MobHappy

Mobile Auction Site

Hunt For It is a new UK mobile auction site, where people bid via sms for listed goods and services. This makes sense, as most auction addicts know that being away from their PC at a critical moment can be fatal.

But in an interesting spin on other mobile auction offerings, they share revenue with sellers, based on inbound sms volumes. Their website claims this is 5p (9c) and the press release is 2 - 3p. But whichever the figure is, it could mean that you could get back your listing fee and more if you go with them, though listing is currently free. It's certainly not going to generate much of an income though, judging by the number of bids most auctions seem to get.

A quick visit to their website though, quickly illustrates their core problem - or any entrant into the auction market, for that matter. Namely, the paucity of current listings emphasises the symbiotic relationship between buyers and sellers. In other words, sellers want lots of potential buyers. But buyers want lots of sellers to choose from. So unless or until you can offer many buyers and many sellers at the same time, you have a big problem. This is why it's so difficult to challenge eBay, as many competitors have found out.

I know that Hunt for It are very new and it's perhaps unfair to point out how few auctions are currently offered. But, this symbiotic relationship means that it's actually really hard to get further than they are today.

As an aside, the other killer feature needed by an auction site is Trust. Having bad links on the site (click "Contact Us" brings up a page about insurance) and with a Help page yet to be written doesn't inspire any level of trust and they need to sort out some basics.

Will the mobile angle crack this market for Hunt for It? I doubt it, I'm afraid.

Story via Net Imperative.

Woof Woof! What a Pig!

Next time you're out and about and someone's phone starts barking at you, it's probably because you're both using True Blue Love's MoSoSo Bluetooth application.

The idea is that people download an app to their Series 60 Symbian, complete a profile saying something about themselves and who they're looking for. Then they choose an animal that best describes their mating habits (hound, bird, ape, moose or pig).

When their phone detects someone in range (10 metres) with a matching profile, that's when your chosen animal lets rip.

True Blue Love has more of an exploratory, arty feel to it than a commercial product, but that's not to say a lot can't be learned and maybe applied to future commercial iterations.

Story via Pasta and Vinegar, where I also recently learned a new piece of jargon - the WOMBAT. No, not another noise on True Blue Love's application, but Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town? What we used to call a Buddy Finder round these parts, when I were but a lad.

Mobile is the Key

Auto-Txt have launched a new car security system, which uses your mobile a supplementary key. The car won't start unless the owner's mobile phone is also present - identified by Bluetooth.

The system, which also includes other features like GPS tracking and remote disabling, is thought to be so secure that it's achieved the highest classification available - Thatcham Category 5, which is a new and comprehensive security assessment.

It's not cheap (£430 purchase/installation and £160 annual subscription - $747 + $277), so it's not really a mass market proposition, in my opinion.

This is especially interesting as it's pointing the way of the future, where your mobile will be as much proof of identity, as a personal communication device.

On one level, you'll use your mobile as a key to get into your house, car or office.

On another, you'll use it to access all your personal data stored online (files, photos, email and the like). Sometimes, you'll want to do this by synching with a keyboard and monitor, but the point is that it won't matter where you synch, as it'll be the phone which will determine access and layout of the display. When someone comes along 5 minutes later and synchs with with the same keyboard, it'll be their files and layout that will be shown.

The other way the phone will be used as proof of ID, will be making payments with the mobile, which is a market that's slow to gain traction, but will happen when someone finally gets the basics right.

Of course, the problem with this scenario is that if you steal someone's phone, you have stolen their identity. Apart from the security nightmares this potentially represents, imagine the huge inconvenience of losing your phone - you won't be able function at any level until you have a replacement.

The big advantage over today though is that all your information will be stored on the network, so you'll just get hold of a new phone, log in securely and you'll be back in business. Quite an improvement over today's painful (sooo, painful!) upgrade process.

Assess My Breasts Goes 3G

UK lad's mag, Nuts, is launching its Assess My Breasts website over 3G. Girls are invited to submit videos of their err.....bare, naked jiggly bits, for viewers to vote on, along the lines of an adult version of Hot or Not?

Initially it's only available on UK network, 3.

Not safe for work.

It's remarkable how this kind of thing has moved from "adult" to "a harmless bit of fun" in the eyes of so many people - including the girl contributors, without whom this just wouldn't be possible.

I still can't see this happening in the US, but stand by for loads of copycatting in the UK and parts of Europe.

Via Brand Republic.

Another Year, Another Carphone Warehouse Content Portal

There are many ways to count the passing of the years; birthdays, holidays, Hogmanay - or Carphone Warehouse announcing a new mobile content initiative.

For those of you outside the UK, it's difficult to exaggerate the importance and success of CPW and how it dominates the UK mobile phone retail scene. It's made founders Charles Dunstone and David Ross phenomenally wealthy and it tends to stride effortlessly from one success to another.

Except in the mobile content business. They've launched a succession of such ventures over the years and poured quite substantial amounts of money into them. Mviva (JV with the mighty AOL back in 2000. I can't tell you how arrogant Mviva were to deal with, which might have something to do with its demise). But then we had ringtones.co.uk and EPOSS, a JV with payment specialist Bango.

And now, according to MocoNews*, we have another pretender to the content thone that will "go head to head with content portals from mobile operators such as Vodafone Live! and O2 Active".

What's interesting about the succession of err...flops (sorry) in mobile content is that their relationship with the customer doesn't seem to allow them to leverage this into selling content - and don't forget, in many cases, this relationship includes direct billing to the user.

There's a number of reasons why this could be the case, but I think it's probably something to do with the impulse nature of mobile content purchase. People tend to buy on impulse from ads they see in the media and while everyone's been trying, there's very little evidence of loyalty towards one provider.

Please correct me if you know better.

So no matter how much loyalty the user feels towards the CPW brand and how much they'd definitely return to buy their next mobile, it's not ever going to get on the content purchase agenda without investing in some way of putting their offering constantly in the face of their customers.

One way might be to emulate the success of their competitors and invest and reinvest in a never-ending media campaign. Another might be to claim some space on the handset real estate and try to constantly promote that way.

