My new Blog is now live

Hi,

Just to let you know I've relaunched my blog with a new design, new content, and new awful pun so to keep up with my musings please redirect to www.ibegyourparton.com

Thanks

James

New survey on mobile operator developer communities

New survey on mobile operator developer communities . Let us know what you think http://bit.ly/Lw2gR

Changes to the O2 Litmus App Showdown

Last week, we launched the O2 Litmus App Showdown, with a prize of £10,000. Whilst we had a very positive response from the community, there was also some constructive feedback on how to make the competition better.

When we were planning the competition, we were keen to ensure we could involve as many O2 customers in the judging process as possible. This caused a problem for developers though, as they would have to give up 95 of their slots required to test apps – slots that as any iPhone app developer knows are extremely valuable.

We listened to the community for guidance on the optimum number of slots reserved for the developer and have subsequently had a chat about structuring things to make sure it works for the developer community.

These are the slight changes we're proposing:

· The panel of judges will be made up of 20 app-loving iPhone users
· Developers will now only need to keep 20 of their 100 slots free for the Showdown

We put this to the O2 Litmus community and received positive feedback on the forums. Hopefully this amendment to the rules means that there is now no reason for you not to enter the App Showdown.

That £10,000 is one step closer!

O2 App Showdown

It's been a while since I have had a chance to post here, although I'm doing better with the old Twitter updates!

It may have looked quiet from the outside for a few weeks, but believe me its been 100mph behind the scenes.

This morning the O2 App Showdown went live - a two month competition to find a great iPhone App for O2, with a £10,000 prize and great publicity for the winning developer. You can find out more here: www.o2litmus.co.uk/appshowdown

Along with the competition, I'm pleased to announce that O2 Litmus now supports the promotion of iPhone App's hosted within the iTunes App Store. This means developers can now promote their apps via O2 Litmus, helping address a common complaint amongst developers - "With the thousands of apps inside the App Store, just how do I get visibility?"

Today's announcement is just the first of few we have lined up, so stay tuned ;-)

New O2 Litmus Software Release Live, 11th June 09

The team has been busy beavering away behind the scenes to bring you the latest O2 Litmus release which went live today.

Firstly O2 Litmus is now connected into O2 UK’s shiny new infrastructure. This should be invisible to you, but it means that we are now super cool and future proofed! We can also start exposing more functionality from inside O2, enabling Developers to make better and more intelligent apps, meaning O2 Litmus members get more functional and personalised services.

If you have heard me speaking at a recent conference or have attended one of our developer days you will know this area is of particular interest.

This new release contains updates of our previous API’s, plus no less than four new API’s providing a rich set of functionality, allowing you to query everything from the users location, through to what type of device a customer is using, down to they have an all you can eat mobile data bolt on provisioned on their account.

Note we have updated the Developer & Member terms and conditions to take into account this new functionality - please review and ensure you understand them, here.

Finally have also updated the O2 Litmus FAQ’s, where you can find out more information on the new API set

I hope you enjoy these new features, and as every please tell us what you think, or would like to see next via the forums.

Have fun!

Plug for Being Digital 2009 including free ticket!

With only 4 days to go until Being-Digital '09 at The CBI Centre, Centre Point.
London. Who will be there?

• Mike Bracken from the Guardian will be announcing the Guardian's
  platform strategy building on their recently launched OpenPlatform product strategy
• Mike Nicholls who built and launched (yesterday) Bing.com (Microsofts
  new search product) will be on the Platforms panel talking about the future of search and platforms at Microsoft.
• Doug Richard (ex-dragon from Dragons Den) will be speaking with Julie
  Meyer (Ariadne Capital) & Charles Cohen (Probability) about how to grow a profitable digital business.
• Ed Parsons (Google) and Gary Gales (Yahoo) and others will be
  discussing location technologies and their future.
• Rory Sutherland (Vice President, Ogilvy One), Nicholas Wheeler
  (Managing Director, ITN On) and others will be speaking about the future of social media.

What is unique about Being-Digital is that there is no PowerPoint.

• The debate will be lead by chosen authorities in their fields who are all accomplished speakers
• They will be sharing personal insights into hottest digital topics
• You will be able to set the questions and guide the discussion via SMS and Twitter
• You'll discover innovative new start-ups
• You'll be able to present your business to active angel investors
• You'll be able to absorb critical opinion shaping your digital strategy

The guys provide a specific demo area where companies can raise their visibility with potential customers, partners and investors. They are expecting around 40 Demo Companies and 200+ digital executives, entrepreneurs & investors making for some excellent networking opportunities along with 2 Angels Den pitch events where startups will be pitching to active angel investors.

If you want to demo email Emma on team@mashupevent.com

UKTI is offering a free booth at Technology World '09 in COVENTRY http://www.technologyworld09.com/ To be in with a chance to win this you have to be a demo company at the event.

