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Yesterday I returned home from the Future Technologies Conference at the University of Oxford and after a good night's sleep and some contemplation I thought I'd write down some impressions as I very much enjoyed the event and received lots of good feedback on my own presentation. More about that part in a separate follow up post.

The end of April is a perfect time to come over to England and spend some time in London and Oxford prior to the conference as spring has already arrived and everything is green and new. In addition to there are two reasons for going to this particular conference. The first one is of course the presentations and speakers of which most are not pushing the company line for a specific purpose but openly talk about a specific topic and the experiences they have gained, for their business and also personally.

The second reason to attend is the audience. Being a small conference on purpose, the people attending mostly do so for their private benefit and the resulting conversations I had with many have been very insightful to me. It was good to talk to people doing so many different things and who I'd normally not meet at all. Also interesting to hear that many people attended the event on their own without being sponsored by the companies they work for. That's great, they are the real enthusiasts and innovators!

So here are some examples of what I particularly enjoyed during the presentations and what I will follow-up on in the weeks to come:

• Tomi Ahonen pointed out that some of his readers have asked him to not only talk the talk but also to walk it. So he decided to publish a book online (his Pearls book volume 1 and 2) instead of in hard cover and he seems to be very statisfied with the results. He said that he earned more with his online books in the last two months than what he got in royalties last year from his books published by John Wiley and sons. Yep, earning a living on book sales in our industry is very difficult, to put it mildley so its good to see that a different approach is paying off.

• William Webb said that the biggest improvement for wireless networks in the future is better wireline, referring to the current backhaul bandwidth crunch. I couldn't agree more and he's put the issue in a sentence with an interesting twist.

• Graham Trickey of the GSM Association (the GSMA) talked about driving inovation with open network API called OpenAPI. I wasn't aware of that initiative yet and will have to find out more.

• Nick Allot: Having different mobile phone operating systems is both good and bad. On the one hand it's driving competition and innovation but on the other hand it also makes it quite difficult for developers to do cross platform development. This is where the Open Mobile Terminal Platform initiative comes in and Nick talked about the BONDI project which aims at standardizing how functionalities most phones have can be access in a standardized manner.

• Phil Northam of Samsung has given us a taste of how Orwell's 1984 looks like translated into the mobile ecosystem. With his 'War is Peace' presentation he made the good point that while the different players in the game are sometimes not very friendly to each other, all the fights going on are not really aiming at total destruction of the other. In fact it would be rather pointless since everyone gains from the other remaining a strong power. If you've read 1984, you'll get his point. If not, I strongly suggest to read the book and to return to Phil's presentation afterwards.

• Last year, Simon Cavill of Mi-Pay made me aware of for the first time of what's going on with mobile banking and mobile money transfers in Africa. This year, Simon gave an update and had lots of now and insightful stories to tell about the topic. I agree with him that what is learnt on mobile money transfers in Africa has a good chance to coming back to other parts of the world. Good to see some innovation flowing in the reverse direction!

• Great presentation from Flirtomatic's Mark Curtis on the life in a startup company, how things never quite work out how you expect them and good examples of how you have to keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve.

• Next was Ed Candy from network operator 3 in the UK with his thoughts on the evolution on networks and services. He spoke very positively on the take-up of data services in the UK and praised 3's initiative to abolish roaming charges between the 3 networks worldwide. His presentation also contained a number of interesting slides with graphs that had values on both the x- and y-scales that are usually left out in such presentations. I hope his slides will be made available on the conference web site to take a closer look. He also mentioned mobile marketing with user consent and Turkcell as a positive example. Have to research that in a bit more detail, too.

• In the afternoon we came to a presentations of Tony Fish, Helen Keegan and Agustin Calvo on mobile marketing issues. Some good bits and pieces I took away from those presentations are thoughts on thinly disguised contempt, that you can't hide behind a PR wall anymore (so true!) and Agustin's reflections and actions on VRM (Vendor Relationship Management), that's CRM put upside down. Have you head about the new unit of a Yoad yet, which is 3% of your income? Me neither. Very interesting concept, have to find out more!

• And finally, the presentations concluded with a great presentation by Christine Maxwell on how art and technology should come together to inspire people. Have a look here for further info on the Leonardo art+technology project.

