MobHappy

Halloween Costumes, For Your Phone

Happy Halloween. To make sure your phone doesn't feel left out on this spookiest of all days, now you can get it its own costume (reg req'd, Fun Friends and AnniesCostumes.com, most of them are plush stuffed animals of various species, nothing too scary (or exciting).

So, if you go whole-hog into the whole Halloween deal, don't let your phone or iPod feel left out. Assuming, of course, you don't already have one of the KDDI phones dressed to look like a lump of cheese.

Carnival of the Mobilists

Rudy de Waele is hosting this week's carnival over at m-trends.org. Plenty of great stuff this week, so check it out.

@Austin Games Conference - Towards The True Mobile Game

Mobile game guru Greg Costikyan, formerly with Nokia Research but now head of Manifesto Games, highlighted a number of problems facing the mobile games industry, and developers in particular.

- The mobile gaming business model impedes innovation, because consumers buy games based on one line of text, and therefore are drawn to recognized brands (Tetris, licensed games, console titles, etc).
- Games are content, media are containers. There's lots of game media, and this medium is mobile. So does the mobile game have to be a subset of "the video game"? Probably not.
- Different game styles are suited for different media. Mobile device will always be an inferior video game platform because of the small screen and controls that are designed for telephony, not gaming.
- So how do we bring about the mobile game? It's not a technological problem -- what games are suited to the device?
- A true mobile game style would provide a collection of game mechanics that together produce pleasing player experiences. Some would depend on the unique characteristics of the mobile devices, some exist in a current medium.
- What makes mobile different as a medium? It's voice-centric, highly personal, it contains a slew of the user's own information, it's networked, it's ubiquitous (both always on and always with the user), it's usable anywhere and it almost always now has a camera.
- But, almost none of the above characteristics can be used by mobile games. No simultaneous voice and data connections, and J2ME (for good reason) can't access phone and date book information.
- The phone is networked, but it's hard to use because of high latency, the JAR model makes it hard to add new levels and content to a game on the fly, and it's also hard to connect services without a server.
- Location-based services still really don't work well. Cell-based locating is too inaccurate, and GPS is too slow and doesn't work in dense urban areas.
- APIs for cameras that are useful to games developers are few and far between.
- To enable mobile true mobile games, technology providers must figure out how to let developers use the features already available on devices, how to use them better and to make sure they're as widely developed -- and as standardized across manufacturers -- as possible.
- Voice is the biggest example. Player communication is vital to every multiplayer game, from cards to MMOGs. Online services in the 80s noticed that just adding text chat to classic board games spurred usage.
- "Single-player games are a wast of devices built for human communication." (A quote from my former colleague Justin Hall on TheFeature)
- How to make voice a reality? Ensure deployment of OMA PoC as soon as possible, and further examine VoIP in the context of gaming.
- People should be able to use their phone books, which is their "buddy list". Shouldn't have to create a new list for gaming. Create ways to for people to play their friends (ie sending an SMS if they're not online), and to make people they've met online "friends" out of game.
- It's in everybody's interest to make superdistribution a reality. If someone wants to send a game to their friend, and their friend wants to buy it, it should happen -- regardless of if they're on different carriers or using devices from different vendors.
- Networking has to improve, and much of that is dependent on operators' configurations -- reducing latency isn't a high priority because gaming is one of the only applications that needs it.
- Developers should have easy ways to both add new content to games (new levels etc) and pull content from a user's phone (say they have a personal avatar).
- The success of mobile games has been based on cross-vendor, cross-operator solutions, like J2ME. But technology doesn't yet let developers take advantage of the things about mobile devices that make them different from any other platform.
- Presumably, the ideal mobile game will be one that won't translate well to other platforms.

Axe Falls On Gizmondo Execs

A commenter on Russell's earlier post about Gizmondo execs and their interesting management payment plans turned us on to a little further scandal earlier in the week regarding some previous extracurricular activities of some of their executive team -- apparently some of them had done some time in Sweden for fraud and organized crime.

In an SEC document that came out this week (but was dated October 20), the two that went to jail resigned along with Gizmondo Europe's MD, who had earlier reimbursed the company for some of the expenses paid to him, his wife and companies to which he was connected that Russell pointed out in his first post.

It's an interesting soap opera. Just a shame it's more interesting than any of the company's actual business.

@Austin Game Conference - Mobile Keynote

Jason Ford, the general manager of games and entertainment for Sprint Nextel gave the mobile keynote this morning at the Austin Game Conference. Here are some notes from his presentation:

- All this talk about the "third screen" -- the mobile phone is more like the 4th or 5th screen for gamers.
- Who is the gaming customer? 51% male, average age of 30 (compared to 44 for general wireless subscribers), ethnic minorities "over-index" for mobile game purchasing. But the next wave of mobile gamers is more mainstream: the average age of people intending to buy games in the next year is 35.
- New gaming demographics, such as the "hard-off" player: hardcore mobile gamers off their normal platform, and are more than twice as likely as average consumer to buy a mobile game.
- Casual games are the most popular for mobile, leading to the "cardcore" player: hardcore casual games players. Sprint's top Bejeweled player has logged 44,171 games in 2,025 hours, and the average of top 100 players is 750 hours. For the World Poker Tour game Sprint offers, players start with $2000. 17 people already have over $10 billion, 61 have over $1 billion, and 675 have over $1 million.
- The market is immature, so it's important to exceed customer expectations with great games and a complete experience so they'll both play again and tell their friends.
- 8 pillars of mobile gaming business: quality, partners, , attract, pricing, carrier, but the three most important are exceed (exceeding customer's expectations), megarg (acronym for make every gamer a repeat gamer), buzz (what happens when you succeed on exceed and megarg)..
- Exceed: games must exceed customers' expectations, which are the bar by which they judge everything. For example, Sprint offers two very similar tennis games. One is branded with a famous player's name, and the second is not. The unbranded game ranks 88 places higher in user ratings, and the branded version is next to last.
- In-fusio's VP of game design says "the definition of a fun game is the one that is able to tap into the emotion of the player so that he/she is compelled to automatically press 'start' again. There is some new hook (and it can be simple) that keeps me coming back. The two biggest reasons people stop playing mobile games is lack of interest and poor overall quality of game play.
- Megarg: Make Every Gamer A Repeat Gamer. New customers are great, but let's keep the ones we have. Look to the customer for feedback and direction. For one game, Sprint's ratings partner had rated a game 8.6, whereas the average customer feedback from 400 votes was 6.1. Evaluate games from the player point of view, not just employees, people in the office, and professional reviewers. To that end, Sprint has a review board of 10-15 customers to look at games. The focus needs to be on what customers feel about a game. Do they feel cool? wowed? happiness? warmth?
- Buzz: Consumers will spread the word about good games if we give them the opportunity. People don't buy games because of brands or technology -- they buy them because they're fun. Customers become "mini-evangelists" if the focus is on great games. 21% of mobile game customers heard about a game from a friend (74% heard about it from a carrier). The highest rated games in Sprint's game lobby have the lowest churn.
- Sprint did a study by geographic area of games downloads, and it could see tiny pockets with high download rates, a phenomenon they put down to people spreading games among their friends.
- Carriers don't always understand what has to happen in developers' business for them to be successful. Conversely, developers don't always understand carriers' business -- these misunderstandings cause much of the conflict between the two. For instance, games are just one thing carriers market to customers, not the only thing.

