, MMS.

So, yes, I agree with Tomi. MMS has humungous potential, just as it always had and has managed impressive results despite its handicaps. But I would predict that unless these shackles are removed (especially the cost element), it’s always going to be a case of being able to be sooo much better.

One of the interesting aspects of the region is the huge success of Blackberry over and above other mobiles. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but one of the important anecdotal causes seems to be driven by societal mores.

Firstly, like many parts of the world, sms usage really exploded historically. So when a mobile comes with a great keyboard for inputting text, it’s interesting. More interesting though is the free messaging system it comes with, which is radically going to reduce your sms spending. And as more and more of your friends get their own Blackberry and can use BiM, the proposition gets very compelling indeed. It’s the first-fax syndrome. In the early days, a fax machine is pretty useless as you can’t send a fax as there’s no one you can send one to. Equally, there’s no one available of putting you in danger of receiving one. But as more and more companies and individuals own one, the stronger the argument for getting one becomes. Until you get to the stage where you can’t operate without one (even though today there are other options).

I think we can certainly credit RIM with a deliberate strategy up to this point – that BiM was a thought-through product and that in the longer term, it would explode as network effects clicked in. But what happens next is a great example of the law of unintended consequences.

While different countries in the Middle East have varying norms when it comes to mixing between the genders, we can generalise and say that things are stricter than we’re used to in the West. In a country like Saudi Arabia, as an example, this segregation is so strict that it’s actually enforced by a religious policeforce. Indeed, only last month a prominent cleric called for those who oppose segregation to be executed, so it’s not a trivial issue.

Initially, people wishing to circumvent these laws led to an explosion of Bluetooth messaging and sms. But the problem with these communication platforms are that the authorities can (and do) trace them back to the phone and thus, the person.

When you purchase a Blackberry however, it comes with your own PIN. But the thing is, the PIN isn’t linked to your phone in any way. Making it the perfect clandestine messaging platform and thus ideal for some illicit flirting or arranging meet-ups for those so inclined.

Another unintended consequence is the little business it’s generated for dealers in Blackberries – or their opportunistic staff. The PIN is an eight number code and it’s therefore logical that a super-memorable PIN, such as 11111111 is going to be more useful that a random one like 74293661. As Blackerry ownership has taken off, useful PINs morphed into cool PINs and thus a highly lucrative premium market has developed, generating significant profits in the grey market.

So RIM are certainly to be congratulated for their long term vision behind the BiM. But I’m sure they could never have anticipated being helped so significantly by such an unexpected following wind.

However, it does raise an interesting issue about advertising and brand association. The generally accepted wisdom in the Brand Manager’s Basic Manual is that brands should avoid advertising in controversial media. These days, a good example of this might be media containing User Generated Content. UGC must be a BAD THING as the advertiser doesn’t know what it might contain and HAS NO CONTROL over the content. Thus, the advertising might appear in conjunction with NASTY STUFF like partial nudity, men wearing skimpy lederhosen or recipes for twee cup cakes.

The other side of the coin is that people who are viewing this perverse content don’t find it controversial or offensive, otherwise they wouldn’t be looking at it. Well, unless they’re trying to be offended, for reasons too strange to consider. So, if they implicitly like the content they’re consuming, why would they find any brand associating itself with that content inappropriate? Or worse, would they not buy the brand which has associated itself with material they like to imbibe?

OK, I realise that this somewhat disingenuous. If a brand associates itself with some kind of extreme political view, as an example, it can come across as endorsement and that can’t be a good thing. But overall, I think brands are far too precious about this issue.

As far as FCUK is concerned, this is a great idea which will earn them millions in free publicity, as well as demonstrating their grasp of the zeitgeist to their brand fans. And when the inevitable “Yes, it was an actual penis” articles appear in The Daily Mail, they’ll be laughing loudly at quite how clever they’ve been.

Mob4Hire is the inspiration of Paul Poutanen, who set out to solve a perennial mobile industry problem of testing not only on the huge variety of 26,000 handsets, but also over the local idiosyncrasies of over 350+ networks in 130+ different countries. Just because you’ve tested your JME* app on one handset in the US, don’t assume that it’s going to work on exactly the same handset in the UK.

Mob4Hire’s solution to the problem is crowd-sourcing and today they have a network of 40,000 highly mobile literate users throughout the world to do not only do usability and functionality testing for developers’ projects, but they do so at up to 90% of the cost of traditional testing. A very strong proposition and one which meets the main criteria for any new start-up – solving a need or real pain in the sector.