A big thanks to Ajit Jaokar, Tomi Ahonen and Peter Holland for organizing it, it was a great day! Looking forward to coming back in 2010!

While in London recently, I had my network analyzer with me to see who of the UMTS network operators uses how many 3G carriers (frequencies) in London.

Back in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I noticed that the nework operators spared no expense on the exhibiton ground and had fine grained coverage installed in the different halls and used most of the carriers available in the UMTS band. In Barcelona itself, however, only a single carrier was used by each.

Back to London: Here, the situation is similar: Despite the recent uptake of 3G dongles, all but one operator use only a single 5 MHz carrier so far. The exception is Vodafone, who’s consistently using 2 carriers throughout London, even in the outskirts. In some areas, they might even use three, as a third carrier is configured but I didn’t pick up a signal on that one anywhere.

Interesting facts and good news, there is still enough space on the 3G band for further capacity enhancements when they become neccessary.

Kudos to Vodafone for their 3G network capacity in London, it’s unmatched at the moment!

A quick note from the Tech Conference in Oxford today: You can follow it on Twitter, search for the #forumoxford tag. Enjoy!

On my way to the future technology conference in Oxford I’ve made a detour to London for some sightseeing. Walking down Regent street, I noticed that the Apple store and the Nokia store are just accross the street from each other so I visited both to get a feeling for how each markets their prodcuts.

While Nokia obviously only markets their mobile phones, Apple’s focus is mostly on their computers and peripherals. The iPhone is everywhere in the shop but most people seem to be more interested in the computers and the demos which are either one on one or for groups. Great idea, train the multipliers and they will spread the word.

The Apple store is several times bigger than the Nokia store and everything is held in white or very light wood color. Together with huge windows and the big glass stairs between the two shop stores it creates a very bright and daylight like experience.

The Nokia store on the other hand almost feels like a dungeon. Everything is held in black, lighting is scarce and there are no windows. That is of course good to bring out the best of the displays of the phones. However, I still felt much more comfortable in the bright Apple store.

Nokia is pushing the Music experience and the 5800 touch phone quite heavily, not only in the store but also advertises it very heavily throughout the city. No wonder sales a huge. Nseries and it’s multimedia capabilities on the other hand don’t seem to be emphasized at the moment.

Thinking about it, group courses on the multimedia capabilites of current Nokia smartphones would be a great thing for the store. After all I don’t think they are used yet by most Nseries owners.

If I ran the Nokia stores, I would also stock some pre-paid SIM cards with affordable Internet access already activated on them that are available in the UK. That way you can still sell the devices separately but have SIM cards ready for those people who want to buy the device and use the services right away. I wonder if mobile operators would be interested in that?

Fresh out of the Nokia BetaLabs comes Nokia Easy Meet, a web browser based mobile collaboration prototype. Great, I use online collaboration with conference calls and slide sharing a lot in my daily work but my solution (Centra) is purely PC based and does not allow sharing content with mobile devices. So I checked out Nokia's prototype application for the purpose.

The first good thing: No software installation is required on the PC or the mobile phone, everything works via a PC or mobile browser that supports JavaScript such as the S60 web browser on my N95. The list of collaboration utilities running directly in the browser looks quite impressive:

• File Sharing, supporting Power Point, JPEG and PNG
• Chat
• Meeting Minutes
• Whiteboard
• Gesturing
• File Downloads
• Participant Awareness
• Remote Content Access (OVI Files).
• One click to join a conference, including voice conference

In practice, it works as follows: As a collaboration conference initiator you need to register with the service, either from the PC or the mobile phone. In fact, everything can be done on both the mobile and PC, although it's a bit more comfortable to use the PC for getting started.

Once registered, setting up a meeting is simple. Enter time, date, participant e-mail address or phone numbers and upload pictures or power point presentations. Once done, participants get an e-mail or SMS with a link to join the meeting. Invited guests do not have to register and just have to type in their name so they can be seen in the status window of the conference. Once they have joined the conference, they can immediately see the shared content such as pictures, presentations and so on.

On the PC, the presentation section can be seen alongside the other windows for instant messaging between participants, a presence window to see who's currently online, a window showing the different pages / images available for sharing, etc.