Find out more here
http://www.being-digital.com/demo/ There is an opportunity to win £5,000 of
virtual office service from eOffice. http://www.eoffice.net/


To register and pay the standard rate of £245+VAT or Entrepreneur rate of £125+VAT please go to www.being-digital.com/register/ However, there are some discounted tickets available from our Partners including SUN, Natwest, eOffice, UKTI and Angels Den. If you want to know more about these please email team@mashupevent.com

If you want to win the only FREE TICKET in the house you have to submit a 30 second video on "what does Being-Digital mean?" http://seesmic.com/mashupevent/

Being-Digital '09 has also partnered with B'tween http://www.btween.com/ who are running a complementary digital event in Liverpool on 11th and 12th June (the same week). There is an inclusive ticket for Being-Digital '09 and the coach up here along with the speakers.
http://www.mashupevent.com/event/btween-09-being-digital-09


Being-Digital '09 is brought to you in by mashup* event - sponsored by: Intel, SUN, NetBenefit, Doughty Hanson, Speechly, BCS, UKTI, WIN and in partnership with NatWest, Microsoft, G2i, DrinkTank, Smarta, Chinwag, Techfluff.tv, Winston&Strawn Bootlaw and The Next Women.

See you there on Tuesday!

Win the chance to go to the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit!

Win the chance to go to the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit!

We’re giving five developers the chance to go to the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit, which takes place on Wednesday 3rd June 2009 to Thursday 4th June 2009 at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge, London

I’ll be speaking on the Wednesday on ‘Mobile Operator 2.0’ and the changing the business model and strategy of operators. That’s followed by a roundtable and panel discussion on the development of operator strategies in relation to increasing mobile user engagement and new approaches to working. The two days brings together some fantastic speakers and panellists, so it should be a great event.

To be in with a chance of winning one of the five passes to Mobile Web 2.0 Summit, just complete the following steps:

1. Register on O2 Litmus at www.o2litmus.co.uk
2. Send an email to james@o2litmus.info with the subject line ‘Contest‘ and the following:

• Your O2 Litmus username
• A 140 character twitter-style sentence explaining why you should be one of the developers to go to the Mobile 2.0 Summit with O2 Litmus.

The competition ends at midnight on Thursday 28th May 2009. Winners will be announced on Friday 29th May 2009 on the O2 Litmus site, with the five winning developers being contacted by email after the competition closes with further details on how to get their passes.

Best of luck and don’t forget – our latest marketing campaign is due to go out to hundreds of thousands of O2 customers, so get uploading your applications to O2 Litmus now!

James
www.twitter.com/jamesparton

Countdown to O2 Litmus Marketing Campaign

I'd like to give you a heads up that O2 Litmus is about to launch its largest marketing campaign to date.

In a few days time we'll contact hundreds of thousands of O2 customers by email, inviting them to join O2 Litmus. We're offering incentives for sign up with 20 Sony Ericsson handsets and ten PlayStation 3s on offer as prizes. I wanted to give you a heads up so you can get the apps you'd like to test, premium test or sell uploaded in advance.

These customers have been carefully targeted based on the phone they own, their usage of mobile data services, and the marketing segment they represent, so we're confident they will be fans of what you are doing.

This campaign will help O2 Litmus to grow and provide momentum. I'm keen to get your feedback on how it goes, and any other marketing ideas you may have to boost O2 Litmus. I've opened up a new thread in the forums for you to comment and chat. (May customer campaign)

O2 Litmus Roadmap Developer Session

O2 Litmus Roadmap Developer Session
Originally uploaded by jamesparton

O2 Litmus held its first "Live Road Mapping" event on Wednesday this week where we had a good dialogue with some of our member Developers. A big thank you for Elayne and Graham for running to the shops to buy a VGA cable for the projector to avoid a disaster!

You can find the topics covered by visiting the Developer Day thread in the Roadmap section of the O2 Litmus forum. Please be sure to give us your views on the debate.

Next up, O2 has also just announced its X Prize competition. If you are a UK entrepreneur be sure to check it out here: http://www.o2.co.uk/xawards

Finally the next of our marketing campaigns to the O2 customer base begins shortly, so make sure you are uploading your applications to O2 Litmus in anticipation of a larger and fresh audience.

O2 Litmus Update

Hello All,

Lots to update you regarding O2 Litmus.

We have delivered a couple of new software releases in the past week, bringing some great new functionality to O2 Litmus. First was the introduction of "Premium Testing" powered by our partner Mob4Hire. You can read the press release from Mobile World Congress here.

Next up, in response to Developer demand, we have introduced support for web based services. So now a developer is not forced to offer a downloadable application when they publish a new project. Now the offer can simply be a URL based service consumed via the mobile phone or PC web browser. We hope this move opens up a rich vein of creativity and starts to move O2 Litmus into catering for PC as well as mobile users.

We have our "Live Road Mapping" session coming up next week which we are all excited about. The original allocation of tickets was quickly snapped up so we added a few more. Be sure to register asap. It will be a great opportunity to meet the team behind O2 Litmus, network with likeminded people, and most importantly tell us how you want O2 Litmus to develop over the coming months. You can get all the details here.

Before we know it the Summer conference season will be upon us and after the stir we have created since launch, O2 Litmus is in demand!!

Here is my current 2009 "fixture list", I hope to see you at one of these events:

Mobile Operator Smart Pipes & Applications, London, 19-20th May, 2009
Mobile Web 2.0 Summit, London, 3rd - 4th June, 2009
Being Digital 2009, London, 9th - 10th June, 2009
Mobile 2.0 Europe, Barcelona, 18th - 19th June, 2009
Mobile Entertainment Market (MeM), London, 23rd - 24th June, 2009

Until next time,

James

www.twitter.com/jamesparton

Drum Tracks

Been messing about recording off my Roland TD-12. mixing in an iPod feed so the drums overlay on top of the original songs. Here's a couple of tracks. Not perfect but you get the idea...