From the Q&A:
- Multiplayer is being used increasingly as an aspect of mobile games, rather than their top characteristic.
- The "predominant" force behind deck placement decisions for Sprint is customer feedback.
- Sprint wants to see the industry grow through alternate distribution channels (premium SMS, etc), but wants to make sure they're done in the right manner and don't alienate customers through things like unclear subscription plans.
- Sprint's policy is that for a game to be billed on a subscription basis, it has to have a service element -- no monthly payments simply to keep the ability to play a game.
- The phone's biggest advantage over portable devices like the PSP and DS are that people have their phone with them all the time.

Hello Helio

One of the MVNOs I met with at CTIA, SK-Earthlink, has rebranded, and is now going by "Helio". It's still planning to launch in the spring here in the US, and hasn't given many details on its content or pricing strategy yet, apart from saying it will target 18- to 30-year-olds with high-end devices and advanced services.

It's early, but the company is still saying all the right things. I missed the news a few weeks ago (PDF) that they hired away the director of design from Danger -- that's a good move as well. The Hiptop isn't without its faults, but its UI and industrial design certainly isn't one of them.

Spot The Base Station

I saw this on Digg earlier: Can You Spot The Hidden Cell Towers?

Nothing new or earth-shattering, but some relatively amusing pictures of base stations and antennas hidden in palm trees, cacti, or, my personal favorite, big plastic rocks.

RSS Has Moved

I've moved the RSS feed for the MMB over to FeedBurner, so please update your subscriptions to http://feeds.feedburner.com/MobileMusicBlog. Thanks.

Intel's New Location Based Technology Needs Useful Applications

One of the big problems with technology is the prevalent attitude that just because something can be done, people will find it useful. It's best seen in engineering-led cultures where there's a feeling that "all that marketing and usability stuff can be worked out later...man, isn't this damn cool?" In other words, marketing and usiblity is the easy, common sense stuff that you put in place when you have a neat-o piece of tech.

There's an example of this that Nicolas at Pasta and Vinegar pointed me to, with Intel's new, undoubtedly, very clever positioning system. The idea is that a device connected to a network can work out where it is in relation to another device on the network. This gets round the main limitation of GPS, which requires line of sight access to a satellite and which is absent in most offices.

It's certainly neat-o and doesn't require a huge investment, as the network is already there. Nice piece of thinking, guys.

But that's where the idea runs out of steam, as there were no compelling ideas about how to use this at the press conference. The examples they give are just rather boring, quite frankly, such as being able to continue a conference call on your tablet PC when you need a cup of coffee and switch it back to your desktop. Or getting an alert if your dog leaves the yard. Hmmm.

There's two ways of inventing technology. Firstly, you to look at user behaviour, identify a problem and then look to invent something that'll solve it. To take an example, when cars were invented, we needed better roads, so the roads were built. No one started building roads in the hope that someone would find a use for them ie that cars would be invented to go on these new smooth, shiny highways.

The other way is to invent something cool and clever and hope there'll be a use for it. That's how, for instance, Post-It Notes came into being. 3M accidentally invented a low-tack adhesive (they were looking for a high-tack one) and one of the engineers started marking his place in his hymn book with notes coated with it. The rest is history, as they say.

There's room for both ways of approaching invention - the planned, marketing led method and the typical skunk works method. But if you do the skunk works approach, you need to go the last mile and work out what the hell it can be used for (assuming anything) and tell people. Otherwise, their reaction is "that's cool, what's next?".

In the same way that marketing and selling needs to translate features into benefits, technology needs to approach things in the same way - and that's to append the phrase "which means that..." to the pitch. Take this example; "So if we have this really cool way of locating a device on a network....which means that you can grab a coffee during a conference call." Is this a compelling application? No - let's try again.

If you're coming up with cool technology, why not give it a try? "...which means that" is a powerful little phrase.

.mobi -- How To Make A Bad Idea Even Worse

Both Russell and I have said we don't like the idea of the .mobi top-level domain. It's the wrong solution to the wrong question -- while mobile Web usability is an issue, it's not one of mobile-only sites vs. powerful mobile browsers. The way forward is a better understanding of Web and information design for mobile users, coupled with a smart browser, that gives them access to whatever content they want -- not just content created specifically for mobile devices.

Now, .mobi threatens all that. We've questioned the idea of creating a "mobiles only" part of the Web, but now it's even worse: unlike any other top-level domain, owners of .mobi sites will be forced to follow a set of "best practices", which the .mobi administrator, mTLD, will develop along with the W3C. This could set a dangerous and, frankly, stupid precedent that allows TLD administrators and registrars to be the arbiters of content and conduct on the Web.

The implications for mobile are a little different. mTLD says the motivation for .mobi is to "enhance and improve the ease of use of Internet-based mobile data services through discoverability and predictability, as well as, speed and delivery to market." That sounds really nice, but it's a bunch of bull. Adding another domain doesn't make things easier at all for end users. All it does is add another possibility users will have to remember when hunting for somebody's mobile site -- is it mobile.XYZ.com, or wap.XYZ.com, or XYZ.com/mobile or XYZ.mobi?

.mobi really is a wolf in the sheep's clothing of usability. Look at the companies behind the proposal and mTLD: three infrastructure and device manufacturers, then the GSM Association -- the trade group of GSM carriers -- and five major operators: 3, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia Mobile and Telefonica Moviles. The operators will use .mobi and the usability red herring as the basis for the next generation of walled gardens.

The argument will be "We only want users to access sites on their mobile devices where they'll have a good user experience. Therefore, they'll only be able to access our own portal, and .mobi sites." Why would they do this? Because through the "best practices" owners of .mobi sites must follow or lose their domain, they can exercise control over the content people view -- and more easily bill for it. And by limiting access to content that follows the rules laid down by this supposedly impartial third party that says it's beholden just to users' best interests, they can avoid the claims of unfairness that dog letting people access content only from providers that have paid for portal placement.

"You can't access that content you want because we're looking out for your best interest," will be the party line.

It's great to act as if you're concerned about usability, but .mobi won't do anything for end users. It's just a trojan horse for operators to, yet again, try to exert unwanted control over what their users do. Having to give their users open, unfettered access to the Internet is most operators' worst nightmares, but it's the consequence of trying to be both the bit pipe and the content provider. It's so typical of operator thinking -- instead of doing anything to make their services better so people will choose to use them, they just try to eliminate the choice altogether. .mobi is a trojan horse designed to do just that.

Location Based Taxis Meets LBS Advertising

Ringo has launched a model that attempts to combine two different ones - ZagMe meets Zingo. It's not auspicious that neither predecessor worked terribly well, though both sounded damn fine ideas on paper.

Ringo allows you to order a Taxi based on your location. You dial "*TAXI" on your mobile. Ringo then tracks where you are, identifies the nearest free Taxi to you and sends it round to collect you. Great idea!

