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.

In case you're a talented developer in or looking to move to, the Brighton area: Future Platforms are recruiting.

Ideally we're after someone with 3 or more years commercial experience of Java and OO software development; web application experience with Tomcat would be helpful too. We also want this person to be experienced with SQL and database, in particular MySQL - going beyond basic SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE stuff to actually understanding what's going on under-the-hood.

Good communication skills will be essential; the position will involve dealing directly with clients (everyone here does this to some degree). Oh - and a genuine enthusiasm for all things mobile is vital.

Drop us an email with a CV if you're interested. This is a full-time position. We will not be using any agencies to fill this role - if you're an agency, please don't bother contacting me about it.