I think that this is a case for the Java portals we heard so much of last year and which, as we suggested at the time, never seem to get to market as marketers realised how complex Java development is. However, a constantly refreshed magazine-type format developed for selected handsets could well prove a winner for merchandising mobile content, if executed well.

But like all these things, it's the execution that's key.

* The original source for the story is the excelllent New Media Age, written by Justin Pearce. Here's the link but you need to be a subsriber to read it -which I'm not unfortunately.

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.

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.

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 to simply go into the kitchen and turn the kettle on, than sms the command to the kettle. And if you're out of the house - on your way home, for example - wouldn't it be better to come home and check there's enough water in it before starting?

However, I think we can expect to see the mobile increasingly used as the cliched "remote control for our lives" - opening garage doors and house doors, possibly controlling appliances and acting as virtual wallets. I doubt these commands will be via sms though, no matter how much the operators would like them to be. It's much more likely to be by hot keys and/or RFID from both usability and cost of use angles.

Apple to Launch Smart Phone?

Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, has said (via CNet News) that it's only a matter of time before Apple launches its own Smart Phone.

This is interesting as it means that they're probably not doing it in partnership with an established player - well, certainly not Motorola anyway. Zander presumably wouldn't be foolish enough to disclose this information if Motorola had been asked to cooperate, whether or not Motorola wasn't the successful bidder. But he does know much more about Apple's thinking than the man on the street, due to the long history between the two companies and the recent launch of the i-Tunes phone.

I certainly think Apple are capable of designing and building a world class smart phone.

The problem, however, is likely to be distribution of the handsets, once they've been built. This, as we know, is the function of the operator in this channel of distribution. Operators will be less than welcoming if the new Apple phone still proposes to use the iTunes side-loading model of music download - and Apple would be crazy to consider launching a phone without music/iTunes. This is because there's no operator revenue model in this scenario - operators still think people will pay 3 times the price of a downloaded song, just for the convenience of direct download.

If nothing else, the wildly underwhelming Motorola iTunes phone has shown that operators were very reluctant to take it on for this very reason.

But there is an intriguing possibility for Apple and one that I don't think any other brand in the world could try. How about going direct to the user, with the proposition that they stick their own SIM card in the Apple phone?

Apple has their own distribution (retail and web), marketing savvy and fanatical user base to make this route to market work. Then, they simply don't have to worry about operators at all.

This scenario clearly does have its customer support and technical issues (who does the user contact if their phone is unsupported by their operator?) but it's one that I bet Apple are considering.

Gizmondo Follow Up

Last week I posted about some corporate shenanigans at handheld gaming platform maker, Gizmondo. The gist of the story was that despite apparently not achieving too much so far, the directors still managed to pay themselves million dollar salaries, buy luxury cars (one worth nearly $250,000) and pay family members for their services.

It seems that I wasn't the only one to notice these err....irregularities. The day after my posting, the company made another SEC filing announcing a bunch of remedial actions designed to clean up its act going forward. This includes the appointment of three outside directors, who will oversee an audit committee and a compensation committee, respectively.

It also announced that the Chairman has repaid the consulting fees paid to his wife and the payment he accepted as part of his compensation package to settle private legal fees. This is to "to avoid any appearance of impropriety" apparently. He also repaid a $4.5 million licence fee Gizmondo had paid to a company in which he has a part ownership "in order to avoid any appearance or doubt of impropriety..... pending the determination of the special committee of the fairness of the transaction to the Company".

What I want to know is what happens to the car?

Seriously, what does seem to be clear is that Gizmondo is cleaning up its act and I'd speculate that this was under pressure from investors, rather than an entirely voluntary act. It's difficult to imagine a management who signed off on some of these deals suddenly having a Damascene conversion all by themselves.

And the fact remains that even if Gizmondo becomes cleaner than a babbling mountain brook, there's still big questions about their product. It's over-priced and trying to take on a bunch of incumbents who are aggressive and well established.

Next Week @ CTIA

I'll be in San Francisco next week at the CTIA show, delivering news from the show floor and the slate of interviews I've got lined up, staring Monday. So be sure to check back early and often.

P2P Live Video Streaming

First we had P2P music sharing, then video and film (via BitTorrent) and now we have P2P live TV streaming, according to the Big Picture.

It seems that some clever Chinese engineers have figured it out and now you can watch live TV on your broadband connected PC.

This is bad news for subscription channels, as it means we can all watch their broadcasts for free. And as music and video sharing have proved, these new technologies spread faster than a fast thing. Indeed, BitTorrent is said to now account for 35% of all traffic on the net.

The other victim will undoubtedly be Big Sport. Indeed, the driver in China so far is English Premiership Football - unfortunately only with Chinese commentary so far, but you could always turn the sound off and listen to Radio 5 Live or something.

But it's going to be difficult to negotiate multi-million dollar exclusive broadcasting rights, when anyone can now easily watch for free from anywhere with a broadband connection.

Like the music industry, TV companies will be slow to wake up to this new threat. But it amazes me that they don't do something - like at least allow a legal channel to develop quickly. If I want to watch The Simpsons current material in the UK, I either have to wait for two years and take out a subscription to Sky. Or I download it free on BitTorrent. If I want to pay a fair price - like $5 - or even an unfair price, I can't.

One of the main reasons why Napster took off was because there was no legal alternative at the time. And it looks like the TV companies are going to make exactly the same mistake. Doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result each may not be the definition of madness Einstein claimed. But it's certainly bloody stupid.

And the Winner of Hype of the Year is....

The tech sector seems especially prone to hype - it's difficult to imagine that say, the ice cream cone industry suffers from quite as much hyperbole and over-claim.

So to really stand out and become a Super Hyper, you really have your work cut out.

But my nomination is the mobile anti-virus industry, most of whom have spent this year attempting to scare mobile phone owners into rushing out and buy their products - otherwise your phone will turn into a zombie and eat all your relatives and turn your brain to mush, or something.

Actually, all their stories are characterised by wild headlines, only to conclude that actually, one virus has been found "in the wild" on a whole continent. My favourite was this one where the CEO of a software company caught the virus and disinfected it with anti-software, provided by one of his anti-virus partners:

"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," [he] said.