When changing from one page / image to the next, it appears quite quickly on the screens of other participants, even on the mobile. Very nice push technology. Same for IM messages, distribution is quite quick. The whiteboard function allows to draw lines in the main presentation window, e.g. to highlight a part of the presentation and changes are also distributed within a few seconds.

As it is still a research protoype, the graphical design of the solution, especially on the PC, is still a bit rough, but that's just that, the technology itself works very nicely and use is straight forward and quite simple to master.

From a conceptual point of view, the biggest issue in my eyes is to make both PC users and mobile users happy with what they see in the main presentation window. For my test, I used a screenshot image with tiny fonts, which are not shown very well on both the PC and the mobile. While much bigger on the PC, the text could still not be read. So for collaboration it's probably best to use power point presentations with big text or pictures without too much tiny content. For the mobile device, a zoom function for the main screen might be something that could help, but I think that would push the processing power of current S60 phones a bit too hard. But as processors become faster, screen resolution increases and screen sizes become bigger, there's a good chance that we are moving closer to a sweet spot where the presentation can be shown in a good resolution in a PC browser and an acceptable quality on the mobile device supported by an intelligent zoom function.

The main function missing in the prototype is a voice conference bridge. However, I can very well envison that this functionality can be added in the future, too. In summary, I am very impressed with what can be done with JavaScript in a (mobile) browser today. A great prototype and we will hopefully see it become a cool product in the future!

Recently, Tomi Ahonen wrote a post over at Forum Oxford about an idea he had how to make use of mobile phones and SMS for engaging customers while the store is closed. I liked the idea very much so I thought I'd share it with you here and give you my thoughts on top. Here's the short version, for the details click on the link above:

Instead of just passively advertising through a shopping window, actively engage your customers with an interactive contest via the mobile phone. Tomi uses a jewelry and watch shop as an example. Here's how the contest would work: Advertise a specific watch, e.g. via an animation (several pictures, some text, etc.) on a computer screen. Tomi likes 007, so in his example it's the villain's watch of the latest Bond movie from Swatch, worth around 100 euros. Engage customers with a contest for the watch by asking them to guess the serial number on the back of the watch. The feedback channel is, of course,  SMS. Simple, convenient, and everybody these days has a phone in their pocket. The PC that runs the advertisement has a mobile phone connected to it so the SMS is received in near real time and feedback can be shown directly to the person who's decided to take part in the contest. Close to the finish date, you can engage customers who have responded by informing them via SMS that the contest is about to be closed and that they can check who's won on the (mobile) web page of the store, generating further interaction with the customer.

Personally, I think it's a great idea! Not only do you engage your customers, but at the same time you can find out how effective your window advertising is. In the thread to the original post, it's been pointed out that you probably can't make money with it with short code SMSes, the setup is just too expensive. But I think the point of the exercise is not to generate cash with the campaign directly but to engage with the customer and thus increase sales.

So I think the biggest obstacle is how to convince shop owners to invest in such an advertising scheme. After all, the (embedded) PC, the mobile and the software to track responses and do some data mining won't come for free and shop owners are usually not in the IT business. But I think that young and tech-savvy shop owners could very well grasp the idea and see an opportunity beyond advertisements in newspapers, etc. Some might even have enthusiastic geek friends that could put the pieces of the puzzle together for them.

Great idea, Tomi, let's see if somebody takes it up and works on a product!

This week, the Carnvial of the Mobilists has stopped over at Chetan Sharma's Always On Real-Time Access Blog. Chetan, a book author and analyst himself noticed that a lot of people contributing to the Carnival are also book authors and he put together the pictures of the people and their books at the top of the post. Interesting self-reaction when you see your own picture and book on a web page without prior announcement 🙂 Lots of great stuff on mobile there, so head over and enjoy!

In a previous post I've discussed my thoughts on how the announcement of Nokia to deeply integrate Skype into the N97 goes beyond the current 3rd party integration of VoIP, IM and presence. Mobile Network Operators of course would like to offer similar functionality and are thus not so happy about the competition. In addition, they are having a difficult time with it for the moment, as their competitive offer with the Rich Communication Suite (RCS), which is based on IMS, is still nowhere announced to actually make it into upcoming phone models.

