MobHappy

Cabir Virus "Infestation" in Australia

Yet another non-story about a mobile virus, following last week's non-story about the US.

ZDNet reports an "infestation" in Australia now.

But, it was only on one phone. In my book, "infestation" normally implies at least several occurrences, but let's let that go, for now.

However, the guy who spotted it is the CEO of a software company, called Bullant Software. Among other things, Bullant make a mobile service delivery platform. They are a partner of SimWorks, who (you guessed it) provide anti-virus software for mobile phones, including the Cabir. Spot a vested interest here?

By the way, this isn't a brilliant piece of investigation and deduction - it's all in the press release, sorry, I mean ZDNet story.

But it gets worse. This CEO (who we're meant to trust to sort out our enterprise quality software) says that after being asked if he wanted to install the virus:

"Somehow, I'm not sure whether I pressed yes or no but it ended up in my handset. When I rebooted my phone, the anti-virus software said I have a virus and asked me whether I want to delete it from my inbox," Wooldrige said.

OK, we all make mistakes and press "yes" when we mean "no" - let's be generous. Although if I sold software installations for a living, I'm not sure I'd admit it, quite so readily.

But what Mr Woolridge doesn't say, is that he'd have to do that 3 times in order to install the thing. There's a mistake and then there's incompetence bordering on the crass stupidity and that's what he's admitting to here.

But phew! The virus was then "easily neutralised by the mobile antivirus product on Wooldridge's phone" Any guesses whose mobile antivirus product Mr Woolridge might have installed on his phone. Might it rhyme with BimWorks?

And this non-story gets worse again. Apparently, it's not the first time Cabir has got rampant in Oz. Last year, SimWorks received a report of another outbreak around a Sydney station:

"Although we investigated it, we never managed to confirm if it was true. I expect there would be other unconfirmed instances around where people really don’t know what it is about and how to get rid of it," he [SimWorks' CEO Mr Aaaron Davidson] said.

Is that so, Mr Davidson? Sounds like us mobile phone owners should cancel our Australian holidays right now. Thanks for the warning.

Or, I guess, maybe we could always protect ourselves and buy your product! Why didn't you just come right out and write that in your press release? Don't leave us in danger of misunderstanding your subtlety here, please.

The Cult of the iPod

Tom Hume spotted this article in The Times, which I find just weird.

The writer starts off by rehashing the old idea that with everyone listening to iPods, it tends to cut them from their environment. Actually, this isn't a new riff anyway. Dr Michael Bull, a Senior Lecturer at the UK's University of Sussex, has been studying and writing about this for years - first with the Walkman and more recently, with the iPod.

What's actually happening, according to Dr Bull, it's all about controlling your environment (from a Wired article last year):

People like to control their environment, and the iPod is the perfect way to manage your experience. Music is the most powerful medium for thought, mood and movement control....

The [New York] Times asked what becomes of the public space when the public space becomes privatized. What about the others -- the person in the supermarket checkout you don't recognize is there? It asks whether the public space becomes colder as the personal space becomes warmer through music.

There's a lot of studies in the literature that demonstrate with the urban space, the more it's inhabited, the safer you feel. You feel safe if you can feel people there, but you don't want to interact with them.

Music allows people to find pleasure in the place they're existing. (Personal stereos) make the user's life much better. It helps them manage urban life.... Urban life is one of the reasons they're using these devices. How often do you talk to people in public anyway?

But then The Times article takes this cocooning effect of the iPod playing your favourite music as somehow evidence that technology generally actually narrows people's lives:

You get your news from your favourite blogs, the ones that won’t challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market — for new age fanatics, liberal talk or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culture is all subculture. Your cell phones can receive e-mail feeds of your favourite blogger’s latest thoughts — seconds after he has posted them — get sports scores for your team or stock quotes of your portfolio.

Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished.

Errr...not sure where to start with this.

Firstly, people have always selected their media based on what they want to hear and read. Why else does the UK's The Sun or The Mirror sell any newspapers? Or The Times, for that matter, if you want an Establishment, right wing view of the world. Bias in media is as old as the printing press.

Socially, people have also tended to mix with people they like, which normally means people whose view of life is pretty similar to their own. It's just not much fun socializing with those you despise or violently disagree with all the time.

But more than that. I'd suggest for the vast majority of people, technology has opened far more minds than closed them. I've been exposed to far more ideas, people, learning experiences, writing and opinions than the old grey world before 1995, when I first went online. Plus, I've been exposed to art, culture, books and music I would never have heard of, but for the web.

The web has also allowed the Long Tail to emerge in the arts and culture, leading far more variety and choice than at any time in the history of mankind.

Finally, the article makes an appeal to us all:

Not so long ago I was on a trip and realised I had left my iPod behind. Panic. But then something else. I noticed the rhythms of others again, the sound of the airplane, the opinions of the taxi driver, the small social cues that had been obscured before. I noticed how others related to each other. And I felt just a little bit connected again and a little more aware.

Try it. There’s a world out there. And it has a soundtrack all its own.

To quote a line from the great Fawlty Towers. "Pretentious? Moi?"

If this is the best old media can come up with, no wonder they've left the door open for bloggers to enter their inner sanctum.

Let Them Have Phones

The Australian Government have identified that having a mobile is essential to success for today's job seekers. Strange that no one thought of this before.

After all, you need to be able to make and take calls from would-be employers and a mobile is a pretty expensive indulgence if you're claiming unemployment benefit.

So they've started to give out "loan phones", which has increased a job seeker's chances by a massive 30%.

So simple, yet so effective. If only all politician's ideas were thus.

Image shows the previous initiative.

Source: Textually reporting a story in The Age. Having said that, the link to the story in The Age doesn't work, but if Emily says it was so, then that's good enough for me :-)

Business Users Slow to Adopt 3G

One of the stories that came out of 3GSM last week (and got overlooked in the excitement) was a speech by Daniel Taylor, managing director of user group the Mobile Enterprise Alliance.

Companies spent $16 billion on mobile tech last year, so it's quite an important audience. It's also an audience that is far from convinced that 3G is for them, right now, according to Mr Taylor.

This is clearly bad news for operators as they have a huge way to go before they can recoup their massive investments in infrastructure and license fees.

I find this story rather odd, to be honest. If I was an operator the business sector would be one I'd be targeting relentlessly. For a start it's one that is relatively price insensitive, providing the solution solves a need. And it's also a sector where you can offer a clear user benefit - quick and easy access to data, especially email, on the move.

In comparison, the non-business user has proven to be mainly turned on by cheap calls, principally as there's no very clear user benefit otherwise - despite some operators continuing to try to sell that dead duck, video calling.

