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 :)