Tom Hume

So, it's that time again. We're exceptionally busy and have won a few new projects and clients in the last month or two - with no sign of business slowing. So we're on the look-out for staff again. We're after a few different souls:

• Developers, ideally with some commercial experience of mobile (J2ME, Android or iPhone), and familiarity with or experience working in an agile environment (if you read this blog you'll know we're a quite formal Scrum shop). You'll have a strong appreciation for the role user experience plays in the software development process. You'll obviously be excellent.
• Mid- to senior-level designers; we'd be open to considering someone without commercial mobile experience, but you'll definitely need a strong background in digital media and a genuine enthusiasm for mobile. We're after someone with a mix of visual and interaction skills - we think the line between the two is blurred, and we like it that way. You'll have to be willing to get your hands dirty and learn a little about how your designs are actually implemented. Strong communication skills will be vital.
• QA - and specifically, someone interested in QA as a career path in its own right, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone to a development job. Over the last couple of years we've developed a huge appreciation for thorough, pedantic, devious, downright cruel QA folks who can find obscure bugs with which to taunt our developers, all in the nicest possible way of course. Someone with experience of both manual and automated testing would be a bonus; double points if you've worked in an agile environment before.

For all roles, you'll be working from our offices in central Brighton, and be very comfortable working in a cross-disciplinary team. You can have a look at our site to get a feel for what we do if you like, though I'll warn you that it's horrendously out of date and gives only a vague feel for where we're headed... We offer good salaries and an opportunity to work on *huuuge* software products which touch the lives of literally millions of people, for a global client base. We like to travel - earlier this year most of the company spent 2 weeks camped out in Shenzhen, China, kicking off a project for Microsoft - but it's not in any way compulsory. We also make a point of allowing time for personal development and R&D, and do some reasonably off-the-wall projects: birdwatching, ghost hunting, and location-based gaming have all decorated our portfolio. Drop an email to recruitment@futureplatforms.com if you're interested, and we'll have a chat. Unless you're a recruitment agency of course, in which case stop reading right now and please avoid the temptation to get in touch, even if you're completely unlike all the other agencies and incredibly special in a way that you can't quite describe without sound like just another bloody recruitment agency. Honestly - every time I post a job advert and politely say "no agencies please" I'm assaulted by a tidal wave of dull phone calls from recruiters who seem to think that by ignoring me completely they'll somehow persuade me to pay them fees, and it's all gotten a bit boring.

So, it's been a week since I got back from Mobile 2.0 - and therefore highly remiss that I've not written about it yet.

I really enjoyed both the Developer Day and the main event. The former seemed to be focused around mobile web - with widgets in particular getting a lot of prominence. Whilst I'm not convinced that widgets are the future of all mobile apps, it's an area where - until recently - I've let myself lag behind a little, so I got a lot out of the sessions. And one quote from the very beginning has stuck with me - Dan Appelquist remarking that applications are nowadays being consumed more like songs than software.

The main event was pretty decent. On both days some panel discussions had a tendency to get a bit angels-on-pinheads - the one where 4 people debated publicly about who was most "open", each using a slightly different definition of the much overused word, didn't really hold my attention. But the off-track talks really shone for me - Tom Raftery berating the industry for its at best token gestures towards environmentalism, and Regine Beatty and Atau Tanaka one-upping each other with wonderful examples of mobile frivolity. And outside of these, Ted Morgan of Skyhook talking about their business (200m location searches a day, vs 300m or so Google searches per day!) and Priya Prakash's talk on Beyond Free (an evolution of the last few sessions I've seen her do) were particularly memorable.

The venues (Barcelona Activa and ESADE) were both excellent (modulo the temperature of rooms in the former, which got quite stuffy). Now I've experienced the double-whammy of rock-solid wi-fi and power at every seat, I suspect I'm going to be a little spoilt.