The other part of the story that I find odd is Mr Tailor saying:

'We also need devices without digital cameras,' said Taylor. 'You'd think it a simple request, but this is a hot enterprise topic. Most firms won't let cameras anywhere near their business.'

This seems naive, at best, on behalf of businesses. I assume they're worried about security. But if so, why pick on camera phones? Why not photocopiers, voice recorders, floppy discs, email, scanners and even pencils - you can copy down secrets, after all.

If you've got a spy in your business, they'll find a way to spy and banning camera phones ain't going to even slow them down.

Story source: VNU

Mobile TV is Waste of Money Say Strategy Analytics

Strategy Analytics have announced that investing in Mobile TV might not be such a good bet, which I've been saying for a while. Still, it's nice when the pro's agree.

I tend to look at simple stuff like if people will use it and, as importantly, pay to use it. It's not going to be cheap and the user experience is going to be pretty poor. This is not what mobile phones have been designed to do. Most successful mobile applications tend to be about two way communication, not broadcast.

So, once users get over the novelty factor, it'll slowly die. It's like when I first got my first mobile phone. I stood in a field and phoned my Mum and said "Hey, guess where I am - in the middle of a field??!!" (Note: it was a long time ago when mobiles were the size of bricks and phoning from fields was rather unbelievable).

Anyway, once she had recovered from the shock of talking to someone in a field and I had got over my delight, I never did it again. So it'll be with mobile TV.

Anyway, the pro's also say:

“Beyond the basic business case and potential cannibalization factors, mobile TV faces four key challenges: The technology roadmap is far from stable; regulation and low spectrum availability may also act to slow the spread of services; beyond the technophile segment there is slow diffusion of media-enabled devices; and uncertain revenue models and value chain reconciliation will deter content industry participation.”

But the amazing thing to me is that investors in this sector are forecasting ROI within 2 to 4 years. Sorry, but that'll just never happen.

The trouble with this type of investment though is that management are faced with very tough choices, which actually favour poor decision making.

Let's take the scenario that everyone in a sector is rushing to invest in say, pork bellies. As a management team, you can either follow the herd or stand your ground.

If you don't follow the herd and pork bellies are a good investment, you've lost a brilliant opportunity and your shareholders will crucify you.

If pork bellies don't come good, you've kind of won, but not many brownie points accrue from NOT doing something.

If you do follow the herd and pork bellies succeed, you've done the right thing. And if they don't and you loose a packet, the whole industry was wrong, so how can you be blamed?

So, is it really surprising that when an industry has a big idea, even if it's transparently the wrong thing to do, that everyone piles in?

That's exactly what's happening here. Mobile TV won't pay back. It's as simple as that.

Disagree? Leave a comment, though that's very slooow (and being fixed). But drop me an email russell at mobhappy dot com and I'll post it for you.

Story source: Moco News

View Blogs and Flickr Photostreams and Images on your Java Mobile Phone

49PM have launched a RSS reader for Java enabled mobile phones. This means that you can view blogs (as an example) on your phone, but that any images are reformatted and optimised to be displayed on your handset.

You could also use the app to view Flickr photostreams, as an example. If you set up a stream for you and your friends/family to use, the latest will be streamed to your phone for you to see. Then, you can save the ones you like on the handset, if you want.

The addressing works intuitively - just enter the URL and the app will find the right feed for you. And only the unread feeds are displayed, meaning that you don't have to download posts that you've already seen.

Pretty useful if you're out and about and need to feed your blog reading habit.

Java MobileATM's Launch

Annoyingly, UK's Link operator of cash machines is launching what it's calling MobileATM. Users will be able to download the Java app onto their phones and enjoy some of the functionality of an ATM.

No, they won't be able to get their phones to spit out cash. But they will be able to check and transfer balances. Plus, they promise a facility to top up pre-pay mobile accounts directly from bank accounts, which is pretty cool.

So why is this annoying? Well, I was pitching this same concept to banks and building societies in the UK two years ago. Back then, polite "that's really interesting" type of comments was the best result I got.

I don't think it was my sales ability either. Like so often, I was just too early and I never seem to learn this lesson. So by the time they were ready to talk I was on to the next big thing. Being right isn't nearly as cool as being rich - or at least making the sale.

One of the hardest and most unfair aspects of business is the right timing. Show me a brilliant idea with a great team and it'll fail if the time's not right. Mediocre teams and ideas can thrive if they surf the wave right*.

You won't read that in many business books.

*By the way, I got the "surfing the wave" thing from the unlikely source of Duran Duran's Simon le Bon. About 25 years ago (yes I am that old) I was sitting next to him in a hairdresser - he was at Birmingham Poly and I was at Aston University. It was before Duran were famous, but they were enjoying some success locally.

The hairdresser asked him how things were going and he said "Well, you know man, it's like there's a kinda....wave and you know, you just gotta ride it, this wave of success....or you, you know, will kinda...fall off and drown, man."

No, honestly, that's what he said.

I thought to myself:

"Pompous, stoned, no hoper, looser." Clearly, I was wrong again.

Story source: VNU Net. Obviously not the bit about Simon le Bon. And he probably wasn't stoned, either.

Skiing with your Mobile in Stubai, Austria

I'd like to welcome Christian Ehl, as an occasional Guest Blogger to The Mobile Weblog. Christian runs an interactive agency here in Munich called Hillert & Co Interactive and I'm impressed with their understanding of the mobile space. More importantly, they understand that mobile is just one part of the marketing channel and mustn't be viewed in isolation. As I've written before, I don't think there's much future for a stand-alone specialist mobile agency.

Today, Christian writes about how ski resorts need to get more savvy about how they attract visitors and keep them coming back:

Going skiing in the Stubaier Glacier in Austria the other day, I noticed how many people take their mobile phones with them on the slopes. Everywhere I looked I saw people taking photos, SMSing to arrange meeting points, kids playing games in the restaurant or listening to music on their mobiles, and wherever a crowd gathers, you can hear a symphony of ringtones. Nearly everybody out there must be carrying a mobile phone and more astonishing, lots of people are using them.

Here's a chance for innovative mobile marketing services. Today almost every skier prepares his trip online. Finding the right ski resort, checking the weather conditions, selecting the right ticket, finding out how to get there and back - all this is done via the internet.

And then, when people leave for their trip, this connection is cut off and they are on their own. But everybody takes their phone. So why are there no services available for us skiers? People are spending time waiting to get into the gondola/ski lift, the ride up to the glacier takes nearly 15 minutes (with great phone reception!). There's so much time where the users can get the latest information, exchange information or even take part in competitions and quizzes. Ski resorts should be a Mecca for mobile services.

And when you talk to the resorts? 1.1 million people come to the Stubaier Glacier every year alone - and they're all anonymous.

