Over at the Mobloplex we’ve been having fun putting together the Moblog UK Valentine’s Day competition. It’s really three competitions in one, with prizes for the cutest couple as well as the best batchelor and batchelorette. We don’t like to exclude anyone.
We want to see your pictures! You don’t have to be a member of the site, just send a picture from your computer or your phone to valentines@moblg.net. From your phone you can use your email application or just send an MMS to that address.
The Mobile Weblog reports that Vodafone have introduced a kind of “0800 for data” service, allowing companies to sponsor the cost of accessing their services. This opens the door for some smart cookies (Google, I’m looking at you) to find the money from other sources, such as advertising, and get more customers involved. It’s pretty easy to choose between the similar services of Google and Yahoo! if one is willing to cover my data charges for me.
I’ve switched my RSS feed over to Feedburner. Feedburner offers a whole slew of great tools for publishers, analysis tools like readership and click-throughs, automatic splicing in of other content, like links posted to my del.icio.us account, smart reformatting of feeds for different user agents, up to promotional kit like pinging Technorati et al every time I update. Basically it’s a feed swiss army knife, I’m very impressed (if a little behind the crowd).
I’m going to be making a few other changes to the site over the next month or so as well, and although the old feed will keep working, I’m going to be promoting the Feedburned feed only.
If you’re reading this through the feed, please update your bookmarks to http://feeds.feedburner.com/afternoon (yes, I would like to issue a permanent redirect header on the original url too, but then where would Feedburner get it’s data from?).
Thanks for reading!
Our mentor just sent me this quote by business strategist Peter F. Drucker.
“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
That’s what we failed to do with Cohack, and aren’t doing enough in Moblog. Sitting down and saying, this is the decision, it might be wrong, it might be right, we hope it’s right, but whatever happens we’ve got to stick by it. We’ve got to execute. We’re a group of people who don’t have management experience, we’re bottom-rung knowledge workers, I produce web pages for example. My stock and trade is HTML, CSS et al, not delegating. That’s something I’m going to need to learn, when someone else should be pulling their weight and when I should be, otherwise we’ll perpetuate the current situation, a constant self-feeding storm of ideas and emails that never go anyway, that never get past the “Interesting” stage.
Been trying to get Technorati to play nice and let me “claim my blog.” It won’t let me. I don’t need their validation anyway.
Maybe I do.
First Impressions Count in Website Design.
“Web designers have as little as 50 milliseconds to capture the interest of potential customers. Through the halo effect, first impressions can influence subsequent judgments of website credibility and buying decisions.”
“[…] that feeling you evoke in users through a “clean, professional design” can have a halo effect on their buying judgments.”
If you operate a website for profit, invest in design! Without it you’re really on to a non-starter. A badly designed, confusing page is the equivalent of turning up late to meetings and not looking the part (and this from someone who has to fight hard not to do both at every meeting). Except of course, that while you can fit in a few meetings a week, your homepage can be shipped to hundreds, thousands, millions of visitors.
Saturday evening, over cheap Lastminute.com dinner at Quaglino’s, Louise and I were discussing which film we’d like to see afterwards. It wasn’t a late meal but for some reason there’s a dead zone in showing times between 20:30 and 23:00. I started looking things up on the Orange Wap site. I used a location search to find the nearest cinemas. Clicking through to a cinema gave me a list of films, which after one more click gave me a list of times. What I wanted was cinemas a) near me, b) showing one of the three films I wanted and c) showing them in the next hour. Surely this is an extremely common case? This should be a single click. I should be able to bookmark http://orange.multimedia/films/nowshowing/ and just get this list, location-aware. Instead I spent much of the meal clicking away, instead of laughing and making polite conversation.
I had an interesting conversation with Nick Hancock of Intelli-call on Tuesday about the thickness of the mobile client. Mobile services should, IMHO, be about shipping the tiny fraction of functionality which is genuinely useful in a mobile setting, everything else should be done through the web.
For Gmail this means I set up my account online, enter my details, but I can use my phone to check my inbox, read and write replies if I really need to. For RSS, this means I have an online feed configuration tool, and a mobile app which just pulls the latest from the feeds I have set to export to that profile. Of course, all configuration should be available on the mobile too, for that one time I really need to change the parameters. So, support the default case with the minimum amount of traffic, but allow flexibility when required. Sound familiar? You should already be doing this on your website.
