Gavin's feet

The Locatrix team held an “offsite” event this week at the Toowong Bowls Club. Our Barefoot Bowls afternoon was enjoyed by all – thanks to Sherwin for the photographs, and to Gavin for logistics (and cooking!). Here’s a few photographs.

Watching his ball go into the gutter probably.

Saqib discovered a talent in lawn bowling.

Gavin on the barbie.. how Aussie is that!

Great BBQ by Gavin!

Gavin doing a dance for us. We are not amused.

Rather than re-hash the news items from the conference itself, I thought we’d devote this month’s newsletter to a rundown on what for us were the top four mobile location topics to emerge last month.

In no specific order, we have:

Enabler Access, or more specifically, how mobile operators can become “smarter” data service providers, was a recurring theme throughout the MWC. Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao spoke of a need to “add value to what we do” in his keynote address, citing that opening enablers (messaging, location, charging, and privacy) through cooperation with content providers was key to providing more relevant experiences for more subscribers. And as a technical starting point, the GSMA’s OneAPI initiative has gained momentum in its first phase. Locatrix – joining vendors like Oracle, Aepona, and Ericsson looks forward to contributing to this effort going forward.

Google Latitude was announced the week before the MWC, proving that demand for location extends beyond corporate LBS applications. There are however limitations to Latitude, and some of these are noted in Telstra’s own blog post and podcast. (You can also read my blog posting on Latitude). There is of course a lesson here: if mobile operators don’t allow access to the enablers, their competitors will simply bypass them.

The OSLO Alliance was announced during the MWC, and while at first glance it seems to be a loose collection of social networking application developers, I’m personally quite thrilled by what they’re seeking: Open Social Location Objects (OSLO’s) that can share a subscriber’s and their friend’s locations/proximity seamlessly across mobile networks, as well as certain profile information.

Collectively, the prominence of these three topics provided a watershed of sorts for Locatrix, demonstrating operator need, market potential, and demonstrable value for social location. And we’re ready to respond. I spent a few weeks in Europe successfully showcasing our eXtensible Locatrix Framework (XLF) to mobile operators; XLF provides a single interface to a subscriber’s social network of “approved” (i.e. locatable) friends that can be used by any number of social networking experiences.

XLF will be the highlight topic of next month’s Position Update, but if you want a preview, drop me a line.

Kudos to Mobile Monday-ers in Barcelona

In a multitude of thanks, I need to congratulate Rudy de Waele and Carles Fereiro (and their team) for a third outstanding Mobile Peer Awards and also Mobile Sunday (the latter so well attended that the bar overflowed into other bars!). Thanks also to Helen Keegan of Mobile Monday London fame for the excellent Swedish Beers event at Dostrece, and the excellent UKTI lunch.

And Finally…

To close on a lighter note –and in response to the barrage of e-mails my Blackberry received on February 18th, I need to state once and for all that – despite the brilliance of Whereis® Everyone for this exact purpose – we sadly have no idea where that particular mobile phone is!

Our panel was chartered to specifically discuss monetisation strategies for mobile – including location, charging, and demographics.  I was joined by KTF’s Dr Terry Ahn, Jagdish Mitra from Canvas Technologies, and Kul Wadhwa from the Wikimedia Foundation.  Besides being an interesting discussion, the panel gave me much food for thought about contextual browsing on the mobile, and whether it would soon become as commonplace as the “regular” Internet.

Case in point: I usually open a PC browser with some sort of intent. It might be to check my Gmail while travelling, see what my friends are up to on Facebook, maybe to check the weather or to research a company or topic I’m interested in.  (Yes, I may use the word “research”, what I really mean is “Google”!).

There’s a sense of service “discovery” that doesn’t apply too much to my PC browsing habits: I have maybe a dozen sites bookmarked that I use frequently, and its amazing how irregularly I stray from these. On the mobile, however, I’m positively hungry for new things, and usually am slightly disappointed when I find something is just a poor facsimile of a service or content supply that is much better on the PC browser.

So for the mobile Internet to get really interesting, the services themselves have to become more contextual and personalised, but also the means by which we discover services (and can make a decision as to their applicable relevance to us in the mobile context) needs to improve.  The experience really needs to be something more than a vanilla menu-based operator portal, and it needs to point me to things that I’ll like. And, importantly, benefit from through use of my mobile rather than a PC.

Is this too much to ask? We’ll see how mobile Internet services evolve over the next few years.  Thanks to all at the GSMA for making the Macau event engaging and relevant.

Similar to the MWC in Barcelona each year, the venue threatens to overshadow the conference.  We’re at the Venetian Hotel & Casino, on Macau’s Cotai Strip, and the sheer enormity of this structure is an experience to behold. There’s indoor canals (full size) and an indoor facsimile of St Mark’s Square, built around several levels of high-end shopping and, oh, there’s also a casino that’s larger than several football fields.

This morning’s keynotes were a mixture of concern for the industry with the current financial crisis – literally billions of dollars worth of telecoms debt falls due in 2009, which will bring operating challenges for many operators – while on the other hand, the sheer ubiquity of the mobile experience (like keys and a wallet/purse, nobody leaves home without a mobile) suggests that while not immune from a forecasted decrease in consumer spending, it is unlikely to be a utility people will readily forgo.

Of course, the rise in mobile broadband around the world is giving extra cause for optimism.  I heard anecdotes suggesting 20% growth in subscribers in 6 months as customers add a mobile USB modem to their existing handset service.  While these subscribers provide good ARPU, several speakers mentioned the challenges presented by the infrastructure – base stations and backhaul bandwidth – needed to service this demanding customer segment.  Its no great surprise that most of the OEM vendors here are touting mobile broadband solutions.

I will post more later in the week, but I have to give kudos to the GSMA and also local MNO CTM – each delegate pack contained a prepaid CTM SIM card.  Really handy, so cheap to do, and a wonderfully useful thing to have at such an event.  Well done!