A View To A Kill, Duran Duran

Bad Dream, Keane

"Official" O2 Innovation Day Video

A little late, but here is the video created by the O2 team capturing the essence of the day:



Also thanks for all the interest in the O2 Litmus Roadmapping event. We sold out the initial 40 tickets, but have just added another 20, so get 'em while they are hot ;-)

O2 Litmus Live Road Mapping

Come join us for a few drinks, some food, some networking, and to hear about some ideas we have for O2 Litmus. More importantly you tell us what you want to see in it, hence the title - live road mapping!

For more info and sign up visit: http://o2litmus.eventbrite.com/

Look forward to seeing you there.

O2 Innovation Day

I was hoping to write this up sooner, but just a few thoughts on the recent O2 Innovation Day that was held at the rather nice Matter Club inside The O2 complex in London on the 16th March 2009.

This was the second year in a row that my team had organised the Innovation Day.

The idea behind the day is to get O2 people out of their day to day working environment. Bring in leading companies that are shaping the agenda of ours and adjacent industries, share knowledge, make connections and stimulate the creative juices.

We learnt a lot from last year's event, and judging from the feedback I have seen I think we successfully applied a lot of the learning's. We brutally chopped the Powerpoint, we focused on panel debate and interactivity, and most importantly we opened up.

This year saw a number of companies invited in to demo and network with O2's senior leadership team. O2 Litmus played its role, with two competition winners (Ribot and Fring) taking their place alongside more established O2 partners like Microsoft & Nokia. I hope this provided some interesting conversation and business development opportunities.

You can read the thoughts of Antony from Ribot here.

You can also watch a couple of Antony's video's:


O2 Innovation Day - morning hello part 1 from ribot on Vimeo.


O2 business strategy innovation from ribot on Vimeo.


James Parton introduces O2 Litmus from ribot on Vimeo.


James Parton on O2 Litmus part II from ribot on Vimeo.


James Parton on O2 Litmus part III from ribot on Vimeo.


O2 Innovation Day - Sesson 1, Mobile application and services from ribot on Vimeo.


O2 Innovation day - session 1, Mobile application and services part 2 from ribot on Vimeo.

Hopefully events like this reinforce that O2 Litmus is helping to drive cultural change inside an Operator like O2, and shows we are willing to air our dirty laundry, wrestling with key challenges in an open and collaborative way.

It also tangibly demonstrates we don't know all the answers, but by using vehicles like O2 Litmus we are genuinely looking to the market and our customers to help shape the future.

O2 Litmus Video Tour

Here is a world exclusive :-)

Before it even makes it onto http://www.o2litmus.co.uk/ itself, below you can finally watch the long awaited O2 Litmus Video Tour, let me know what you think...


O2 Litmus Video Tour from O2 Litmus on Vimeo.

#himum

“My mum told me she is now following me on twitter so she knows what I'm doing as i don't ever tell her, lol. Hi Mum if you are reading this” 8:51 AM Mar 11th from web

So I posted what I thought was a rather unremarkable tweet back on the 11th March.

I’m so busy at work, and spend my life talking to people about what I do, I always fail to devote as much time and effort in communicating with my parents as I should. It has become a bit of a running joke in the family. “How can you stand up and present to hundreds of people, yet when you speak to me you can’t manage more than a mumbled sentence”, you must know the kind of thing I’m talking about?

I do often feel like Chandler from Friends, where no one quite understands what he does for a living.

Anyway a few weeks ago I was literally stunned when my Mother tells me, “Oh I’m following you on twitter as it’s the only way I can see what you are up to” This from parents who are not exactly technology leaders, and only had Broadband installed in the last few months.

Quite how she had discovered Twitter, and then found me I’m not quite sure. I will have to quiz her this weekend. (Mothers Day and all that). May be we can tweet each other from across the table when we go out for a meal!

I was equally surprised yesterday at the O2 Innovation Day when @tonyfish said he has starting seeing people including “hi mum” in tweets after my original message. I’m not sure if I truly am the trend setter Tony positioned me as, but thanks Tony anyway! If this is all old hat with you Twitter Vets, then apologies, I am fairly new myself to the Twitsphere. (Is that a term??!)

Still, spurned into action by my cyber stalking Mum, I will be including #himum in all my whereabouts status updates from now on.

So I wonder how many of you find yourself in a similar position via your use of social media, and I guess examples like this reinforce Twitters move into the mainstream.

30 Top Albums

Lifted from my Facebook profile...

Don't try to be cool, tell the truth...Think of 30 albums (shrink it to 15 if you like) that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 30 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea? Good.

