Tom Hume

From Russell Beattie's notebook, on "N-Gaging Piracy":

"Like you say, maybe piracy is a good thing for the N-gage, if it gets more people playing mobile games and starting to think about phones as a proper gaming platform. It's not good for games developers right now, who are losing revenue (and many of whom will go out of business).

I wonder how accepted MP3 and the like would be if they'd had DRM from day 1."

Sincere apologies to anyone who's visually impaired and reading this weblog. After months of putting up with it, and despite the admirable firefighting efforts of the MT-Blacklist plugin, I finally became sick of spending time deleting comment spam and installed SCode.

So now whenever you comment you are asked to type in a human readable yet bastard spammer unreadable number. If this causes problems for anyone, please email me your comment (anything at tomhume dot org should get through) and I'll post it here myself.

I had forlornly hoped that Google might address the problem (as I understand it comment spam basically exists to upgrade PageRankings) but twas not to be...

From "http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008106.html#comments", on Russell Beatties blog:

"Hmm, "we'll build traffic and work out how to monetise it later" - sounds familiar from somewhere. ;)

I think the porn industry will (and does) make money from mobile because it addresses one of the most basic human drives. Porn's proven that it can do this throughout the last 30 years (and probably much further back - any experts on the history of porn round here?) Much as I like the idea of entrepreneurs sitting round going through stacks of nudie mags trying to work out how to find the killer ingredient for their next mobile service, I don't think that's the way it'll go.

And this doesn't mean operators will be bypassed... the moment you want to bill for this stuff, where do you go? Do you get your customers entering credit card details? Or do you get them charged via their phone bill? The latter requires operator involvement but is way more convenient.

Ringtones and logos are a big industry too, very competitive, and with a reputation for shadiness rapidly approaching that of the adult industries. How many of those companies bill primarily by credit card? Answer: none, despite the fact that they'd be giving 2-3% to CC handlers rather than 50% to operators. It'd make a *massive* difference to their bottom line if they could persuade people to pay by credit card - but they haven't managed to. Why? It's not as convenient for the customer.

And finally: what happens when operators work out how to do co-branded porn, own-brand porn, or to make money by distributing it themselves (mainly by addressing all the child protection and brand association issues)? What happens when I can get my grot easily through Vodafone Live? What will this mean for off-portal merchants of scud? How discriminating is your average purveyor of filth?

Yes, porn will be popular... but no, this doesn't necessarily mean operators will be bypassed.

All IMHO of course :)"

From "MMS Takes off?", at The Mobile Technology Weblog:

"Compared to a response rate for an advertising campaign, 0.25% is certainly poor (from what I know about average rates)... but this isn't really the same thing, is it?

IMHO two better comparisons might be:

How many people go onto the Channel 4 chat-room after watching a given programme?

How many people write into programmes to get information packs by post?

I don't know what the rates for these are, but they seem like a better comparisons: they're calls to action, undertaken at the expense of the viewer, and involve stepping out of the medium currently being accessed (TV) and using another (internet, the written word)..."

From "Content Filtering AKA Clumsy Censorship", on Mobitopia:

"As I understand it from MoCoNews, the blocking of sites was a problem with the implementation of content controls, not with its configuration (i.e. teething troubles which should be fixed). And content controls should allow differentiation between different kinds of adult content.

Given that Vodafone effectively controls all of its customers access to the net, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to effectively whitelist access to sites. Isn't this exactly what's done at lots of schools?

It runs counter to what I'd expect from an ISP, but maybe this serves to highlight the difference between the comfy consumer-friendly "we'll bill your children" brands of MNOs and the tech-heavy "we are pipes" approach that the fixed-line internet has gone down.

FWIW I don't buy the "you shouldn't block porn because you'll kill the industry" defence. Whatever your personal view on the subject, it's an emotive one for much of the population, and one that needs to be addressed in some way."

From "Nokia: Innovate on the Inside" at Russell Beattie:

"Are there any S60 handsets that are S40 sized?

I moved to a 6230 recently, but had been on a 6100 for a few months before that - and really liked the form factor. It didn't fill my pocket or feel bulky like my old 7650/3650, it felt like a *phone*.

6230 does everything I want and more (J2ME/BT/radio/WAP/etc), screen size is adequate (more would be nicer but it's not a killer), it's *responsive*, and stats I see for WAP traffic to some services we run indicates that S40 handsets generate 2x the traffic of S60...