Then while you're in your cab, it sends you advertising for businesses in the immediate location. This is based on the frankly rather gimmicky "Cost per Radius" concept ie the closer your taxi's drop off point to the advertiser, the more the advertiser gets charged. So if you're within 351 feet or more of the advertiser, you get charged 5c, ranging up to 25c for within 50 feet. Advertisers can specify both the maximum cost per ad they want to pay and a daily budget (like Google's AdWords, which they invite comparison to).

Ads can be sent to the phone or printed out in the taxi, if the advertiser wants a paper-based fulfillment option.

As I say, all this sounds terribly logical. Except that Zingo - another service that allowed you to order a location-based cabs - essentially failed, being sold off for £1 after millions were spent developing the system. You can read my analysis, subsequently validated by the founder here. But the basic problem was failure to sign up enough drivers, leading to serial disappointments on behalf of the users. Once users have been let down a few times, they simply give up.

For this sort of model to work, simultaneous critical mass of users and suppliers is crucial. Users need to know that when they order a cab, it arrives. Cabbies need to know that it's worth their while doing, as there's lots of users gagging for the service. This simultaneousness is incredibly difficult to achieve.

ZagMe (which I was involved in founding) was a location based marketing play, that did achieve much success before running out of funding. It didn't help that we ran out very soon after the 9/11 thing either. Having said that, we recruited 85,000 users and ran 1500 campaigns for some blue chip and independents and learned a lot about location based marketing. Sorry, if you're sick of me writing about it, but if it has escaped your notice, ask for my free white paper on the whole story.

The main trouble with ZagMe was that it was far, far too early - it's still too early in my view, which if I'm right doesn't bode well for Ringo's secondary business model.

But, the key issue here is recruiting enough paying advertisers to make the business model work. Where the Ringo model does make sense is that the users are primarily travelling in a Taxi, as opposed to waiting with baited breath for an ad to arrive. Therefore, user acquisition isn't such an issue. Although, presumably, they will have to get users to agree to accept the ads and offer some kind of targeting over and above the location.

As an example, if I agree to get an ad and it's for women's shoes, it's going to piss me off for wasting my time, more than encourage me to rush into the store. Result; pissed off customer who won't use the service in the future and pissed off advertiser who has just wasted the cost of the ad and pissed off Taxi driver who won't be sharing the thousands of dollars of commission she was promised.

Edward DeFeudis, is the President and CEO of Ringo, and has been dreaming of boundless wealth being delivered by the Ringo model. Here's his calculations:

"Our revenue estimates project that our vehicles will each print one coupon per trip with 10 trips per day at an average of $0.15 per coupon. Assuming that we achieve our goal of 100,000 vehicles, our CBR ad model will generate an extra $150,000 per day or $54.75 million per year in addition to our basic taxi and tow transportation services increasing our total projected annual revenues to over $127 million."

As any wet-behind-the-ears VC knows, this is not a remotely feasible way of calculating revenues. There are four HUMONGOUS hurdles to this;

Finding enough advertisers - it's going to be unbelievably difficult to find local businesses who understand enough about marketing to get this concept. Based on my experience, it simply won't happen.

Cost - even if you find advertisers, they won't pay this kind of cost to start with.

Location - even if they have a raft of advertisers, if you factor in time and location, the chances of the taxi dropping off someone within 350 feet anywhere in the US, that has an advertiser signed up on the correct tariff and who wants the traffic at that time of day, must be millions to one against. The math is far too complicated for my humble brain, but I'd go so far to guess that it's actually billions to one against.

Taxis - how are they going to get the 100,000 vehicles he blithely mentions? Zingo struggled to get 1,500 in a city the size of London.

So, I'd say likely revenues will be in the region of peanuts for the foreseeable future from the location element. Maybe they'll have better luck with the Taxi-calling side of things, but unless they've worked out where Zingo went wrong, that doesn't look too promising either.

Sorry, I can't be more positive about Ringo. But shoving together one failed and one inconclusive business model just means a greater chance of failure as far as I'm concerned.

3 Launches $10 3G Handsets

UK 3G operator, 3, is about to launch two Euro 9 ($10.75) handsets into the Irish market, according to The Sunday Times.

Signing up for its Euro 60 a month package ($71.74) entitles you to either a Sony Ericsson K608i and the NEC 338. This undercuts Vodafone by c. Euro 40 for the SE model.

While heavily subsidised handsets are nothing new in the industry, it's interesting that 3 is resorting to the only tactics that seem to work for the company - discounting the hell out of its products. It famously struggled in its early marketing in the UK by trying to persuade us that we should all go 3G to get mobile video calls. Finally, they were forced to abandon this and simply offer cheap voice rates.

Of course, signing up subscribers with attractive price-led packages isn't necessarily a poor strategy. If people sign up to one thing (cheap voice calls or handsets) and then discover all the other compelling benefits of using your service, they may remain loyal in the future. However, if your service has little to differentiate it from that of your competitors', price-led activity leaves you very vulnerable as users will simply switch to cheaper offerings as they emerge.

It's too difficult to say if 3 has a compelling and sustainable competitive advantage, but my current feeling is that they probably don't in comparison with the fearsome competition in the UK and Ireland.

Time will tell.

Mobile Sousveillance Does It Again

We've had some debate of what's the proper term for sousveillance/ coveillance/ equiveillance, but I'm pretty sure this is sousveillance -- a youth in London filmed a cop putting his friend into a garbage can.

Textually and The Times call it "a twist" in happy slapping: apparently a couple of police officers went to a park where some kids were supposed to be throwing conkers (horse chestnuts) at people. The two guys started filming the police, and wouldn't stop, and one of them ended up in the bin. That must be some of that new community-based policing people are talking about...

Anyhow, they've got the video, and are considering legal action, and the cop's under investigation too. The lesson here is that nothing is really secret anymore -- everybody's carrying a recorder of some kind around.

If Car Companies Employed People from Telecoms

Carlo and I have been kicking around what would happen if a car company only employed people from the telecoms background. This is what we came up with.

1. New cars would come with wheels that you need to change before you can drive it on A roads and you'll need to reconfigure the brakes before they work.

2. Ads for every car will promise speeds up to 450 miles per hour.

3. Access to gears 4, 5 and 6 will be hidden.

4. Changing lanes sometimes makes the car stall.

5. Running costs are a closely guarded secret. But what is clear is a surcharge if you exceed 8,000 furlongs and 3 chains a month and driving your car outside your country of residence makes you eligible for a very nasty surprise indeed.

6. You can listen to the radio -- but it costs extra.

7. When you buy a car, you have to promise to keep it for two years, during which you can only use one brand of fuel - although some shady garages will "unlock" your car. You can also refuel over the air, as well as garages but over the air costs twice as much as it's so convenient and cool.

8. Every car converts into a submarine, a hair dryer, a solarium, a sauna, a cooker and a toaster. The main benefit of car ownership becomes "she sure makes grrrreat toast".

9. You'll notice quirky little changes in the car controls depending on the manufacturer. Some cars put the gas pedal on the left, some favour the traditional right - with hilarious results!

