Tom Hume

If you're interested, there's a piece on J2ME fragmentation and our recent approach to it from Thom and Doug, our Lead Developers, over at Glider Gun...

Yesterday afternoon we invited the Trutap team down to Brighton, for a post-project retrospective. It's the first time we've done one of these with a client - normally we run them every fortnight with the whole FP team. On top of learning what we could from our largest Scrum project to date, we wanted to lift a bit more of the veil.

I won't go into the full details of how we ran the day; aside from anything else, the festivities afterwards have blurred much of my memory, but I do have a good set of notes regarding our learnings. As is traditional for us, we split these into things that went well, things that didn't go so well, and things we'd do next time. There was also an opportunity for us to call out individuals for particular appreciation, which I liked.

So, here's some of what we got out of it:

What went well

1. Porting has been extremely smooth this time around. Within 10 days of completing a reference version of the product, we've fully QAd and released the new Trutap for around 150 handsets, with more following as I write. Most of the credit for this rests with our fine development team, who've been leading us away from the industry-wide nightmare of maintaining hundreds of different versions of the product, and towards a rosy future of fewer SKUs. There's another post about this on its way, and I mentioned how we've done this in my Future of Mobile presentation. Suffice to say TT version 1 had more than 30 SKUs, all built from a single code-base but targeting different devices. TT version 2 has a single binary, and comes in 4 flavours for different screen sizes.

2. Shared documentation and tools, in particular the product backlog (all work remaining to do) and our bug tracking system, really helped. We were operating very transparently; I do wonder whether a less technically capable client would be as interested, but for those who want it, we'll do this again.

3. The relationship between the development teams at Trutap and FP was strong: we like each other and we got on well. 'Nuff said.

4. Weekly meetings were very useful, though we only started holding them a couple of months into the project.

5. Change was handled smoothly; we were able to accept change, addition of scope and iterate aspects of the product as necessary throughout.

6. We worked at a sustainable pace; we week before launch there was an eery calm at both Trutap and FP. Tthe product was there, the bug count was close to zero, and we hadn't had to work evenings and weekends to get to this stage. Compared to the period before previous launches I've known (even for Trutap), this was incredibly calm. I don't think our adoption of Scrum can take all the credit for this - the project involved a skilled team at FP and TT who'd worked together before, for one thing - but I certainly think it's helped.

What could have gone better

1. Wireframes were a poor means of specifying the product, requiring a lot of clerical maintenance and attention from both sides and offering an ambiguous level of detail: too much in some areas (e.g. screen layouts), too little in others (e.g. error states and flows).

2. We started the project haphazardly at both sides, and had to act to bring it back on track a couple of months in.

3. The design process had "too many cooks" and could have been more focused.

4. We should have spent more time explaining our approach, from both a project management and a technical perspective. We never actually sat down with Trutap and said "this is how we're going to work", instead keeping the details of our process to ourselves. With a large successful Scrum project under our belts and a bit more self-confidence, we'll do this next time. Equally, from a technical perspective we had a clear idea of how we broke down the work (into screens and UI components) which we could have shared earlier on.

5. Using version 1 of the product as a catch-all default was a mistake; where not otherwise specified, the product was to "work like version 1" which led to some scope being missed off planning at the FP end, and some confusion where new features didn't dovetail with old behaviour.

6. We had many means of communicating: Google docs, Basecamp, Fogbugz, a Jabber chat-room, email, face-to-face meetings, etc. This sometimes led to a lack of clarity and nervousness: when a chat-room had been set up but our dev team weren't available in it (because they were getting on with work!), the client worried. Next time around we should clarify communications methods: different tools seemed good for different jobs.

7. Early in the project, we weren't as good at making collective decisions as we were later on. A looming deadline always helps focus the mind ;) but we'd try to get this focus earlier on future projects.
   

Next time around...

1. We'll prototype more and wireframe less. We may invest time into tools to support this. Wireframes don't cut it.

2. We'll plan to iterate from the beginning, allowing contingency in timescales and commercials (in fact the latter was planned for, as it turned out ;))

3. We'll introduce any change at fortnightly sprint boundaries. A couple of times we had mid-sprint changes which led to the dev team at FP thrashing and progress slowing. Lesson learned: we should be more disciplined here.

4. Towards the end of the project, we had a day we called the "UI Sweep", where the TT product team sat with our developers and worked through final bits of polish. This made a difference to the product quality disproportionate to the amount of time spent. It's quite gruelling for the developers, and relies on good tools and practices that let you make changes there-and-then, but was ultimately very worthwhile. The idea of an on-site customer is classic XP.