This is a man whose company makes and sells software, by the way, not some techno-ignoramous.

It rather came to a head yesterday with Sophos, another anti-virus company finally getting fed up and issuing a "why don't you just shut up and get back in your box?" kind of statement and describing the latest claims to be "bonkers" (via Silicon).

While it is possible to get mobile viruses, the average user is more likely to get one than I am to ride to work this morning on a dolphin - and I live in land-locked Germany. And even if you do get one, you still have to agree twice to install it, so you have to be unlucky as well as stupid, so you're probably not long for this world anyway.

One day, mobile viruses will be as big a problem as they are for PCs, but we're a long way from that right now.

2 Billion Mobile Phones

This weekend, the 2 billionth mobile phone was connected, which is a pretty important milestone for the industry and for our very society too.

Another slightly mind buggering stat is that it took 20 years for the first billion and a mere 3 years for the next.

The world population is only 6.5 billion, so Nokia are forecasting slightly slower growth - the next billion will take around 5 1/2 years, they reckon. Meaning that sometime in 2010, around half the world's population will own a mobile phone - and probably considerably more will have access to one. This level of technology penetration is simply unprecedented, as it bestrides both developed and developing nations. Is there anything else that comes even close?

Many great fortunes lie in wait for the entrepreneurs and investors who make the right bets. Just as many great companies will crumble away unless they accommodate the rapid changes that are already in train.

One of the old guard with perhaps the most to lose as the world changes from PC-oriented to mobile-oriented is good old Microsoft.

VC, Fred Wilson, has an interesting post speculating that MS has already used up 3 of its corporate lives and he wonders if they'll do it a fourth time. Fred thinks that the driving force behind this is open source, but I think that's only a symptom of the changes that are going to happen. Much more fundamental is that the mobile will become the primary way we access digital information and MS doesn't even really have a toe-hold in mobile.

Fred calls the next phase on technology Web 2.0 but I think it's actually Mobile 2.0 and once you get your head around that, you can start to understand that "paradigm shift" begins to look like an understatement, such as describing Everest as "quite a big hill".

Brad Feld, another highly respected VC, inspired Fred's post and it's worth checking out too. Brad says that products like Vista and Office 12 will make 2006 the year of Microsoft. That may indeed be the case. However, unless they start seeing the way the mobile wind is blowing, it's likely to be their swan song.

The iPhone Cometh - Yawn

Well, I guess we should say something about the iPhone, though there isn't a lot to say, other than wow, the Nano's damn cool, don't you think?

So as predicted here in August 2004 the iPhone has come to market. It's worth noting that way back then, the launch of such a thing seemed very unlikely. Big Steve was vehement that Apple weren't going into this market and it was some time later than some other pundits started to believe it might happen.

But after many missed deadlines and mucho hype - the BBC was even speculatively predicting it yesterday morning - it launched like a damp squib. Actually, if I was Motorola, I'd be pissed off today that the phone was launched at the same time as the Nano - it's a bit like introducing a supermodel and her rather plain cousin to a playboy. His eyes aren't going to be on the cousin, that's for sure.

What is surely the big missed opportunity here is the interface. What makes the iPod such a genius and iconic product is its usability. Merely slapping an iTunes button onto a so-so phone, which is already rather out-dated seems to have missed the point completely - despite the bonhomie and backslapping of the launch.

But it is important as while the ROKR itself might disappoint, it is the way the market's going to go. Sure, there'll be people still carrying MP3 players around in five year's time. But most of us will be listening on our phones.

Global 3G Tops 50 Million

One of Bill Gates' favourite sayings is that we always overestimate progress in the next two years and underestimate it in the next 10. This has certainly proven true for the launch of 3G, which has only now just passed the 50 million subscriber mark, according to an announcment today from the UMTS Forum.

The largest markets are Japan (16.5 million), Italy (6.5 million) and the UK (4 million) and there are a total of 75 networks.

The early years of 3G, in Europe anyway, were dogged by poorly designed and clunky handsets, appalling battery life, technology that didn't work (I never made a call on 3's network that wasn't dropped at some point) and a curious obsession with promoting video calling. None of this led to much success, funnily enough.

In Europe, 3 have found the only way to shift handsets is to offer voice and data packages at a huge discount to the incumbents. But despite this, they've still managed to get higher ARPU than their competitors.

The real problem with 3G is that the operators haven't worked out why we should buy a 3G phone - what exactly are the benefits and how will my user experience be improved over GPRS? This is partly because no one has developed the applications that need 3G speeds to justify themselves.

Traditionally, such applications have come from entrepreneurs and indie developers, not from operators themselves. And in Europe certainly, these smaller players have been deprived of investment cash in the last 5 years.

However, this may well change, as there are signs from the US that the VC community is beginning to get hyped by mobile and I can foresee an investment boom or certainly a mini-boom about to happen.

Time for people with real mobile experience to head over to the US, which is where the mobile action will be in the next 5 years.

SemaCode and Wikipedia

Picturephoning reports that Semacode have launched what they're calling SemaPedia.

Semacode, the company, make codes, along the same lines as QR Codes or Shot Codes. While the underlying technology may vary, the result is that you take a picture of the code with your camera phone and you're taken to a specific site.

In the context of the Wikipedia, you can fix a code onto a physical object and "click" on it by taking a photo, to reveal the relevant entry in Wikipedia on your phone. I have described how this might work in my post "A Manifesto for Taking Wikipedia into the Physical World" and presented it to the Wikipedia conference, Wikimania.

So you could say I've been championing the idea. In fact, as far as I know, it's originally my idea (though I'm sure someone will be able to say that they thought of it in 1976) and I should therefore be delighted to see it brought to life.

However, I don't like this at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wedded to any technology and indeed, have made the point that physical markers like this are probably only a bridging technology until something like Siemens' Virtual Graffiti arrives on the scene, that automatically "sniffs" out virtual links.

And the more tech companies who promote this idea, the more widespread it'll become, which is great.

