I am speaking in Austin (as a satellite event to SXSW) alongside Taptu and BlueFlavor. Should be a very good one.
And on the European side, Andrea is doing Barcelona, where the subject is mobile travel. Also set to be a great evening.
If you’re going to either, one of us will see you there 
This is an odd feeling: Standing in line for security at O’Hare… Idly reading Private Eye… Turning to page 27… WAIT a minute! That looks familiar! I wrote that!
Yes, yours truly has the dubious honour of having made Pseud’s Corner.
For those of you not familiar with the aforementioned organ, Private Eye is a satirical UK magazine that has a regular spot where outrageous quotes from the pretentious and precocious are paraded. Authors, actors, art critics and such like.
This week, a mobile CTO!Seems the editors look a shine to my Mobile Monday Barcelona introduction.
OK, so maybe it was a little heavy on the rhetoric, but still… I get to share this (perhaps dubious) honour with Fay Weldon, Ozwald Boateng and A.A. Gill – so it can’t be entirely bad.
Along the lines of ”how to [..] feed your CTO“, and “N things you didn’t know about blogger X“, I was staring at my cluttered desktop, wondering what it all means.
Featuring…
- A variety of development tools (Eclipse, Visual Studio, MySQL, Wireshark, FTP, SCP, JMeter scripts, a JSON parser)
- The Android SDK
- Portions of a mobile web book I am writing
- Slideware for various products & projects
- Domain analysis results
- An Ubuntu ISO image and an Apache install
- An OPML file of mobile blogs
- My registration form for MWC
- A JPG helpfully named “graph”
- A bunch of browsers
- The hiring plan for my team
- MetaWeb Query Language documentation
- Mobile Monday Dublin’s Peer Awards application forms
- Two mysterious text files called “yes” and “no” (?!)
- Some social network clients
- Something to listen to
- Armadillo Run
- …and a folder named “temp” – where all this rubbish is shortly headed.
Yes, that pretty much sums up the last 3 months of my life. What’s on your desktop – and why?
…but I’ll keep it short. That I can so easily tells you everything you need to know about the show.
There’s a lot going on at the the Mobile World Congress, and of course there are lots of sub-markets and sub-industries being represented. But the thrust of the show is pure telecoms. Device and infrastructure vendors trying to wow network operators.
Everything else (in particular, hall 7, complete with porn and prayer room) is really just a side show. However important you think content provision are, you can guarantee the telecoms world doesn’t.
So, on that basis, the show was rather disappointing.
If the handsets launched were supposed to be some sort of comeback, then Cupertino will sleep easily. That side of the show was dominated by one company – who didn’t even turn up – and I thought everything else was utterly underwhelming. (At most I might see myself with an X1)
And on the network side, I’ve rather lost track. The acronyms are getting farcical. Too long for me to remember which ones are which, and which ones are actually synonyms for something else. So forgive my naive conclusion that there was little news there either.
In previous years, the implicit message from GSM was “We are the Masters of the Universe”. This year, there’s nervousness. This is an industry that knows it is about to be disrupted, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it.
On a personal note, the show was most notable for the number of virtual folks I finally got to meet: James Whatley gets special thanks for finding me a personal mobby. After days of being locked in with analysts and journalists, it was nice to come out blinking into the sun and meet people who speak my language 
I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the introduction of this year´s Peer Awards in Barcelona.
I hope it´s not to precocious to post the conent of a three minute speech! As it happened I deviated a fair deal, but the spirit was about right.
——–
Hello Barcelona. And welcome to you all.
We have an amazing afternoon ahead of ourselves. An amazing venue. An amazing city. An amazing organisation team, and of course amazing people. You know, this is not Mobile Monday Barcelona. This is Mobile Monday The World.
I feel honoured to have the chance to welcome you all today. To see such a talented collection of individuals in one room together – all under the banner of mobility – is truly exciting to me. Somehow I feel we are coming of age.
It is so easy to forget what the mobile industry is all about. Yes, its economics are very enticing. Yes, its trade shows are awe-inspiring. And of course the technology is always mind-blowing!
But it’s not really about any of those things. Our industry is about something else. About communication. And communication is about people, human beings. You might call them “users”, “subscribers”, “audiences”, or “eyeballs”. But they are human beings.
In fact you could say that the mobile world is the ultimate social network. One day it will be the size of the entire species. A vast and intelligent network of human beings. Our fellow human beings, wherever in the world they are.
And I have no doubt that that mobile environment must be used for good.
