Shopping by Mobile Java App: "Are people ready to shop via their mobile? I can certainly see a niche developing for impulse purchase of things like books, CDs and gadgets. You read a review in a magazine, brochure or via RSS on your phone and want to order it before you forget. You don't need to see a picture or find out much more about it, as a book is a book is a book. So you open up Reporo and order with a few clicks."

Whilst I'm sure there are other folks out there who can comment on the whys and wherefores of running a service like this from their personal experience (go on - you know you want to), a few things immediately struck me about Reporo:

1. They ask for credit card details *way* to early. One minute I'm telling them what sort of handset I have, the next they're demanding my VISA number; err, no thanks. There's no way I'd hand that over to a company I've never heard of, before I've ever received a service from that company or know I want to buy from them.

2. The purchase process looks way too involved: open the app, choose what you're after (books etc.), choose retailer, choose search, enter search term, choose item, drill down to buy it, choose card, choose delivery address, confirm, see receipt. Wow that's 11 steps; anyone would think that they've taken a web site purchase process and just shoehorned it onto mobile! Here's my ideal: open app, enter what I'm after, choose match (drilling down by item type if there are too many entries), click "buy", that's it. 5 steps, and that's 3 too many for my liking.

3. Looks like they're missing a trick and not doing best-price finding. So if I want to buy a DVD from one of their retailers, do I have to search each one separately and work out who's cheaper myself?

4. The special offers stuff is a nice idea.

And, minor gripe here: am I the only person working in the industry who gets annoyed at service demos which are so *obviously* mockups? Please - if you're going to give me an online demo of a mobile service, do so by grabbing the screen from a live, working version... otherwise my gut instinct is to see it, recognise it as a mockup, and immediately feel all sceptical. And no-one wants that.

Random Chuck Norris Fact: "Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants."

It seems a bit redundant for me to comment on this month-old post from Carlo about MVNOs: "Mobile operators don't seem to like segmentation much, beyond perhaps positioning their prepaid and contract offerings at different age groups. But it's a viable strategy, and one they don't necessarily have to leave to outside MV"

The John Strand talk I went to last Wednesday has definitely made an impression on me: the idea that no-frills MVNOs are spreading across Europe and eating into the territories of incumbent operators is exhilirating: simultaneously scary (a shake-up like that could change the landscape of our industry more than a little) and exciting: disruption always throws up a load of new opportunities.

Mobile Data Users Give Up When Going Gets Tough: "The survey, conducted by NOP on behalf of Olista, which provides services for cellular operators, found that 64 percent of respondents who actually tried to use mobile data services said they'd give up trying after one or two attempts if they ran into trouble."

OK, the usual story here: flip those percentages round and it starts to look good. 36% of respondents who tried to use mobile data services said they'd keep trying after one or two failures. Not that as an industry we don't have a lot of work to do, ensuring that services are robust and easy to use, but it's early days...

Well... post-World Telemedia I'd planned to take a few days off, consciously planning to do nothing with them. So obviously on Sunday I came down with the bastard cold that's been floating around and have spent most of yesterday and today alternately sneezing and leaking. But what better was to dispel phlegm than working your way through the I-mode developer documentation, eh?

It's good stuff, though it confirms my view (not held by everyone) that writing markup is only a tiny slice of the overall development effort for any mobile service - and that as such, the "cHTML is just like HTML" argument used to sell I-mode in to content providers is pretty irrelevant.

Which is not to say that I don't rate I-mode: the documentation is unusually relevant, concise and clear compared to some specs I've read (or ahem written), and seems to have a very clear pragmatism underlying it. And my experiences of using it so far have been positive.

As will be bloody obvious from all this, we have an I-mode project on. It's a bit different from most of the stuff that we do in one key respect, and should be quite nifty once launched. More soon.