This means that there's a great potential to get skiers' permission to open a dialogue with them and then provide them with ongoing services. Want customer retention? Then, start communicating!

This is a natural opportunity for some great mobile marketing. So, come and see what Stubai will start offering soon. Other ski resorts take note!

Russell adds: I've been doing a lot of skiing this season too and have also been struck by the way mobiles have penetrated this area of society. One of the things I like about skiing is the peace and beauty of the mountains themselves. And it's disconcerting to be standing there and have a mobile go off next to you.

Some people stop half way down the piste to answer calls!

But this just proves Christian's point - there's lots of potential demand for some very fine mobile marketing.

If you want to be a Guest Blogger on The Mobile Weblog, drop me a line russell at mobhappy dot com and give me some ideas. We have an audience of 50,000 or so readers, so it's nice exposure, if you're looking for it. 70% of the readers come from the US, with the remainder mainly in Europe and Asia.

The Bluetooth Viruses are Coming! Ahhhh

One of my predictions for 2005 was that

More and more mobile virus stories will hit the headlines. Only for the real story to emerge that to catch one you'd have to be as unlucky as to get struck by lightening on a clear day while standing in a rubber suit at the bottom of a swimming pool.

In the last few days, there's been a flurry of these non-story stories. Cabir has been discovered on 2 mobile phones is the US - one in a mobile phone store. Pretty obviously, someone did this deliberately by polling available handsets in the store and pressing "yes" that they did want to install it. As any Bluejacker worth their name knows, mobile phone stores are good targets.

160 Characters has an excellent (if rather long) article by Nick Hunn of Bluetooth specialist Ezurio.

Here's what you have to do to install one of these Bluetooth spread viruses:

1. Have a Symbian phone in the first place.
2. Activate Bluetooth, so your phone is discoverable.
3. When an unsolicited message appears, open it.
4. When your phone then asks you if you want to install a program that you haven’t just deliberately downloaded, press YES - three times. (Asking you three times is built in to Bluetooth standards precisely to avoid non-morons accidentally installing stuff).
5. Apply for life membership of your local Stupid Society.

Still worried? It's easy to make Bluetooth on your phone invisible by going to the Bluetooth menu and setting it to be “non-discoverable” or “hidden”. It'll still work with your headset, PC, PDA and other Bluetooth devices – you just need to temporarily make Bluetooth visible when you set them up . But it means your phone ignores any legitimate Bluetooth messages which happen to be floating around. Or more prosaically you'll avoid the fun and serendipitous experience of being Bluejacked.

The article also hints at a possible conspiracy theory - we love them, don't we? It stands to reason that operators don't like Bluetooth, as it doesn't make them any money when you use it. Plus, it could actually cannibalize revenues by allowing savvy users to swap content (like ringtones) without paying either the data cost or the content cost.

That's why, for instance, Verizon recently disabled Bluetooth recently as it allows them to keep control of your phone, in the classic walled garden strategy that never works.

So instead of disabling Bluetooth, they could spread viruses by Bluetooth and then get frightened users to ask their operators to disable Bluetooth. Brilliant!

Obviously complete rubbish*, but brilliant anyway.

Actually, a far bigger danger for the transmission of viruses is by MMS, but operators have been very canny about protecting us from this by making sure that MMS doesn't work properly. Now that is clever :-)

*Nick Dunn's article doesn't conclude this either, by the way.

Wind Up Mobiles and Wallpaper

Not that we ever doubted that we're obsessed with mobiles, as a culture. But if you had missed it...

Firstly, from Japan, we have Keitai Vyuun (via Gizmondo) which means, roughly, "mobile zoom". What you get is a pair of stick-on wheels for your mobile, which you can wind up and race....presumably against other mobile phones.

Something so utterly pointless is going to be mega-huge this Summer.

And then we have a rather memorable quote from Jay Cordenberg (via Iconoculture):

"Even a night out with the girls seems to be an occasion to change their [mobile] wallpaper - to match their shoes or handbags."

OK, admittedly, Jay is the publicist for Crazy Fun Babe, a Canadian wallpaper seller. But that doesn't mean to say it's not what happens.

Location Based Tourism

I wrote a post about location based tourism a couple of weeks ago, at the request of a Mobile Weblog reader.

Incidentally, if you have anything you'd like my opinion on, for what it's worth, drop me a line or leave a comment.

A good example of LBS and tourism is covered by Poynter Online with a post on Time Spots in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

It's loaded onto a PDA that you can rent from larger hotels:

The device is filled with useful info on events, hotels, restaurants and attractions. In addition, audio tours covering all important points-of-interest are provided, along with games, just in case the points of interest do not entertain you at all.

But the PDA is also connected; for the flat fee you pay, you can send e-mails, visit Amsterdam-related mobile Web sites, and call other Timespots users, as well as a large number of hotels, restaurants and tourist services. And the mobile device has a camera on board that allows you to take snapshots and e-mail them to your friends and relatives or your weblog.

The PDA is also GPS enabled meaning it can do obvious stuff like "where am I?" and "find my nearest coffee bar, I fancy a spliff". Well, you'd hope so.

But as Poynter notes, it would also be cool to have less obvious things like what the street looked like say, 10 years ago or what historical events took place there.

Or where the nearest coffee bar is, or have I said that?

Bush v Kennedy

Here's a picture of the famous JFK "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in 1963

You can read the speech here, if you like.

I couldn't help contrast this to Mr Bush's visit next week to Mainz. The German government is basically putting the whole town into lock down. They're closing roads, schools and even rivers for the day as well as imposing a 37 mile exclusion zone for air traffic.

Meanwhile, there will be a "Red Zone" where no unauthorized personnel will be admitted.

As far as the mobile angle is concerned though, there are plenty of rumours that they're going to shut down the GSM network - or perhaps have the ability to request a shut down if they need to.

It's one thing to protect Mr Bush. It's another to inconvenience the good burghers of Mainz. But isn't it another thing altogether to endanger their lives by depriving them access to the emergency services on their mobiles?

Thanks to Irakli for pointing me to the story.

Is Mobile Phone Jamming the New Bluejacking?

There seem to have been a flurry of people lately, claiming to jam mobile phones - for "fun". Or maybe it's a flurry of stories, which all seem to lead back to the New York Post one here.

You can buy one in the US for upwards of $250, which seems quite a lot of money to spend just to annoy people - or perhaps to stop people annoying you.

Having said that, the fine (in theory) is $11,000 for using one, which implies it's a brave or a rich person's game.

If you're puzzled by the Bluejacking reference in the headline, you can read more here. More harmless fun for kids!

Scanning Documents with Your Mobile

CNet posts a story (via JK on the Run) that the Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France have turned a mobile phone into a document scanner.