10. Come on... you have a go. Leave a comment with some ideas!

(Pic from Car Art Agency).

So, WAP isn't Crap After All

According to the BMRB Internet Monitor 49% of 20 - 24 year olds in the UK have used the internet on their mobiles and 21% of all users have bitten the bullet.

This is pretty amazing considering:

- Many, many phones still come with the wrong settings. This means that the purchaser either has to change them or just give up at that point. Be very afraid if the head of engineering at an operator ever switches career and starts designing cars - you'll be expected to put the wheels on yourself.

- WAP marketing promised the earth, such that even a broadband type of speed and experience would have been a little disappointing. The sloooooow speeds and painful waiting around was just awful.

- Even now, there's actually surprisingly little content that looks good and is easy-to-use over WAP. The vast majority on web pages aren't optimised.

Now admittedly the survey is only looking at sampling - in other words, users may well have tried it, only to die of boredom during the process. However, the Mobile Data Association shows around 1.8 billion page impressions a month now and this is still growing at abut 24% year on year, so clearly many are finding the service useful enough.

With 3G speeds, the mobile internet is not only going to get better, but it'll really start to resemble a small screen version of a broadband connected computer. At that point, someone of any age will be unusual if they didn't use the mobile internet.

The way this scenario will eventually play out is that the mobile will become the primary way most of us access the net and I think this'll happen within 5 years.

Via The Big Picture

Cleaning Out The Links Drawer

Time once again to clean out some links that have piled up again. Here goes:

TechFaith: A Firm Grip On Handset Design - A short BusinessWeek article that's interesting reading about TechFaith, one of China's leading handset design companies. TechFaith employs about 1,800 designers and engineers (that make an average of $1,000 a month) that churn out handsets for 9 of the top 10 Chinese manufacturers as well as NEC, Kyocera and Mitsubishi.

Freeware support from Symbian" - One of the big concerns about the implementation of the Symbian Signed program was that it left small and individual developers out at the expense of "security". Well, no more, apparently. Freeware developers will be able to get their apps signed for free.

KDDI's EZ Channel - Wireless Watch Japan has a video about the EZ Channel video offering from KDDI that offers 30 different "channels" of video content that delivers clips to subscribers late at night and early in the morning. It's hard to make a judgment on the content, but the delivery is interesting -- the clips are transmitted when there's excess network capacity and then stored on the user's handset for whenever they want to watch.

The Mobile Device Detection Problem and Transcoding sites for a mobile can be tricky - A couple of posts for Charlie Schick that are good reading for anybody that wants to develop for the mobile Web.

Vodafone Australia changes 'Mobile Internet' pricing from kb-based to time-based - I'm no fan of per-KB or per-MB data charging, but time-based is about the dumbest thing I can think of.

New Toy

I got a new phone last week, a Sony Ericsson K750i. I thought maybe it was time to stop using smartphones for a while and go back to a featurephone. I've been really impressed with the UI on the phone, and for mass-market I really like it a lot better than Nokia's Series 40. The only issue thus far has been finding non-game Java applications, but I've found 2 winners in Opera Mini and WorldMate.

Anyhow, I'll put up some further thoughts on it after I've used it some more. But in the meantime, feel free to share any tips, tricks or cool programs in the comments.

Gizmondo's Launch Package

A while ago, we looked at both handheld gaming wannabe, Gizmondo, firstly questioning their strategy and then looking at some very dodgy goings on in terms of management remuneration and benefits.

On the eve of their US launch on Saturday, Chris Morris at CNN has got his hands on a device and is singularly unimpressed too. The game portfolio is poor, controls are errr.....poor, video playback is pretty poor too. See a pattern emerging here?

But the thing that beggars belief is that they're "launching" without any retail support. Oh, they do have 14 stand-alone kiosks in malls around the US. So that's OK then.

Call me naive, but how on earth can the management justify their million dollar packages, with performances like this? And why on earth would people keep investing in this company?

I'll leave the last word to CNN, lest you think I exaggerate. Bear in mind that Gizmondo is priced at $150 more than the PSP, for its unsubsidised model:

Regardless of whether the Gizmondo's launch is in stores or online, it probably won't make a big difference. The system is sub-par. The games are barely worthy of mention. And the extra features just won't appeal to the gaming audience the company is targeting.

The Secret To Mobile TV? Bigger Bullet Holes.

A couple of posts over at MocoNews this week caught my eye and joined up in my head. The first mentions how a prominent media figure in the UK is starting a company to buy up rights to distribute TV and video to mobiles, even though he's got no idea what the business model will be -- which also seems a roundabout way of saying he's also got no idea if it's going to be successful. The second points to an NYT article that says content producers are equally clueless about what will work for mobile video, but that the producers of the "24" mobisodes found out that wide shots don't work and that they had to double the size of the bullet holes and use more fake blood.

Two different angles, but the same point: nobody's got any idea what's going to work. This shotgun approach, though, doesn't really seem to be the best way to figure it out, but it seems about on par with the creative thinking that comes out of the entertainment industry these days. There are a few problems here, all stemming from a lack of understanding of how the mobile device fits into people's personal media landscape.

People's media devices -- TV, computer, DVR, stereo, iPod, phone and so on -- all need to be a part of the same pool of content. I listen to music on my computer, stereo, MP3 player. I play DVDs on my TV or on my computer, and TV shows come from my DVR or BitTorrent. The idea that any one of those devices or any of that content are their own islands doesn't fly.

Modern media is about control. I control what I consume; I control where and when I consume it, and how. Mobile, especially mobile TV and video, has to fit in to this. Video content only accessible on a mobile phone is generally pretty pointless. I want access to my content, not just what somebody decides to give me. This doesn't give live TV broadcasts a free pass, either. If people are already looking to time- and place- shift "normal" TV, tying them to broadcasters' schedule on their mobile phone probably won't work either.

The idea that people will maintain different and separate sets of content for different devices is outdated and outmoded. Everything's got to work together. The sooner people pushing mobile video and TV realize this, the better off they'll be.

Ads on 3

Continuing the "ads on devices" theme, Tom Hume writes that 3G UK network operator, 3, are planning to become an advertising channel as part of their new strategy, in addition to the See Me TV move that Carlo reported yesterday.

The idea is to open up their 3.2 million users to targeted advertising, which might include Push as well as Pull.

Previous experiments with downloadable video ads for the iPod and cult film "It's all gone Pete Tong" led to 100,000 and 160,000 downloads respectively. (By the way "Pete Tong" is Cockney Rhyming Slang for "wrong" - it wasn't a documentary on the DJ, as some reported).

This represents about 3 - 5% of the user base, or even as high as 8% if there was no duplication between the two, which admittedly seems unlikely. However, it's also worth nothing that the novelty effect will have inflated results and the more videos are available, the more competition there'll be. So I'd expect average response rates to fall off pretty dramatically. Of course, skilled advertisers might still achieve even better numbers if the ads are truly great and have real viral potential.