More than this though, on a personal level I got a lot out of the event. It seemed to have a perfect mix of 50% familiar faces and 50% new (and friendly) ones - I'm not a natural networker, but felt very comfortable at the event. And in particular it was great to finally meet Dom and Francois of the W3C and Mike Rowehl - all of whom I've known for a while, but only in a virtual sense. It's nice to have that corrected :)

I did a couple of sessions; one on Mobile User Experience for Developer Day, which was well attended but missed the mark a little, I felt. I emphasised how we run UX alongside development at FP over and above the specifics of mobile UX, and whilst my audience seemed happy to engage on this, I think I could've either been clearer in the title for the session, or put more emphasis on tactics than on process.

The "play" panel I sat on at the very end of the event was a different matter: really good fun, and an utter privilege to talk about location-based gaming, ghost hunting, shitting and sex, generative music and digital rights issues with Professor Tanaka, Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, Akhil Monappa of Atlas Venture, and Michael Breidenbruecker - the lovable nutter behind Last.fm and RJDJ - all ably held together by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.

And again, on a personal note I had a very interesting chat with Ted Morgan at the post-event dinner, learning exactly what it's like to get into work one day and find a message from Steve Jobs on your voicemail :)

Thanks to Rudy, Dan, and all the organisers and behind-the-scenes folks who made it happen. I'm already looking forward to next year, though I think I might give myself an extra day in Barcelona to help recover from Sonar...

Mobile 2.0: Priya Prakash, Nokia: Beyond Free

Priya's slides are online here.

What's a designer doing talking about pricing? Unless there's a seamless and delightful user experience, nothing will sell. We know that people report higher priced wine as better.

Between Apple and Dixons, the last mile for delivering consumer technology is broken.

iPhone owners are a community, a club. iPhone purchasers are buying into a community.

The Wii community is proud of the injuries they've sustained - yet we consider this poor usability.

What is free? Time and attention are not free, nor are status and effort.

If you want users to upgrade from free to paid, you need to demonstrate the clear benefits they're missing in the free version, and design seamless calls to action to get them to convert. 37 signals are very clear on what their basic plan doesn't do.

Metrics are gold dust, they're a key tool for learning about your users.

If they've paid for it, users will return to an application more often.

If you want to monitise the user experience, you need a highly reactive business strategy.

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Context Panel

Moderator: Raimo van der Klein, SPRXMobile

Gregr Skibiski, Sense Networks

Tommy Ahers, Vodafone (ex-Zyb)

Felix Petersen, Nokia Berlin

Ted Morgan, SkyHook

Xavier Carrillo Costa, Digital Legends

XCC: we spend a lot of money simulating the real world. Now we're connecting with the real world, and it's changing the game paradigm.

TM: Have difficulty figuring out some behaviour. We see some locations which have huge numbers of lookups, but can't work out why. One of our heaviest location users on the iPhone is the RIM HQ.

FP: We have a successful mapping product. We realised a couple of years back that we didn't need to license traffic data, we could gather it ourselves from looking at behaviour of users with our product. Google built a product on the back of inferring meaning from links between pages; we can do the same with geographic links.

TA: Heading up location team at Vodafone now. When I promised to change Vodafone from the inside, I didn't realise how big it was :) Enabling location apps through the web framework.

GS: We get lots of data from carriers around location. 4-5% of people will use an app 15 times on the iPhone. So can we use combinations of location and other date to predict which apps people will use? There is a link between historical location usage and app usage - e.g. for directory applications, someone moving around a lot is more likely to use one.

Q: Where do you get the data to predict churn, age, sex?

GS: Direct from carriers. Usage of the data is tightly regulated, but for an internal purpose like churn measurement is allowed. External stuff like marketing has to be opt-in.

Q: The US is not very regulated when it comes to privacy. Can you give us examples of data extracted for LBS in Europe, compliant with DPA and Privacy laws?

A: (TA) Latitude. (FP) At Nokia we opted against doing a friend-finder product. The issue is tracking vs publishing; Latitude seems a little naive.