5. We'll have weekly meetings from the beginning, with everyone engaged and involved.

6. We'll get everyone to the pub more often :)
   

And the role of honour: called out for particular thanks were Ali, Tobias, Luke and Rob @ Trutap of Trutap, and Thom, Doug and Serge at FP. Thanks again guys, we built something fantastic :)

None of this would've been possible without the able and entertaining facilitation provided, as ever, by Joh Hunt - cheers Joh :)

Google Voice Search is, frankly, amazing. Not because it works well. Most of my searches so far have been comically misinterpreted, though I note that (for research purposes only you understand) "Britney Spears" has a 100% success rate, even when I don't employ my appalling California accent.

No - to me, it's the sheer chutzpah of doing something like this, and the laser-like focus on reducing the time between deciding your wanting to know something, and Google giving it to you. I touched on this topic briefly in my talk on Monday at Future of Mobile, and Tim O'Reilly has a nice post about mobile being the lynchpin between humans and the cloud - spot on.

Can you imagine what sort of world we'll live in in 5 years time, when improvements in voice recognition (probably based around brute-force techniques rather than smart voice recognition algorithms - scale's just another tool to these guys) put an increasing percentage of our species' collective knowledge even closer? Beautiful.

I really enjoyed Future of Mobile yesterday.

The day started a little sluggishly with a well-qualified panel discussing the future of mobile operating systems. I didn't feel I learned much here - revenues of the panelists businesses weren't particularly exciting, and aside from an interesting conversation around runtimes I didn't feel I learned a great deal.

For me, things really started to take off with the presentation from Doug Richard of Trutap (disclosure: they're a client of ours). Doug was talking about the rise of a middle class in the developing world that shares aspirations with the middle classes everywhere, and quietly pointed out our arrogance in assuming that it could be otherwise. I particularly liked his notion that Western operators would adopt defensive positions and hence take fewer risks (and be less innovative) than those coming out of India.

I didn't devote much attention to Matt Millar from Adobe, I'm afraid - sorry Matt, but I was doing last-minute panicking about my own presentation. I've not watched the video yet, but whilst I'd spent more time preparing than I ever have in the past (and felt the slides were reasonably polished), I made the mistake of over-planning what I was going to say. Normally I work from bullet points and just chat around them (something I'm comfortable doing) but after my hour-long overrun at the Werks talk a month or so back I tried to restrain myself by planning what I'd say in great depth. The upshot was I felt like I was working from a script, and had to keep checking where I was, staring at a screen instead of talking to the audience. Lesson learned there, but at least I managed to get my macaroons-as-analogy-for-porting slide out.

The bloggers panel was a really good format: 6 bloggers, 6 minutes each, mirroring blogging itself. Really nice to hear Vero Pepperell evangelise a human approach to communication - as an industry we ought to know that stuff, but I can't help feeling we need someone to gently beat it into us on occasion. Helen was righteous - nuff said.

A lunch, or non-lunch, followed. If there was a weak point to the day overall, I'd say it was the facilities. I heard plenty of people complain about a lack of wi-fi (though as a 3 USB dongle owner I managed OK), there was no lunch provided, and no coffee in one of the coffee breaks. Fortunately Kensington is full of restaurants and cafes, but it would've been nice to hang around in a throng during all these breaks. The auditorium itself was excellent - a lovely space, good sound, and power to most seats.

Rich Miner gave a great talk in the afternoon, filling in a bit more detail around Google and their plans, and drawing on his own history launching the Windows SPV Smartphone when he was at Orange. He gave a good if negative insight into the world of operators when he talked about product managers feeling threats from new product developments and derailing them.

Interesting also to hear about his take on mobile web apps - that they fail for reasons of network latency, lack of local storage, and access to device capabilities. Whilst you can see efforts in Android, PhoneGap and OMTP Bondi to address some of these, it's a little way from the "web apps as future of mobile" angle which I'd heard Google were adopting.

And similarly it was good to hear Rich quizzed on the topic of Android and fragmentation by David Wood (who's more qualified to talk about this than he?). Rather than espousing the rather bland "we don't think fragmentation is in the interests of the industry" line I've heard from Google before, Rich talked about the value of having a reference implementation by which to judge others; a conformance test being introduced for OEMs; and the use of challenging and popular reference apps to provide a "Lotus 1-2-3" style evaluation of an Android implementation.