In other words, take any camera phone with a res of 1 megapixel or more, point it at a text document (or say, a white board) and click. The resulting image can be transfered to another phone or perhaps more interestingly, to a computer, for printing or editing via OCR.

Apart from the obvious James Bond and/or corporate espionage applications, it does make the whole process of scanning and archiving much easier and quicker.

But it also enables you to record for later use all of text-based messages and memos we see every day. For instance, if you see a memo on a Notice Board, you can take a snap and refer to it at your leisure. Or send it to a colleague by MMS (OK, let's assume it works) or bluetooth it to your pc and email it.

The launch is expected later in the year.

If you're in the scanning business yourself, maybe a change of career would be apposite?

Record Every Phone Call on your Nokia Series 60

Israeli company, Natural Widget, has launched Natural Recorder, an application that automatically records every phone call you make or receive.

If you have a Nokia Series 60 phone, you can download and install the software for $11.95. Thereafter, all your calls are recorded until you choose to delete them.

While recording a phone call isn't that difficult, what's actually clever about this is the memory management system. It claims that you'll never run out of memory, as the phone automatically deletes the oldest messages to free up more space - unless you've specifically saved them.

This is a great app for say, clarifying a previous conversation you've forgotten the details of. But, it's one more reason to get a shag phone if you don't want your partner listening to all those calls that you've forgotten to delete.

It also means that we'll have to assume that, like email and sms, voice calls will potentially live forever and be able to listened to by everyone else in the world.

So be careful with those endearments and indiscretions. They may well come back to haunt you.

Story source: Israel 21 C

Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

Mobile PC has a list of the Top 100 Gadgets of All Time.

It's got some great photos, but it must have been quite a challenge to put together and bound to be a little controversial!

What have they left out, that you'd have put in?

There's some fascinating ones here, like Number 18, pictured above.

MOTOROLA DYNATAC 8000X, 1983
Ten years after Motorola researcher Martin Cooper placed the world's first cellular call, the rest of the world got its shot. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X brought mobile calling to the masses (or about 300,000 very wealthy people) for just $3,995 plus outrageously high usage fees. Fortunately, the 8000X offered only one hour of talk time, so it was difficult to rack up stratospheric bills.

How times have changed.

Something for the Weekend from SFR

An amusing ad from French mobile service, SFR.

A mobile keeps things truly personal - unlike an answerfone.

And here's another good one doing the rounds. A Sysadmin's dream.

Have a great weekend.

Russell

File Sharing TV Programmes - 24 and The Simpsons Lead the Way

Hurray! The UK leads the world in something again. Unfortunately, it's just pirated TV programmes download from Bit Torrent networks.

18.5% of all piracy is happening in the UK, ahead of Australia at 15.6% and the US at 7.3% according to research by Envisional.

The report concludes that the main driver (apart from high broadband penetration) is that people want access to the latest programing from the US. They want this season's Simpsons and 24.

So why don't broadcaster think about synching launches? Then users could go legal. Or maybe sell programmes on demand once they've been been broadcast. I'd pay $5 for a new Simpson's episode.

Whatever they do, they need to do something quickly before it spirals out of control, like the music file sharing networks. Give users a legal option if the demand is there.

Story from Net Imperative.

Skype, Motorola and VoIP - The Operator's Dilemma

On Monday Motorola announced a strategic alliance with Skype, the Voice over IP service.

For those that don't know, VoIP lets you make pretty good calls over the net. And because it's going over the net, it's free providing you have a connection and a device capable of interfacing like this. Historically, this is generally a computer, with a mike and speakers if you want to talk to and hear the other person.

Skype is free to download and free to use, meaning you can make free phone calls all over the world. And 71 million people have downloaded it, so far.

To date, that's mainly meant that landline operators are loosing revenue and this is going to escalate horrendously in the coming years - especially when cordless VoIP handsets (like "real" phones) come on the market. This is expected to happen this year.

The double whammy for landline operators is that more and more people are choosing to "cut the cord" or decide just to own a mobile from now on.

But the Motorola announcement means that soon we'll be able to make Skype calls on our mobiles. Actually, it's not just Motorola that's the issue here - all the handset companies are looking at bundling VoIP capabilities.

This means that we can bypass the mobile network operator's voice tariff altogether from our mobile phone. And if we're at home or in range of a hotspot, we can bypass the operator altogether and still make calls.

The one redeeming piece of news is that switching from one network to another as we're truly roaming is not reality yet - although it's only a matter of time. So the idea of walking down a street and the handset seamlessly selecting the cheapest network is not possible. But if you're sitting in a hot spot and don't need to move out of the zone while you call, that will work fine. Now.

So what would you do if you're an operator? Voice is still overwhelmingly the "killer app" of mobile, accounting for the lion's share of revenues. Supposing a significant part of that will be lost to VoIP? Which, realistically, is highly likely.

There are really only two routes available.

Firstly, you can try to stop VoIP happening. You can refuse to sell handsets that have the features that enable this. You can try to stop users making VoIP calls with whatever weapons you happen to have in your armoury, fair or foul.

As an example, Verizon tried this sort of approach recently in relation to local file sharing, by disabling Bluetooth on their handsets. Much hue and cry followed and a class action has been filed to try to force Verizon to back down.

Top tip: If your customers start suing you, you're usually wrong. Even if Verizon win the case, they'll loose their customers, so it a Pyhrric victory, at best.

The point, I think, is that trying to prevent progress is not a useful or successful management technique - it just doesn't work. Fighting market trends is only going to have any positive results in the very short term. But before too long, you'll be swamped and forced into an ungainly retreat.

We're seeing this happen in the music industry daily, as desperate record company bosses try to stop the free file sharing networks. This is in spite of being majorly responsible to their set up and growth by refusing to sanction legal operations until it was far too late.

And despite any actual evidence that file sharing harms revenues.

The only other approach is to shrug (Gallically, if you manage it - the French do shrugging so well) and although it feels counter-intuitive, embrace these changes. You have to run as fast as you can towards the approaching danger. Seek out handsets which are VoIP compatible and market the new service aggressively to your users.

While cannibalism will obviously occur and threaten your revenues, it's better that you do this and still maintain your relationship with your customer. There will be other services that you can sell them and you may survive as a company and still even be profitable. You may even figure out a way of making more money from them.

If you don't do this, it's a sure fact that someone else will, maybe one of those nasty little MVNO's with nothing to loose and unimaginable riches to gain. And that's when giants are in real danger of toppling slowly over, never to get back up.

I'd be quite surprised if any of the biggies have the guts to take this approach. Human nature is to go into denial at times like this. But it's happening and bold decisions are needed.

Anyone agree? Disagree? Please leave a comment - it makes me go all weak and shivery when you do that.

Is TV the Next Victim?