I don't get S40-bashing - it's certainly not as featureful and I can see how some users might really need to have 3rd party native apps on their phone... but for most people out there, S40 handsets are more obviously phones (and thus less intimidating) whilst retaining a load of new mBoom goodness :)"

and

"I see what you mean, but I think that Series 40 appeals to lots of people precisely because it's more familiar and phone-like, and less feature-ful. Most of my friends from outside the mobile/new media industries have Nokias; they've all gone for 7210s and the like. For most of them it's their first camera-phone - having a camera is itself a novelty and quite exciting (whilst for us it's old hat).

I see S40 as a mid-step between old-style voice+sms only handsets and future mobile data... and as such reckon it's important that S40 not be too flashy. Gyrating icons might look pretty, but they'll put some people off. The S40 interface is an evolution of previous Nokia UIs, and can be traced back quite a long way to early handsets; so it has some familiarity to anyone who's owned a Nokia handset before.

S60 is great for power users, and spreading from the top down. But motivating the majority of mobile subscribers to get using data services won't be achieved by persuading them to completely change their ideas of what a phone is... it'll be done by teasing them along the way, using more familiar devices (for now)"

From "Stupid, Stupid Operator Creatures" at Mobitopia:

"I'm not sure that this was an advert for the specific service you're talking about (football) commentaries.

Lots of the operator advertising I've seen recently (in the UK) seems to be echoing the Bob Hoskins "It's good to talk" campaign that BT ran in the 80s/90s. From what I remember reading (sorry can't remember references) the campaign was designed to stop the public from only using phones for important conversations, and to stimulate voice usage by getting people chatting and exchanging smalltalk. I've read somewhere that it had a dramatic effect on BT voice revenues.

In much the same way, operators are running advertising showing trivial uses of text messages (Vodafone), letting you try before you buy (Orange), and in this campaign emphasising that the cheapness of voice calls makes them suitable for lots of things you may not have considered before.

It's not so much about selling sports commentaries as persuading the public that mobile calls are cheap enough to not worry about, and thereby get people talking and texting more (nice safe well-understood revenue streams that don't rely on selling in new concepts or investing in new handsets/network kit)."

From "", at :
From Can you see me now? Good..., at Russ' Notebook:

"I'm as sceptical about the bland repurposing of TV content for mobile as the next man, but the fact that 3 hasn't been a success doesn't necessarily indicate it's the wrong thing to do - there are a load more reasons why 3 haven't made it big yet ;)

Personally I've stolen the video of Tomi Ahonen, that just as MTV introduced the idea of very short (3 minute or less) stories as music videos, mobile may well bring about a similar sort of content: 10 to 30 second clips which are designed with mobile in mind and tell a story well in the confines of screen size and time. This seems to be a view that Nokia are pursuing - check out Nokia Short if you've not seen it before (http://nokialfw.haygarth.co.uk/nokiashorts/)

Streaming video may well be workable on handsets, and bandwidth may be available to allow it for individuals, but whether the networks could support it as a mass market service in the near future is a different matter, no?"

From "Unfinished Revolution", on Mobitopia:

"Frank

Check out WDP (also known as WDPSMS) and Nokia Narrowband Sockets (from which I think WDP evolved).

It's a means of applications exposing "ports" on which they can be contacted by SMS. I believe their is scope in the spec (not sure if its implemented anywhere tho) to allow applications to be woken up by such incoming connections.

The Nokia 9210 supported WDP-SMS in its PersonaJava implementation; I'm not sure which other handsets do/did this..."

and

"Frank

What you're asking for implies a massive overhaul of the mobile internet - giving every device an IP address and ensuring this IP address is permanently accessible from anywhere. That's not, realistically, going to happen for a good few years yet - no matter how much we might want it.

WDP-SMS is an evolution of the Nokia Narrowband Sockets standard. NBS was proprietary, but WDP isn't (it's part of the WAP Forum specifications iirc): so it meets your requirement of being an open standard.

When you receive an MMS, you're actually getting a WAP Push message (itself delivered using SMS) which notifies your handset that there is an MMS waiting for it to pick up. Your handset then makes a GPRS connection (using HTTP from what I remember) to pick up the message from your MMSC.

So I guess it's a straight choice: if you want to do this stuff today, look at WDP and the MIDP 2 push registry (which uses JSR 120, which uses WDP). If you want to wait until every phone has an IP address and you can directly connect to ports on a handset - settle in with a good book for a few years ;)"

From "What about MMS Voicemail?" on MMSMemo:

In general, the idea of using MMS to deliver content other than photos hasn't been explored fully yet (though I know that Robert has had some ideas here): audio clips (match reports, extracts from books, music, weather reports) and lengthy pieces of text just aren't deemed as zappy as pictures, I guess...