Today, Mob4Hire has a bunch of other testing type services. But the one that really caught my eye was for Apps. As you probably know, most Apps Stores help discovery via implementing some kind of user ranking system. In Apple’s case, it ranges from a measly one star, up to the coveted 5 stars. Mob4Hire tell me that 83% of people only download 4 and 5 star Apps, which means that a 1 star rating kills any chance of success. To put it even more bluntly, if you launch an App which gets a 1 star rating, you’ve just completely wasted your time, energy and whatever money you spent getting it out there.

But how do you know if users will rank your App high or low? That’s where Mob4Hire come in – by pre-testing your App before it’s launched. Not only will you learn what your ranking will probably be with that version, but you’ll find out why. This allows you to improve and tweak your App, re-test and launch when you’re confident that you’ve cracked it.

This is a really valuable service for everyone from Indie developers to brands looking to launch an App – it removes the risk and uncertainty from the process and avoids the curse of the one-star. It’s hard to see why developers wouldn’t use this.

Mob4Hire have won a bunch of awards in their short life to date and it’s certainly a company to watch.

* JME is not a typo. Sun renamed J2ME back in 2005. Clearly not one of the world’s best branding campaigns, huh?

One of my concerns is how the information that’s posted in the virtual world remains usable, or as I wrote at the time:

Is Augmented Reality going to be so cluttered, ugly and intrusive that people eventually abandon using it altogether?

Bear that in mind when you watch this short video and you’ll see what I mean. Who would want to live in a world like this?

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

In my post, I called for some of the industry players to get together to agree guidelines to prevent this kind of scenario ever emerging. I still think that this is vital if the AR vision is to become a viable proposition. Otherwise what’s happening today is sowing the seeds for the sector’s future destruction.

[Video spotted on the excellent Daily Irrelevant]

I make no apologies that some of these are a little bit obvious because at least 50% of the finalists throw away their chances of winning by failing to observe at least one of these rules.

1. Sorry to be a little harsh and language-ist here, but the presentations are in English. If English is not your mother tongue, or if you aren’t very good at it, you’re going to be at a disadvantage. Every year, there’s more than one company who finishes their 3 minutes and no one has a clue about what they do. Naturally, this means that they don’t have a chance at winning awards or attracting any attention from the bloggers and journalists who attend.

So, the first rule is: Choose someone to present who can speak the best English. If you are the CEO and can’t speak English well and the most junior person in the company happens to be fluent, put your pride aside and get the Junior to do it. It’s much better that everyone understand the presentation than recognises you as the big cheese – there’ll be plenty of time for that later.

I feel a little bad about writing this part, especially as my language ability is so rubbish. But it really is important.

2. Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse

This again sounds obvious. But loads of companies run out of time and quite obviously have missed out some of what they really wanted to say. 3 minutes is not the standard length of your company presentation. You will need to adapt and it won’t work on the fly.

Did I say that it’s important to rehearse, especially the timing? This includes rehearsing in front of colleagues and getting honest feedback. Then try and giving it to people without expert knowledge and get them to explain back to you what you do.

3. Stand out. You’ll need to give this a lot of thought, before you start rehearsing. But you’ll be competing with the best startups in the world and from a judging point of view, it can be a little overwhelming. If you’re on towards the end, you have to really make sure you’re memorable.

One of the best examples from last year was Unkasoft. After a general introduction to the product (you can skip the first 1 min 40 secs if you’re in a real hurry), the speaker suddenly bought the product to life by acting out the special features and which included a quite spectacular…..well take a look.

Difficult to forget, right? All the judges need to do was to use a shorthand “ah, he was guy with the great presentation” and he’s memorable.

4. Humour helps, if you can pull it off. But it’s not a fundamental requirement and culturally, it doesn’t always work.

The above are hard and fast rules – ignore them at your peril. But what follows are my opinions, based on the 100 or so pitches I’ve seen over the years at the MPAs and other events.

5. The best presentations start with a clear statement of what problem the company is solving, followed by an explanation of what the company does. If you can tell this as a human sized personal story, this might work even better. Babajob last year did this really well, when the presenter told the story of two nannies (with photos of them) in India. Although similar in age, qualifications and experience, one earned $20 a month and one earned $120. You can read more here if you like, but the point is that by telling a story about a couple of individuals, it made the presentation memorable and understandable.