It was Bluepulse that really got me thinking about this. Bluepulse is a Dashboard/Konfabulator-style widget environment for mobiles. I can make connected apps quickly and easily. With lovely Web 2.0 access to data Orange’s data about film showings and my current location I should be able to write a quick Bluepulse app that gives me what I want.
Wait, Orange don’t let me get near their film data and certainly not to my own location data.
Went along to Mobile Opportunities today. Tony Fish of AMF Ventures brought a good crowd of enterprises, entrepreneurs and investors, many part of the Momo community, to the basement auditorium of Simmons & Simmons in the city. The investment part of the crowd apparently representing some £20bn of private equity.
Chris Burke, former CTO of Vodafone UK, discussed the status of the various mobile technologies in the wild. Tony Fish introduced the elements of Web 2.0 to mobile applications. Thomas Wheadon, of Simmons & Simmons, looked at the legal impliciations of becoming an MVNO. Finally Alan Moore, technology futurist, addressed the vital issue of community audiences and creation.
Chris Burke kicked off by sifting through the technologies currently playing out in the mobile space. Asserting that customers don’t care about access technologies, he was openly scathing of the 3G strategy being followed by the MNOs, accusing it of being blindly dominated by marketing. Addressing what people really want he discussed music, pointing to Sony Ericsson’s success with the walkman phones, and video, though not necessarily TV. Worried that operators had got too used to fat profits and had forgotten how to focus on revenue, he asked why is there not more focus on the two things that really work in revenue terms: voice and messaging. He looked at the different flavours of messaging, SMS in Europe, email in Asia and IM in the US, drawing the common thread between these and pointing out that these markets are developing, with Cingular’s email offering and SMS starting to happen in Asia, and how there’s still room for innovation, though things like Vodafone’s TechCentre, providing SMS distribution lists.
Burke discussed data cards, a 3G service that has gained some traction, but again was bemused by the operators’ strong desire to forge ahead with HSDPA rollout, increasing bandwidth, when coverage and reliability are the primary roadblocks for data card users. One of the most interesting things covered was IMS, a technology platform for multimedia services, IMS could be something of a great white hope allowing operators to innovate more cheaply. For example push-to-talk services could be built on top of IMS.
Tony Fish brought along the idea of Mobile Web 2.0 (site has Tony’s slides). Being a big Web 2.0 fan, I found this interesting. Fish quickly covered off the elements of Web 2.0, long tail, remixability, value of original data, etc, broke down Tim O’Reilly’s definition and referenced just about every company that has graced TechCrunch‘s pages, before proceeding to get to the interesting bit: how this affects mobile. The key thread was the long tail, he expects to see the mobile space transition from a small number of providers trying to create mass-market killer apps, to many small organisations creating thousands of niche apps. Currently, this raises the so-called “developer’s dilemma,” the network equipment, middleware, terminal equipment and service provision are disparate and hard for a single small developer to unite.
Some of the key principles of Mobile Web 2.0, on top of those that are accepted components of Normal Web 2.0:
The interesting part for me was the opportunities and ideas that Fish raised in conclusion. Private equity: users won’t be paying, following the Google model of bringing money raised in advertising to bear on previously safe revenue streams like access. Hijacking the phone: taking control of handsets, possibly going as far as replacing the entire handset OS, presumably with Linux et al. Not taking the web to mobile, but mobile creating value for the web. This point being especially relevant to us at Moblog and to the mobile thin client model. Finally communities, the critical success requirement of any 2.0 venture, be it web or mobile. Communities are niche groups joined by interests, not geography.
Thomas Wheadon from Simmons & Simmons addressed the process of becoming an MVNO. He covered the different risks and rewards for strict and loose MVNOs. Strict, like Virgin, use their own equipment, incurring considerable capital expenditure early on. The risks are high and the rewards not amazing. Loose MVNOs are just agents. The risks are less, there are still pitfalls, specifically in the areas of reliability and liability, but many of those are manageable if the potential MVNO has their eyes open. Wheadon also mentioned the relatively new phenomena of MVNEs — purely access providers. A quick list of MVNOs compiled from Wheadon’s talk and from Alan Moore includes Virgin, Disney, Tesco (just launching), P. Diddy and Kiss! Fertile ground indeed.
The last speaker, Alan Moore, Technology Futurist at SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, was the most interesting in my opinion. Building on the themes of the democratisation of the mobile space touched on briefly by Chris Burke and covered in more depth by Tony Fish, Moore expanded on the shift in the nature of the audience for digital marketing and applictions.