This level of pull-based response is pretty impressive, even though, as I wrote earlier, the number of brands who can create this kind of work is going to be pretty limited. In particular, making ads exclusively for a channel that gets 100,000 views is going to severely restrict production costs, unless it can be proved that these 100,000 are super-sneezers. In other words, they go out and show it to all their friends, who transfer it to their phones (via an unrecordable channel like Bluetooth) and they go on to do the same with their friends.

Having said that, while it may pain ad agencies hugely, we don't have to look at high production values to produce an effective ad, especially given the medium. How much do you think Ringtone Dancer or Numa Numa cost to make? I'm guessing nothing in either case, though admittedly, they weren't hampered by a brief to sell product.

So much for pull based stuff, but 3 claim that they're going to look at push based marketing too, or that's what I take this to mean; "customers willing to receive communications that correspond with their interests could be targeted directly".

This is a dangerous game to play if it's not done incredibly well - it's not something they should attempt half heartedly. Even assuming permission is granted, wrong targeting or poor timing of the message quickly turn it into Spam. And if they're perceived to be spamming, permission is withdrawn permanently - there are no second chances in mobile marketing.

At the very least I hope they've read my White Paper on this area :-) Drop me an email using the link on the top left, if you'd like a free copy.

Original story via The Guardian.

Ads on the iPod

There's been tons written about the launch of the iPod with video and especially the deal with ABC to sell popular TV programmes via iTunes for $1.99. You can download episodes like Lost and Desperate Housewives the day after broadcast.

On the surface, this seems like a clever move for ABC. They can make the sale twice - firstly via their network and secondly via iTunes. Plus, they can put their customers in danger of acquiring programmes legally.

But the major impact this is going to have, assuming it takes off, is on the already beleagured ad industry.

Not only are they effectively locked out of the channel, as the situation currently stands. But if it's represnetative of things to come, it appears to kill off the idea of advertiser-funded or subsidised content via these new channels - mobile included. This is because at $1.99 a programme equates to a mind buggering $1,990 CPM or cost per thousand viewers. This is way beyond any brand's budget that I can think of.

Since ad-funded content has oft been mooted as a possible way forward for mobile, this must be seriously worrying.

In fact, according to Reuters last night, advertisers are already worried by this and are starting to come up with some increasing wild ideas. This includes pressurising ABC to leave in the ads, as originally broadcast - which conflicts with Apple's statement that they wouldn't allow ads on the iPod. But then they said that they wouldn't launch a video iPod either, so this could just be a negotiating stance.

Other ideas include offering a subsidy to viewers if they watch an ad first. This has regularly been tried as a model and always fails, but I come back to the point above, that no advertiser could possibly afford to meaningfully subsidise programmes at these cost levels. Do you think people would be interested in a 10c subsidy on a $1.99 purchase, for instance? I don't.

A possible future for some advertisers might be to offer ads that are so good, viewers will want to download them to watch without another incentive. I can see this happening with work of the quality of this new Guinness ad, for instance. But brands that lend themselves to this kind of execution are few and far between - there's no hope in this approach for Joe Soappowder.

Are we going to see a return to advertiser-created content along the lines of the old, original soap opera? Or perhaps huge growth in product placement, such that advertising and content can't be separated on the iPod, mobile or by the PVR?

Certainly these things will be tried.

But I suspect that this model is now broken and beyond tweaking or repair. The future will belong to marketers who understand this and seek to engage with their audiences using new and altogether different techniques.

That Didn't Take Long

I pointed out last week a company's new offering that tracks users' content on mobile networks and gives them rewards if it gets passed around by other users. Today, as part of its "new strategy", 3 UK announced See Me TV that pays users 1p every time their video gets downloaded by another user.

Users upload a 30-second video clip, which then gets put on the channel with other submissions, and every time somebody clicks, the user gets a penny (which is then PayPal-ed to them once they've racked up 10 pounds -- or 1000 downloads). 3 gives a few details about navigation, saying the clips will be divided into categories, with the most popular clips at the top of the menus -- which sounds like it's going to be the content deck scenario all over again, where the top entries get all the clicks. I'm assuming there will be a way for users to send "check this out" messages about specific videos to their friends as well.

The press release also mentions "editorial guidelines" -- which presumably means the videos will be reviewed to make sure they're not happy slapping vids or something. Seems like if this takes off, that would be an awful lot of overhead.

"Now" You Can Respond To Mobile E-Mail With A Voice Message

Mobile e-mail company Visto says that it will add the ability for users of its mobile e-mail service to respond to messages with a recorded voice message. "Voice is the next logical step in the progression of mobile email, providing mobile professionals with the freedom to choose how to communicate, depending on the situation and the business need," says the company's CEO.

Um... hasn't this functionality always been there, pretty much since the beginning of mobile phones, let alone mobile e-mail? It's called a voice call?

ShoZu Your Photos to Flickr

I've documented the problems of MMS many times and two of the central problems always come back to ease of use and cost.

ShoZu might just solve these issues, making it much easier to upload your photos as you take them on your camera phone and share them with friends and family.

ShoZu is a simple application you can download to your phone. Once installed, it offers to upload a photo to your Flickr account every time you take one. It's as simple as that.

Assuming (and it's a big assumption) that your phone's internet settings are correctly enabled, that's all there is to it. No complicated installation or software to learn. And no costly MMS charges - just the cost of the data transfer one time and you can share photos on the web and via email.

I don't know what the business model here is. It's a free-to-download application currently, so maybe the plan is to sell this once the product has moved out of beta stage. I'm also a little surprised they don't offer a choice of the more popular photo-sharing sites - Flickr might be the darling of the chattering classes, but there are others like the insanely popular WebShots, as an example.

It's also interesting that they've gone for a B2C model, unlike Cognima, who have focused on providing white label services that do pretty much the same thing. Cognima raised $12 million in the Summer to expand.

I'd say the value in the chain here is a B2C play, if they can make it happen. B2B invariably gets commoditised, squeezing margins until someone comes along with a way to make it happen cheaper than you're prepared to do it.

Mobile Marketing Toes A Fine Line

All About Mobile Life points out a cool marketing campaign for the movie The Ring 2 (which looks to have ended some time ago, as the movie came out on DVD in August). It's the sequel to a Japanese movie called Ringu, the plot of which is basically there's this freaky video, and anybody that sees it dies within 7 days unless they can solve its mystery.

When somebody visited the promotional Web site for the film, they could enter the e-mail address and mobile number of a friend, who then got an e-mail directing them to the site to watch the trailer. When they started watching the trailer, they'd get a call on their mobile, and when they answer, a voice whispers "seven days". Yeah, I think that would pretty much scare me into code brown.

A little digging makes me realize that yes, the campaign isn't new, but it's new to me, and All About Mobile Life raises a good point -- that while they think it's a pretty compelling idea, they'd be pretty pissed off if anybody gave their mobile number to some ad campaign. I would be, too, really, no matter how good the ad was or what I got in exchange. My number is my number, and I and I alone should decide what to do with it.