6. Don’t focus on the tech. This might sound odd in an environment dedicated to technology, but the story you’re trying to communicate is what it does and how it makes the world a better place, not how it works and a full list of all the features you’ve worked so hard to code. If you’re thinking of including a complicated diagram of how the tech is architected, you’re probably on the wrong track.

7. I find images help to reinforce messages, especially in a multi-cultural audience. Equally, slides with too much text detract from your story. There’s loads of comparisons of Steve Jobs Vs Bill Gates style of presenting around, but one of my favourites is over at Presentation Zen. Clearly, poor use of PowerPoint hasn’t exactly held Bill back, but for lesser mortals like us, the Jobs Method is going to be more effective most of the time.

Finally, please remember, a great idea poorly presented won’t stand a chance. A good idea well presented might very well win something.

If you’d like to add your ideas to these, please feel free. If you are entering the MPA’s – Good Luck!

Representative Democracies work by voters electing someone to supposedly represent their interests in the legislature. The elected official applies their own and probably more often, their political parties’ judgment on how to vote. And the only thing the electorate can do if they don’t like the way their representative votes is to kick them out when it comes to re-election.

But with today’s technology, we don’t have to put up with this any more. It’s possible to direct an elected official on how to vote on a daily or weekly basis. The role of the politician would change to one of explaining in simple terms what the more complicated issues of the day were and the citizens would make their opinion clear. Any politician standing in any election today could already pledge to vote how they were instructed – or at least take it into account, which would be a great and brave first step.

Technology is already changing politics. Examples range from the huge grassroots fund raising initiative we saw in the US last year, to national elections conducted online (in Estonia in 2005 and 2007) to iPhone Apps (thanks, Lisa) that allow you see who your MP is and educate the user. And 226 Parliamentary candidates in the UK are using Twitter to communicate with the electorate. What’s the betting most are using to to broadcast, rather than as a feedback loop though?

The problem with Direct Democracy is that the people who could make it happen, the MPs and political parties have the most to lose from this disruption. The role of the MP would suddenly be stripped of most decision making – actually, would we need these intermediaries at all any more? The parties would also face great change. Sure, they could compose a manifesto, but each piece of legislation would only be implemented at the behest of the people. Gone would be the days when a party could do pretty much what they wanted, with a suitable majority.

The unknown factor, of course, would be how this would influence the policy of a country generally. Would we fight quite so many wars, for example, where the people whose children would die would be in change of the decision? Would counties like the UK re-introduce capital punishment , as surveys seem to suggest? Would the man on the street want a control on immigration, in an anonymous voting structure?

I think we’ll have to keep guessing on these other and other issues, at least for the time being. But I am convinced that Direct Democracy will happen. The question is, when?

There were two pieces of news this week that demonstrated the other side of this coin, namely that people who download free stuff also spend money on music and that it’s possible to make money out of free anyway.

Exhibit 1 is provided by the music industry themselves in the form of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) and report they published online. As Torrent Freak points out

Compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…

* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online.
* 33% more likely to buy music albums online.
* 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services.
* 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.

The implication of this for me, is to confirm empirically what I’ve observed anecdotally, that file sharing is very often used to preview music, the best of which they go on to purchase. Obviously, there are many citizens who don’t conform to that model, but I wonder how much music they’d actually buy if they couldn’t get it free anyway?

Meanwhile, Moco News reports that Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge enjoyed 2.5 downloads of their App in the first two months, but that 1 million were pirate downloads. However, Tapulous knows who these users are and treats them slightly differently to ordinary customers by showing them more ads. This results in many converting to their best customers for virtual goods they sell in the game and for paid music downloads.

So there you have. File sharers pay for music. And you can make money from people who start off by thinking they won’t pay you. Who would have thought it?

This isn’t a new idea – I was thinking and writing about it back in 2005 when I wrote A Manifesto for Taking Wikipedia into the Physical World and I don’t claim to be the only one 5 years ahead of the ability of the technology at the time. Back in 2005, I also presented the idea at Wikimania, where the audience included Jimmy Wales himself – you can read a rough transcript of that here too if you like.

My concern (as you’ll see from those posts) is how this information is curated that is being eagerly posted all over the place as I write this today. My original thinking would be to have an organisation in place like Wikipedia, who would be able to police it for accuracy – whether deliberate or intentional. If you think about it, the potential for abuse is huge – just imagine a restaurateur making up their own reviews. And potentially, it’s infinitely more complex than Wikipedia as it needs a central repository for the information, which is then edited for accuracy and authenticity, ideally by someone with local knowledge too, before being allowed to be replicated locally.

