April 2006 – Page 2 – WirelessMoves

Mobile Monday Paris April – Pictures and Report

My first Mobile Monday in Paris. I was very positively surprised to see so many people there and had many good discussions. As you can see in the pictures the number of people has easily surpassed 200. Here are some details of the event as it happend.

Presentations: (here’s a link to most presentations)

The first presentation was by Vincent Veran of Axalto, one of the leading SIM card manufacturers. Their latest ideas they are working on are large memory SIM cards for preloaded content and storage of content such as eMail, a SIM card based web server for applications such as easy access to the operator portal and contact less applications embedded in the SIM. For the later, applications such as contact less payment in the metro (similar to the Felica service in Japan) come to mind.

The second presentation was given by Alex Kummerman of Clicmobile and he gave an overview of a current proof of concept application his company is trialing in Geneva at the moment which deals with finding out if some of your friends are near you while being at a certain location.

Mobile Gaming was the theme of the third presentation of Nicolas Caris of Acute about Urban Rivals. urban-rivals.com is an online game which seems to be an adaptation of a game initially launched back in 2001 in Japan (my interpretation as in 2001, iMode was only available in Japan). How I would have liked to have that in my pocket back then in school 🙂

Finally, the fourth presentation was given by Valérie Beaudouin of France Telecom about perceived and real usage of mobile and mobile services.

Discussions: Glad to have met Stuart Mudie at the MoMo to discuss many on and of topic things. Other people I have spoken to include someone who promotes tracedog.fr, a cool utility for dog owners how get tired of searching their dog. I really like the application, check out their web site!

Operator and supplier attendance: Thanks for hanging out the list of attendees and separating the participants in operators, suppliers, mobile media, etc. Interesting to see many people in the the operators category, lots of people from Bouygues and Orange, only few from SFR though. To my surprise only few people from suppliers at the meeting. Some from Ericsson and only one or two from Nortel and Alcatel. I find that somewhat strange.

Summary: All in all a great evening, a big thank you to the organizers and the speakers of the evening. Looking forward to the next MoMo Paris on the 5th of June.

WLAN is catching on in Paris

When I moved into a new appartment in Paris last summer there were ‘only’ two WLAN networks in the air in the range of my PC except of my own. Today, there are already six (see picture). All of them but one are protected and some even use WPA. Not too bad for a country in which three years ago Minitel was considered state of the art 🙂 The main reason for this explosive growth is probably the fact that a fast DSL connection has become affordable for most people. 20 euros per month for a 20 MBit/s ADSL 2+ connection with an unlimited data volume or 30 euros a month for a subscription that includes a phone flat rate for fixed line calls and TV (both over IP). I wished wireless Internet access via UMTS was already available at a similar price.

.Mobi is coming – That’s good and bad

So .mobi, the top level domain for mobile friendly web sites finally took the last hurdle and we should see the first sites soon. As everything in life there are good and bad sides. In this particular case I see extremely good sides but also extremely bad sides of the idea.

The good side: There is a large community of proponents including mobile operators and device manufacturers. That ensures that it won’t take long and we will see a large number of mobilized sites which can then be advertised very easily (e.g. amazon.mobi, nokia.mobi, ebay.mobi, etc.). That’s great when you see it on a poster somewhere while out in the street or in an advertisement in a magazine. It also seems like there is a code of conduct for creating web pages for the .mobi domain which can even be enforced. Good thing! BTW: I wonder how iMode proponents feel about .mobi and those rules!?

The bad side: It’s gonna separate the PC Internet from the mobile Internet. That’s bad as links in the future might even be more intended at either only PC or mobile users. Take the following case: I like reading blogs with my blog reader on my mobile device More often then not, interesting blogs contain links to other sources. I don’t think these links will direct me to .mobi sites in the future… So Google’s mobilizer for PC world sites is necessary more than ever. Maybe it can be made smarter to detect that there is a .mobi equivalent to the PC world link. But that requires the same URL structure for the .com and the .mobi presence of a site.

In the end, you can’t have them all…