But to try to brand the Real World Wikipedia concept with a company's name is completely unacceptable, implying an ownership of the idea that simply doesn't exist. Wikipedia belongs to everyone and this is entirely against the spirit of the movement.

Personally, I also don't like the Wikipedia-derived page design of their website as it implies an association and endorsement that I don't believe exists. It also omits the crucial feature of Wikipedia - the one that allows readers to edit it - which somewhat misses the point.

So, Semacode, please fix this as it'll only do you PR harm if people think you're trying to hijack a much loved institution. Change the name and clarify the site and then feel free to carry on this exciting project to universal applause.

I'm going to send this to the guys behind the project and see what happens.

PSFK Interview

Irakli (a fellow immigrant Munchener) interviewed me last week for PSFK Trend and TRND, a sort of German language equivalent.

The interview is actually on their subscription site, IF. But whether by design or some worm hole in the space:time continuum, you can read it here if you want. Well, you can when I'm writing this anyway.

That's me, by the way, in the photo. No comments please, it's not Hot or Not.

Happy Blog Day

Today is Blog Day, in case you missed it. A day to celebrate blogs and blogging everywhere.

The idea was thought up and promoted by Nir Ofir of SparkArmada blog and jolly good it is too.

There's two components:

1. If you're a blogger, list 5 blogs on your site that you enjoy and think your readers will too. Flatteringly, Nir recommends MobHappy in his 5 - thanks Nir!

It's better if they're newer blogs, or less well-known, as it would be frankly rather boring for everyone to recommend blogs you probably know about and read already.

I also haven't included any of the 14 Essential Blogs available on our Free RSS Reader for your mobile.

2. Tell a non-blog reader about blogging - just send them a link by email to a site you think they'll like.

I'd also add a third point - why not switch to subscribing to your favourite blogs by RSS, if you don't already? A blog reader like BlogLines is free to download and very easy to use. See what Seth Godin wrote yesterday.

OK, here's my 5 blogs in alphabetical order (pause for much head scratching):

Alfie's Blog - Alfie Dennen is the man behind a top UK moblogging site and OrgasmaTones. Always an interesting snippet or two or some original point of view.

Blueserker - Long live the niche! This site just writes about unusual Bluetooth stuff, with narry another headset review in sight.

Distraction Culture - Mark Curtis has been around the UK digital scene for ever and this is his blog. Always original, thought provoking and insightful. I'm interviewing Mark about his new book of the same name later this week.

Musings of a Mobile Marketer - Helen used to work with me at ZagMe and has carried on with hands-on mobile in the UK. This makes her a veteran of the mobile scene. Her informed observations and ability to "see it like a user" make her required reading for mobile marketing enthusiasts.

Pasta and Vinegar - Quirky kind of art-meets-academia-meets-location stuff.

Sorry if you didn't make, but I deliberately selected the smaller guys, for a change. And sorry if you're included and a actually a mega-blog blogger - no disrespect intended. I just used the number of BlogLines subscribers as a rough, rule of thumb size measure.

So there we go - Happy Blog Day to you!

Update by Carlo: I'll stick mine here, too. These things have gotten more difficult now that I'm working with some of my favorite writers, like Russell here and Mike Masnick at Techdirt. I'll try to stick to Russell's rules and post some perhaps lesser-known favorites:

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect - With fear of misdescribing what exactly it is Jan does, his blog features photos from around the world showing how people use their mobile phones and how mobility is working its way into society -- generally in interesting and/or unexpected ways.

Lifeblog - Charlie Schick - Charlie was te marketing manager for Nokia's Lifeblog product until recently, and his blog was sort of focused on it, but as he's poking around looking for his next project, it's become much more generalist on mobility and marketing. But that generality hasn't made his blog less interesting, it's made it even more so.

Line of Site - Steve works for Feedburner, so he's got consistent insights on RSS and mobile, which is handy. He's also got good taste in music and is a soccer fan, which helps too.

Tom Hume - I'm breaking one of Russell's rules by including somebody in our top 14, but I really like Tom's blog. It's the perfect combination of very focused writing and interesting links.

PinkDome.com - Covers Texas politics with all the snark they deserve. So named PinkDome for the pink granite used to build the capitol building.

The Remorseless Rise of VoIP

A new study by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) makes worrying reading for mobile and fixed line operators alike.

The research found that users of retail VoIP services had more than doubled in the last year, from 5 million to 11 million at the end of July. But this doesn't include computer-based services, like Skype, which claims to have 51 million members worldwide.

And Google Talk, launched last week will inevitably boost the market further, even if pundits are disappointed with its features. However, if it works properly, it's hard to argue that it's not going to succeed, even if it never catches Skype.

If VoIP starts to tip, which seems pretty inevitable, as it's hard to argue with "free" or savings of 80% for retail services, it's going to inevitably impact on operator revenues. The OECD predicts that fixed line operators will fight back by offering more chargeable services, such as domestic and small business wi-fi networks putting more pressure on their mobile cousins.

When a business is faced with a fundamental change like this, it can do one of two things. Hope it'll go away. Or offer their own version of the service to keep its customers, uncomfortable and suicidal though this may feel. But at least the latter course allows you to retain the customer albeit at lower margins than you enjoyed historically.

So far, most operators seem to be taking the denial route, or maybe they're just waiting for the right time. I hope hope they don't leave it too late.

A footnote in the OECD report also has bad news for TV companies. As more and more people start to view TV on the net, this will lead to a decline in audience and thus ad revenues.

"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese curse allegedly says.
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Location-Based Mobile Media Course

Just because operators in Europe are reluctant to get into location-based services and their cousins in the US are dragging their heels over implementing Directive 911, doesn't mean that the rest of us have given up on LBS.

Pasta and Vinegar reports that The University of Southern California has launched a Location-Based Mobile Media Course, for students who want to find out more about this area and who may well be the true visionaries of what LBS can deliver in the future.

The course, led by Julian Bleecker (pictured) promises to be pretty hands-on, requiring students to "design and develop a project that addresses the opportunities presented by locative mobile and pervasive media concepts". I'm sure that they'll do better than the current rash of kid and employee tracking. Yawn.