Firstly, we had music file sharing, which hasn't gone away by any means despite the rather desperate attempts of the RIAA and the quaintly named BPI to bully customers through the courts.

Then we had the MPAA shutting down sites using Bit Torrent to distribute legitimate files and some of their member's films.

Now apparently TV execs are wetting themselves as it seems programmes are making it out there too.

The New York Times (via Emergic) writes:

Millions of viewers are now watching illegal copies of television programs - even full seasons copied from popular DVD's - that are flitting about the Internet, thanks to other new programs that allow users to upload and download the large files quickly. And entrepreneurial souls are busily concocting even newer applications, including one that searches the Internet for illegal copies of any television shows you may desire and automatically downloads them to your computer.

Not surprisingly, the repercussions - particularly the rapidly growing number of shows available for the plucking online - terrify industry executives, who remember only too well what Napster and other file-sharing programs did to the music industry. They fret that if unchecked, rampant trading of files will threaten the riches of the relatively new and surprisingly lucrative television DVD business. It could endanger sales of television shows to international markets and into syndication. And it could further endanger what for the past 50 years has been television's economic linchpin: the 30-second commercial.

Unfortunately, the 30-second commercial has actually expired, it's just that no one has actually noticed it. It's been killed off by market forces that are impossible to resist - TiVo and the web are part of it, sure.

But advertisers are starting to switch budgets heavily to online now. New research from Starcom shows online growing at 52%. Why? It's accountable, targeted and affordable, even for the smallest businesses. It's opened up the long tail of advertisers and no one knows how big that untapped market actually is.

Other news on the media. Rupert Murdoch, famously sceptical about "new" media has gathered his top management to work out a new strategy for the internet. He can smell the money shifting and clearly wants a slice of the new pie. As probably the best strategic media man of the last 100 years (no matter what else one thinks of his style of business), this is an important indicator.

I wonder if blogging will be on the agenda? Not so for Michael Wolff, acerbic New Yorker columnist and writer of the classic Burn Rate and the interesting, but inconclusive Autumn of the Moguls. I think it was inconclusive as he's too close to his subject (the collpase of media) and failed to see what's actually happening to the media he was writing about.

Here's how BuzzMachine reported a recent speech about blogging:

At some point in the '50s Truman Capote was asked about Jack Kerouac, and he said, "That's not writing, that's typing," which is to some degree how I feel about blogs. I even hate saying the word blog. I hate being forced to say the word blog.

When I look at that particular blog piece of software I react viscerally. I said, "Oh, I don't want this. I don't want to be part of this." There's that scene in "Doctor Zhivago" where the professionals and the intelligentsia are reduced to having to walk with the hoi polloi, and that's what I feel when I'm forced into this blog stuff.

So I want to take what I think of as a noble and principled stand in saying that I'm not going to be part of this blog stuff. And I'm going to insist upon this until I am washed away....

Well, they do have impact. Part of it is actually involved with a kind of further devaluation of information because what it sets up is this constant second guessing of information. Which is not necessarily bad but it does lower the value of all information. You undermine that authority of information. But having been around this business now for some time I've learned that nothing lasts too long. By all rights, 18 months from now we should be looking back at this and all kind of embarrassed to say the word blog -- I hope.

I think he's wrong. I think he's very wrong. I also think he's an arrogant prick to suggest that somehow old media journalists are inherently superior. But most of all, I think he's running scared. His well-paid and prestigious job's on the line ultimately and the only way he can cope is to regress into denial.

What exciting and fast moving times we live in!

NTT DoCoMo Confronts the Seedy Side of Mobile

Yesterday in Cannes, NTT DoCoMo, President Masao Nakamura, was very open about some of the problems mobiles cause and what they plan to do about it before society starts pointing the finger.

He highlights issues like the use of mobiles for anonymity by criminals, voyeur pictures with camera phones and the responsibility of an operator to maintain an effective network even in a surge of calls as a result of a Tsunami-style crisis.

Weirdest of all is "book piracy" where people photograph whole books in book stores to read later. Imagine how much time this would take? And then you get a pretty dodgy image to actually read it.

But it's good to see NTT DoCoMo standing up and doing something about these issues.

Story source: Information Week.

Dinner Invitation

San Francisco artist, Marc Horowitz, was on the set of a shoot for Crate & Barrel (dinnerware). He scrawled this message on a white board, as a kind of joke.

dinner with Marc 510-872-7326.

The photo made it to the final catalogue, which went to about a million homes.

So far, Marc has had over 5,000 calls, some from cranks, as you might expect. But some inviting him to dinner across homes throughout America.

He's on a 70 dinner tour, with a book and film in the pipeline. See the video here.

Why don't you give him a call?

LG Sees Flying Pigs

An interesting quote from LG, one of the world's largest phone makers:

"Video telephony is known to be a killer application for 3G," added Jinsung Choi of LG Electronics. "However, it turns out that other relatively simple multimedia applications such as MMS are more popular in reality. The way end users accept new applications are different from what we think," said Choi.

Hmmm. Do people still think that video telephony is a killer app? That's so 2003. And even then, a lot of us were pointing out that it wouldn't happen like that.

And where is MMS popular? Certainly not in the West. It's a dog, technically, from a usability angle, commercially and no one in marketing has figured out why people would want to use the service.

Quote from East Asia Times via Picture Phoning.

Can You Help?

Irakli, a Mobile Weblog reader, has a question for all you out there who know your operator networks.

I know from all the feedback I get that there's lots of you who know far more than me about techie things, so now's your chance to help and earn some karmic brownie points at the same time.

I'd like to know how a mobile network is designed to cope with a sudden
surge, ie if something big happens somewhere and the rest of the
country tries to phone in. How does the system balance the surge? Can
there be any sort of priorisation (always presumed there is one in
place and that the telcos wouldn't admit). How many simultaneous calls
would an average network in an average european city of 1m cope with?

Can anyone help? Leave a comment (though it's acting very slooooow right now) or email me by clicking here.

Gartner's Hype Cycle

I was browsing Anita's excellent RFID Weblog - a must read if you're into this stuff - and came across a reference to Gartner's Hype Cycle. I hadn't seen this before, though I'm all to familiar with the phenomenon and it's good to see it spelled out like this.

According to Gartner, new technologies:

"... first climb a steep "hype" curve, as pundits describe the benefits and paradigm-shifting characteristics of the technology.

Next, they plummet into a "trough of disillusionment" as inflated expectations get pushed aside by the reality of performance.

Finally, as the benefits are better understood and realized, mature and stable offerings emerge. The best example is the boom and bust of the e-commerce revolution and the subsequent stabilization of industry players such as Amazon and eBay."

Another way of looking at this is when technology goes from being vendor push to user pull. Once vendors have basically given up and moved on to the next new, new thing, some cool users will come along and find the technology lying battered, bruised and unloved.

