Amazon continues to amaze me with the work they are doing in their Amazon Web Services unit. What Amazon is doing with Web Services, S3, their “elastic computing cloud,” the Mechanical Turk, etc… seems to me like it’s from the future. It’s the most exciting thing on the Web right now. They are technologies, completely orthogonal from their traditional business of selling hard goods, that are enabling innovation and new businesses to grow up around them.
Wow. This is big. This is a big room filled with Web developers, entrepreneurs, managers, etc… (helpfully color-coded on their badges). Easily 500 people here. Probably more. All the chairs are filled up and I’m sitting on the floor. I think I forgot how big these things can get, and I forgot how much bigger the general Web community is compared to the mobile community. Great presentation from last.fm. Big message was: design your service as a platform (open APIs). Allow others to build stuff on top of what you’re doing – that promotes growth. Great sutff. Due to speak tomorrow on future of mobile web applications… I think this might be the largest audience I’ve spoken in front of (assuming they all show up tomorrow). Even bigger than Fundamentos Web which was already pretty big.
The Yahoo! stand Yahoo! had a really big stand this year at 3GSM where they were showcasing their wizzy new version of Yahoo! Go (more coherent thoughts on that later). They were giving away dishes of yummy ice-cream as well, but by the time I got to their stand to get some they had run out of spoons so I had to go source my own by raiding the adjacent cafeteria (who actually had also run out of spoons leaving me in the position of having to eat my Yahoo! ice-cream with a stolen fork). In retrospect, I wonder: is this a metaphor for what Yahoo! is doing in the mobile space right now? I think it’s possible, but then again they may have just run out of spoons.
Moconews published a good summary of the panel on mobile search that I sat on at 3GSM. One thing not covered in the article: mobile web skepticism still rampant. A guy from the audience still didn’t believe you could have a compelling Web experience on a phone, let alone a good search experience. I told him he might need a new phone. After the panel, I sat down with him and took him through the mobile search app that was bundled on my N73, then through a Yahoo! search using Opera Mini on my Blackberry (since he was using an older Blackberry). He left a convert, I think and he might not need a new phone after all if his existing phone can run Opera Mini.
So. After experiencing the 3GSM conference for the second time, what are my thoughts? First of all, I am very much more impressed with the event this year than I was last year. It’s even bigger (60,000 attendees this year up from 50,000 last year). There’s a greater variety of content here. Last year, as I said, it was all about MobileTV. This year, there were still people talking about MobileTV, but you also have lots of people talking about things like mobile Linux and open source, location based services and of course mobile Web. Lots of great product announcements. New version of Yahoo! go – looks very cool. I downloaded it but haven’t really taken it for a spin yet. Many people have commented positively on the trend of operators becoming “more open” – a good trend. There seem to be more startups this year and in general much more innovation on a number of fronts. Lots of people receptive to the Betavine message I was spreading around. All in all, a great and hopefully productive week. Hopefully some more coherent thoughts soon — right now it’s time to sleep.
Just a quick post on this. In a word, it was awesome. Kudos to Rudy for putting it together and likewise to everyone else involved in developing it. 23 startups from 23 Mobile Monday chapters around the world showcasing some great (and sometimes surprising) products and innovations. My head is still spinning.
It’s 10:00 on Monday and Tim Berners-Lee has just delivered his keynote address. The key message: the Web is an open platform and an enabling technology layer and as the Web moves into the mobile platform (“convergence”), we need to keep the Web open. It’s a simple message, but it bears repeating, especially here at 3GSM where so much of the hype tends to be about vertical applications such as Mobile TV and music downloads. The Web’s openness is precisely what has fueled its success and allowed it to be such a global success story. I hope that message is received here at the conference. Side note: there is no free wireless network here! There is a “pay for” wireless network available — for €200! I don’t think so. Very unimpressed. Come on GSM Association — get someone to sponsor free Wifi. There’s sponsorship on everything else — it shouldn’t be so difficult. A so-called “back-channel” is becoming de regeur at events like this around the world. Especially as 3GSM embraces so-called Internet-Mobile convergence, it’s vital to activate that back-channel.
Here I am again in Barcelona, a year after attending my first 3GSM event (the Euro-centric mobile industry’s yearly love-fest). Last year, I was an observer. This year, my schedule is packed. I’m attending Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote tomorrow morning. I’m being a judge at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards tomorrow afternoon. On Tuesday, I’ll be at the W3C booth promoting our work in Mobile Web Initiative. On Thursday, I’ll be attending the dotMobi Advisory Group meeting at the Wireless Developers Forum and speaking on a panel at the iHollywood Forum. Finally on Thursday I’ll be on a panel at 3GSM itself (although I’m still not listed on the conference Web site. Of course, throughout all of this, I’ll be talking to anyone who wants to listen about Vodafone Betavine! Last year, 3GSM was all about MobileTV. This year, mobile Internet will be front and center. My schedule this week is one measure of this increased focus on the Mobile Internet. I’m particularly excited about the Mobile Monday event tomorrow, where we’ll be featuring 20+ exciting start-ups from around the world competing for peer recognition. I’m also looking forward to spending some time just walking the floor and seeing what the flavor of mobile innovation is this year. If you’re here at 3GSM this week, leave a comment here or come find me at Mobile Monday tomorrow and say “hi.” (or ask me about Vodafone Betavine!) One thing’s for sure: it’s going to be a frenetic week.
Well … we are living in interesting times. Apple’s Steve Jobs has released an Open Letter (published on apple.com) effectively championing the idea of a DRM-free world. Why? Because DRM systems “haven’t worked.” I completely agree. In fact, DRM is a dangerous delusion. Jobs may see the writing on the wall with the release of Microsoft Zune. Who knows why he has chosen this moment in time to express these thoughts. Meanwhile, here in the UK, the BBC are doing their own soul searching around DRM. The BBC Trust, which is a kind of watch-dog organization that sits on top of BBC, has launched an online “consultation” regarding its use of DRM in the on-demand services it plans to launch shortly over the Internet (branded iPlayer). They want to know how long users of this server should be able to save content on their PCs for later playback. They also want to know how important it is to be able to support multiple OSs. The current plan is for the player to support only … you guessed it … Windows DRM format (currently not available on Macs let alone Linux). As a Mac user (despite what the Guardian says, they just work better) I was appalled when I heard this, but even if you’re a PC user, think about this: I can go buy a Tivo or get a Sky+ box and download shows and save them for as long as I want. Furthermore, I can download most television shows without DRM protection over the Internet …
Today we launched something that we’ve been working on for a while here at Vodafone. It’s a developer community portal called “Vodafone Betavine.” The idea of the site is to be a resource to the developer community, especially individual or small company developers working on mobile and communication-oriented applications across a range of platforms. There are other developer portals out there, but they tend to be either platform specific or otherwise tied into a commercial process. Vodafone Betavine is an R&D effort and as such is pre-commercial in nature. It’s aim is to stimulate the developer community and thereby encourage growth of the whole ecosystem. Stuff that gets uploaded to Betavine remains the property of the contributor. It’s a place to get people to download your applications, test them, comment on them, etc… Likewise, we hope it will become a place to go to find great, innovative apps that you’ll want to download and test. The site itself is still in the Beta phase, but will continue to improve over time as we keep rolling more featutes into it. This project is being run like a Web 2.0 startup within a big corporate. As such, continual releases and improvements as well as direct feedback from and communication with the site development team will be a key aspect. This is something new for Vodafone and we’d all appreciate your support with making it a success. If you’re a developer and you have an app that’s in some way related to mobile or communications, go to the site, …