This illustrates the biggest problem with mobile marketing, or at least most implementations of it. It's got to be permission-based, regardless of if that fits with the campaign or not. If it doesn't fit, change the campaign. While I think the use of people's numbers here is pretty borderline in terms of what's acceptable, I'm not the one with the brand on the line. Anecdotal experience tells me, at least here in the US, mobile spam still isn't a very big issue for people -- and that's the way it should stay. It's one thing when your Hotmail account gets bombarded with messages for sketchy porn sites and herbal Viagra. But it will be another when well-known, supposedly reputable brands begin sending unsolicited messages to mobile phones. The reaction will be far, far worse.

More Stupid Phone Thefts

If you're going to steal a mobile phone, I guess it would be a good idea to make sure that it didn't belong to a high level US diplomat and that it wasn't GPS enabled and thus couldn't be tracked back to you.

But that's precisely what happened to two Bulgarian policemen, according to CNN. U.S. ambassador, John Beyrle, left the mobile by the x-ray machine in Varna Airport. The policemen pocketed it and denied finding it when the ambassador phoned to ask.

When the phone was tracked, it was found still in the policeman's pocket.

Irakli, who sent the story in (thanks!) also raises a very interesting point, inspired by a comment on Fark, which said:

Who the hell steals a cell phone? Maybe in Bulgaria they're worth something but normally the only value a cell phone has is if it has a sex video on it.

In other words, the phone is useless as means of using it for free calls etc, as it'll be shut down anyway. And also, who do you phone, as you'll be leaving evidence pointing back to you?

So is there a value to the content it might contain? That home-made porn video or your other half scantily clad. Or even ringtones and other content.

It's an interesting question, but I don't seriously think that gangs of criminals are targeting mobile phone content as we write. Besides which, it seems a pretty hit and miss affair, unless I'm innocently assuming that home-made dirty movies aren't on practically everyone's phone out there.

But, it could be something to look out for in the future. Samsung announced today the first 3 gigabyte memory phone, which can therefore contain an awful lot of content, ranging from a music library to a couple of full length movies.

This means that potentially, the value of the content (assuming it was acquired at retail value) could quite soon easily exceed the value of the phone itself.

Interesting thought that....

E-Plus' MVNO Strategy

German carrier E-Plus says it will launch a new prepaid service aimed at Germany's sizable Turkish population, with calls and texts to Turkish phones costing the same as to German numbers. James Enck beat me to the punch on a few points: I can't think of another example of this sort of no-brainer MVNO (though apparently it's been available in Belgium for two years when it's a tactic providers of international calling cards have been using for a long time, and one some VoIP providers are turning to as well.

The bigger issue is how it fits in to E-Plus' overall strategy. The carrier launched two other sub-brands (are they MVNOs when they're owned by the network provider? I guess that's just semantics) earlier this year: Simyo, which only sells SIM cards online with cheap calls, and Base, which sells flat-rate voice and text plans. One thing you hear when talking about MVNOs is that they're not necessarily competition for carriers because they target a niche market that a physical carrier might not be able to adequately serve. But it looks like that's exactly what E-Plus is starting to do by identifying markets it could better serve with new sub-brands.

Mobile operators don't seem to like segmentation much, beyond perhaps positioning their prepaid and contract offerings at different age groups. But it's a viable strategy, and one they don't necessarily have to leave to outside MVNOs.

BT Launches a Whole Range of Terribly Boring LBS Services

What is it with Location Based Services? Knowing the pretty exact whereabouts of a person (or at least their phone) seems a pretty exciting concept, but no one seems to be able to actually translate this information into something that sounds even vaguely interesting to the user - or works from a conceptual point of view.

BT have launched a whole range of LBS stuff today and frankly, I can't summon up the energy to even yawn about them - unlike young Hayden McNamee pictured here. According to Net4Now, BT will be wholesaling LBS to its mobile operator and ISP customers, for them to sell on to the end user. Included in the range is:

- Child and elderly people tracking
- Traffic and directions
- Find my nearest things like ATM's, supermarkets and Petrol/Gas stations.
- Employee spying (actually they call it "tracking")

Child tracking, as I've written before, is founded on two basically wrong assumptions.

The first is that in the distressing case of an abduction, the kidnapper doesn't know that the phone can be tracked. The first thing they do unfortunately, is dump or switch off the phone. So any peace of mind about that use is false.

The second assumption is that such services track the child. They don't. They track the phone. Therefore, if you're using it to spy on your kids, all you're doing is monitoring where their phone will be - which most kids can work out pretty quickly will be where they are meant to be, even when they themselves are miles away partying and doing drugs.

Old people tracking? For the life of me, I can't see why the elderly might consent to be tracked or why others might want to track them. It's not as if there a major crime wave inpensioner-napping. And if they're the kinds of people who get lost regularly, shouldn't they be cared for in a different way altogether?

Feel free to educate me on this one.

Yes, traffic and direction, if you don't have a nav system in your car can be useful, in extremis. But hardly exciting.

Find my nearest apps have been around for a while now and frankly, there isn't much a demand for them. Most people spend most of their time in an area they know ie where they live and work. And even if they wander out of this zone, do they really need to ask their mobile where the ATM is? In most towns in the UK, you only have to wander about 100 m in any direction to come across about 10 of them.

And how often, are you driving along in an area you don't know, do you have sudden urge to hit the supermarket?

Which leaves employee tracking services, that I've written about before too.

So while it's laudable that BT are deploying LBS, they really need to go back to basics and ask why anyone would want to use any of these services, at least on more than an occasional basis. But coming up with answers to this, probably needs a type of creativity that would not typically be found working in a large corporate like BT.

So they should be asking others to help them come up with the applications for LBS, leaving BT's considerable engineering skills to develop and deploy the resulting applications that people might actually want.

i-don't Quite Get It

Both Tom Hume and James Enck have posted pictures and post about some of O2's i-mode ads in London. The "i arrive soon" in James' example seems kinda silly, but the one Tom saw (similar to the one pictured here) is a bit more troubling: "i am faster than wap". As Tom points out, why would O2 want to associate i-mode with WAP? They've gone to great lengths with their Active portal to distance it from WAP, so why call it up with i-mode? What made WAP suck wasn't just that it was slow.

The feeling I get from both of the ads is that O2 is overestimating the power of the i-mode brand. I doubt a lot of average people in Britain (or whatever smaller set of those O2 is targeting) know what i-mode is. And they still won't have any idea after seeing this, unless they remember to visit the i-am-i-mode.co.uk site tucked down there in the corner. If they do visit that site, they're told what i-mode is and why it's so great -- but why not show people? The general impression of mobile data services (no thanks to early WAP efforts) is that they're clunky, hard to use, and pretty pointless. If i-mode is so much better, make people see that and believe it. Don't just take their email and mobile number so you can send them a reminder message to come back to the site later.

If i-mode is supposed to be so revolutionary for mobile data, use marketing that expresses that, rather than some oh-they're-not-showing-anything-so-its-mysterious-and-ergo-must-be-cool-stuff. I also saw this one on the above-mentioned site. Unless they're planning on having Ian Broudie be the spokesman, isn't it a few years too late to try to follow the Japan Is Cool wave of things like Muji and Uniqlo?