They'll pick it up, dust it off and think of some cool and froody uses. They tell their friends who tell their friends and in time, we'll suddenly see that there's a significant and thriving user base.

WAP's a great example of another "emerged" technology. Location is still in the trough of disillusionment, after the hype of a few years ago.

And MMS is never going to get out of the trough unless they try something different.

PR Strategy for 3GSM

I wrote earlier about some truly atrocious PR. In order to address the balance somewhat, I asked Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR to give Mobile Weblog readers some good advice. Rainier really know their tech stuff and no, they're not paying me to write nice things (unfortunately!).

Here's what Stephen says about managing press relations at the current Cannes MobileFest:

It is day two of 3GSM. 652 exhibitors. 880 press releases. How the hell do the 800 or so journalists visiting the show dig out the interesting stories? Inevitably it is the big brands that the get the attention - at least in the traditional media.

Today's Financial Times reports on two stories from 3GSM. Nokia and Microsoft, which will see Windows Media Player ported to Nokia phones and Verizon has acquired MCI in a $6.75bn deal.

Rainier PR has four clients at 3GSM for which we've been scheduling press meetings. But the volume of announcements means that many journalists had their press meeting schedules booked full at the end of January.

The traditional media, particularly print, are limited in the amount of space that they can give to news from a show such as 3GSM, leaving niche web sites and bloggers to report on the more innovative stories.

If you want to drive press coverage don't issue news announcements around a show - unless you're a big brand. Instead use exhibitions to network informally with the press and save your news stories for when there is less competition for press attention.

Next week will be a quiet week for announcements from mobile firms.

Good advice indeed, just about redeeming PR as an industry :-)

Having said that, Rainier's own survey into the state of the PR industry revealed that "35.8 per cent of journalists found PR agency staff were 'muppets' with little knowledge of either their needs or their own client." So we can't be totally surprised by the Orange story earlier.

Orange Bans Porn but Promotes Video Flashing

The Register, that venerable organ, reports that Orange have banned access to adult content for those not registered as over 18.

In order to register, you need to leave your credit card details with Bango and sign and get witnessed an official statement saying you wish to register as a pervert. Actually, I made that last bit up, but registering is effectively the same thing, methinks.

In another story, also reported by The Register, Orange were looking to jump on the Valentine's Day bandwagon with this rather desperate piece of PR hackery:

The countdown clock to Valentines Day has started frenetically ticking and still most of us are racking our brains on how to create enough excitement for the most romantic day of the year. A new offer from the mobile company Orange, including two-for-the-price-of-one 3G video handsets could save the day for hot blooded Brits who want to gear up for an explosive evening. Just imagine the swell of anticipation that a few well placed video calls made during the day could make - and with 3G even last minute wonders could find themselves pulling the rabbit out of the hat with flowers and dinner reservations booked over the Orange network.

Some of my best friends are in PR but ...sheesh.

And I've written about Mobile Flashing before (video calling someone with a pic of your naughty bits). Is that what they're suggesting with "imagine the swell of anticipation that a few well placed video calls made during the day could make"?

We should be told :-)

Valentine's and Dating Bluetooth Stuff

OK, I know I'm a day late with this stuff, but you're unlikely to actually use some of these things.

Firstly, we have Popgadget featuring Hugm's. These bluetooth connected light-up devices send an sms hug via your mobile when you squeeze them.

It gets better (or worse, depending on how curmudgeonly you are), the sms hug varies according to how long you squeeze these things - Long squeeze: 'hhhhhhuuuuuuuuuuggggggg'; Short hard squeeze: 'hhHHUUUUUUugg'.

Then Textually reports on an art project in London that's a mobile riff on the ancient art of carving love messages on trees.

Each participating tree has an embedded LED device embedded in the bark and a unique phone number to sms to. You send your message to the tree and it's displayed in lights.

When you leave, the message disappears but if you return, so does your message as the tree "remembers" you. It's not clear how this works, but we can assume some kind of locative signal (perhaps Bluetooth again?).

And finally, you missed the opportunity to participate in the official Bluetooth Valentine's Day, where you could send suggestive icons to the object of your affections.

This one means "Get a new haircut" and this one

Fancy going dancing? (I hope).

Obviously for the romantic souls among you, you can use all these ideas everyday for the loved ones in your life. They may start to treat you a bit strangely however - you have been warned.

iRadio from Motorola

Most of the mobile world is focused on Cannes and the plethora of news coming from there (look out for PR guru Stephen Waddington's thoughts on this shortly). Meanwhile, across the pond, there's a gathering of tech Illuminati at Demo in Phoenix, Arizona.

Legendary blogger Scoble is one and reports that "Motorola rocked the house with a demo of iRadio" which will be officially launched later in the year.

The breakthrough Motorola iRadio solution will mobilize hundreds of commercial-free Internet radio channels and your personal music collection, letting you enjoy your favorite genres, artists, and tunes whether at home, in the car, or on the go. The service uses a high-speed Internet connection, Bluetooth(R) technology, and a mobile phone to offer listeners a continuous entertainment experience - you can start a song on your car radio at exactly the point where you stopped it on your living room stereo.

I wrote an article over at The Feature last year arguing that radio was the natural partner for the mobile, not TV which everyone keeps going on about. And the more I think about it, the stronger I hold that opinion.

The other angle to this story, is what will iRadio do to Moto's other partner - the iPod?

Nokia Launches Local Marketing Solution

Nokia launched its Local Marketing Solution last week (via Blueserker) and has teamed up with Coke (world's biggest brand) to demo it at Cannes (the 3GSM World Congress) this week.

The system works by allowing users to set their preferences as to the sort of advertising they'll accept on their phones. Then, when ever they're in range of a special Service Point, they get the ads they're interested in by Bluetooth.

The service points themselves are small (A5) and just require electricity to work - no cabling or internet access is needed. Updating of offers is done over the operator network. But obviously they still need to be deployed in the first place.

Currently the service works on Series 60 phones. Advertisements are stored in a dedicated folder, not in Messages.

Operationally, the operators install and run the Service Points, but the real estate where they are installed needs to be negotiated. Nokia speculates that this could be provided by barter - thus, a premises owner could get usage of the machine in return for installation.

I haven't actually seen the user interface for this, which is going to be pretty key in getting users to play ball. But this is one of the great strengths of the Nokia franchise, so let's assume this is going to be great.

One of the main things is going to be the default factory settings though. If users have to find the folder and switch it on, there's a danger of very, very low take up. If the default is on, there'll be accusations of spam flying around before you can say "luncheon meat".

The most exciting thing about this for me, if it can be made to work, is the long tail angle. Much of Google's success is via the Adsense and Adwords concepts, that allows small companies/advertisers to place highly targeted ads which work. This has allowed Google to access the long tail of advertisers or make sales to millions of first-time advertisers.