One of the course papers is worth a read if you're into this area - The Geospatial Web: A Call to Action. What We Still Need to Build for an Insanely Cool Open Geospatial Web by Mike Liebhold. In this, Mike explains the true vision of what this is all about:

We'll be able to view and utilize tags, pages, and graphic data about places far richer than the current yellow pages and commercial POIs (points of interest): environmental details; live, in-place cultural information, entertainment, and games; history, mythology, and social information about people nearby; geodemographics; micro-local commercial information; safety information based on data about health, accidents, and crime; political data, facilities details, and local public services; physical objects' material composition and origins; links to manufacturers' sites and help desks; instructions on uses; stories about prior use; user annotations; digital graffiti; user-created art; and location-tagged messages.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

SMS Voyeurism

You know how some web sites have a fascination that's almost voyeuristic - I'm thinking of things Hot or Not, still going strong after all these years.

Now there's a another one, in the form of a new feature from Treasure My Text, the sms online storage company I wrote about last week. It seems that many users are quite happy to publish their sms for all the world to see and it's rather compulsive.

Messages vary from the obscure and personal to witty or sexually explicit (and I do mean explicit!). You can even sign up to an RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest.

Treasure My Text are calling it a Slog (SMS Log) and I can see that Slogging (by which I mean reading Slogs) might be the big thing this Autumn.

Top UK Java Games

It's been 8 months now since we looked at Java game downloads in the UK, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the market has developed since then. After all, 8 months is a whole generation in terms of technical and user development in mobile.

According to ELSPA's Official Mobile Games Java Download Chart, compiled from data provided by the 5 main operators in the UK (ie Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, Orange and 3) the state of the universe looks like this:

1 LEMMINGS - IFONE
2 WALL BREAKER - INFUSIO
3 TETRIS - IFONE
4 PUB POOL - INFOSPACE
5 WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE - GLU MOBILE
6 SWAT SNIPER - INFOSPACE
7 LMA MANGER 2005 - JAMDAT
8 PITFALL GLACIER - DIGITAL CHOCOLATE
9 MINI GOLF CASTLES - DIGITAL CHOCOLATE
10 PITFALL JUNGLE - DIGITAL CHOCOLATE

There's a couple of things to note here, though.

Firstly, we have no data about how much each title sells, which is a little disappointing. It's also worth noting that a game promoted by a larger operator can sell less per user than a smaller operator, yet still be ahead in the charts. So, we really do need volumes to be able to usefully coment.

Secondly, it is only games sold via the operators. Since we've seen recent claims that off-portal sales of content have now reached about 70%, we are in theory only looking at 30% of the market here. This could be very skewed in terms of results, as gut feel tells me that most savvy mobile users and gamers would be buying off-portal, leaving the laggardly rump buying from their operator.

If that is the case, the operator chart would reflect an innate conservatism and a preference for games that don't exactly push the envelope.

So here's a call for a better chart for us play with, which would include off-portal sales too. This doesn't have to be exhaustive, but certainly some of the bigger indie games sellers and resellers.

Anyway, with that in mind, what does the chart tell us?

Well, certainly oldies are still dominating the download scene. Are they really better, or are developers failing to get to grips with the new medium of phone-based gaming? Or is it a reflection of the type of gamer buying from operators, we discussed above?

The other interesting development is the sudden arrival of Digital Chocolate on the scene, with 3 titles in the top 10. This is the company founded by Trip Hawkins, who previously founded Electronic Arts, which practically invented the modern computer game. Trip is a master of the sound bite (he describes mobiles as "social computers" and "sieze the minute" is a nice description of mobile gaming) and founded the new company specifically to take advantage of the new mobile medium, attracting some impeccable investors on the way.

It looks like he might just be able to pull off that very rare trick of creating two hugely successful companies. Sure, it's early days, but signs couldn't be much more promising.

Wikipedia Goes Mobile

Following my talk at Wikimania about bringing Wikipedia into the real world, via our mobiles, Textually reports that, using Interactiv's Java-based JOCA app, "mobile phone users are able to screen the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia within a few seconds".

This is great. Now all we need is a way to link the physical world to it and we can do what I was talking about.

And that'd be very, very cool.

Free Mobile RSS Reader Loaded with 14 Essential Mobile Blogs

This is, after all, a blog about mobile technology, in case you hadn't noticed. As such, we thought it would make sense to be able to read MobHappy on a mobile phone too.

So we've teamed up with the guys behind Free News and come up with our very own RSS Reader - FREE to all MobHappy readers - the full version costs $20 a year. Instructions for downloading are at the end of this post.

But that's not all. Our RSS Reader includes 14 other essential mobile blogs that we've chosen for your delight and edification. It wasn't an easy choice, by any means. Some favourites we left out as they weren't specialist enough, like Regine's wonderful We Make Money Not Art and the gadget people like Engadget and Gizmodo.

We only had 14 entries available, so both Carlo and I had to leave out some personal favourites. So to get round that, we've introduced a special Guest Slot, that we'll change from time to time. The first Guest Blog is Mobile Diva, Darla Mack - enjoy!

Here's a run down on the rest: 

i-mode Business Strategy. No one can fail to notice that much innovation in mobile comes from Japan. And historically, i-mode has done a lot of that innovation. It's therefore pretty essential to follow what's happening there and these guys do a great job of keeping us all up to speed with events.

MobHappy and the link blog. Well, we weren't going to get left out of our own gig :-) The link blog is stuff we think is interesting, froody or quirky enough to be worthy of your interest, but which we don't really have anything to add to.

Mobile Burn. Michael focuses on the really important stuff - with a handset bias.

Mobile Weblog. Russell started this site, but Oliver Starr has ably taken over with news and insightful comment.

MocoNews. Another highly authoritative and comprehensive news source, with some incisive comment thrown in. Sister site of the prolific Paid Content.

Om Malik's Broadband Blog. Om is highly prolific and his inside knowledge and vast array of contacts means that he's often breaking important news.

Phone Scoop. Important news and comment from the mobile world.

The Pondering Primate. Makes us think, with a constant stream of new ideas.