Tomi Ahonen was hilarious and upbeat as usual - full of detailed and slightly threatening stats on the hold that mobile has on us, and case studies of fantastic things launched elsewhere (usually Asia). The Tohato "worlds worst war" was my favourite: purchasers of snack products fighting one another in vast virtual armies, wonderful.

And the day finished with another panel discussion: lots of disagreement from qualified folks who've been doing this stuff for years, including two of our clients. We had some kind words said about us by Carl from Trutap and Alfie of Moblog fame - thanks guys! - and it was particularly interesting to hear the pendulum of fashion swing back towards applications, away from the mobile web. I wonder how permanent this effect, which is surely down to the iPhone App Store, will be?

The evening party followed, carrying on the upbeat atmosphere :)

My slides from the day are online here. The lens-tastic Mr Ribot took video footage of the talk which you can see here, and I heard a rumour that the official footage from the event may go online some time too.

Thanks to Dominic and all the team at Carsonified for the hard work they put into the event - I know all too well from Sophie how much this takes, and they did a cracking job. And a particular yay to Mr Whatley, who stepped in as compere at the last minute and did an excellent job of keeping the audience engaged, even in those sleepy after-lunch slots ;)

Future of Mobile: Panel Discussion

Panel discussion:

Dan Appelquist, Vodafone
Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic
Alfie Dennen, Moblog
Justin Davies, Twenty10
Carl Uminski, Trutap
James Body, Truphone
Sam, A.N.Operator

Q: Carl, where did you get your jacket?
A: !

Q: For application developers: where were we 2-3 years ago, what's changed, what's good, what's bad?
MC: You can advertise on mobile. There's a large audience to reach on the mobile, who weren't there 2 years ago. We ran our first ads on Admob in August 2006, saw an attractive cost of acquisition, but low volumes of users. Just after xmas 2006 we ran our first ads on operator portals and got 3.5k users in 3 hours - and they're good users, they spend money with us.

Q: And you Alfie?
AD: Advertising has made a difference, particularly if you don't have a relationship with an operator. Users aren't as afraid as they were of going off-portal.

Q: Justin/Carl, are applications still a dark art?
JD: J2ME lets you go quite a long way across the board in handset support. Java implementations are getting better but there are still problems. Applications now do work on handsets - a year ago VCs didn't like the idea of them, they preferred sites, but now people understand them better. Android, Apple have launched marketplaces and people are now used to them. From a UE point of view an app lets you do things a web site just can't do.

Q: How have emerging markets reacted, Carl?
CU: They're often not 3G users. We're finding customers with good connections and data rates, they're very cheap to use. We use optimised protocols to avoid bill shock. Also handset manufacturers and operators like applications.

Q: James, has the iPhone changed much for you?
JB: The App store has been a big success. We were the first VOIP app in the App Store, and did very well out of that.

AD: Doesn't it take us back a bit to have these closed, partitioned areas where commerce takes place? Won't discovery suffer?
JB: The Apple system isn't perfect but there's a fair chance an app will work if you get it through there.

Q: Will the application store model ever be mass market?
JD: It already is.
JB: We generate more revenue from iPhone users than Symbian users
DA: The App Store has also debunked the idea that real users don't want to use applications. The prevailing wisdom have been that applications were for the nerds.
JB: It's more about people not being told what they can buy by operators.
MC: It doesn't make much difference whether it's operators or Apple telling customers what they can download. It's more about how users will discover you, and thinking about how it'll happen in a years time once the fuss around the iPhone store has gone away. It's easy to get in the top 10 now, outside of that you're in the long tail - so where's the discovery then?

Q: Are you familiar with the UK operators and their developer services? Vodafone Betavine, O2 Litmus, Orange, T-Mobile.
DA: It's great to see O2 coming to the table. O2 Litmus is different from Betavine.

Q: Sam?
Sam: Operators have some value to add: identity, location, and billing. Location is being eroded because they didn't do anything with it. Identity is useful (through control of the SIM card). Revenue shares on billing are still very high.

Q: Do you use external agencies?
MC: Yes, but it depends what for. In the last 2 years, an external agency for usability - and it paid for itself twice over.
CU: We use Future Platforms :)

AD: Panelists doing applications: do you see a move towards web-based?
JB: It's going to be a mixture.

Q: How does a company approach Vodafone? Who sites the budget/acceptance of a third party app. How realistic is it for me to get my new application onto phones?
DA: The answer long-term is to use the web as a distribution medium. Vodafone is in a joint venture with China Mobile and Softbank Mobile. Q3 they're launching an app platform with these guys to upload widgets to a single store and have them distributed across all OpCos.

