Now you can "interact with the music charts" via Orange.

I was chatting to a record company guy the other day about how mobile as gone, and he offered the opinion that the success of the ringtones and logos market has led to an over-commercialisation of mobile: that every mobile campaign feels the need to try and sell people stuff, just because there's a good precedent for it and it can. And this might be a rather greedy, short-term approach that does damage to the long-term value of mobile. And there are lots of ways that you can get value from mobile without selling directly to people: promotions or supporting other aspects of a campaign, for instance.

Certainly my first impression of Vodafone Live! was that it felt too expensive: there was a lot of stuff there and it seemed to work well, but the moment I tried to do anything of value I was being charged for it. Either I'm a fixed-lined internet fuddy-duddy, used to getting all my stuff for free, or operators need to tease their customers into making purchases in a more subtle manner.

So I'm going to be chairing a session at next years European mGovernment conference, held just down the road from us on the Sussex University campus at Falmer. The theme of the session will be "Best practices for delivering mobile services to the mass market", and will ideally include contributions from a range of people: operators, local government, service builders, handset vendors, and others. I'd like to concentrate on practical advice, ideally aimed at people who may not have any experience of mobile and what makes it different from other media.

Consider this a call for papers; if you'd like to speak at the event (which is the first conference I've seen which brings together mobile and government), send me (Tom dot Hume at futureplatforms dot com) a proposal for a paper, and CC it to submissions at mgovernment dot com. Submissions need to be in by 28th January 2005, but even if you don't have time to get a paper together, drop me a line and let me know you're interested...

O2 is apparently considering "adopting the i-mode technology standard". Calling I-mode a set of technical standards kind of misses the point: it's a business model based on generous revenue shares and an expression of an ecosystem that allows DoCoMo to define standards, as well as those standards themselves (most of which are based on open Internet technologies). But that's by the by...

An alliance with NTT DoCoMo would undoubtedly bring some learning to O2 on how to produce popular services... but what is this worth? I-mode has been documented by its originators and analysed to death by outsiders over the last few years, and many of its strengths are completely independent of any technology: they're commercial or procedural. O2 have made a significant investment in WAP, and (like all European operators) have a large installed base of WAP users who they need to support. They'll also have pre-existing infrastructure internally (e.g. billing systems) which they can't just junk.

So O2 can't bring I-mode over without supporting additional technical standards; and they're unlikely to copy the revenue model wholesale (by offering a 91/9 revenue share in favour of content owners)... so err what do they get, other than a chance to bask in the reflected glory of DoCoMo? It's not a wealth of content - only a miniscule percentage of Japanese I-mode services are in English and appropriate for UK distribution; and it's not better handsets either: they're here already.

Is I-mode really magic pixie dust with a secret ingredient? Or is it a set of practices which, like most really great ideas, are obvious in hindsight?