We had a very interesting discussion at OpenMIC 2 today, I put the topic up as “Lets Design the Perfect Mobile Data Charging Model” quite a daunting task but I thought it might attract attention
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I’ve been experimenting with my unlocked 3.0 iPhone 3G for a week or so now and I’ve just got the MMS Settings sorted. see below for details and an explanation of what you need

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So the G1 is out, I’ve had a chance to play with one in a T-Mobile store and it seems like a nice OS, however it doesn’t look like an iPhone killer yet.
Lets take a look at some of the points I’ve picked up on.
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Its been a long time since I last wrote a proper post and I doubt this will be that, however having just spent the afternoon chatting with the guys at carsonifiedabout whats happening in the mobile industry I’m feeling all inspired.

Currently I’m sat in Starbucks in Bath and I’m using my Orange Mobile Broadband dongle to get online, quite frankly its great! Whilst I loved the idea of Wifi hotspots in Starbucks (coffee & the web my 2 favorite things) I very rarely used them. Why? well mostly it came down to cost & usablity. Paying per minute for wifi is just plain crazy and especially at the rates TMobile charge. Mobile Broadband dongles are availble for around £15 per month and that gets you about 3 gig of data, whilst that may not seem much if your comparing it to a home broadband subscription its plenty for using a laptop on the go. I suppose I could get a subscription to TMobile’s hotspot but I really don’t want to as it feels like a lot of hassle and wouldn’t work everywhere.
Ok so full disclosure time I work for Orange and don’t pay for my mobile broadband but when I leave I think I will get one and pay the bill for it!
The usability is spot on, Orange have even created a Mac client so I just fire up the software, plug in the stick and click connect, The odd time I’m tried to use a paid hotspot its been a real mess of trying to get the connection, then open a browser, wait for the re-direct and then get out my credit card to pay for it. It just doesn’t seem to fit my work flow.

The speed is perfectly good, I don’t know what I’m getting here but its probabbly around 1 meg and I’m browsing and watching the odd qik video without even thinking about it. I’m not gonna download a whole software update via this but that can easily wait till I get home. I’ve certainly never thought that a hotspot had amazing performance.
The cloud wifi have got a nice setup where the account is tied to the hardware mac address of a device and therefore it connects seamlessly, this works great for my iPhone on rail stations but I think when we see the 3G iPhone its usefulness will diminish, again the hotspots aint everywhere.
Now the only problem is I’m out of coffee and don’t want to pack-up my laptop to go downstairs to order another one, anyone know if the Bath Starbucks is on Twitter? 

Better late than never, I`ve put down some of my thoughts as to what mighthappen in the mobile industry in 2008.
1) Location Services
Location is going to be big in the mobile Internet in for 2008 but this will be in spite of the networks not thanks to them.
Mobile operators have had services allowing applications to determine a users location for year but they have kept prices so high that it makes any kind of web business model unworkable. However, we are no starting to see 3rd parties building location services to bypass the operators, in addition handsets are appearing with GPS. this combination of these 2 factors mean that we are in store for some pretty cool location aware mobile web apps.

2) Handset vendors will gain more strength.
2008 will see a rise in the popularity of handset manufacturers as they start to compete with the operators for the relationships with the customers. Nokia`s OVI and Music Store are good examples of this.
Users feel a strong attachment to their handset more than their operator and this will translate to a better brand awareness for the likes of Nokia, people choose the handset that they really WANT whereas they choose their network based mainly on price and coverage.
Handset makers will also exercise their advantage to pre-install software on their devices that drive usage of their own services, the operators won’t like this but in the end they will have to accept it or not offer the handsets which will loose them customers. The iPhone will lead this shift.

3) Operators arn’t dead (yet!)
Whilst from within the industry it will look like the mobile operators are condemned to be little more than bit pipes they will still continue to run successful mass market services as the majority of customers out there won`t fully understand what alternatives are out there. The operators have a hug installed base of non tech-savvy users and they rely on these people for their revenue, however this base can only decrease but I doubt that the operators will realise until its too late!

4) An MVNO might get the mobile Internet right
This one is more a wish-list than a prediction, I’m not really convinced it will happen in 2008 but hopefully it will one day.
Mobile operators are sitting on some huge advantages when it comes to data services, they have full and open control of pricing, identity and all sorts of meta information on users. However they seriously lack innovation and most of them are now part of giant lumbering corporations therefore are unlikely to do anything revolutionary. However we are seeing multiple virtual operators spring up, in the UK these are people like Tesco, Virgin, and Carphone Warehouse. Until now most of these have competed at the bottom end of the market offering cheap voice calls or just wanted to extend their brand. Blyk are once operator who are doing something a bit different with their business model but ultimately they attract customers on price.
However I think there is real scope for a web company to open up as an MVNO using a combination of their brand, technology and infrastructure to provide some killer mobile web services, oh and of course basic voice calls will still be there just the same as anyone else. Can you imagine how cool it would be if google was your service provider!
There is a chance that some startup could do this too and then maybe sell out to someone like google or yahoo but I`m not sure if they’d have the momentum to get there (unless they’ve got some major VC backing) Still if there are any startups out there that fancy doing this I`m always looking for a job 

5) There is no 5
Why do online lists always have to be top 5 or top 10! I’ve only got 4 ideas so I`m stopping there not cramming in one more obvious idea just to round the numbers out.