Russell Beattie. It's a little known fact that to be a great mobile blogger, you need to be called Russell and have a surname beginning with B. This Russell focuses on usually one quality post a day and very much opinion based. We say it's essential to know what he's thinking.

SmartMobs. This multi-authored blog, led by Howard, is a news based blog covering how mobiles are changing the world. Inspired by Howard's book of the same name, it's essential reading.

TechDirt Wireless. Carlo's other blogging gig and a must-read for mobile enthusiasts. Mike Masnick also has an annoying habit of pinching our stories - before we write them, leaving us with nothing more to add.

Textually. Emily's blog empire also includes Picture Phoning and Ringtonia which combined cover everything there is to know about mobile news.

Tom Hume. One of the oldest blogs in the UK and winner of a Net Imperative blogging award, no less. Always something new here, which you won't find anywhere else.

We may update all these from time to time and we'll certainly feature a new Guest Blog pretty regularly. You don't need to do anything to get this new content, by the way. Just carry on using the reader.

The MobHappy RSS Reader is for you, so if you think we've left someone off or would like to nominate someone for a guest slot, leave a comment or email us.

How to Download Your Free MobHappy Browser

It's pretty simple actually.

Just point your phone's browser to http://mh.mwap.at and download the application. Or if you're a download and sych to your phone kind of person, point your computer's browser here, and if you need the Palm version, A< href="http://64.122.184.169/midmh/palm/MobHappy.jar">get it here.

Most phones are supported, but it doesn't work on Verizon and if you have a Treo, you'll need to download Java. For a more complete guide to compatibility, click here.

That's it. We hope you enjoy your RSS Reader. Tell your friends!

The Fairy Tale of Flytxt and The Princess

Tall, dark and handsome Veteran mobile marketing company, Flytxt, has been engaged in a fairytale brief to handle the mobile club activities of teen and tween author Meg Cabot - creator of such classics as The Princess Diaries, The Princess Diaries: Take Two and The Princess Diaries: Third Time Lucky.

Contrary to many opinions you might read, mobile marketing is not for every product or service out there. It is not the new, universal marketing panacea and many brands should note that just because you can do something, doesn't mean to say that you should do it.

But this seems a great example of a very natural marriage of mobile marketing and a very appropriate brand. Teen and tween girls love their mobiles and are always among the first and enthusiastic adopters of sms, especially. Therefore, while sms is getting big in the US, it'll be very well established already among Meg Cabot's fan base.

These kids will also relish feeling part of that community and there's plenty of content available to feed them and add lots of value to their lives - an essential part of mobile dialogue is adding value. It's also a great way of announcing the new Princess Diaries: Volume VIII (or whatever we're up to now).

I hope that they all live happily, and blissfully, ever after.

Though I'd rather my daughter didn't find out about the club as it'll be just another excuse to watch that DVD for the 87th time.

Source: Brand Republic

3 Investing in Viral Videos

UK operator, 3, have some great ideas and some rather weird ones. Which I guess is OK, as it's better to try lots of stuff than do nothing at all - and the mobile market's just unpredictable enough that some of the less likely ones just might work.

But I'm decidedly confused by the latest bandwagon of Viral Videos, reported on by Justin in the NMA.

Viral marketing can be remarkably effective, consisting of three stages.

First, you create something that you think your target audience will find interesting or amusing enough to pass on to their friends.

Then you seed the message to a group of people you think are disproportionally likely to be sneezers ie those who will pass the virus on.

Finally, you sit back and watch as the message goes round the internet 27 times and congratulate yourself on a brilliant, highly cost-effective marketing campaign.

The medium is frequently video, but not always. Text, games and images have all been used and all worked as well or as badly as each other. Because the thing about going truly viral is that it's very very difficult to get right all the time.

Anyway, what 3 are doing is promoting their network as great way for marketers to use viral marketing via their network. But then they seem to have forgotten what viral means and talk about making viral ads available via video short codes for their customers to download. Which means that they're expecting people to pay to download advertising, right?

Well, clearly it would have to be quite an exceptional ad to get people to pay for it. But what's viral about it? Where's the sharing?

I suppose you could argue that kids might share a really great clip over Bluetooth, much as they're doing with Happy Slapping or sending the clips they've paid to download to their friends. But if that is the case (and it's far from clear), what we're talking about is using 3 as a great way to seed viral marketing campaigns.

Can anyone shed light?

Anyway, I'm off to Frankfurt and Wikimania early tomorrow as I'm speaking there at 2.30 tomorrow. If you're around, come and say Hi. I'll post a rough transcript of the idea I'm talking about (bringing Wikipedia into the physical world) here at MobHappy.

How People Use LBS

Location enabled mobile phones are still in their infancy in both Europe and the US - although there's already a significant, if small, market for handheld specialist GPS devices, made by companies such as Garmin and Trimble. Indeed, while the PDA sector is in decline as I wrote yesterday, the one area that is showing growth is GPS enabled PDA's.

According to Trimble, the 10 -12 million Americans are using their handheld GPS devices for:

• 19% hiking, backpacking
• 12% hunting
• 14% boating/fishing
• 12% off road ATV
• 11% Geocaching

As a long range forecast, as GPS becomes integrated into phones, I can see Geocaching being used pretty successfully in a marketing context - a kind of "treasure hunt" theme.

While this survey is interesting though, I'm not sure it tells us how people will use GPS, once it's packaged in their phones. It's one thing to buy a device to support a hobby (like fishing) and it's another when you suddenly find that your mobile does this groovy thing new thing that you didn't know about.

But it is another powerful example of the real world meeting the digital one and meeting at the mobile phone.

New Mobile Device Database Launches

I wrote a while back about Paul Golding's idea for giving better resources to developers about the many and varied handsets available to them. Anyone who has ever tried to develop an application for a mobile device knows that it's a complete nightmare to try to get it working across all handsets, operators and payment plans (or even some of them!) at the same time.

One of the issues is a lack of a central resource or repository of information on handsets. While Paul wanted this to be provided by operators, it was always more realistic to see this coming from an independent source and one has been launched today by Mobile Research - the Mobile Device Database.

