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
Showing posts with label mobile monday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mobile monday. Show all posts
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Monday, 16 February 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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 ;-)
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 ;-)
Saturday, 31 January 2009
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...
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...
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