Dreamtime - The Cult
Construction Time Again - Depeche Mode
Songs From The Big Chair - Tears For Fears
The 12" Album - Howard Jones
Under A Blood Red Sky - U2
October - U2
The Doors - The Doors
First And Last And Always - Sisters Of Mercy
Talk About The Weather - Red Lorry Yellow Lorry
Never Another Sunset - The Rose Of Avalanche
Gods Own Medicine - The Mission
First Chapter - The Mission
Pornography - The Cure
The Real Thing - Faith No More
Attack Of The Grey Lantern - Mansun
Friends - The Bolshoi
Badmotorfinger - Soundgarden
Disraeli Gears - Cream
Dirt - Alice In Chains
Exit Planet Dust - Chemical Brothers
Twice As Nice - Fantazia
Diamonds Are Forever - Salvation
II - Orbital
Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz
Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
Screamadelica - Primal Scream
Ten - Pearl Jam
Tinderbox - Siouxsie
Through The Veil - Claytown Troupe
Vivid - Living Colour

Mobile Monday London, 9th March, Write Up

A quick wrap from last night Mobile Monday London Event, which posed the question “What have Mobile Operators done for us?”

As I was speaking and on the panel I didn’t have a chance to write many notes, but thankfully a few audience members did, and @ribot recorded the presentations for prosperity.


James Parton presents O2 Litmus at Momo London from ribot on Vimeo.


Terence Eden of Vodaone on Operators and Operands, a Love Story - MoMoLondon from ribot on Vimeo.

Check these out for reviews of the evening:

Pudding Relations
Expanding Horizons

You can view my extended 12” remix O2 Litmus presentation here

I felt the evening went well.

There is always a degree of frustration in the room when the Operators get up on stage, and I totally understand why. In the past we haven’t done enough to help the developer community, and it is understandable there is a healthy dose of cynicism when Operators claim they are listening and trying to change for the better.

You can read some of that sentiment here.

I certainly welcome the opportunity to have a more open dialogue between Operators and the Mobile Monday community, and I think we should have a follow up session including some of the other Mobile Operators, especially Orange who invest heavily in Orange Partner.

I think in the main the O2 Litmus message was well received, but you tell me ;-)

When I set out with the concept we deliberately spent a lot of time researching what was wrong with existing Operator developer communities, trying to get under the hood of the frustrations of trying to work with us.

The fact that I was getting similar questions, and may be a sense that the O2 Litmus story was too good to be true, reinforced to me that the insight we gained must have been on the money, because I genuinely believe O2 Litmus can be the breath of fresh air the community has been crying out for.

However O2 Litmus is not the silver bullet to all the problems the world has to offer. We need Developers to join to tell us how O2 Litmus should develop. We can’t hope to get it right without the community taking an ownership role. As I mentioned last night, our thoughts on the O2 Litmus roadmap and API evolution are all public domain in the forums, so please feel free to join and engage in the debate.

My key take out from last night was there is still much to do to reduce the fragmentation in the mobile industry. We as Operators need to do much more to collaborate more closely and reduce the complexity and pain of creating successful mobile applications, and successful businesses.

The green shoots of this new thinking are appearing in initiatives like the GSMA OneAPI project and I will be taking a proactive stance with my colleagues at the other Mobile Operators to put some energy in bringing us closer together. The days of wall gardens are gone, and I don’t intend to be competing with other Mobile Operators for Developers, O2 Litmus is not about that.

It was great to hear Betavine is now promoted from Vodafone Live, I think that is a big step forward, and you should check out their Widget competition where £20,000 is up for grabs.

So a positive evening I felt, and hopefully a platform to build an ongoing dialogue with the Mobile Monday Community.

What did you think of the event?

If you have any questions that didn’t get answered last night, feel free to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn or james@o2litmus.info

Photo's from MWC 2009

Presenting in the Business Models of Mobile 2.0





Chilling with our buddies from Mob4Hire...

O2 Litmus Deck for Mobile World Congress 2009

Here is the deck I used during MWC 2009.

O2 Litmus Mobile World Congress 2009

View more presentations from James Parton. (tags: o2 litmus)

MWC Day 4

Well we made it to the end!

I spent the whole day at the WIP Jam, speaking on an "un" panel, and managed to get the last word in (!). I then co-chaired the testing round table with Paul from Mob4Hire and generally hung out and had a number of interesting conversations.

You can check out the Twitter chatter from the event here #wipjam

Here is a photo of the wrap up at the end of the day:



The general theme of the panel was fragmentation, technology choices, distribution and of course how to make money.

In terms of summarising my contribution, I'll start with my closing comments / rant.

One of the panelists said Operators need to reduce their revenue shares on premium sms to give the developers a break.

The developer community has a clear message /requirement - show me how to make money. To achieve this all parties in the value chain / ecosystem (insert buzzword here) need to be incentivized to invest.

This is the only way we can turn this into a sustainable business.

The panel included handset manufacturers, VC's, Operators, and software sitting in front of a room full of developers. Everyone in the room needs money. How then does a race to the bottom, cutting value out of a nascent industry, help any of us?

Marketing is not about giving stuff away for free. If you make a product people value they will pay you money for it. It's worked for thousands of years, so do we assume mobile app's won't work like that? What's special about this space? Am I missing something?

It's all about setting expectation.

If you position something as worthless today, it's so much harder to go back and then justify imposing charges later on. I've heard stories this week of developers giving away app's they believe have a value purley to drive visibility in the growing mess that is the Apple app store. "I have to because I need to stay in the top 5 so people can find me"

That's a crazy model right, and how does that answer the question show me how to make money?

I made the point a couple of times today that the mass market does not know what apps are. It's a small community of developers and early adopters (mostly iPhone owners we are led to believe, may be GetJar would disagree, they seem to be doing ok!!) that are creating all the buzz at the moment.