Q: With gaming generating more revenue than movies, why no mention of mobile gaming today?
JB: In the iPhone App store, lots of the popular apps are games.
AD: There's no-one from mobile gaming on the panel.

Q: For a mobile developer starting a new project today, iPhone or Android?
MC: Logically iPhone, cos it's out there and Android isn't.
AD: What he said, in part because it's hard to get onto any portal. If your business doesn't need a complex application, look at XHTML.
DA: You can do more with the web right now, on Android you can use Gears with web apps to get location/local storage. On iPhone you can use PhoneGap to do the same.
JB: We go for the platforms that generate revenue. Number 1 is Symbian, because "quantity has quality all of its own", 2 is iPhone because there are fewer but you generate more revenue. 3 is Blackberry.
CU: When you're looking at social networking, you need Java to get lots of platforms. iPhone and Android don't do J2ME. GetJar does good distribution through their store.

Q: Are iPhone users normobs?
JD: Apart from the people on this panel, yes. It's changed perception of what a mobile can do.
AD: Let's not forget it was broken in so many ways, but it was good at the basics. I don't have much time for it - it's taken us back a bit.

Q: What user numbers are mobile ad servers looking for to place ads?
MC: More than a thousand a day. Depends on whether it's on cost-per-click or CPM. CPM means 20-30k+ users a day before you make an impact. The off-portal market isn't expanding as fast in the UK as we would've liked to have seen. We're very dependent on advertising on operator decks. You need different techniques to milk a cow, a pig, a goat and a chicken.

CU: On location services, most people don't go to that many places: work, pub, gym, home. Because it's in a social context - it's useful. e.g. my friends know where I am if I'm at work.

Q: What's the best way to get new users? Bring them from the web to mobile, or direct to mobile?
JD: Get them on the mobile web, because you know they're already using the net on their phone. You can also filter by device.

Q: Will the most exciting apps come from Silicon Valley or Europe?
DA: India
MC: Europe
AD: Europe
CU: Europe
JB: Europe
Sam: Europe for Europeans, America for US

Q: Future of Mobile is...?
DA: The web
MC: Complexity
AD: One Web
JD: Personalisation
CU: Please cheap data
JB: Freedom
Sam: One web

Q: Android or iPhone?
DA: Android will be to the iPhone what the PC was to the Mac
AD: iPhone will learn from the web, it'll be an even playing field
JD: Android because it'll be on more handsets in emerging markets
CU: There's no comparison. It's Android or Symbian, iPhone is an end-to-end experience, Android is an OS.
JB: Today: iPhone. In 2-4 years, Android's looking good.
Sam: Android on an iPhone

Q: What's your favourite mobile app?
Sam: Twitter
JB: Mobile facebook
CU: Google maps
JD: Google maps
AD: GMail
MC: Google Maps
DA: Koi Pond

Future of Mobile: Tomi Ahonen

Mobile is as different from the internet as TV is different from radio.

All the concepts for TV we have today cannot migrate back to radio, though they did evolve from.

91% of mobile owners keep the phone within 3 feet, 24x7

Mobile is as addictive as smoking cigarettes. Removing mobile phones produces similar withdrawal pains as attempting to stop smoking.

Text-and-driving is more dangerous than stoned or drunk driving.

63% of people are not willing to share their phone with our spouse.

1 in 3 partners snoop inside the phone, mostly when we're in the shower. 10% of people ended relationships after this.

1 in 4 British couples sleeps apart 1 night a week because of their partners addiction to Blackberry, phones, etc.

Mass media are print, recordings, cinema, radio, television, internet, mobile.

What is print doing in a presentation with mobile? In Japan, mobile books sold ¢82m mobile books in 2006. 5/10 best-selling printed books started as mobile books. Books are written on phones using text-messaging, spelling and style.

The internet subsumed media that came before, and added interactivity. Look at Habbo Hotel for an example of a fixed internet service which raised revenue through mobile: by using billing.

Mice Love Rice: a song released for free on the internet. Sold as a ringback tone, raising $22m. Ringback tones have to be enabled by operators.

Don't try to copy the internet: create something new.

Mobile has seven advantages over internet: personal, permanently connected, always carried, built-in payment, present at creative impulse, most accurate audience, captures social context.

Carbon Diem: location-based service tracking how your mobile moves, discovering speed of movement and inferring carbon usage. Young people care more about green issues; for Tomi's generation WW3 was the threat.