Augmented Reality has many exciting potential uses, but the annotations are only going to work if the information is credible and the user can rely on it. Otherwise, a few dodgy meals on the basis of forged reviews, or some misinformation about the historicity of the building or district will undermine the user’s trust. And once that’s gone, it won’t return.

This type of messaging is sometimes called Digital or Virtual Graffiti and this highlights another of my concerns about this type of user generated content. Is Augmented Reality going to be so cluttered, ugly and intrusive that people eventually abandon using it altogether?

Of course, this content doesn’t have to be user generated. It could be centrally controlled and generated with partners by the company developing the AR. But then, that has real scale issues if the ambition is to populate a country, let alone the Globe.

Please don’t understand me – I’m a huge fan of the concept of AR and you have to only read my 5 year old posts to appreciate that. But I’m raising some very valid issues for the nascent industry that need to be thought about seriously once we stop getting hyped by the hype.

The best way that the AR industry can start tackling these issues is form some kind of Association or Committee to agree some standards and best practices. It won’t be easy – these things never are, especially when you’re writing the rule book as you go. But it does need to be done if the AR industry is to thrive for its users and equally importantly be self-regulating.

10 years ago I attended the very first meeting of what became the Mobile Marketing Association in the UK (and perhaps the first such meeting in the world). Then the mobile marketing industry was at about the same stage at AR, maybe even lower profile in many ways. It was the right time to start thinking about the “boring but important” issues then, just as it’s the right time to be thinking along those likes for the AR industry today. Because if these things aren’t thought through, the sector will never take off.

I really love my Kindle. I especially love the ability to hear about a book and be reading it within minutes. I am a voracious reader and it’s just wonderful.

But, it does illustrate very well the difference between “search” and “discovery”. If you know what book you want, it’s easy to find it on your Kindle (or PC). But if you just want to do the equivalent of wandering into a bookshop one wintery Sunday afternoon and browsing randomly through the bookshelves, digital still can’t match the analogue experience. Sure, we have Recommendation engines and such like, but they are still pretty basic and seem to be lagging behind most other technologies. I won’t go into an exhaustive list here, but I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve found a favourite author’s new book by visiting a bookstore or reading a review in analogue media. And yet, I’ve already told Amazon that I love that author, so why haven’t they told me about the new book?

At the same time, some research yesterday highlighted the ongoing trend of people using their mobiles in retail stores to check product reviews (52%) and more worryingly, if you are a retailer, to cross quote pricing – 36% at the moment. Note that this was a survey of Smartphone users, so as more and more of us use these powerful devices, this is going to be an increasingly noticeable trend.

If you are a retailer, you will already be losing market share to the digital world – look what’s happened to the analogue music store in both the US and UK (and I think that this would have happened without “piracy”). But this ability to cross-check pricing, which empowers the consumer to decide if they want to delay gratification for a better price, or if they’re prepared to pay a premium price to have it now, is going to accelerate the trend.

At the moment, online stores like Amazon benefit from a low cost distribution model, with no retail stores. However, there is an argument that we’ll increasingly hear that online retailers are actually parasitically benefiting from their physical competitors by inadvertently being free showrooms for Amazon et al, where consumers go to discover and browse, only to actually buy online or over-the-air.

In the short term, I don’t doubt that we’ll see all kinds of shenanigans associated with industries experiencing great change. Sooner or later a book store or other retailer will ban people using their mobiles in-store and much good it’ll do them as it isn’t trying to solve the problem, but treat a symptom. We saw a lot of this kind of behaviour from record companies in the last decade or so.

Longer term, I believe that online retailers will have to grab the bull by the horns and recognise that they need to help physical stores stay in business. This isn’t a philanthropic motivation at all. If physical stores disappear, there”s a very real danger that the market as a whole will shrink, certainly for a product such as books. If we can’t find something we really want to read, we’ll find another way to occupy our time. And discovery remains an important stimulus of sales.

So, do you think we’ll see Amazon bookstores on our High Streets and in our shopping malls? I do. I also think we’ll see some intriguing affiliate programmes aimed at supporting and making money for the independent book store in the not so distant future.

In some ways, it’ll be the giant bookstore chains that will no longer be able to compete and we may see a renaissance of local bookstores which, on balance, would probably be a good thing.

The book industry is changing increasingly in a fast and furious way and the players in the market need to change accordingly. And we know what the alternative to change is, don’t we?