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And another follow up post on the University of Oxford's Future Technology Conference: During on of the many "socializing breaks" I met Eric Seuret of 3SMobile and he told me about the crop insurance via SMS application for farmers in Kenya he has developed for Syngenta, a large global agriculture company. The concept is so elegant, simple and has the potential to improve the lives of many people, so I asked Eric to send me some more details about how the service works. Here are the details:

The weather insurance solution via SMS helps protect small holder farmers against the risk of drought.  When a farmer purchases certain Syngenta seeds and crop protection products he obtains special insurance stickers.  When he has collected a certain number of stickers he gets an ID number which entitles him to 1 acre of free weather insurance for that season. To obtain the insurance he does not need to fill out any forms or contracts.  All he needs need to do is SMS a unique insurance code ID to a local number. The system then verifies that the insurance code is valid and confirms the farmer's insurance status.  If the farmer has a larger plot of land he can obtain multiple cards and insurance policies.

Throughout the course of the year the farmer is kept informed of major weather issues that are related to the policy via SMS.  At the end of the season the historical weather data is used to determine which farmers are entitled to a payout based on their region.  In the case of a payout the farmer is notified via SMS and they can go to the stockist to obtain the payout.

It is the first time that insurance has been made available to small holder farmers in Kenya with 1 acre or less of land.  This has only been possible through the use of mobile technologies were the solution finally became cost effective.  Mobile phones were used to simplify the administration, reduce costs, enable immediate registrations, and to help form a direct link to the end customer. In many cases the mobile phone represent the only way to reach the farmers without physically visiting the remote villages.  The innovative solution is currently running as a pilot project and is so far proving to be very successful.

The insurance concept and solution was designed by Rose Goslinga and Fritz Brugger for the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Development and developed by Eric Seuret.

If you've been waiting after my report on the ForumOxford Future Technologies Conference 2009 for the presentations of the other speakers, they are now online and can be found here. A little bit hidden but definitely worth a look is Jonathan Marks' video summary of the event. Not much more to say, so head over and enjoy!

Over the weekend, I wanted to take a closer look at the 3GPP Earthquake and Tsunami Warning System (ETWS) for GSM, UTMS and LTE. I was expecting to find proper stage 1, 2 and 3 documents in place by now so implementations could follow soon. It turns that of the three documents, only stage 1 (3GPP TS 22.168) has made it so far into Release 8. However, it seems that the specification might have been withdrawn at SP-43 in Biarritz in March 2009. 

The same applies for the stage 2 documentation 3GPP TS 23.168, it's current state is "withdrawn". There is a pointer to Technical Report (not a specification!) TR 23.828 which gives an overview of the different options analyzed and the proposal at the end to go for solution 5. Solution 5 would be to send a first warning to the mobiles via a special paging message with further details right afterwards in a cell broadcast message. For GSM mobiles already engaged in a voice call, the BTS would create a special SMS and sent it over the slow associated signaling channel while the call is in progress. In UMTS, paging messages can also be received during a call. What's not mentioned is how mobiles currently having a GPRS TBF established would receive the notification as there is no associated circuit switched signaling channel and pagings would not be received over the paging channel. But for the moment, that is beside the pont, since both stage 1 and stage 2 of the specification was withdrawn.

However, there is a link to 3GPP TS 22.268, a stage 1 specification for a much more generalized public warning system (PWS). No stage 2 specification exists so far, so this one is also at the beginning. It's an interesting document as it shows how much time there is to warn the public about an earthquake or a tsunami. Very challenging!

I am a bit puzzled!? Looks like ETWS was already quite well on it's way but now seems to be suddenly stopped? Did it fall short of the requirements? If you know more, please leave a comment below.

O.k., I'll play along with Nokia marketing for the N97 today for three reasons:

• I can't wait for the N97 to be launched so I can finally get one after months and months of waiting.
• I hope they made good use of the time and have a usable firmware version by now.
• I like the N97 "making of" video embedded below. O.k., it's marketing, but well done and it reflects my passion for mobile communication.

Nuff said, here's the video, switch to HD, full screen and enjoy!

Over at TelcomTV, a video series has been started on the impact of the Information and Telecommunication Industry on CO2 emissions, energy consumption and how to reduce the impact as we go forward. One episode is published per week together with lots of background information. A very interesting project sponsored by Ericsson and Juniper and I'll be surely watching it over the coming weeks. There's also an RSS feed on the page so you don't have to remember going back to the page once a week for the latest update.

When do you know that a technology has not only reached the main stream but that virtually everyone uses it? I think that stage is reached when not only kids are "doing it" but the 60+ generation as well.

Only a couple of years ago my mother was saying "yes, I have a mobile phone but I don't like it and it's only lying around at home and dust is settling on it". Now in 2009, she's sending me SMS messages on a regular basis and even admits that it is fun. (!?)

Why this change of heart I asked her? "Well", she said, "all my friends send me text messages these days, so I do it too now and it's great fun". Incredible, generation 60+ is using SMS now and they like it. And all of that despite the horrible user interface of a mobile phone, especially for people who keep insisting that the TV remote control is too complicated. I am amazed!

As promised in the previous post on last week's ForumOxford Future Technologies Conference, here's my presentation I gave on the evolution of mobile networks and how operators can benefit from that when designing new services and applications. The slides pretty much speak from themselves so I won't go into the details in this post. If you have some thoughts, comments and questions on the topic, just leave a comment below, I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail with you.

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!