Moore’s thesis is compelling. Digital brands are life-simplifying, life-enabling and navigational. Communities have transitioned from very fixed and rigid, created by state, religion, geography, to being very fluid and flexible, made up of highly-empowered individuals, individuals who the curators of the content they consume. The product-consumption machines of the post-war era have given way to individuals who value life and experience, self-determination, in the post-modern age. Internet, mobile and especially Web 2.0 fit the needs of those individuals better.
The traditional “cold” media, one way, built around persuasion, is being dominated by the very active, bi-directional “hot” media. Things like Pop Idol, the song by the winner of the Chinese Pop Idol was downloaded a billion times and she’s one of the very few fairly elected public figures there. Things like Jamie Oliver’s extended agitprop school dinners programmes and the redoubtable Ohmynews, the blogosphere, even World of Warcraft.
All this impacts on the interaction between brands and individuals in a fundamental way. Interactions shift from traditional persuasion to bi-directional and trust-based, as discussed by Glenn Urban and The Trust Imperative. Word of mouth becomes super-important, as seen in the Buzzmachine DellHell incident which was thoroughly analysed by Market Sentinel, Onalytica and Immediate Future PR. Some 49% of mobile buyers are influenced by word of mouth, research by Nokia revealed that the length of the buying process has shrunk incredibly from 6 weeks to 6 days. Quite possibly this can be attributed to the 24 hour nature of content in the new web, primetime is not a time of day, it’s a state of mind.
The 4 Cs of mobile, commerce, culture, connectivity, community, bring incredible results when mixed in the right measures. China’s Pop Idol success, the Artists First service allowing musicians to sell music direct from their sites, the Twins MVNO in Hong Kong: a service branded to the equivalent of the Spice Girls or something. Community is an incredibly powerful marketing tool when you identify and target the alpha users, the nodes in the network that will carry your message out to the edges most quickly. Moore had many more examples success stories, all of them interesting, but we ran out of time, so the last great thing he covered in depth was CyWorld, a mixture of Habbo Hotel and mobile blogging. CyWorld is Korea’s answer to MySpace, and it has more users. Visitors create rooms that represent themselves, forming part of a virtual space. They sell 100,000 songs a month just for use as background music.
Like Burke and Fish, Moore sees the operators as resting on their laurels. Robbie Williams sold 20% of tickets for a gig in Germany over mobiles — why aren’t there ticketing services? Why aren’t there health or education services? Why focus on access technologies when there are so many vertical opportunities? Tying back into ideas of the long tail of mobile applications.
The message of the day was there’s a coming shift in the mobile space, the accepted hierarchy is going to change, innovation has been stifled and huge profits soaked up. Chris Burke was most damning of his former employer, though equally of the other networks. Tony Fish began his talk by warning people that what he was about to say might include ideas the big players would not like. Many of the ideas raised by Fish and Moore are widely accepted in the blogosphere and the core community of innovators on the web (of which I count myself a fanboy), but whilst they’re relatively simple technical problems, they’re huge shifts in the way people do business. The labels attached to suits today bore both sides of the divide, Vodafone were just in front of me, I saw Orange on the way out. I hope those representatives took some food for thought away with them too.
So there you go, great event Tony! I’ve tried to be succinct without leaving too much out, let me know if you were there and heard something different :-).
You can see the pictures I took at the event on my Moblog, they’re a bit rubbish I’m afraid.
Watching the BBC’s Review 2005 programme on mobile-phone news gathering certainly provokes thoughts about nature of “citizen journalism”.
It’s clear that there is a massive shift is underway with in the journalism world. Blogging democratises reporting, but with mobile content, there’s something more subtle happening. The majority of the eyewitnesses in the programme, the alleged citizen journalists, did not really identify with the phrase at all. They saw their role almost just as simple cogs in the machine, snapping pictures to support the real journalists.
Currently at least the citizen journalist model works because content is passed to a major news organisation. It’s really an evolution of the eyewitness, rather than a revolution. Bloggers attack the other end of the spectrum, creating mini-news organisations, but they are even less well placed than the mainstream organisation to cover events, as their resources are so small. They might get there 15 minutes, and they’re certainly well positioned to comment and review primary sources within their own theatre (e.g. Iraq).