(Photo from Dan Taylor on Flickr)

Mobile Music's, Um, Big Competition

The battle to be the dominant music player isn't just between the iPod and the mobile phone. A BT analyst says that soon, well, within 15 years, women's breast implants will hold chips to play music. The article originated in The Sun, which isn't necessarily the most reputable source -- but I guess if there's one thing they are familiar with, it's breasts. As they put it, "One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the woman’s entire music collection." It would then apparently transmit to headphones and be controlled over Bluetooth.

Bluetooth, huh? Sounds like it could start a "boobjacking" fad.

First Carnival of the Mobilists

We're delighted to host this first edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists, which aims to showcase some of the best writing on the web about mobile. You can read more about the idea here.

So without more ado, let's get stuck in.

I'll give pride of place this week to The Pondering Primate, not just because it's a great post, but because he contacted me from his hospital bed to make sure he was included. That's commitment for you! On your behalf, I wish him a speedy and successful recovery, a return to his pondering posts and those ridiculously hard Iron Man contests of which he is so fond.

As he's been bed ridden and unable to blog this week, we've raided his archives and revisited We Interrupt This Broadcast.... in which he ponders the future of advertising in the mobile phone context. This vision closely ties in with what I believe will happen as the mobile becomes the tool to link the real world and the digital one.

We interviewed Mark Curtis about his new book, Distraction Culture, a month ago and Mark has a blog of the same name. This week, he's been looking at Orange's new UK interface for some of their phones, asking why bother, if it's not a significantly better usability experience. For instance, accessing an sms now takes six clicks, whereas the old interface took just one.

Dorrian Porter is a blogger I haven't come across before, which is what the Carnival of the Mobilists is all about. Dorrian's post is an exploration of how we might use digital tools in the future. One school of thought is that we'll all be wedded to one device. Dorrian takes another approach and suggests that we'll have many devices and simply use the one that suits our purpose and need at the time. But because all our information will be stored on the web, we'll be able to access it from a plethora of devices.

Definitely worth a read.

From a relative newbie to one of the most well-established names in mobile blogging - SmartMobs. Inspired by Howard Rheingold's book of the same name, the blog is multi-authored by a talented team of contributors. This week's contribution is from Gerrit Visser, who brings our attention to an interview with a senior source at the BBC, which is looking at integrating blogs more centrally into their news reporting.

Where the BBC leads, others tend to follow and this could well be the way of the future.

Meanwhile, Oliver Starr, writing at my former home of The Mobile Weblog has put forward this post. Oliver writes a mash up of predictions for mobile technology, based on his own observations and the thinking of analysts, Bob Egan, Service Director of TowerGroup Emerging Technologies and Craig Mathias, Principal of the Farpoint Group.

All the predictions are interesting (Linux cleaning up in the mobile OS battle, which I certainly believe), but the one that caught my eye most is "Location Based Services will be "Huge Huge Huge" for both business and personal use", which has been very much my stance for the last 5 long years of false starts, operators failing to deploy the technology and market scepticism. I really believe that this is coming to an end and we may well see some real action now.

Nice one, Oliver - The Mobile Weblog will be hosting next week's Carnival of the Mobilists, by the way. Drop me a line if you'd like to host soon.

Troy Norcross really hates spam - and I mean really. So much so that he writes a blog called Mobile Marketing & Spam, dedicated to best practice mobile marketing. His post this week introduces the concept of "TRVR (phonetically that's Trevor in case you were wondering) And TRVR is Timely Relevant Valuable and Requested". And all push marketing communication is spam if it's not TRVR.

Mobile marketers take note.

I wrote my first book (actually, my only book, so far) with Ajit Jaokar and it's great to see his subsequent publication, Open Gardens, written with Tony Fish, do so well. This week, his blog of the same name, revisits one of the ideas in the book - an OpenWaspa.

Ajit's looking for feedback on the idea, so make sure you pop over and help. But the basic concept is that OpenWaspa solves a number of key problems in the mobile development market, including helping developers find mobile operator partners.

Rudy de Waele, writing at Random One, has been looking back at September 2005 as the month where Fixed Mobile Internet Convergence finally reached its tipping point. While the Skype/eBay deal arguably grabbed the headlines, there was a whole bunch of announcements and deals to make it a real landmark month. "Mobile as we knew it is gonna be definitely different from now on..."

Jim Hughes is another mobile blogging veteran, with his Feet Up blog and he looked at the surprise Nokia launch of the E Series. This includes "the Blackberry slaughtering E61 (killing doesn’t begin to sum up this niche destroying device)".

If only Nokia had the same flair for publicity that Apple does, we might have seen quite how momentous this launch actually is.

And finally.....one of the ongoing discussions that's being passionately debated is the issue I wrote about yesterday - the Separatistas Vs the Convergionists. This thread is being followed at i-mode Strategy too, with an interview with Mike Gauba, academic and consultant. Mike is a Separatista - or at least an Anti-Convergionist, which is a slightly different thing.

On the other side of this debate, one of the leading clergy in the Church of Convergionists is our old friend Tomi "ha ha" Ahonen who controversially wrote on his blog, Communities Dominate Brands, a post called "2006: the year the i-Pod died". Tomi preaches a classic Convergionist sermon, which is certainly where I come from too.

There's a debate going on at Forum Oxford (free to join) if you'd like to follow it or contribute to it.

Whoops, I nearly forgot! Our favourite MobHappy post this week was Carlo's Digital Vs Actual Memories, which has also attracted many comments from our readers. Carlo had these deep thoughts at a recent Coldplay concert - well, you have do something to beat the boredom.

That brings us to the end of this week's Carnival of the Mobilists. I hope it was interesting/enjoyable/stimulating and introduced you to some posts you may well have missed. Everyone involved would love some feedback, so please, please leave a comment and let us know what you think. Especially how it can be improved.

Next week's Carnival of the Mobilists will be at The Mobile Weblog. Send your entries of your favourite post from your blog about mobile, by 9.00 pm Pacific Time to mobilists@gmail.com.

Thank you all - bloggers and readers - for making this happen!

The Real Threat To BlackBerry

Nokia released its version of the BlackBerry-killer today -- three of them, in fact. It launched the "E Series" (presumably E for Enterprise) with three Series 60-based handsets, one fairly standard candybar setup, and 2 with full keyboards, one a flip model along the lines of the 6800 series, and another looking pretty much like a BlackBerry or Treo. Different form factors for different tastes -- something that took RIM a few years to figure out and something that goes along with what Sony Ericsson was telling me about the demand for Java productivity apps.

The form factors aren't what makes this a threat to BlackBerry, nor the Nokia badge. It's the platform agnosticism when it comes to push e-mail. The E Series devices support six push e-mail platforms (BlackBerry Connect, GoodLink, Nokia Business Center, Seven Mobile Mail, Seven Always-On Mail and Visto Mobile), and of course, anything else that comes along with a Series 60 client. This means users, or more importantly, their corporate IT departments, aren't tied into BlackBerry (or any other provider's) service. Having a large installed base of BlackBerry devices, compatible only with RIM's service, is a good lock-in. Should a company want to switch, they've got to replace a slew of devices -- but not so with the E series and other platform-agnostic devices.