RVDK: Location updates are social behaviour - when people update their location manually, they're saying something.

FP: Manual location updates are more interesting and more relevant.

Q: How far can prediction go?

GS: We take a group of people, a year of behaviour, crunch the data, then work out if they e.g. like rap music, go out at night, and can see we've accurately predicted what they like.

FP: I have to make an effort to physically go somewhere - so it has a lot of meaning. Dopplr are doing interesting stuff with location and the social graph; I tried it and they predicted places I'd like with surprising accuracy, based on very little data.

TM: Most advertising is based on your home, which is where you spend very little time.

FP: But this doesn't matter. We used to derive intent from demographic data, now we can predict it from real behaviour.

XCC: In the console world we manually mine data.

Q: The location visualisation and predictions are fascinating. Can you say anything about apps that generated swarm behaviour?

GS: Talks about taxi visualisations; these bring a feedback loop which modify behaviour.

TM: We've not seen anyone build swarm behaviour, but don't have access to the data in realtime so it's hard.

Q: Context is more than location, it's about a network too.
FP: We've seen lots of interesting examples... we can derive more than location from the phone. We form social graphs every day by interacting, the explicit "we are friends" of Facebook is very raw. If we could mine your everyday life we could be more subtle.

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Ted Morgan, Skyhook

"We're the guys who put the dot on the map". Preinstalled on iPhone, iPod Touch. Number of LBS apps growing - now 3000 across devices, tho vast majority on iPhone.

Mainly travel/navigation apps, but social (not including FB, Myspace or Twitter, none of whom natively do LBS), lifestyle, fitness, are next categories.

Average user requests their location 6 times/day (more than typical number of calls/day): totally 200m requests a day via Skyhook (compare to US Google traffic of 5-600m searches/day).

Two examples: Trulia and Taxi Magic.

Trulia: house-finder showing where nearest open houses available for viewing are nearby (instead of showing all sales).

Taxi magic: one button ordering and paying for taxis.

Last Call: track your drinking, know when to call the cab, find the nearest lawyer.

Geocade: location-based leaderboards for multiplayer games - narrowing down leaderboard by people around you. Lovely.

License plate finder, where you get scored on how far away you are from the state in question, cute.

UFO finder: find sightings near you for the last 40 years.

Average price of location apps: Apple $3.60, Android $0.84, Blackberry $13.60, Ovi $3.18, Palm free.

Mobile 2.0: Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability

greenmonk.net

Drivers for sustainability: climate change (we're all fucked) and the business case (sustainable companies tend to outperform their competitors).

ICT could reduce 15% CO2 emissions globally: through 1bn PCs, 1.2bn landlines, 1.4bn internet users, 4bn mobile users. So mobile is the target for this stuff.

Handset manufacturers are doing sod all: they all have "a green phone".

Many carriers don't mention sustainability initiatives: O2 have a reasonable site, Telefonica and 3 don't.

What are developers doing? Clearstandards have an iPhone app to calculate carbon footprint. 3rdWhale, MobiMonster also get a mention - the latter reduces energy usage of phone. But nothing really significant.

What if:

• Manufacturers made phones to last 6y not 6m? 60% of a phones carbon footprint comes from manufacture. Rent phones, don't buy them.
• Phones were made from biodegradables?
• USB chargers were standard?
• Operators switched to e-billing?
• Operators shared networks?
• Developers used mobile platform to build apps which mae a difference?
• Grid computing client apps were made for mobiles?

I wonder... How does mobile compare to PC - are phones implicitly more energy-conservative? And what specifically can developers do?