If we discount all the value out of the market today then you have set expectation for mass market adoption when it comes, if it comes. Again, how does that help you make money?

In a side conversation I likened it to Henry Ford giving away Ford Model T's free of charge before anyone had a driving license. Sure there was a risk that no one would trade in their horse for a car, and some one had to build roads, but stick in there, be clear on the value proposition and if people understand and recognise the value they will change their behaviour and pay you at the same time.

Kind of irrelevant if operators share 100%, 70%, 50%, 30% of revenue, if the price point is zero.

This leads me to the second theme I tried to explain. How many developers research their ideas and trial their products with real end users / customers, or is the model throw something against the wall and see if it sticks?

There seemed to be no real preference in the room, with many trying both. Surely in the current climate developers can not afford to speculate on what customers may want when they could learning what customers do want. Back to Henry, if you get this right, then you can charge a premium because there is an inherent value in what you are doing.

As the guy said at the last Mobile Mobile in London, "all of this is great, but tell me how I make money from Widgets and don't say advertising"

MWC Day 3

Ok these are getting shorter each day!

Quick post to summarise today.

I kicked off with a joint presentation between O2 Litmus and Oracle at the Oracle cafe. Seemed to be well received and had some insightful questions afterwards. Thanks for the opportunity Ty.



I then had meetings with Microsoft Silverlight, a great conversation with @sbisson and Mary Branscombe. Then catch up with an old friend James Patmore, and went onto meetings with Informa and Jouni Forsman & Joy Yang from Gartner.

Then had meetings with Facebook and a trip over the the Israeli trade area which was hectic, but looks like there is a lot of buzz and innovation coming out of there. Whilst there I bumped into Luc Jacobs who I know from way back in his Nokia days.

Anyways enough about me, I'm pooped and want to sleep...

Interesting stuff from today:

MEF launches 'Smart Pipe Enablers Initiative'

Gordon Ramsay now on iPhone - man is there no where I can escape the man, talk about over exposed...

iPhone game developer earns $600k a month

MWC: Amdocs launches 'app store' platform

MWC: Newbay's 16 million new year messages

I've probably missed some interesting stuff, but I'm done!!

WIP Jam all day tomorrow....

MWC Day 2

Kinda cheating by posting this early, but I doubt I'll be in front of a screen again tonight.

A little head down today. Spent some time on the Telefonica stand and met a few people including @paulwebster. I took a quick picture including the glamorous Carmelo sporting his pride and joy the O2 Litmus Polo ;-)



Had a great meeting with my Telefonica colleagues from Open Movilforum and I think we are going to see some kick ass developments by combining the best of both approaches to better serve the developer community.

I did an on camera piece with BBC Click we will see if I make the edit, I hear they are brutal on cutting down the material broadcast!

I then headed over to the Business of Mobile 2.0 Conference to speak and sit on a panel including Google, Yahoo, Goojet, Fortumo & Qualcom.

I stuck around to listen to the next session and glad I did as @tonyfish was great and thought provoking, making some great points about where the real value in the future sits.



Most of the big press releases came out yesterday but this caught my eye:

Qualcomm and Nokia kiss and hold handsets:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32667/MWC-Qualcomm-and-Nokia-kiss-and-hold-handsets

Yahoo Mobile Also Wants to Claim The “My Phone” Moniker.

Tech Layoffs Surge to 300,000

Startup news roundup

MWC Day 1

Notable news / announcements today:

Nokia to launch Ovi App Store:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32620/MWC-Nokia-unveils-Ovi-Store-app-store

O2 Litmus announces partnership with Mob4Hire:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32621/O2-customers-to-trial-Litmus-app-store

Nokia & Adobe offer $10m Flash Developer Fund:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32634/Adobe-and-Nokia-establish-10m-Flash-fund

Orange Extend App Store:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32661/MWC-Orange-extends-App-Shop-adds-widgets

Microsoft unveils Windows Marketplace for Mobile:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/32658/MWC-Microsoft-unveils-Windows-Marketplace-for-Mobile

Most of today was travelling for me, but I managed to hot foot it across to the Mobile Monday Peer Awards, as O2 Litmus was proud to be one of the sponsors, held at the beautiful Palau Musica Catalana.

Basically each of the 68 MobileMonday Chapters (cities) select their local startup nominee which are filtered down to 20 finalists who present on stage in a 3 minute pitch.

The judging panel, seen below comprised of various industry experts including @unpocodetodo from Telefonica R&D.



The dreaded three minute countdown clock:



The winner "in spite of legal concerns" was Popcatcher who enable personal recording of songs from FM radio broadcasts for storage on the phone as MP3 tracks. On top of that their software also automatically edits out any advertising and DJ chatter. Impressive if it works and is legal!

For a good round up check out @mikebutcher summary here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/16/mobile-startups-whittled-down-to-the-last-five-in-barcelona/

Whilst the judging was taking place we all mingled in the bar and I got to catch up with the @mob4hire guys, the guys from Soonr, GetJar, amongst others. It was rough to hear from the Californian guys just how tough financing is at the moment, but the silver lining seems to be if you can make it through this, then your business really has great potential for the up turn.

I must invest in a Netbook so I can do this stuff from the event rather than going back to my hotel to fire up the laptop, still good excuse for a early night in preparation for a busy day.