This Local Marketing Solution is the same - potentially. It allows small corner shops and retailers to plunge into low cost, tightly targeted advertising and CRM programmes, for the first time.

But these people are going to need a lot of persuading and then education into Best Practice. This is a lot of work for someone and I wonder who is going to do it?

I do have two main issues with the execution of this, great idea that it is in principle:

1. I wonder if there's enough in this for the operator? Bluetooth transactions don't generate revenue for anyone, so at best, the telecoms benefit is indirect - getting people to use their phones more and more.

Sure, updating the service points uses the network, but we'd have to look at a scenario where millions of them were installed to even be measurable.

Location stuff is a long way down operators' agenda right now (wrongly in my view) and I can't see this changing much.

For this reason, I wonder if it would be better (or even possible) to integrate this with an SMS platform too.

This would also give greater penetration of handsets and get over the short term lack of service points. After all, in the short term, most users aren't going to get any messages because they're either rarely around a service point or when they are, there probably won't be any advertising available.

Another important issue is the range of these service points - if we're talking 10m standards, this problem is compounded.

2. Who will do the selling?

Let's assume operators are convinced to give it a go. They sign on the dotted line and put up a meaningful amount of service points. Who is going to sell the ads and administer them?

I know from ZagMe days that mobile marketing adsales is damn tough and I don't think the market's changed that much. Plus, when you do make a sale, the admin and chasing up of copy etc is a very time consuming job. You can't assume that advertisers in the short term will do this or operate the service from their PC's or something.

It's also going to be low volume in the short term, making agencies very difficult to interest.

On the plus side though, the free cost of transmission means that it should be possible for retailers with very low margins to use. Thus fast food and coffee shops, as an example, could in theory participate, even though they could never afford to use an SMS based system.

I can't find any information on what it might cost to advertise on this service, or maybe the idea is that each service point is only used by the advertiser on whose premises its installed. Thus, maybe, they get free advertising in return for siting the service point?

I think the short term future of this might be to penetrate a niche (like exhibitions and conferences) rather than go mainstream. While Nokia may have lots of plans it isn't talking about, there's a huge job in the middle which needs to be done. Evangelizing agencies and advertisers, persuading retailers to install service points, helping them to come up with great advertising that users will appreciate, administering the system and sharing knowledge across the advertiser base is just for starters. This middle job is essential to its success and there's a danger that it is underestimated.

But it's a bold and innovative idea and Nokia should be congratualted for thinking big.

What Napster Proves..

Unless you've been off-planet in the last week, you can't have failed to notice that Napster has launched a new product. For $15 a month, you can have "all you can eat" musically - for as long as you continue to pay your $15.

I'm not going to join the debate here about whether this is a good thing or not, as it's been widely written about everywhere else.

But a Boing Boing reader does demonstrate a really nice piece of legal thinking:

Another aspect of the Napster to Go model is that it shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false.

If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads.

It would be interesting to see if such an argument will hold sway in the courts....

More Free Ringtones

Following Nokia's call for free ringtones distributed via P2P sharing last week (I'm amazed that this hasn't been a bigger story) there seems to be a spate of services like this springing up.

Another Midi/MP3 converter is Freeloader, which is the same team who are behind Treasure My Text.

Mobile Weblog reader, Paul, writes:

We're not completely sure how many people can really be bothered to
actually compose their own Midi's as its fairly laborious if like me
you don't know the first thing about music. MP3 stuff is a lot easier
as you can use any old sound you can make or sample (eg our top
download at the moment is the sound of a Tasmanian Devil which someone
over at boingboing.net recorded in a zoo and posted).

At present though Midi based ringtones are the dominant format for
ringtones and the most compatible, so the most popular use for
Freeloader is finding Midis on the net and using these to make your
ringtones for free.

Ringtones for the people!

Russell

PS If you have a product or service you think Mobile Weblog readers could like, drop me a line at russell at mobhappy dot com.

Mobile Marketing Week

There's been a few threads about mobile marketing this week, which I've wanted to briefly comment on.

We have both Nokia (Blueserker link) and Siemens announcing forays into mobile marketing enablement. I'll write something about Nokia in due course.

Siemens' concept is more general than just mobile marketing, involving Digital Graffito - a concept I wrote about over at Net Imperative last year. This includes a phrase that could have been lifted straight from the Siemens' Press Release:

If you project this idea into the future it’s conceivable that we would have a swathe of digital graffiti to enrich our environment. It would be both non-polluting and not even visible.

So basically, you write your geo-specific message and attach it virtually to that place. The message is then collected and read by future visitors to the area. This can be one person (or defined group of people) or everyone who has their phone activated to collect such a thing.

As I've said before, I think this type of application is really exciting, bringing together the real and digital worlds. It could also be seen as a sort of hypertexting, something I've been banging on about together with like minded Pondering Primate , Vanilla Gorilla. Check out his blog - a lot of great stuff.

Anyway, back to mobile marketing.

One possible application Siemens are forecasting is mobile marketing. Advertisers leave messages for later collection by shoppers. Shoppers must have their phone activated to get these and they can be time sensitive - thus disappearing at a pre-determined date.

Mike Masnick analyses this angle at The Feature in his usual concise way. His concern is that the binary on/off mechanism will make most people switch off permanently, thereby negating a potential useful service.

Mike's solution is something he describes as "more pull than push", but for once I kind of disagree with this prescription. At ZagMe, the technology limitations forced us to run a pull/push based service. In other words, Zaggers had to activate the service each time they went shopping (pull), then we'd start sending messages (push).

The problem with this is that people forget about the service and/or how to use it. In fact, 70% of people never activated the ZagMe service a second time. While you could argue that this was because they hadn't liked it the first time, our follow up research proved that this was far from the case.

The fact is that when the inertia effect is working against you, it's much, much more difficult to get a service off the ground, even if all your users love you. While good technology may triumph in the end (WAP as an example), it's far from guaranteed.

Furthermore, much to the disgust of hardened anti-marketing geeks (I'm not including Mike in this group, by the way!), people love to get mobile marketing messages, provided that they add value to their lives and are well targeted - and obviously if they've opted-in in the first place.

You don't have to take my word for this (although I do know what I'm talking about from first hand experience). M-Internet 360 reported on a typical survey this week too.

Based on over 20,000 responses recorded in the research, it can be concluded that consumers are ready to receive mobile marketing: above 80 % of the respondents expressed their acceptance towards mobile marketing.

This wasn't one of those bias "users say overwhelmingly that they want to buy our products and have our babies" surveys, but undertaken by Faculty of Economics and Business Admin at the University of Oulu. Rainier PR undertook a similar survey last year (about Bluetooth based mobile marketing messages) and reached very similar conclusions.