Mobile 2.0: Panel Discussion on openness

Moderator: Matthaus Krzykowski, VentureBeat

David Wood, Symbian

Jacob Lehrbaum, Sun

Andreas Constantinou, VisionMobile

Pat Phelan, Cubic Telecom

Christian Sejersen, Mozilla

MK: What is openness to you at 8am on a Monday?
AC: There was a big splash around openness 2008/2007 when Android came along.
DW: It's a culture change, around getting trust from the community.
CS: Most communication takes place in the open - wiki, newsgroups and IRC.
PP: As a semi-MNO we've had to go in and build APIs. Carriers are quite closed in general.
JL: I came from a hardware background (where open was about systems), then into software (which had its own definition), then mobile, where open means "you can install an application on your phone".
AC: We have open application SDKs, communities. Android is open source, but can you influence its development. Governance models cover everything a source code license doesn't: can I influence the source code, who arbitrates between contributions, can I get nightly builds.
DW: Is Open just marketing? No, we're in the middle of a 2-year project to open the Symbian source - we wouldn't do this for marketing brownie points. There are companies that have done a good job with a tightly controlled stack, but over time we think that open standards win out. Look at Firefox, it's not downloaded because it's open source, but because it's a good product.

...

JL: There's a balance between giving people to ability to change anything they like, and keeping compatibility (particularly across devices).
PP: 50% openness is like being half pregnant

DW: Alongside any drive to openness is a drive to ensure the system isn't corrupted from within.

Q: I own mean. How do I get access to systems which have been closed for a long time?

DW: Symbian will open two new websites for participation from customers: not just developers, but gadget enthusiasts too, requesting features. And we want to lower the barrier for easier programming: Python, Flash.

Q: Isn't an open platform one that doesn't charge $1500 to get source access (Symbian)?

DW: It will be free ASAP, by June next year or maybe sooner. We can't open it up immediately because it currently contains entangled 3rd party software code.

Q: What do you think of operator-owned app stores? Are they not a walled garden?

JL: Many to date have been closed. If you're selling something you need to take responsibility for its quality - even if it's free. So there's a level of closedness you need as a vendor.

CS: There has to be a check in the app store for it to have credibility.

DW: OSS needs some help to avoid the problems Christian has highlighted - avoiding fragmentation.

Q: 10 years later we need to talk about openness and making money. Where have we gone wrong.

CS: We don't charge for products, we do rev share on search partnerships.

Q: How can open be safe?

AC: It's not about safety, it's about blame. Who pays the bill for fixing it? With Java, you ask the user to take on liability for installation by asking them regularly.

CS: Open source is one of the best vehicles for making secure products - it rules out security by obscurity.

Q: Who pays for the cost of policing the apps ecosystem?

JL: Carriers often feel responsible because they own the customer relationship. Anyone who the consumer feels they have a relationship with has to take on some of the responsibility.

PP: Apple have a competitive pricing model, and that includes the cost of their organisation to police it.

Mobile 2.0, Carlos Domingo, Director, Internet and Multimedia Lab, Telefonica: Open with care or care to open?

Revenue growth in traditional broadband and mobile is diminishing. New revenue sources are being collaborated over and fought over. Telcos can't capture any of the new growth using traditional methods.

The industry used to be a chess game (controlled and predictable). Now it's poker (living with uncertainty, requiring investment to see what happens next).

To get there we need a number of things:

• Open conversations with customers, "get naked"; be transparent on tariffs, billing, claims; have 2-way communication with customers; speak their language or risk a disconnect with them.
• Establish open innovation networks, work out how to collaborate with small companies, universities and large corps. For Telefonica they invested in Kyte, Loomia, Eventful, FestureTek and Amobee.
• Open innovation doesn't mean killing internal R&D. Get ideas from across the organisation.
• Open networks: become an open service platform to reach a long tail of developers. Telcos own lots of unique/useful assets: service delivery, call control, device access, infrastructure, SMS, QoS, identity, charging, location. Network resources are not the only interesting thing for developers. Knowing a customers social context is useful - imagine an API to tell you programatically if a customer is working or is at home.
• One API; we've loads of standardised APIs: OneAPI, Bondi, W3C, device/OS, network-specific.