Tohato: Japanese snack brand, introduced 2 new snack brands: Satan Jorquia and Habanero. Invited customers to choose a brand and fight the other brand in the "worlds worst war". Gamers joined by scanning a 2d barcode in a bag. Recruiting friends earned promotion in the army - all done via mobile, battles scheduled at 4am, with a 24-hour gaming news channel.

Hoshi-Ichi Maniac: mass participation TV format in Japan, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, knock-out style quiz. 200k live players on the first run.

"Create services that are so amazing that the first time someone uses it, people think they're magic" - e.g. Kamera Jiten, a cameraphone translator which takes photos and translates them English to Japanese.

Future of Mobile: Rich Miner, Google

"Changing the mobile industry, one phone at a time"

Pre-iPhone, we saw the mobile industry as being closed. Unlimited data plans, browsing anywhere, installable apps... all moves towards openness, all difficult to reverse.

Every carrier in the US now has unlimited data plans: "carriers tend to behave like lemmings, when one starts in a particular direction the others follow behind"

iPhone pushed carriers to embrace someone else's brand on their network and be supportive of a model they couldn't directly monitise.

How bad could it have been? RM launched the first Windows Mobile SPV phone; didn't work that well, but showed promise. Orange was launching Push-To-Talk at the time, the SPV had a bug with PTT which MS were going to take 18 months to fix: derailing the launch. He worked for Orange Ventures, investing in applications and startups, but it still proved impossible for Orange to launch new products. Apps needed to be signed, tested, embedded. PMs of any threatened products derailed new ones.

The ability for consumers to connect directly to publishers (err... is it direct if it goes via Apple/G stores?) is a fix for this.

Mobile is the best distributed device, and in many cases the only connected device end-users own.

So it's important for Google. They found getting apps signed across many carriers troublesome. Constrained devices needed innovation to fix. Overall it was confusing to the developer and the end user.

As bill of materials cost for device falls, software has been a growing percentage of % of device cost: operating system, browser, codecs. There was no proprietary, open OS - and it felt bad for one entity to control any platform.

Simon from the Gears for Mobile team:

Lots of developers want to do quite simple things. On the desktop, between 2003 and 2006 there was a shift away from writing apps and towards mobile apps. GMail showed that the browser was capable of some interesting things. Google Maps showed nice draggable components.

Mobile web apps suck for 3 reasons: latency in the network, poor access to local storage/caching, and lack of access to device capabilities (e.g. location).

Gears was originally designed for enabling offline web apps on the desktop. Today in the Android browser, you can deliver LBS apps.

End piece: "no one party controls the platform (nor a committee)".

Apps are self-published. No human makes a judgement on apps to go out.

Q: In open source projects, usability tends to get left behind. How are you going to guide the UI of Android?
A: Most of the phones we carry today aren't open source; this doesn't mean they have good interfaces. TiVo is built on open source with a good UI. Most of the web is built on open source.

Q: (Claire Boonstra) iPhone had greater hype than the iPhone when it first came along.

Q: Open technology, but will Google control it in any way. As a developer can I replace the search engine or maps application?
A: You can build a handset with no Google apps.

Q: (David Wood) How will you ensure the applications written by developers run on different handsets, when the platform has been modified by handset vendors?
A: Despite Java's best efforts, there wasn't a reference implementation to judge them by: this is the difference with Android. So the chances for fragmentation are lower. And we'll introduce a conformance test for OEMS, and encourage carriers to run it. In the early days of PC Clones, you had the "Lotus 1-2-3" test - if it ran this, the clone worked. We'll pick reference apps that challenge the platform in a good way, and educate people that these matter.

Interesting, a different argument from the one I've heard before (which was that fragmentation won't happen because "it's not in our interest") - much more detailed, much more useful.

Q: In the current implementation of Android, developers can't create their own home-screen widgets. Why?
A: The home-screen is just an app. We ran out of time to get a widget architecture in there. It's a common request

Future of Mobile: Doug Richard

When you run software companies in the US, you divide companies into the US and Rest Of World (ROW). Trutap focused on the RROW (Rest of the Rest of the World).

Last year, a load of new users got their first mobile: 7m new people per month in India (that's one Finland per month). 130m new mobile subscribers worldwide last year.

Many of them think they're middle class: they have a purchasing power equated aspirationally to this. We're under the misimpression that the market is either a small wealthy market, or a huge number of third-world users.

It's not all farmers sharing crop prices.

So this is 500m+, disproportionately young consumers. They have fundamentally different quality of life in Mumbai to LA. Luke @ Trutap spent lots of time in India early this year, including dozens of interviews of current, prospective and failed Trutap users. They have the same needs as western kids have today with their iPhone or PC.