Hopefully my good intentions to post each day will continue, if not apologies in advance, and follow me on twitter @jamesparton for more immediate thoughts / observations.

Mobile Monday London, 10th Feb, Write Up

I had an interesting time down at Mobile Monday London last night.

It was held at the CBI Conference Centre (base of the Centrepoint tower by Tottenham Court Road tube station).

The evening followed the standard MoMo format of short 10 minute presentations, followed by a panel debate, Q&A, and networking.

The panel was made up of:

Samuel Sweet - Ikivo
Nick Allot - OMTP BONDI
Kevin Smith - Vodafone
Christian Sejersen - Mozilla
Francois Daoust - W3C
Graham Thomas - T-Mobile

I posted various titbits live from the room via Twitter last night (see my feed here) and below is a quick summary of my thoughts.

The evening was billed as “'The changing landscape of the mobile web'.

Kevin from Vodafone was first up to run us through the OneAPI initiative from the GSMA.

The goal of the project makes absolute sense – to deliver a standard way for 3rd parties to connect into Mobile Operator infrastructure and services. Stop the fragmentation, and make developers lives easier by reducing time spent on integration to allow more time to be devoted to innovation.

At the moment all the Mobile Operators around the world offer access into their networks via API’s, but in a non standard way. This increases the cost and complexity of developing an application that can be universally accessed across all operators in one territory.

Due to a history of acquisition in the Mobile industry, often the API’s from the same Operator Group (e.g. Orange, Vodafone, Telefónica) differ from country to country compounding the problem. Therefore for any developer with international ambitions the complexity of the challenge dramatically increases.

In the current scope of the project are enablers like messaging, user profile & charging.

The other important point Kevin made was by getting this right the Mobile industry will attract in new non mobile developers. As the web world and mobile world’s collide, projects like OneAPI help reduce the barriers for cross fertilisation. This has to be great news from a business perspective (more opportunity) and from a customer perspective (more innovation)

The one big question for me that was not answered by Kevin’s pitch was how the required investment from the Operators will be financed?

The business folks inside the Operators will be looking at the money required to build out these standardised API’s, and ask the simple question “where is the return on investment”.

The application / long tail space is notoriously difficult to forecast from a revenue perspective. I know I’ve tried!!

In such a nascent market who really knows where the revenues will flow from and who will be the winners and losers. Let’s hope we have some fresh thinking from the people holding the purse strings and there is a philosophy of speculating to accumulate. I’ll be dropping Kevin a line to find out if he has the answer!

The OneAPI project will have a high profile at next weeks Mobile World Congress so I suggest you seek them out. Check out the OneAPI Seminar on Tuesday 17th at 9:30am: (GSMA Seminar Theatre, GSMA Pavilion. Hall 7, Stand 7P01)

Following Kevin we heard from OMTP, Mozilla and IKivo. These presentations were quite technical in nature and focused on the need to develop to standards to open up the mobile opportunity.

This is always a thorny subject. Innovation always drives speed to market and features at the expense of interoperability. Nick from OMTP commented that over 20 companies had gone off and developed 20 different flavours of widget.

Ikivo claimed a joint project named “T-Omnia” with Samsung and SK Telecom of Korea for a new device UI based on widget technology that replaced the native Windows Mobile UI had increased sales of the device by 300%

Christian showed the Alpha 2 version of the “Fennec” browser, basically Firefox for Mobile. It looked very nice on a high end touch screen. Would have been nice to see it on a mid range device. Watch the video here:


Fennec Alpha 2 Overview from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

The Q&A session dealt a lot of the issues around standards, the speed it takes these things to come together, and the various roles of all the parties involved. W3C was frequently referred to as the “Mother Ship”

The most pertinent question from the floor was from an exasperated developer along the lines of “all this talk of standards is fine, but tell me how I can make money from widgets, and I do not mean advertising?”

For me that succinctly summarised the overall problem with the evening – lots of tech talk (which I guess is understandable) but no one attempting to tackle the business agenda.

This should have been Graham’s opportunity to step and reassure, however his main point was one of getting more people to use mobile internet services first before working out specific business models for widgets and apps. That sounds great for an Operator (more use = more data traffic) but unless T-Mobile are proposing to share that traffic revenue with the developers it doesn’t answer the question.

We seem to forget that without a commercial framework to foster 3rd party innovation which presents a real opportunity for the developer to make money; the ideas will dry up, new products dry up, end user demand for data and services dries up.

With that challenge looking for a solution, let me leave you with the O2 Litmus URL ;-)

New Developer Competition on O2 Litmus

Orginally posted on http://www.o2litmus.co.uk, 4th Feb 2009

Win the chance to exhibit at the O2 Innovation Day!

O2 is holding an Innovation Day on March 16th 2009 at The O2.

The day centres on creating a platform between O2 UK and a select number of technology partners, highlighted by key note speakers, focused discussions and knowledge sharing on innovation in the mobile industry.

We’re giving two developers the chance to exhibit at The O2 on the day, giving them unparalleled access to senior O2 decision makers and our industry partners. This is a great chance to raise awareness of the applications you’re developing and get in front of the people that matter the most at O2.