Ask me for my LBS Marketing White Paper, by the way, if this area is of interest to you.

I do agree that the binary on or off solution is limiting though. What I think is need is three settings; off, on for private messages and on for commercial ones.

After that, people need to have the option to drill down and state what kind of commercial messages they want to receive - or don't want to receive. Plus, put a profile on their phone so that the messages are targeted at least by age and gender and maybe more in the future. Imagine a record store being able to address a user knowing the genre of music they'd like, as an example?

There are other issues with this type of service. Two big ones are

1. There's a big operational problem for most retailers. Most marketing in centrally agreed and acted on - frequently months in advance. The best LBS marketing will need to be local and executed on-the-fly. I doubt many retailers would allow their local store managers to take this sort of responsibility.

Obviously, central systems could work, with offers controlled by an application influenced by stock levels, season, weather, competition information and store traffic to name a few variables.

2. An open system like this is bound to be abused by the few, poisoning its effectiveness for everyone else. This could be unscrupulous restaurateurs posting rave reviews themselves. Or retailers failing to follow the rules of adding value and targeting, for instance.

So we'd need a police force to monitor (perhaps) and cut off abusers (certainly).

It'll be fascinating to watch how Siemens control the roll out of this service and if it signals the LBS Marketing is about to happen at last.

Stylish Video Editing on Nokia

Muvee is an app from Singapore which is very cool. You shoot a video clip on your Nokia (7610, 6630, 6670, 3230 for model number fetishists). Then you choose a template for your "Muvee", which gets automatically mixed with your video to give special effects, text message and sound track.

The results are surprisingly professional from the demo on the site and threaten to make someone else's home video interesting!

The idea is you then send it by MMS, assuming the recipient is on the same network, or that your operator has figured out that network compatibility might be important and that you have the right settings on your phone in the first place. And that MMS happens to work on a Tuesday :-)

But if the idea can overcome all these barriers to usage, it's great and I'm sure will do really well.

The service costs £3.50 (c. $5.60) which I'd say is a tad expensive. But not unreasonable, especially when you think that this isn't a everyday purchase, a little like a small gift.

I've long argued that one of the issues that's holding MMS back is the lack of creative template-driven content. This is a great example of the kind of thing I mean.

Story spotted: Broadband Blog, a newish blog (I think) set up by Om Malik and a few pals. This one written by serial entrepreneur, Ramesh Jain. Not to be confused with serial entrepreneur, Rajesh Jain, who writes at Emergic.

Convert Music to Ringtones Free

jkOnTheRun featured this free service, run by a 17 year old in the US. Smash the Tones allows you to convert a midi file ("They're usually free... just keep looking!" at sites like MidiSite) into a ringtone.

As the man says:

I've been working on this since Thursday night. It takes an MP3 off your computer, compresses and trims it down for your phone, then sends you a text message so that you can download the file. Pretty sweet, huh? Best of all, it's free! "Why would you pay FIVE BUCKS for a ringtone???"

As I covered off in my predictions, this is the year this kind of thing takes off big time.

The Napsterisation of the highly lucrative ringtone market is starting.

LBS and Tourism

Clara, is a reader from New Zealand and doing a thesis on LBS. She's asked me a couple of questions - if you have any, feel free to leave a comment or email me.

Firstly, she asks:

If you had to explain LBS in one sentence to someone who's unfamiliar with the term 'location-based services' (i.e. 99% of the population), I'd love to know! This is something I struggle with everyday when I get asked about my thesis topic - it invariably takes me about 5 or 6 sentences, and by then their eyes have usually glazed over...

Yes, I know what you mean! My whole career has involved jobs that no one understands. Sometimes I hanker to be something like "a policeman" or "a librarian".

So, an LBS definition. How about:

Location Based Services (LBS) are services that recognise where a device and its user are geographically and interact with the device and user accordingly.

I still think you need a "for instance" with this one, so it's not perfect. Can anyone do any better?

And in a supplementary question, Clara asks about tourism and LBS - something I hadn't thought about really:

Do you think there might be some issues with LBS which would particularly apply to tourism? For example language barriers, the increased importance of location (i.e. with 'where-am-i' and 'where-is-my-nearest' services), etc?

Do you think it's even worth it trying to offer tourism-exclusive LBS, or is it more likely that the tourism application will come later, after LBS has hit the local consumers (thereby developing the necessary infrastructure)?

One of the big issues that many of the first LBS services stumbled on was that you often only need information about the area you are in when you don't know it very well. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of people live and work in areas they do know, you're de facto limiting the appeal of the service to most users.

Therefore, stuff like "find my nearest x" isn't relevant to most of us, most of the time. [Obviously, there's a lot more to LBS than local information, by the way].

However, with the tourism sector, the big advantage is that people probably do need this local info and may be willing to pay for it.

After that, things get pretty complicated on numerous fronts.

Firstly, inbound tourists are quite difficult to market to. Target them abroad and the wastage is huge. Even with a big tourist destination like London, many, many more people are going to see your ad in the US who will never go to London, than intend to go in the next few years.

And if you wait to hit them with the service when they're en route (eg via the airlines) or have arrived, it may be too late. They may not have a mobile with them, they may not have a roaming arrangement with their carrier, or their mobile may not be compatible with the network.

Obviously, you can try to target them during the trip planning/purchasing cycle, but I would worry that the message would get lost in the clutter of more important things they're thinking about then.

Most serious though is the cost to the user. With a plethora of different roaming charges, how can the marketer or the user have any hope in estimating how much the service will cost? The only thing we can say is that it'll be pretty expensive bearing in mind how much operators hit you for in roaming voice or data calls.

As an example, you might think that Talking Street's narrated tours of Boston or New York over your mobile is good value at $5.95. But the ominous "but regular charges from your cell-phone carrier, such as roaming and text messaging, may also apply" would probably be enough to deter most people without a US phone.

Obviously many tourists come from within a country and they would be both easier to target and the roaming issue wouldn't apply.

This cost issue is supported by the trial of the m-ToGuide which targeted English and Italian speaking day-trippers in Siena, Spanish-speaking domestic tourists in Madrid and English and German speaking business travelers and cultural tourists in London.

600 people signed up and 70% claimed that they'd use it again. BUT only 50 per cent of the trial users were willing to pay the €12-14 (c. $19) daily charge for the m-ToGuide basic service. This obviously indicates some price sensitivity and roaming is going to further complicate it.

Obviously, you can also provide them with a handset that gets round that issue, but then you become a service provider and rental agency with all the associated logistics and staffing issues.

Thinking more micro - say at individual museum or gallery level, dishing out a device which has a guide or LBS service like