It is the human beings in this room that are making that happen. You, your friends and your colleagues around the world, are
the creative, disruptive, and pioneering force that must lie behind the grand mobile ambition.
All I am going to say about dotMobi is that we are here for no other reason that to help you realise that ambition.
What I see in front of me today is not a safe and lazy industry. You are not faceless brands, multi-national monopolies, or sanitised and defensive incumbents of some dull grey ecosystem.
No. You are the mobile mammals. You are the individuals, the entrepreneurs, the artists, the merchants, the craftsmen and women, the smart, ambitious, bright young things of all our mobile tomorrows.
So. The next time you are rewriting your business plan again or pitching your startup to yet another jaded investor, the next time you are up at three in the morning writing software to launch the following day, the next time you are in a sales meeting, telling sceptical potential customers that you have what it takes – I’ll be there with you. We’ll all be there with you. We’re a community. The Mobile Monday community.
And we have got what it takes.
And you do know that we are doing something quite special, don’t you? Nothing less than the formation and refinement of an entirely new medium. The reinvention of communication for the whole human species. Somebody in this room might be doing something that can change the human race, and that can change the world to make it somehow a better place.
That is a huge privilege and a huge responsibility. I trust we all take it very seriously.
Nevertheless, that is why this afternoon’s competitions are going to be very exciting. Good luck to you all and thank you!
Wondered where I’d gone? Thought we’d been a bit quiet at dotMobi for a little while?
Sorry
Next week is the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And if you’re blogging, you can’t also be flat out trying to release something seismic for the mobile world.
DeviceAtlas. A huge lump of tarmac falling from the sky to fill in that huge pothole in the middle of the mobile superhighway (the one labelled “too many damn devices”). And Find.mobi. Start all over again and re-imagine search for mobile from the ground up. What would it look like?
Any idea of how involved these are? I only just realised I’m doing an introduction at the MoMo Peer Awards on Monday.
If you’re one of the 1,000 people waiting for email from me, don’t panic. I am alive. Just. (“Yes! We found the memory leak!”)
Sleep can wait. All coming soon. I’ll see you next week.
Dear Mobile Blogosphere, your advice please.
I run Mobile Monday in Dublin. We put 4 local mobile startups up for vote for nomination to the MoMo Peer Awards in Barcelona. Final results were as follows:
- 3G Doctor, 6 votes, 4.51%
- Nubiq, 6 votes, 4.51%
- Sentry Wireless, 118 votes, 88.72%
- AdCafe, 3 votes, 2.26%
Now obviously, there’s a fairly comprehensive win for Sentry Wireless. However, we also had about 120 new members to the group in the last 24 hours, and there’s a decent correlation with the voting.
On one hand I welcome new members! On the other hand, I’m not sure that this results accurately represents the balance of our traditional membership. Quite a few of the new subscriptions immediately unsubscribed.
I now feel a little like the UN trying to make sense of a country’s democracy after failed elections. Should I …
A) Leave the poll results as they stand
B) Void the results of anyone who joined after the poll was announced
C) Put the vote back out to the 9,000 members on dev.mobi
D) Make my own independent professional judgement based on the applications
?
1) They seem to love politics, and 2) throw great parties
TechLudd this week exhibited the best of the latter and the worst of the former.
Whether or not you think it’s fair to veto events that others are working hard to put on, far more impressive was the bar brawl that followed, weeks before the thing had even taken place.
And – in a brilliant piece of politik and self-promotion – the critics manage to take credit for the changes that were made to result in the resounding success.
So I am about to slag off next week’s MobileMonday. I think I can then take credit for it being a great event.
(Which is my way of saying “see you there”…)
This doing the rounds (thanks to ceo), which of course makes me wonder what type I am.
Well, my golf is certainly not up to scratch, so I think I’ll plump for a blend of the first and second.
I think it’s phrases like “neither nocturnal nor diurnal”, “temporally ambiguous”, ”drawn towards alpha software like a moth to a flame”, and “prototypes that they quietly whip up and surprise the company with” that seem to ring true with my life.
Oh and a “whiteboard deathmatch” sounds like fun.
Er. Guilty.
It must be time for more obvious punditry from the augursphere.
“2008 will be the year of mobile data, flat rates, Apple & Google phones, mobile advertising… blah blah blah”
No kidding.
Me? I just got back from holiday and I’m chilled in a rum punch sort of way. So no frantic soothsaying from me. But I had one interesting prefiction for a few years out.
Can you imagine a day when Google Maps for Mobile becomes their primary search interface?
(Oh. Don’t forget you heard it here first )