In the West, the PC is private; in Mumbai it's public - and data is more expensive in internet cafes than it is via mobile. Expressing yourself via the net becomes harder in these conditions.

In LA, internet usage is primarily PC. In Mumbai, it's mobile.

Needs and aspirations are the same between the two. I believe social networks are a temporary phenomenon on the PC: they belong on the phones. We want to keep up with friends and associates constantly, to meet others: this nirvana is in the offing. Nokia talk about the super-address book, but it's all the same thing. The new emerging middle classes are as large numerically as the whole of Facebook today: so social software isn't done and dusted, it's not all done yet.

Western operators will make conservative choices and adopt a defensive position - Indian operators will be more inclined to do risky stuff as they grow. All these things that people understand the mobile industry has to get over? They'll get over them first in India.

Internal goal for Trutap 2.0: delivering an iPhone experience to everyone else. Can we do this? No - I don't own an operator, I have slightly less cash. But we can move in that direction.

The iPhone is having a disproportionate impact on the world: in emerging markets it's practically non-existent. But it shows what the future should be.

This will happen where there is capital, opportunity, and a large emerging middle class.

Trutap was a support of a web existence. We support all the worlds IM transports. Dating sites arose on the web independent of social networking; in Japan the two never split.

... shows off Trutap ...

We have an odd and unique time coming - the IT industry has been driven by the US, whilst mobile was driven from Europe. But we need to be sensitive to the fact that much innovation will come from emerging markets.

What makes smartphones smart? Panel discussion with Simon Rockman

David Wood, Research, Symbian
Olivier Bartholiot, Purple Labs
Andy Bush, LiMo Foundation
Rich Miner, Google
James McCarthy, Microsoft

DW: We'll look back on phones of today as being rubbish in future. Very happy to see Google services running well on Symbian phones. Looking forward to collaboration; whilst competition stops us going stale, there's too much variety in the market and it's slowed us down. Symbian is a combination of old (some code is 14 years old) and new (continually renewing). Innovation is going to speed up: Symbian are removing some fragmentation from their platform (i.e. UIQ), and embracing open source.

OB: Recently recalibrated themselves as a software business. Today, the specialists in Linux on low-end devices.

AB: LiMo, a young organisation (<2yo), meant to consolidate a lot of fragmentation that was happening. First release of the platform was shown at MWC this year, second release this year. Model is that member organisations (LiMo are non-profit) contribute: about 1000 engineers working on the platform. Not a standards organisation, they're about producing real code. Use the best of open source (e.g. GTK). Their members half half a billion subscribers on their networks. They're a governance organisation: one member, one vote.

RM: Hardware OEMs and carriers don't understand software very well. This is why Apple could embarrass the industry with the release of a first-generation handset. They understand software, developers, frameworks and platform design. They built not just a handset but an ecosystem. Google fundamentally believes mobile is an important platform, and we need to get our applications out on mobile. We struggled to build MIDP apps that wouldn't require changes, app signing.

JM: To be an OS provider, you need to achieve some scale. We have over 100 mobile operator partners across the world today. All major operators sell Windows Mobile devices. MS licenses software to OEMs: the core OS is valuable.

RM: Google has no business model as regards Android: it's all open source. The aim is long-term: over time, we think that mobile is important. Our mission is to reach everyone, and we need mobile to this. Our business model is advertising, and it's important that no one entity control the mobile phone platform. Once we can deliver value to the consumer (as we did with search), we'll figure out how to deliver advertising. Android is "designed to go downmarket quickly". A lot of economies "aren't two-screen economies, these are the only devices they have".

SR: Olivier, could you talk about your business model.

... stuff about Purple Labs revenues for 2009 ...

DW: Last year we generated $300m from licensing. Symbian Foundation will be about 1/10 size of the current Symbian.

JM: HTC have been a great partner for Microsoft over the years. Samsung are grabbing UK market share in Windows Mobile terms. All our OEMs serve different markets, they all do different things.

SR: Motorola are stopping doing Symbian phones and starting to do Android phones, what do you think David?

DW: It's understandable that handset vendors don't want to rely on a single OS. In a few years there'll be less hedging of bets and some consolidation.

... panel agree that runtimes grow in importance ...

DW: Emergence of runtimes doesn't remove the need to solve fragmentation at the operating system level.

Q: What makes a smartphone smart?
DW: The ability to add features.
RM: Smartphones haven't been very smart. You could barely make calls on them when I launched them at Orange.