But it's not enough to standardise: we need to be making money.

I've put the slides from my talk at Mobile Web Summit 2.0 online - they're here, if you're after them.

My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty.

We had fun in the panel session afterwards too, where I got to trot out a theory I've been nurturing around mobile advertising: on the web, the aim of advertising has been to drive users to useful web services, where they can get something useful done. On mobile, applications are a more appropriate destination for advertising.

Why? Mobile web sites tend to be more limited. There are a few really "sticky" ones (itsMy and Flirtomatic, I'm looking at you), but most destinations for mobile advertising are ad-supporting microsites with little long-term value for a visitor. As such, applications are a more natural and worthwhile destination for mobile advertising: give your prospective customers something genuinely useful they can carry with themselves and see value from again and again, rather than expecting them to return to a microsite.

If you're sceptical, I'd encourage you to look at iPhone app store statistics - the average free app is being run 80 times. This might not mean it's a great place to run advertising, but I'll wager that's roughly 80 times more traffic than most mobile microsites get...

Expanding the horizons of Mobile Web 2.0 to boost the developer ecosystem: An overview of the latest work and progress to move on to the next stage of evolution

"The Mobile Web is a Disruptive Innovation": this is not business as usual, we need new practices for how we develop and engage with the community.

• New markets: e.g. social networks opening up customer segments not served by web players (e.g. ItsMy);
• New players (Google, Apple);
• New business models (e.g. app stores);
• New customer expectations (UX, working out-of-the-box, sharing with friends);

We have turned a corner in the industry: as of yesterday, Dans wife is using the mobile web :) We don't need to talk about how to get people using it any more.

Current industry trends:

• Location apps and the location-based web;
• Social apps going mobile;
• Web browsers become runtimes - web as platform, more application development moves to the web with HTML5, widgets, rich APIs; this decreases fragmentation. As an agency you don't have to think separately for mobile - the same skills are transferable for PC web and mobile;
• Open source;

Clash of civilisations between web and mobile:

• Web: fast, software driven, scripting, APIs, iterative;
• Mobile: market size, scale, control points, regulation, customer ownership;

Mobile web apps

• Web has moved from page-metaphor to application metaphor;
• Mobile web is going the same way;
• Widgets are at the epicentre of mobile/web convergence;

Presents the Twiggy Widget: they got Carsonified, a web shop, to build a widget that does Twitter search.

Location is one of the most important device APIs right now. Working within W3C to build geolocation APIs for the web,

Widgets are made for the mobile web.

Ends with a personal please to end version numbering of web sites.

Panel discussion

Tim Green

Dan Appelquist

Raphael Gourmot from Orange

Sten Minor, VP of software and platforms, Sony Ericsson

TG: Dan showed a vision of web applications and open standards. How much of a hindrance can the device be, with different form factors etc. - Stan?

SM: We need to improve on standards. We have middleware, web runtimes, application ecosystems. In an ideal world you can combine these layers in ways you want. In practice you have vertical clusters (Apple). It's a nightmare to develop apps in this environment, advanced applications have to be made specifically for different clusters or across J2ME.

DA: The widget and runtime environment works well. It's easy to build an app that only makes sense in one screen size/form factor. There's skill in doing device-independent UI. There are tool chains underway to help developers here.

RG: We're helping developers with porting to devices and operating systems. Things have improved a bit, in 10 years. We still face fragmentation. W3C with device APIs runs the risk of following J2ME, with manufacturers implementing standards differently. We're working with middleware to do multi-publishing (e.g. Celsius). But who is the audience.

DA: Regarding the comparison between JSRs and web apis: there's a rabid web developer community intent of ensuring browsers support standards correctly. We need to engage early adopters and developers first, to try and bring this culture to mobile.

SM: We should differentiate on top of standards, not by supporting them.

TG: How?

SG: In services on top - not by locking in users.