Ah, but Windows Mobile can do this too, you say. That's true, but the success of BlackBerry and its much, much simpler OS versus Windows Mobile indicates that while people want powerful data capabilities on a BlackBerry-style device, they want something that works more like a phone -- meaning there's a big opportunity in the space for Series 60 devices.

It should also be pointed out that the E Series are compatible with Avaya and Cisco IP PBX systems by virtue of Wi-Fi connections. Of course, there's a BlackBerry that can connect to PBX systems and do email over Wi-Fi... but it doesn't have a cellular radio.

Mobile Inventor Warns Against Convergence

There are two schools of thought about mobile.

There's the Convergionists, who believe that all devices will end up converged into one. And the Separatistas, who believe that one device can't possibly do anything as well as a specialist one and that people will continue to prefer to own lots of devices to do different things. Debate between the two parties can be as passionate as any political hustings.

Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone back in 1973, has come out firmly as a Separatista purist this week at the Global Mobile Congress in China:

"The application of 3G is a universal device. One device will be all things for all people. That's a wrong picture. It turns out that when you use a universal device, it doesn't do any one of these things very well," Cooper said.

He's right, of course - but he's also fundamentally wrong in his conclusion. How so?

It's unlikely that say, an MP3 player or a camera in a converged phone will be as good as their specialist counterparts, certainly when they're first launched. But that's missing the point. The functionality on the converged device just has to be good enough.

For the vast majority of us, who don't use many of the functions on our gadgets and who can't tell the difference in sound quality between a phone and an specialist MP3 player, good enough is always going to win over perfect, if it means that we don't have to carry two devices.

That's why Nokia is the world leader in digital camera sales, when the first camera phone was only launched 5 years ago.

That's why I no longer own an alarm clock. That's why I no longer own a calculator. That's why I haven't switched on my PDA for 18 months.

That's why the iPod will die as a mass market proposition within 3 years.

That's why side-loading of MP3 players (as opposed to downloading over the network) might be the way for the foreseeable future.

Good enough is what technology is all about. It's a very powerful concept.

Call for Entries to Carnival of the Mobilists

We announced last week The Carnival of the Mobilists - a weekly celebration of the best writing about mobile in the Blogosphere.

We're delighted to say that the idea has been very well received and we already have half a dozen entries for the first Carnival on Friday. If you're a blogger about mobile, you have until 9.00pm Pacific Time tonight to send your entry in to mobilists@gmail.com.

Don't forget we still need volunteers to host the Carnival, although we do already have several bloggers signed up.

And don't forget to check back here on Friday to read the best writing on the web about all things mobile.

I Have Seen The Future Of Mobile Content...

... and it's blue, apparently. Lots of companies are lining up to sell mobile porn -- with unclear results -- and today brings news that sex advice videos from "The Lovers' Guide" will be available on 3 UK. Despite my generally gloomy outlook for mobile porn (I'm still struggling to come up with "use cases"), I actually think this one might work out pretty well.

The videos are 30 to 60 seconds long, not only in line with the preference for bite-sized content, but short enough to sneak in when somebody might really need it. The mobile phone is a pretty good delivery mechanism for the content, too. It's an intensely personal device, not one that people tend to share and one that can be taken somewhere a bit more private that a big PC or TV set, and the content is easily disposable -- all things that could lower the potential for embarrassment people might feel accessing this kind of content. (Thought I guess all those could apply to porn, too...)

But mobile's also an interesting platform here because of the potential for recurring visits -- if the service is set up so that users can quickly and easily find the relevant information, I'd think there's a decent chunk of 3's users that would check in time and time again. The thought of a subscription service, even, with regularly sent, um, advice, makes the mind boggle.

I noticed The Lovers' Guide also have "The Young Lovers' Guide", which appears to be a little more standard sex-ed fare than the version for adults. This seems like it would be a good fit for mobile as well, particularly since it offers young people a sense of anonymity when accessing it. I guess this isn't porn in the strictest sense, but maybe my pessimism in sex-related mobile content is unfounded. Maybe.

Creating A Mobile Music Ecosystem

I've still got some stuff from CTIA I haven't covered yet that will trickle out for a while. One such topic I've been meaning to write about was based on my meeting with some of Sony Ericsson's developer relations folks. One thing that struck me during the conversation was how they're trying to build an ecosystem for developers around mobile music, not just using it as a tool to sell phones. They've done something similar with 3D Java games -- making support for it standard across most of their line, then encouraging and supporting developers to use it.

To do the same thing with mobile music is a fairly novel approach and one that's unique as far as I can remember. Most manufacturers' support for mobile music thus far focuses on playing back sideloaded music, or more often, supporting a carrier's paid download service. But there's far more to mobile music than that, and getting developers on board to create some music-centric applications will give the mobile music market a boost overall, whether it's streaming radio, song recognition, or anything else.

Some other random bits and pieces from talking to Sony Ericsson:
- They're seeing non-gaming use of Java on the rise, particularly for productivity apps. It's trickle-down from smartphones, primarily as a lot of business users want smartphone-like capabilities in featurephones.
- On the company's Fun and Downloads site that has games and wallpapers and the like, they get far more visits to the WAP version than their web site, and the biggest increase in downloads in the first half of the year there was from China.

ITV Goes Mobile

New Media Age reports that ITV, the UK's largest advertising-supported TV network is extending its reach into mobile.

ITV already has an initiative it calls "Beyond the Spot", which aims to sell advertisers and agencies other forms of marketing over and above the traditional 30 second spot. No, not 60 second spots, but stuff like Broadcast Sponsorship, Online Sponsorship and Branded Content.

"Beyond the Spot" will now include some mobile offerings, with the principle objective of enhancing 30 second slots by allowing the viewer to intereact with the ads. This includes functionality like mobile coupons, entering competitions and offering product samples.

My question is: what's taken them so long to offer this? SMS has been mainstream for 5 years now and the technology for running these kinds of services has been available for that period too.

Better late than never, I s'pose. Now all they have to do is get agencies to understand what they're talking about and we might see some interesting joined up marketing initiatives at some point.

However, the fact remains that the average Creative Director can't get his/her brain round technology and is still deeply wedded to old school TV advertising. Until agencies start employing people who are fluent in both marketing and technology, rather than one or the other, we're not going to see real marketing innovation develop.

I still see no signs of this happening to any great extent, so I think the mobile ITV initiative will be doomed to run (if anything) yet more "Txt and Win" campaigns, where the most creative thing the agency comes up with is dropping the "e" from "text". Wow, that means that they must really be in tune with the yoof of 2day.

Mobile Controlled Kettle

British tea maker, PG Tips, and mobile operator, Orange, have teamed up to launch a mobile controlled kettle, according to New India Press.

The idea is that you can sms your kettle (the ReadyWhenUR) with the command "Switch on" and it err...switches on and boils - assuming you've remembered to fill it with water. Then when you get to the kitchen, the water is already boiling and ready to make your tea.

Apart from being a good joke present this Christmas for tea addicts everywhere, does this have any value? Not really, but it could be a sign of things to come.

In its current format, if you're in the house anyway, it's much simpler