To be in with a chance of winning this fantastic competition, just complete the following steps:

1. Register on O2 Litmus at http://www.o2litmus.co.uk/
2. Upload an application to the O2 Litmus site
3. Send an email to james@o2litmus.info with the subject line ‘Contest‘ and the following:

• Your O2 Litmus username
• The name of the application you have uploaded
• A 140 character twitter-style sentence explaining why you should be one of the developers to exhibit at the O2 Innovation Day

The competition ends at midnight on 4th March 2009. Winners will be announced on 6th March 2009 on the O2 Litmus site, with the two winning developers being contacted by email after the competition closes.

Best of luck and we look forward to receiving your entries!

James
www.twitter.com/jamesparton

Friends Electric or Billy No Mates?

What I noticed this last weekend was just how much of my online time I now spend managing lists of friends I have scattered across the various sites & online services I use. Every time I update my personal website I have to remember to post in four different places to ensure the people that have indicated they are interested in what I'm producing get to hear about the update.

I don't know about you but I feel I'm at breaking point and now refuse to join any other social networking type service, not because I don't enjoy exploring a new innovative product, it's simply I just don't have the time to invest in building up yet another isolated island of friends. It will have to be a one in one out policy from now on.

I'm not the most prolific online friend maker, but here's an idea of what I'm faced with managing, by service and number of friends / contacts:

LinkedIn (686), MySpace (505), Outlook / Blackberry / SIM Card (383), Twitter (202), Plaxo (187), Facebook (160), Hotmail / MSN (118), My Forum mailing list (25), YouTube (12)
That's a total of 2,278 people.

How many of these are duplicates? How many of them are "engaged" and regularly contacting me or visiting my site? How many of them are connected to other contacts I know? How many could introduce me to the killer contact to achieve my next business objective? I have no idea!

This isn't an exercise in "how many friends have you got?", just to request for someone smart to come up with a way of managing this mess from one simple interface, a one stop friend shop in essence.

Islands without interoperability have been proven to hold back the potential of great ideas time and time again. The internet has brought great innovation and services to the mobile industry, but the mobile industry has some learning's to share back.

We got some pretty basic things right. Going on a business trip? Well I can travel around the entire world and my phone will just work, however to charge it I need a bag of power adapters because the folks in the power companies never sat down to work out what a plug should look like.

Phone calls, text messages, and increasingly picture messages (but admittedly we have some work to do there) wouldn't be as useful or as prevalent if you could only communicate with people on your own network. It's the crossing of boundaries and universal communication that drives adoption.

So there's the tip. Feeds, RSS, mash up's are only the first step in making this stuff easier. FriendFeed is a step in the right direction, aggregating together various service updates and feeds, however it's the friend management that is burning all my time and limiting what I can do with these services.

I need a single site that can aggregate all these islands of friends together, which can be manipulated to show different views like "service of origin" e.g. Facebook, YouTube, plus handle updates and messaging from a single interface.

Taking it a step further can we achieve a single online address book serving all of our digital needs, accessible from your mobile phone, PC, online services, car, TV / set top box? I suspect technology is not the issue here, probably more an issue of trust, security and ensuring provision of consistent, reliable network connectivity.

Get this right and suddenly your "friends" become a really invaluable tool and asset to get stuff done. Friends become electric. If it carries on like this I can't afford the overhead and would prefer to be Billy no mates!

Twitchhiker

Just a quick post...

If any one is still left in any doubt about the power of social networking, even as something as simple as Twitter (micro blogging / status updates limited to 140 characters per update), then checkout http://www.twitchhiker.com/ and start following @twitchhiker now!

See the power of the network spreading before your eyes!

Good luck Paul :)

February Going's On...

Firstly thanks for stopping by. I've finally got a round to setting up a personal blog to try and aggragrate stuff I'm guest writing on other sites, and to provide a home to various personal ramblings and nuggets I pick up along the way.

For those of you that don't know me I'm the creative force behind O2 Litmus and as such I have spent the last 18 months talking to, and working with, some great people. Now we have the thing built and launched, 2009 is going to be busy spreading the word and helping the developer community make some money, good news huh? :-)

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona dominates the month, and O2 Litmus will have a visible presence down there, below is my upcoming schedule so it would be great to meet and chat...

February 2009:

2nd: Mobile Monday, London

16th - 19th: Mobile World Congress, O2 Litmus on Telefonica stand (Hall 8 stand 8B185)
16th: O2 Litmus sponsors Mobile Monday Peer Awards
17th: Speaking at the The Business of Mobile 2.0 Conference (14:40)
18th: Speaking at an Oracle Breakfast Briefing, RSVP by e-mail to anders.lundell@oracle.com
19th: O2 Litmus sponsors WIP Jam

26th: Oracle Webinar (details tbc)

March 2009:

5th: NavTeq Webinar

More soon...

And the winner of the most important API of 2009 is...

Orginally published at http://www.wipjam.com/ on 30th January 2009

We’ve asked our discussion leaders for WIPJam session to share their insight of the mobile developer world. This post was penned by James Parton, Head of O2 Litmus, the mobile developer programme with a twist and a sponsor of the WIP Jam Session at Mobile World Congress 2009 (#MWC09).

Open source, crowd sourcing, app stores, open networks, Web 2.0, Mobile 2.0, co-creation, user generated content. It’s clear that the future of application development is a hot industry topic.