DA: Users want a consistent experience when they pick up their phone too.

RG: People are buying devices for form factors, looks. Some of us might buy for features, but we're geeks. For services, differentiation is difficult: how do you do it? You update your browser on the desktop every year, but you don't tend to do this with your mobile. I'm seeing lots of single-platform developers at Orange, who want to reach beyond where they are now. To be more positive, the real benefit from the web.

Panel discussion: impact of form factors. Role of the mobile browser. Ideas on how a more open web might enable more social applications. Where does the handset company sit in a mobile-web dominated future?

Group 1: lots of industries will be trying to apply their industries to the mobile web. Look at broadcasting, say - the mass market want content from broadcasters, aren't fussed about technology. We need to be talking more to the content industry.

SM: Within Sony, there's a lot of collaboration - Sony Pictures, Music, Playstation

DA: It's always good to get the content industry involved earlier on in the standards process. It's hard to engage broadcasters in sometimes-speculative standards work, because it's not really part of their business model. The BBC is definitely on the leading edge.

RG: Content providers were very involved with standards, but it was all push-based. Now they're waiting for standards to be ready. What about DRM? The content industry want their content protected.

Group 6: We collectively wailed when standards were mentioned. The consensus was that they don't work.

DA: I completely disagree. The whole value of the web - the most succcessful interactive media ever - is interoperable standards.

Group 6: Yes, but the web is a case of an individual driving standardisation. But in a business environment the dynamic is different. Telecomms industry has thousands of useless standards.

RG: Standards covers a wide number of layers. The web industry creates upper-layer standards, transport-level layer standards are lower layers. The web industry is moving down the stack whilst the mobile industry moves up.

Q: When we talk about mobile web, we're often thinking about firing up a browser: Safari is one app on the iPhone. Need the mobile web be about the browser? Is the browser the only way to go or will individual mobile applications be it?

DA: The UX of the web runtime environment is that you invoke an application; this is the widget experience. The stock and weather widgets on the iPhone are built in this environment, but Apple don't open them to developers.

Funding the Future of Mobile Web 2.0: The Investors viewpoint in 2009 – is Mobile Web 2.0 the next growth opportunity?

Tony Fish, AMF Ventures, Angel investor

Roberto Bonzaninga, Balderton Capital

Mark Gracey, Scottish Equity

Daniel Waterhouse, Welington Partners

Hugh Fey, OpenVantage

Hugh Campbell, GP Bullhound

Moderator: Tim Green

TG: Why are you an awkard git, Tony?

TF: I'm independent so I can challenge assumptions.

TG: Give me an example of counterintuitive thinking.

TF: The last panel. Standards for applications at the edge are bollocks, driven by people who own the infrastructure.

RB: We as an industry would be better if we thought about consumers. Forget about technology, standards, consume.

TG: Why are there fewer fast-growing mobile companies in your recent list Hugh.

HC: There were 5-6 out of 50. Our table was based on revenue growth; startups in mobile are struggling to deliver this here. Mobile advertising is shot for the next 18 months.

TG: Is it getting harder to generate investment interest?

HC: It's hard for mobile, software and content businesses to raise money right now. VCs have made bets which didn't work out and it's a tough ecosystem for a young company - very busy value chain, problems getting a big enough revenue cut to support yourself.

MG: We've invested in Surfkitchen for longer than we would've liked and they've been through ups and downs. In the last few years we've seen interest in this company grow, operators have long-running projects that have wasted money - they want valuable companies to help them transition to what the iPhone has done. It's tough for startups in mobile infrastructure as well as apps.

DW: The investment community has been scarred by history - mobile gaming, music, LBS have all unravelled in a bad way with few success stories. The ecosystem is improving but there's hesitancy.

TG: Do investors hunt in packs?

TF: No. Mobile has to interface with lots of other things. To talk about it in itself is naive. The industry is scarred because operators promised lots of data consumption and failed to deliver: people create more than they consume. This is where mobile is relevant.