It looks to be a very comprehensive resource, covering all operators and handsets currently sold in the US market. They'll be expanding into Europe soon too, though if they cover all markets, the complexities are a little mind boggling.

The service is available on a subscription basis, the price of which is not disclosed in the press release or on the website.

While the service sounds great, I always find it annoying when companies don't disclose the cost of doing business with them. If I'm interested, I now have to contact their sales team. If I then find out it's $5,000 a month, this is way beyond my (fictional) budget. This means they've wasted my time and theirs to produce a lead which is useless. So a guideline price would be very useful, fellas.

Or does anyone think it's a good idea to be cagey about your pricing policy? The only exception might be real luxury goods where the "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" principle might conceivably apply.

Ringtone and Wallpaper Mashups

Empowering people to create their own ringtones from templates or mashups from their own audio files is a brilliant concept, if you can get it right.

It has a number of real benefits for users. Clearly, there's loads of demand for ringtones. The end product is very viral as all their friends (and anyone else in earshot) get to hear the finished results. It's something kids talk about to each other too - most of them are obsessed with tones anyway (spot the huge generalisation). And the incumbent providers are pricing their products far too expensively - how Napster can possibly justify selling a whole track for 99c and a part-track (aka a ringtone) for $1.99, beats me. Napster is also selling tones at one of the most competitive price points in the market.

The final benefit of allowing users to create their own tones is that you're catering to the very reason that they're using tones in the first place - it's about self-expression and personalisation. With their own unique tones, they won't be just another kid in the pub with the latest Green Day or 50 Cent ringtone. It might actually feature 50 Cent, but it'll be their own mashup - which could be pretty damn cool.

So it's interesting to see the launch of the Ringtone Media Studio, from Avanquest Software. This allows you to download the software you need to  create and remix your own tones. But there's also a bonus as you can make wallpaper (another huge and profitable content sector) and edit video samples too.

This means for a one-off cost of $19.95 for downloading the software, you never need to hand over another cent to mobile content sellers. There a free trial here.

We're going to see a lot more of these types of product as the mobile content market implodes. I wonder if it's an exaggeration to ponder if ringtones could be one of the shortest multi-million dollar market sectors ever? Start-up to boom back to bust in less than 10 years? Hmm... we'll see, though there's plenty of profit to be had in traditional tones in the meantime.

The one area I wonder about with the Avanquest model is if they couldn't be a little more creative with the pricing model. Why not try a web-based subscription model, where for say, $2.99 a month, you get 5 tones and 5 wallpapers, as an example. It's just that with kids, a one off, high priced download cost might prove to be a little more that they're prepared to, or can afford to, pay.

Story via Mobile Burn.

Taxi Aggregator Launches

Crane Dragon appears to be a London, England based company founded by a bunch of bright, successful guys (no women on board - bad news) to create start-ups. A kind of next-gen tech uber-VC, that invests its own money in creating next-gen tech ventures. Very cool.

Except, I'm sorry to say, that its first concept is doomed - just my opinion obviously - which doesn't bode well for its future.

Texxi ("the taxi you text") is a Demand Responsive Transit Brokerage system. In other words, this means that if you want to order a taxi, you text in the Post Code of your destination. Then, Texxi's server aggregates your details with other travellers who want to go to the same place and confirms the taxi driver's name and badge number and tells you and your fellow passengers where to meet up to board the taxi.

In turn, the taxi driver gets an sms with his/her new passengers' booking references and is told where the hook up place is.

This sounds pretty cool on the face of it. The Texxi user pays a fixed price per journey of £5 ($8.77) in the launch city, Liverpool, which is probably lower that they would have paid on their own. The driver probably gets a higher fare than they would normally get for the same work. Oh ...and there's some laudable environmental benefits too, of cutting down on CO2 emissions and stuff.

So what's wrong with the business model? In my opinion, it's flawed on a number of levels, from simple usability to practicality to a failure to understand human nature.

The first (and biggest) problem is the classic Catch 22 faced by this kind of business. Taxi drivers won't sign up without passengers - and passengers won't sign up without taxi drivers.

Just supposing I'm in Liverpool right now and 1. Know about Texxi 2. Remember the not-so-catchy short code of 87222 and 3. Actually know the Post Code of where I want to go.

So I text my Post Code in and wait. The question is, how long will I wait? Because even in a city the size of Liverpool, the chances of finding even one other person wanting to go to the same location at the same time is actually pretty remote - let alone three or four others, unless they happen to be with me already.

Will I wait an hour? Very unlikely, as I'm either in a bit of a hurry (hence the need for a taxi) or it's late (and I'm drunk, which doesn't make me a patient passenger able to follow instructions very well.). So after 10 minutes, I get fed up and make other arrangements, forgetting (or I can't be bothered) to tell Texxi.

15 minutes later, the taxi driver rolls up to find no one there. Or possibly one person offering £5 for a £15 journey. How many disappointments will the driver experience before giving up and slagging the service off to all his driver mates?

Hmmm.

Their next problem is Taxi Driver Inertia (TDI). We've seen this problem with Zingo, which I've written about before. Zingo is a location-based cab calling service - you call a number and it puts you in touch with the nearest London cabbie. This has equally laudable benefits for drivers and passengers - but drivers just won't sign up. This means lots of passengers trying Zingo and experiencing disappointing results.

You might try something new, like Zingo or Texxi a couple of times, but if they continue to fail to deliver, you stop trying.

New ventures need self-belief and a management team committed to overcoming obstacles. But at some point before launch, they need to take a hard look at the idea and really tear it apart - or get an independent advisor to critique it. Texxi appears to have skipped this stage in its development.

I hate to criticize new ventures, especially as they need encouragement and nurturing, more than anything else. Equally, sometimes the best advice you can give a management team is "give up now". I'm afraid that's my take on Texxi.

Pic via Taxi Bot. Story: Green Car Congress, although I have a feeling I may have read about it on SmartMobs....

RSS Feed Move

We've started a new FeedBurner feed for Mobhappy, mainly so we can keep track of how many people are subscribed. While the old feeds will still work and you're free to use them, we'd appreciate it if you changed the feed URL you're using to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mobhappy, if it's not too much trouble :)

Thanks!