When we look a bit into the future, however, I think network operators can make a compelling offer by combining a couple of elements which can't be matched easily by Internet based companies:

Embedding VoIP, IM and Presence in the Connected Home Network

In essence, the connected home network approach ties computers, TV, media storage, audio, etc. via Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable together and makes any content available on any other device. The crown is to also tie in the mobile phone / smartphone, which can then be used in cellular networks and via Wi-Fi or a Femtocell in the home network to offload traffic and to interact with the home network devices. Stack on that remote access to your data via cellular and you've got a truly connected home, a truly connected user and less dependency on data store in the cloud.

In this context, RCS makes a lot of sense and adds a lot of value. While roaming outside, RCS uses the cellular network for IM, presence, picture sharing, etc.. While at home, the Wi-Fi network takes over. The big benefit: Just one way (i.e. one phone number) under which you can be reached. The open point here is that I am not yet quite sure if the the mobile device can also to the IMS network via the users Wi-Fi home network or if a Femto is required for that. But at least with the Femto, that's something Internet based companies struggle with, there's always a 'media break' between the VoIP implementation and the default telephony stack in the mobile.

A big issue for RCS is how to create a critical mass so IM and presence. Here, I think it is necessary to have a gateway to other IM services such as Yahoo's or Microsoft's. An interesting approach, as it is not the Internet companies that go to operators but where operators go to Internet companies for the cooperation. It's been done before.

A lot of work ahead for operators. But I guess the embedded Skype client won't be that last word on the subject in its first incarnation, either.

This year at the Mobile World Congress, Nokia and Skype announced a cooperation that would bring Skype functionality to the Nokia N97. At the time I took notice of it but thought, well, I've already got instant messaging clients on my Nokia phone including presence and the partnership between Skype and network operator 3 has also brought Skype voice communication, or at least a special flavour of it, to mobile phones. So why the fuzz?

Well, I think it could be the deep integration of it all. According to the press release, Skype will not only be a third party program on the side but it will be integrated with other applications on the phone, especially the phonebook. According to the press release, Skype functionality such as presence and instant messaging will be embedded into the phonebook. Further I assume that since the press release mentions that Skype voice calls will be enabled over 3G and Wi-Fi, 'real' Skype Voice over IP calls (rather than the circuit switched approach used with '3') can be made directly from the phonebook as well.

It may sound trivial but I think such an integration would be very compelling to users. I and some other people I know have been using the built in SIP stack of (most) Nseries devices for some time now and very much value the deep integration into the overall functionality. SIP VoIP calls can be made from the phonebook or directly by typing in the phone number and selecting "Internet Call" instead of just pressing the green button. The phones can even be configured to always use SIP and only fall back to cellular when the selected network for SIP is not available. Very powerful as the SIP stack automatically activates itself once the phone detects the network(s) that have been configured for VoIP use (e.g. the Wi-Fi network at home). Hopefully, we will find the same deep integration of Skype with all its features. That would really distinguish it from current third party solutions which are always a bit on the side and require "specialized handling" that only few normobs (normal mobile users) would put up with. If all this happens, well, we'll see.

Also very important: Skype already has a critical mass, i.e. millions of users out there that already use it on a PC. An invaluable asset that is absolutely necessary to start such a service. Another things that speaks for Skype vs. other solutions (such as SIP) is the easy configuration: Only the username and password is required, plus maybe a selection of the networks over which you would like to use it. That's it. Compared to that, manually configuring the SIP stack is a black art.

Some Mobile operators have let it known that they are not very happy to see this happening. They argue that it will bite into their current business model and future opportunities. So, the first response was often that they would block it. But I think that would merely delay the process, if at all. I would be surprised if Apple, Google and others aren't already working on similar things. Also, I think some operators will make no attempt of blocking it, so people who would like to use the functionality would go there. But why block it? If people want to use it over the cellular network, they need a data subscription, which earns the operator money as well. So I am not convinced they wouldn't benefit from this as well.

Another approach for mobile operators could of course be to offer similar functionality. Not so simple, but not impossible, especially in combination with "connected home networking". More on that in a follow up post.

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted over at "mjelly mobile 2.0". As always, a great assortment of posts on mobility from all around the world. I agree with the host, Vero's post over at the Taptu blog on Gravity, the new S60 Twitter Client, is especially noteworthy. So without further ado, I recommend to head over and enjoy!