DW: I'm not seeing mobile being an adjunct to the web service. We invest in Qype who have a simple iPhone app contributing a significant percentage of content to the service, though still a small number of users.

RB: VCs are guilty of a bit of homogenous thinking. We need to look at things with fresh eyes: the world changes, ecosystems change.

HC: If you'd have taken the Crazy Frog to an investment committee, it wouldn't have gotten funded.

MG: Jamba wouldn't have made it past our investment committee.

TG: What's the current situation like, in terms of quantity of available funding, and approaches from mobile startups.

RB: We've started a new $100m fund. I spend a lot of time on mobile startups. We don't see much truly new stuff. I'm a bit disappointed that Twitter was created in San Francisco - we had SMS here for years. But today it's exciting that When we look at something, it's not about what I, or operators, think... it's about what consumers think. You can see consumer traction - we can be wrong, but the consumer is normally right. We see lots of small startups, 1 or 2 guys with 1m downloads.

TF: There are fewer startups now, I'm happy about this. We've stopped seeing the same startups come back again and again. Folks are leaving corporates with good ideas.

RB: From an investment POV, App Stores have given us data to work with as to what users are downloading. There's money in the big funds in Europe, but we need great ideas!

TG: Are companies coming with next-generation ideas, or ideas for folks with feature-phones or with wide distribution across the world?

MG: On-device portal is a dirty word these days, it's v operator-centric terminology. We're seeing a lot of companies, but the plans are more plausible. Applications have been proven. It's easy to test, tweak and improve businesses; to invest less and see how it goes.

Q: What areas of the value chain, and what subsectors, do you think are most interesting for investment?

TF: Don't care. Is the market big enough, can it work, is there an exit?

HC: Mobile communities is an area seeing tremendous growth, there's so many interesting things here. Micropayments, smart ad tracking,

RB: As a fund, we don't think like that. OpenVantage are using an old technology; it's the consumer proposition that's working. I think less about the space they're in, and more about the proposal. But it's time to do disruptive consumer propositions now.

HF: Yes, VCs hunt in packs. City events last year made things tighter, valuations are lower. The technology doesn't matter; we're supporting the accessibility and support of spontaneity. We bring this to sports betting.

Q: How many mobile investments do you expect to make this year, when did you last do a new investment?

DW: Last time was 6m ago, first question don't know: we don't have an allocation.

MG: Twice this year. Again, we have no allocation.

RB: Same for us; last one is *now*, we're closing a round. No quotas for us.

TF: 60 days ago.

Q: What's the one thing you'd like to see change in the industry to help you invest more:

RB: Consumers.

TG: What's the most common mistake.

RF: Operator deal: that one deal will change the world. I'd like operators broken back down to providing capacity.

Beyond SMS voting - mapping the future of Mobile Media 2.0

Barry Houlihan, CEO, MIG

SMS voting isn't happening in the UK right now, but the future is optimistic.

MIG: 120 staff, £65m revenue, organic growth, no funding. Freemantle Media, Comic Relief, etc.

Jigsaw: mobile interactivity agency, doing mass-participation in the UK. NewToy, a live experience technology agency.

Kilrush: mobile internet publishing platform, making it easy to integrate mobile with web. Drag and drop, feeds, etc., to help team build services easily.

Walkers crisps activity geneated 60/40 activity in favour of mobile, all by SMS.

47% of all written communication between 15-24yo is by text.
UK consumers send 28 textx messages a week, only make 20 calls.
24-44 year olds are 70% of UK mobile browsing.
67% of the UK mobile browsing internet in the UK is male.

Freemantle aren't seeing a return on their mobile content investments, and are publicly saying they're going to cut back. Endemol have said their biggest challenge is working with application providers: ensuring that apps deliver engagement.

Are You Ahead of Time? A Crowdsourced Vision of Mobile Media, Monty C M Metzget

An interactive session....