The guys behind the Eden Project are keeping busy: "Unlike Eden, which uses fossil fuels to heat its domes in winter, Kew of the North is expected to get its fuel for free and would run at a profit even without visitors. Civil engineers working with Grimshaw estimate that it could earn about £12m a year by generating heat and electricity on site and from taking the green waste."

DoCoMo launch another payment method: "iD will enhance existing credit card services by giving credit card owners the option of making payments via a DoCoMo wallet phone linked to the card, in addition to conventional payments with their plastic credit card. The payment procedure will be as simple as waving the phones in front of dedicated reader/writers at stores. No signature will be required for purchases under a certain amount, while purchases exceeding this amount will require the user to simply enter a password via a device linked to the reader/writer."

Either DoCoMo are very good at giving the impression that they're constantly rolling out amazing new services like this... or they're really doing it. I can understand their behind ahead of us when it comes to technology, but the rate at which they launch stuff is just phenomenal.

Why is this not the case in Europe? Discuss.

World Telemedia Day 3, Dating and Mobile, Eythor Arnalds, Enpocket

Dating has been big online. Why not mobile?

Enpocket provide apps & services + marketing services to operators. Work with media owners to mobilize content.

This is tied into cameraphone usage:
- 680m handsets sold in 2004
- 80% of new handsets have a camera
- 400m cameraphones will sell this year
- That's 5x the number of cameras

This affects everybody (shows pic of Colin Powell photographing Bush's inauguration). People are staring at the screen of their phone, not the event itself.

Revenues from non-voice services are starting to kick off.

Dating and picture sharing are both high on the list of things people want to do on their phone.

3G adoption leads to more usage of WAP etc (apparently).

Mobile content is different in terms of cost of marketing and investment. Compare downloads (games and ringtones) to dating and communities. Downloads need a big push to promote, have novelty factor, die quickly. Information services tend to stay low; community services have an organic factor and may be slow in starting, but they grow and grow. It's network effects obviously.

Enpocket connect different platforms and operators to a single community.

Enpocket built a dating engine, deployed with 22 operators worldwide. It powers match.com in the US. Built their own brands in Russia (Ya Rjadom, 400k customers in Moscow region), Spain, UK, India (TrackUrMate, 600k customers) around this engine. Working with an existing large brand is less of a risk for an operator.

match.com looks absolutely beautiful in terms of presentation, for a WAP/XHTML site. Lots of imagery. Matching criteria are different in different territories (in US: it's all about physical attributes, in UK: trends, movie choices, etc.; in Asia: it's about zodiac etc; in Russia: are you male or female ;))

Ratings.

Threaded discussions and chat-style messaging.

They use a lot of the profile for matching (location etc.)

Blocks, etc.

They've seen 10% organic growth per month from deployments.

"Proven ARPU" of $25

Average 6% takeup in Iceland and India as percentage of operator customers. Nearly 10% of folks who get the service on a SIM in India use it!

Over 50% of their US users are chatting to folks within 200 miles of each other. Location is important.

Preferred billing model is by subscriptions. They've seen >600SMS per person using the app via a SIM toolkit application, which is 10x as many as they get from folks going via shortcode.

They have security filters for swear words and phone numbers, to prevent transfer of them. They try to keep people within the community.

They've done off-portal (Pocketdater in the UK, direct B2C). 80% of their revenues come from operators.

Question: What did people prefer to do online vs cellphone.
Answer: Mobile users are typically 10 years younger. They thought most registrations would come via web - in fact 80% came via mobile. Mobile users pay less and get a scaled down version, but they send more messages.

Looking at video and TV in Q1 next year.

Question: Can you do this on regular SIM cards?
Answer: they have a menu-based SMS version. Takes about 3 messages to ask the right questions and get a match.

Question: When you use the SIM toolkit, do customers subscribe?
Answer: Subscription model is preferred for WAP. For SMS it's per-request billing.

Question: which is most successful market?
Answer: Iceland is very busy but small. US, Russia, India, Spain, UK are the biggest.

World Telemedia Day 3: Virtual Babies: Eccky, by Yme Bosma, Media Republic

*Bizarre* instant-messaging avatar generating thing where you invite your friends to create a baby with you, via IM.

Parents compete for attention from this baby. Parents just chat via IM with their baby, which apparently learns to talk gradually. Eccky will text parents to drag them back in.

1 day real time = 1 year game time, initially. Then they sped the game up to 1 day real time = 3 years game time.

Why? Eccky is about playing with someone else. Young people are living their lives online, and not alone. Eccky is an alpha version of a game which evolves around artificial life (oh god).

Behaves like any other user in the buddy list.

My World Telemedia skit seemed to go OK. It wasn't as well-attended as I'd expected; with a name like "World Telemedia" I expected vast halls containing thousands of chattering mobile enthusiasts, not the die-hard 15 or so we got. But hey, that meant we could just chat to them a little more than would be otherwise possible, and quite a few of them hung around after for that.

Ren Reynolds and Vicky Wu of FrogHop ably coped with a missing speaker and ran the session. I still think a "transmedial access solution" sounds like something you hear shouted in an episode of ER, but I think I get what Vicky means now :) If you're into this stuff, take a look at the FrogBlog.

The slides from my talk, "Building a mass market casual gaming service", a case study for our work with Puzzler over the last 18 months, are here. Of course all the really interesting stuff is in my notes and my head, neither of which are fit to be put online - drop me an email if you'd like to know more.