Q: Why is there no Apple representative on the panel?
SR: They declined to send anyone. They prefer to keep to themselves.

It's a chat-show format! Tim Green hosts.

First up: Mike Short, VP R&D, O2.

TG: How's mobile going to be affected by an economic slowdown?
MS: Anyone in the room feel a slowdown? It's still a growth industry; there's a lot left to do wrt content and applications.

TG: Isn't a discretionary spend on content threatened?
MS: There's bound to be some belt-tightening, but people are going wireless over fixed. We're seeing 38% year-on-year growth. Public sector are starting to show an interest - unheard of a few years ago. Some areas (e.g. some aspects of content) might slow down, but overall growth.

MS: Operators don't want to do content themselves, they want partnerships. They've not been happy w/slow growth of WAP, iPhone has shown that usability stimulates growth.

TG: O2 are not supporting all Nokias because of conflicts (with Ovi?)
MS: Yes, but operator ranges are always limited. We can't stock them all.

Helen Keegan: What's your top tip for what'll be big in the coming year?
MS: More of the same. More mobile/web combinations as web players come into the market.

HK: How can we get web and mobile side of our industry playing together?
MS: Education helps. Events like this help. Trialling things with the customer in mind helps - some web ideas don't fit well.

David Wood, Symbian: Will we seem more of the same delivered more efficiently thanks to companies being more cost sensitive?
MS: Efficiency will come, but we'll start thinking of new ways to do things. How can mobile help in new application areas? e.g. NFC trials with TfL embedding Oyster into handsets.

Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic: Did the NFC trials involve O2 taking 35% revenues, or normal content revenues?
MS: Normal commercial arrangement for Oyster (i.e. no huge revenue share for operators). We won't see a revolution in the next 2-3 years, but rather an increased range of devices to increase utility.

James, Truphone: Your team did well to secure the iPhone. What's the one thing you learned from the iPhone user experience?
MS: The Store - there's a lot of lessons in there as strong as the usability angle; which is why we're setting up O2 Litmus.

Will, D2C: We've battled fragmentation for the last few years, but it's getting worse and there's a trend towards applications. How do you see this moving?
MS: Fragmentation isn't O2's responsibility, but if customers want something new we won't stop them. We have some influence, but they're asking for different things. We're interested in global, not UK-centric standards.

Next up, Russell Buckley from Admob.

RB: iPhone is becoming #1 device worldwide (out of 12m sold worldwide).

TG: What are the form factors for advertising?
RB: CPM graphical banners are UK/US only, much volume comes from outside. 30/70 in favour of graphical and iPhone banners.

TG: How do you see the vocabulary of advertising changing? Banners are form the Internet and a bit lame, after all.
RB: New media tend to borrow from older ones. Same is true of the mobile Internet: we've borrowed formats from digital and this has worked well, but the iPhone lets us do new formats to play to mobile for the first time (e.g. click-to-call, location-based).

TG: How realistic is it to take the iPhone formats and profilerate them across handsets?
RB: Other models (e.g. RIM Blackberry) let us play to strengths of mobile. We're transitioning from old WAP to iPhone type experience, but whether the iPhone is the winner is moot: it's given the rest of the industry a vision.

TB: What about brand-building? Is the Carling iPhone app an advert?
RB: The old model of interruptive advertising is starting to fade. The people having big success (e.g. Jaguar) are more concerned with the overall customer journey.

TB: How many of your advertisers are mobile content/handset companies?
RB: We spoke to them first, if we can't sell to ourselves who can we sell to? The US is more receptive to new adverts/formats, the car sector in particular have taken off.

TB: Where's the line between advertising and marketing?
RB: CRM is untapped and important. Don't cancel my credit card when I spend abroad: send me texts re transactions to save me hassle and make it my responsibility.

Andy Walker, Geomoder: Asks about LBS.
RB: We're prenatal about LBS. We've not cracked delivering messages yet - we've tried LBS alerts via text, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Mapping shows us the way but it's a huge logistical problem to get this into the heads of the sales force.

Scott Beaumont, Mippin: What can we do to bring better quality brands onto mobile?
RB: I'm global chair of the MMA. P&G want to talk to their "next billion" customers, not the mobile industry... Admob have a lot of inventory in this part of developing world.