Ringtone Piracy

A survey by QPass, has shown that the ringtone industry has lost $40 million since Q1 2004 and will loose a further $123 million by 2007.

The problem is that many pesky kids are saving the (free) preview tones and putting them on their mobiles.

While this does certainly happen, I suspect it's dwarfed by the same pesky kids sharing their ringtones with their pesky pals - whether they obtained the original legitimately or not. Ask any 12 - 16 year old about their tone collection and it becomes pretty apparent that they don't pay for many of them.

But, back to the QPass survey. The point of the research is to prove that there's a problem in the first place, as QPass want ringtone vendors to use a digital rights management system to protect their tones from such nefarious piracy. Like their very own Qpass Content Delivery Platform, as plugged in the original press release.

So they ran some tests:

The Websites tested included 42 mobile carrier portals and 58 online entertainment and music stores offering full track music downloads. Out of the sites tested, 40 percent of carrier sites and 31 percent of other portals such as online music stores and entertainment sites were unsecured.

So what they've proved so far is that some sites are vulnerable to preview piracy, which is an interesting fact, but one that's certainly known to anyone who studies the young mobile phone users.

But they couldn't let it rest there - they wanted an eye-catching headline, which means quantifying losses. So, as far as I can see, they made up some big numbers, doubled them, divided by 3 and multiplied the resulting figures by the Marketing Director's birthday to come up with their $40 million.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, they can't possibly quantify losses any more scientifically than this, as they're trying to measure something which is, de facto, unmeasurable and undetectable.

In fairness to QPass, their little PR sally does seem to have worked, with even even the good old BBC rushing to help plug their DRM system. While at the same time managing to convert dollars into pounds by using the Euro exchange rate, according to James at Moco News. Oh well, we can't always get everything right.

The ringtone business does have immense problems on the horizon, which includes P2P sharing and self-created tones. These will make this little problem appear as no more significant than the middle name of your great, great grandmother.

Story via Moco News. Pic of the original pesky kids via Classic TV.

Linux Beats MS in SmartPhone Shipments

Last week, I looked at the share of the SmartPhone market held between the two operating system leaders, Symbian and Microsoft. In that battle, Microsoft was being battered and outsold by 8 to 1.

I didn't examine too closely the Linux position as it was very much a niche play according to the stats I had at the time, though I did predict that this might change.

But latest Gartner stats show that Linux is now bigger than Microsoft, accounting for 14% of shipments in Q1 2005 vs Microsoft's meager 4.5% share.

SmartPhones are the fastest growing sector of the market and is forecast to account for 200 million handsets in 2008. But, there's more to this sector than just raw numbers. The real power-users and opinion leaders in mobile all have SmartPhones. I do. You probably do too - and if you don't, my guess is that you're unusual among readers of MobHappy. Drop me a comment if I'm wildly wrong here :-)

This means that Microsoft are loosing the battle for the hearts and minds in the SmartPhone sector, if they haven't already lost it already anyway.

This puts Microsoft in an incredibly bleak position in the mobile world, which will become bleaker still when they finally realise that the mobile will do to them, what they did to the mainframe - accessing the digital world by PC in 10 years (maybe less) will be a minor eccentricity, like hand writing a letter now if you're under 20.

So what can they do? With plenty of cash, I think they'll have to buy a handset manufacturer and lever their way into the market that way. The current strategy clearly isn't working and there's no real future for them in sticking to the PC. It would be like a buggy whip maker doggedly continuing to turn out buggy whips in the early years of the last century in the face of a market about to embrace the motor car.

Who will it be? Motorola or Sony Ericsson would be my bets, but what do I know?

Image from projects.Linux.Wine

 

ICE Virus Scam

Last week, I wrote about the ICE idea, where it's suggested that you prefix an entry on your mobile phone with ICE or "In Case of Emergency". That way authorities know who to contact if you're involved in some kind of incident.

This is perfectly legitmate and you should do it, if you haven't already.

But in a bizarre twist, hoaxers are trying to spread another rumour to the effect that prefixing an address with ICE will somehow empty your PAYG account. For example:

I have just received information from XXXXXXX Solicitors that there is a new mobile phone scam concerning Pay as You Go (PAYG) Mobiles.

The scam is that you are asked to set up an "In Case of Emergency (ICE) Account" on your PAYG mobile.

Apparently this is a modular system that searches for the word ICE text and then changes your phones setting and takes any PAYG credit left on your phone.

Please ensure that this information is circulated to all staff and please pass on to family and friends.
Source Hoax Slayer

I've seen similar mesages in chat rooms recirculating this kind of advice from CTOs of Global Banks.

It's rubbish, of course. Pure and simple bollox. Ignore it and laugh hard in the face of anyone who tries to convince you and walk away shaking your head sadly.

BBC Creates Virtual Graffiti

Textually writes about the BBC's latest experiment - virtual graffiti, though they're not calling it that.

The BBC have partnered with Hewlett-Packard Labs and Gavitec, to support a new series, Coast. They've created 39 interactive coastal walks around the UK, including 12 you follow using your Series 60 Nokia phone.

"The trial will allow roving ramblers to reach for their phone and call up site-specific extra audio and WAP content from the programme using "visual triggers" and their mobiles phones"

Data codes are used to access the information (not dissimilar from bar codes), although it's not entirely clear how these work, at this point. However, it sounds similar to Shot Codes in that people take a photo with their phone and get taken to the appropriate WAP site.

I believe that this concept is going all the way to mainstream, as we increasingly link our physical worlds with the digital one. One example of how this might be used is to have a physical Wikipedia, for people to find out more about their surroundings. I'm giving a speech at Wikimania in Frankfurt in a couple of weeks, if anyone's interested in this area. Just have to write the bloody thing first ;-(

Naturally, the technology will evolve so that the phone sniffs links out for you, rather than needing to click on a physical hyperlink. Then you just need to tell it what kind of thing you'd like info on and it'll alert you accordingly. Obviously, if you have a few minutes to kill, you'll be able to browse links manually too.

My hope is that if I can get the Wikipedia expertise, energy and execution skills on board, that we could really make this happen.