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 ;-)