Audioblog might be a useful tool, but why on earth is providing my daytime phone number and credit card details mandatory for a free trial account!? If they do anything with either, I’ll give them a piece of my mind.
I have work-related reason for signing up, otherwise there’s no chance they’d get my business.
Got back from Mobile Monday drunk, snoozed for an hour and now I’m learning new hacking tricks! I surely do have the strangest working hours. I have an excuse, Louise started a new job working nights this week, she finishes at four and will be back in an hour. I wanted to stay up and wait for her.
Anyway, Hijax is the combination of two very cool ideas: 1. Ajax, 2. Progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement, advocated by Jeremy Keith, in his book DOM Scripting (which I do not own and have not read), suggests that whizzy JavaScript functionality should be automatically added to a simple HTML page after the fact. So instead of building an app with a bunch of links that call JS functions, I’d create a vanilla web app with links to new pages. Then I would write JS code that goes and finds those vanilla links and hijacks them, replacing them in the DOM with links to teh whizzy.
This idea doesn’t just relate to Ajax of course, but it provides a foundation for building higher-quality Ajax apps. As Mr Keith so eloquently puts it: “progressive enhancement automatically guarantees graceful degradation.” Because the old links are still there for non-JS users (old browsers, browsers with no JS, search engines, etc) my app still works perfectly well, if less whizzily.
This is the single coolest JS trick I’ve ever come across, way cooler than all that Ajax rubbish :-). Deployment of JS whizzitronics follows the same model as the deployment of CSS beauty. The underlying content is preserved, so you can have your cake and eat it too. I highly recommend reading Jeremy’s blog and the sample chapter as he explains this stuff much better than me in my tired, post-booze state.
I’m a hacker. Hacking is my raison d’etre you might say. I come from the open source community side, so it’s no surprise that my view of Bill Gates has never been that rosy.
I watched Bill’s presentation from CES today. I thought it was a bit dull, nothing revolutionary there, but then it is a consumer crowd, rather than technologists so that’s fair enough I guess.
But as I watched something strange happened. I had been reading yesterday about the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation’s support for the “14 big health issues.” As I watched him I thought about who this super rich man was, I noticed he was wearing quite a nice shirt. Age has improved his appearance vastly. I’m a bit of a nervous presenter, so whenever I watch a smooth presentation I’m always jealous. Then I realised that I have begun to respect Bill Gates.
Shock! Horror! I have friends (who may even comment) how out of sorts this is. It’s quite revolutionary. The key of course is that this respect isn’t for a fellow technologist, but for a businessman.
Of course, I was a young fool to be so dogmatic and blinkered in my unkindness towards Mr Gates, but at least I’m starting to see more of the bigger picture.
F– me!
Number 1 for “web developer london.”
In April 2003 I was third, rereading my post about that prompted me to try again, smilingly thinking I would be like last or something.
Now that’s some good SEO juju. Completely accidental as well. As clearly shown by the fact that I’m 10th for “london web developer.”
We’re in the process of bringing advertising to Moblog UK. Just simple Google AdSense ads for the moment, but it’s a turning point for a site started as a hobby. It’s becoming a business. I got involved in the Moblog Technology side of things, which seeks to find applications for the underlying mobile content capture technology. However, since talking to Technokitten and others we’re now re-evaluating the value of the site, of the community. Having just got into web dev as the dotcom crash arrived, I wasn’t hugely taken by a advertising-lead business plan. But look at the average acquisition price per monthly unique visitor from some of the big deals, some old, some bang up to date (data from Business 2.0):
The average is $38, by that kind of logic, Moblog is worth $4.1m! The newer deals price the average punter at a significantly lower level, but even a $1 user value is a very interesting proposition. Our plan is to increase return visitors by a factor of ten this year and to create revenue with advertising on the site and by maintaining the proportion of those people that want to become subscribers. If we can do that in 2006, we might have a good 2007 as well.
We’ve been lucky enough recently to find ourselves someone who’s been successful in a dotcom business and who has taken a shine to our plight. I hesitate to use the word mentor as it’s still early days, but she’s helping us to focus on planning and delivering. These are two things which need to be regarded with the utmost respect, it’s easy to pledge, hard to do. We’ve made a lot of plans in the last few years, and I hope we’ll have a 2006 of Getting Things Done.
Personal site of Ben Godfrey, wandering hacker, serial founder, techno fanboy.
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