James, mJelly.com: Much of your traffic is in India, Indonesia, etc... not that much value to advertisers though. What's going to happen?
RB: Our biggest market is the US; UK is in the top-5. 1.5bn in Indonesia leaves lots of potential: a few clicks will matter (sounds to me like the old "we just need 1% of the market" play to me tho). A click today in the UK/US is worth more than in Indonesia, but for brands wanting to talk to these customers for the first time it's got potential.

Half-time with the Mobile Industry Review team. Fairly harsh slagging to the G1: "it's really shit hardware, but Android is really amazing. The screen is crooked. Good points: browser is nice, stable."

Next: Madhuban from Irini (sp?).

TG:
M: Investors are looking beyond applications to investments in IP rights.

TG: If there's no liquidity in financial markets, can we expect money to flow (in mobile)?
M: Trade buyers are coming from the US, UAE and India.

TG: Are India and China looking to invest outside their home territories?
M: In markets like this you'll see some bargains. Mobile is high-growth and in overdrive. India and the UK have common themes: from an operator POV they're the most competitive markets, but in terms of ARPU they're the opposite: so in one you play a volume game, in the other value-add.

TG: Russell, you've had your share of VC money. How do you feel about the situation?
RB: You've seen the Sequioa "RIP" presentation. Investment now would have been on different terms to a few months back. Cost of doing a startup is much lower now than 10y ago, you can work on a shoestring and build value in the downturn so that when the market recovers you're well positioned.

TG: What companies are you looking at?
M: The fundamentals of investment haven't changed. Using mobile as a means to deliver a piece of technology is interesting; cites example of an Ecuadoran community using mobile without operators, or mobile used as card reader/scanner for couponing.

TG: Some of the technologies are disruptive - doesn't that make for a high risk investment?
M: Yes, good VCs can see opportunities before they become mainstream. Skype etc were disruptive investments.

And now, Bill Thompson, "a hairy man".

BT: I get to play with things and see how they might be useful. Mobile has been the most interesting area for the last 8-9 years. It's like a waterwheel: someone is always drowning, it certainly has it's downside.

BT: I have seen 1 videocall in the wild, in a bar in Barcelona. It reminded me of cable where the cable companies tried to get us to buy TV, when we wanted IP connectivity. All the talk of advertising etc., masks a reality: phones will become Just Another IP Device. Many of the models built around its affordances as a phone will stop being workable and new things become possible. People challenging the status quo of operators etc. will have a difficult time, but will prevail. We will change handsets and expect portability of UI. Portability will bring audience loyalty.

TG: What timeframe for this to be a mainstream consumer choice?
BT: Vested interests tend to decay. As technologies emerge, so do new possibility of making money. Incumbents either self-cannibalise (rare) or die. (He's talking about strategy tax I think). New entrants with nothing to preserve can offer something fantastic - e.g. a handset that clones the UI of your current phone?

TG: If the handset companies become clones and networks become pipes, who are the big forces?
BT: The OS developers (if they're lucky) or the applications and services. It's all IP in the long-term, all bits on a processor. Phones become commodities, but no-one has a "right" to make a profit.

TG: How can Vodafone reposition for this?
BT: Buy a foundry. Make chipsets. Be Qualcomm. Support the multiplicity of handsets in software as well as hardware.

BT: Binge drinking is a side-effect of mobile phones. My daughter will arrange to go out, but not to a venue - just-in-time socialising. Landlords need to offer cheap beer in happy hours to keep customers, hence binge drinking.

Dan Applequist, Vodafone: There's a lot of entrenched cynicism in the industry, that real people don't want these services, preferring hand-holding. What do you say to people who take that view?
BT: Good UI design is like a new sexual partner: revealing him/herself slowly. As you explore you discover new opportunities for pleasure, ideally at minimum cost. I'd like big, thrusting bandwidth.

DA: Where's the balance point between disruption and disrupting yourself out of business?
BT: In next 4-5 years we'll see failed disruptions ("peaked too early"), have their ideas picked up on, giving them an opportunity to build new businesses. The worst thing is that someone large (Google) sees your business as their marketing expense.

TG: What will move people in this direction? Most people still only want voice and text.
BT: Imagine Nokia 8600 running Android. You don't need to give people interfaces today, but you do need to give them platforms which support what they want - so when they want these services, they're there.

RB: Opportunity is for incumbents to be disruptive (e.g. O2).

David Wood, Symbian: On the question of UIs changing according to your mood. Have you seen what QT do?
BT: This is the way things will go - it's a question of how much functionality you reveal to the user and when?

James, Truphone: Network operators annoy me when they tell me what I can do - e.g. the Blackberry Storm with Wi-Fi taken out for Vodafone. I want a phone with everything open.