I’ve added something new to my personal site, lifestream. Its a collection of all the feeds for the online services I use eg twitter, flickr, tumblr last.fm etc. Arranged in chronological order.

I saw this on Jeremy Keiths site  and basicaly liked it so much I decided to rip it off! Thanks Jeremy.

It’s still got some work to do, Jeremy uses different colours for each item but I’m not sure if that will suit me, although I do like the way the older stuff fades out, might need to look at his css 

I think the biggest enhancement I’ll make is the ability to tun on/off each feed so If you don;t wan’t all my last fm you just un check that. Although it will have to be some web2.0 AJAX’y goodness for that.

The bit I like the most is the location stuff e.g. Sam is in Bristol, this is something I’m working on to improve all the GPS & Location stuff I’ve been playing around with for a few years, hopefully more to follow soon.

I’ve been thinking about my whole web2.0 life for a few weeks now and the multitude of different platforms out there. Some of you know me weel enough to know that I’m not a fan of systems that don’t interoperate! SMS only really took off once you could text across networks and its often one of the biggest barriers to suceess for a service (Yes kids there was a time when you could only send texts to people on the same network - ask your parents!)

Anyway just as we have a very split IM world and people end up with several apps open to stay in touch with people across varios service so the same is happening with Web2.0 sites. Many sites allow you to update your status during the day but I find myself having to post to twitter, facebook my blog and jaiku with basically the same thing.

What I’m thinking of doing is building something to keep all of these in sync, you update one point and it pushes it out to all your services, sortof a GAIM for Web2.0.

The question is how to do this? The obvious way seems to be to use one service as a master and have all the others pushed from there. The obvious one seems to be twitter, its got a multitude of ways to update your ’status’ and seems to be one of the most widespread, also its pretty simple and lightweight so if you don’t have a twitter account signing up for one is no biggie. However twitter has one gap in their API, you can have your status pushed out to a call on another service in some http manner. The only way for twitter to push out to an application is using IM, so I would have to run an IM server to recieve the updates form twitter and post them to the other services. The other method would be to poll the twitter status’s and update accordingly but that doesn’t scale.

Please post your thoughts on this and how you’d use it, also need to find the business model here, bandwidth aint free!

So I’ve heard a lot about twitter and the noise has been rising, Listening to twit on the way to work they were all about it so I decided its time to check it out.

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So What is twitter? Its really hard to say as I don’t think it falls into any obviuos catagory, its a great example of a new format for information thats simple and flexlible that will push tech forward. It depends on what its gonna be used for but its kinda a hybrid of instant messaging, blogging & rss with a community angle on it too. They’ve kept it really simple asnd jsut bulit a communications system then put it out for people to use and develop.

Its got what I think is key to any new web service: API’s without this any app is doomed to fail as in time people will want to use your service their way. Twitter seems to have hit the right spot here. I havn’t delved into the API yet but some of the mashups I’ve seen seem really useful. I’ve got the BBC news and this has been pushing headlines to my phone all day.

What I’ve guessing is the original concept of twitter is cool too, I can add people I enjoy on podcasts to my group and get updates during the day about what they’re doing. It really adds to the sense of personalisation & community in podcsting. It actually seems like I’m getting texts from Leo Laporte and Cali Lewis about how their days going (kinda sad & fan like)

I wonder how long before some mainstream celebrity gets a twitter account and posts updates on their day? Or rather before they have some peon at their record company invents a ficticous life for them, Can just imagine the sort of thing you’d see if I was getting updates on Paris Hiltons day 

So wheres twitter going? Well I don’t think anyone really knows, I’m not quite sure what their business model is. The SMS in the UK come from a longdial number so they sure aint making any money on those and that will cost per message. The site doesn’t seem to have any ads and I dont see a premium option. I guess they could offer a paid service but I’m not sure who to charge. You could limit the number of ‘feed’ a user can subscribe which might work well but I’m sure we’d just start to see a hiarchy of feeds to merge your popular stuff. Charging the popular people would work for the celebrity blog scenario so the more popular you are the more you pay but this might kill the power of blogging in that anybody who makes good points can get big. On the plus side they’ve already got an SMS interface so it should be fairly easy to start billing the users, I’d quite happily pay a couple of dollars a month for this but please dont make the mistake of charging the users to recieve on a per message basis. This really ruins the experience as you feel bad every time to recieve a message so instead of jsut ignoring the uninteresting updates you get annoyed thinking I’ve jsut paid for that!

I’m guessing that the eventual outcome is that someone will buy twitter but who? The easy money would be on google. Twitter is already using jabber so its driving usage of Google Talk, hook it into blogger & google reader and theres some sweet 2.0 synergy (Buzz word alert) I suppose theres the chance that one of the telco’s might pick it up as theres a nice new SMS/IM convergance use case there (more buzz words) but I doubt it will be out there long enogh for any of the mobile operators to notice. If it really kicks off I guess they’ll build their own closed watered down services in good time:-)

Still I’m gonna start twittering and use it while its good but somethings gotta change one day its too good to last