Tip your hat to Apple. They have quickly transformed a cottage industry, struggling to find a poster child, into a serious business in a very short space of time. Through great end-to-end user experience – often overlooked by many in the area - we now have people buying apps on a regular basis. If you had asked those same people 6 months ago what kind of app they were interested in, they would have struggled to even define what an app was, let alone have a clear view on what was missing from their app life.

This wave has also beached in corporate boardrooms with many companies now launching or planning to launch app stores in reaction to the success of the Apple App Store. This leads us to ask where will the industry be in 6 months time?

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer for a second. They switch on their PCs and are be offered applications by their internet service provider. They then go to their favourite portal and may be offered applications, next they will see sponsored links for applications from their search engine.

Next they then pull their mobile phone out of their pocket and see an application store from their handset manufacturer, and sitting next that is the icon for their mobile network’s app store. Confused? Just imagine what the customer is thinking.

On the surface this explosion of app stores is a good thing for developers – more places to sell your apps means more people buying those apps, right?

However, this could be misleading. Many of these app stores are using aggregators to fill them up. This may lead to the vast majority of stores containing identical catalogues.

I can see parallels between the growing app market and digital music. Research has shown that over 90% of digital music catalogues are never downloaded. It’s an extreme example of Prato’s law. Are App stores already following the same path?

If these stores are filled by aggregators, and managed by marketers believing it’s all about catalogue, how do you as a developer get noticed? You want your app to be Smells Like Teen Spirit, and avoid being the obscure Cat Stevens B side from 1967 that no one wants!

So how do you solve this problem?

Customers. They are out there. They have an opinion. They are potential consumers of your products. You should get to know them, and love them. If you want to be successful, you have to prioritise customer relationship and service. Don’t just focus on the next feature you can build into your software.

Going back to my digital music analogy, we are going to see a huge attrition rate for apps. Thousands will never be downloaded or make profit. Can you afford to burn time and money speculating on what customers might want? Why not ask them before you commitment your engineering resource.

How do you find and reach these customers?

You should be seeking out partners that provide the most important API going forward. The winner of the most important API of 2009? It’s the Customer API.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if a large organisation was willing to step out of the way and let you interact directly with its customers? You would be able to demonstrate, co-develop and refine your product directly with end users?

This has to be a win – win approach. You save time and effort by refining your ideas before commercially launching, the end user feels empowered by helping to improve the products they and their friends will end up using, plus they get to experience these apps before anyone else – very different to a traditional retail environment where you buy and either love or hate the app you get.

Come and check us out here and upload your apps: http://www.o2litmus.co.uk/ or you can contact me directly via Twitter: www.twitter.com/jamesparton

Have you registered for WIPJAM yet. Rumour has it there are 2 tickets to give-away to the O2-Telefoncia party on Tues nite…

Mobile 2.0 San Francisco

Orginally published at www.bima.co.uk on 8th November 2008

This week I was fortunate enough to have been able to attend the annual Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, on behalf of O2 Litmus. The one-day event took place on 3rd November at the Hyatt and was a sell-out, with over 300 people in packed into the venue. What was interesting to see was not only the international outlook on the mobile 2.0 scene, but that the mobile application developer ecosystem is rapidly building in size and credibility.

Venture capitalists, start up’s, operators and established application developers sat closely alongside one another in San Francisco. I was one of a relatively small number of Europeans at the event, and it was clear to see the benefits of such a closely knit community both in terms ofcollaboration and ideas.

The topic talked about the most at Mobile 2.0 was what gives mobile applications the ‘X Factor’.

Many of the questions from the floor insinuated that many developers were still working hard to find sustainable business models for mobile. Many were looking at ad funded as the potential solution to their problem.

However the view from the VC panel was as clear as it was stark. Mobile applications which solely rely on advertising revenue are consistently failing to attract any interest from the Bay Area VC community. This is due to high levels of cynicism that mobile will be able to generate the CPM rates & volumes required to sustain a VC investable business.

“VC investable” is the key term here. All on the panel were at pains to state that many app developers will be able to create a business in Mobile via Ad funded, with the potential to scale to single figure millions of dollars per year. However, of course, the VC community are looking for exits of substantially more than that, and you got the sense everyone is still searching for the Mobile poster child company to emerge.

Secondly there was a detectable frustration with a lack of innovation coming through. Too many ideas being presented to the VC community were seen as line extensions, simply taking an existing concept and adding one or two new features - not breaking fresh ground or coming up with differentiated & unique propositions. This view was backed up by Sarah Lacey in her talk entitled “Secrets from Silicon Valley” held in London on 7th November.

An great tip for anyone going in front of these guys was be prepared for the “why now?” question. In these increasingly tough times the entrepreneur must be ready to convince the VC that they can’t afford to just sit back and let some other guy take the risk on their idea.

The theme of negativity on ad funded models was articulated by Tim Chang from Norwest Venture Partners, citing companies like GetJar who are building a sustainable business in Mobile. In anticipation of this focus on monitisable transactions, Tim was particularly supportive of micropayments and companies in the payments space.

I’m not an application developer though, so although the sweet spot for hot applications right now was compelling to see, what I found more insightful was the appetite for the industry to collaborate to create better things in the mobile 2.0 era.

I can see too that it will be important for Mobile operators like us to help bring customers and application developers together and step out of their way to let both parties get the most out of one another.

Consumers want cutting edge apps and developers want to reach an audience more easily. I see no reason why this won’t be the future model, and we will all be able to learn a lot from the journey.