Between Brackets

Even though the questions “what is it”, and “what’s mobile about it” didn’t get answered, there were a number of interesting insights.

DIY metering

It becomes incredibly easy to capture data and publish it to the web or process it otherwise. Martijn Pannevis made a gauge that showed the ‘balance’ of votes of people. The more people tweeted the hash code #iphone, the more the gauge went to the left, the more they sent a hash code in favor of Android the more the needle moved back to the right.

All he’d needed to achieve this was buy a little box at http://iobridge.com. Set up an account. And do a little web programming. Sounds easy enough to me

Booreiland

Menno huisman (Co-founder of Booreiland) had a number of interesting examples that will be available in the form of his presentation online on MoMo’s website soon.

David Orban – WideTag

The IPv6 protocol has an address for every billion (or so) atoms. This means that every non-nanite machine can have an address.

Now, if every machine that surrounds us starts shouting its state (power consumption, oil-level, heart-beat etc) to the internet we (humans) won’t be able to listen to them anymore, there will be too much data for us to process. So we’ll need to automate the processing and analysis of all this data (this is in fact already happening a few years be it on a small scale compared to what is coming). Machines will need to process and analyze their own data and the data that other machines feed them. Machines must become autonomous (unless for some reason we don’t want this -think Dave, or think Terminator). A good example being the vacuum cleaner that independently finds its way back to the charger when its battery is almost empty.

The internet of living things: opensource genetics

The highlight of the evening was the speech from Andrew Hessel about the internet of living things. A passionate speech about how genetics are becoming digital.

Summarized:

the price of determining the DNA sequences is dropping dramatically, the price of (re-)sequencing DNA is also dropping fast. This means that what is currently the playing field of a few smart people that happen to have a lot of money to spend (universities, big corporations), will become a gigantic industry in which a much larger number of smart people (needing only a fraction of the currently required budgets) will be able to create all new kinds of DNA.

It’s as if the bacteria took 4 billion years to create us, so we can re-create them. And we thought we were intelligent

Watch the video it’s really interesting.

No, it’s not George Clooney’s own vanity website It’s a site that’s about sharing your medical data with other patients like you.

In the traditional healthcare system: you feel sick, you go to the doctor, she prescribes you some drugs, you go to the drugstore, you take your pills, and you -hopefully- get better.

PatientsLikeMe.com works around the notion that getting yourself involved in the process of listening to your body and symptoms, thinking about how and what you feel, makes you more conscious about your illness. Recording your medical data and sharing it with others, makes it possible to have a better view on your symptoms to yourself, others and doctors. Instead of going to the doctor and having a fuzzy description of what you feel, you can give the doctor a detailed description of what you have been feeling over many days, weeks or months.

The internet makes it possible to create bigger communities of patients suffering from the same disease than in the physical world. Often the small communities on peoplelikeme, are even bigger than the groups of patients that were followed during the clinical trials of drugs that treat their diseases.

People record all kinds of daily habits: what did I eat today? How do I feel today? …? And because they record it regularly, they have a lot of information when they go to the doctor.

Business plan? Peoplelikeme works together with pharmaceutical companies.

Nick Hunn worked on the new low energy bluetooth standard that -according to him- we will see implemented in hundreds of millions of devices as soon as the beginning of 2011.

His presentation revolved around the central question: what if everything were interconnected?

Not only your TV-set, your computer, your iPhone/iPod, digital cameras and the likes. But also door-knobs and handles for instance.

And what if these door-knobs and handles were fitted a sensor to measure your pulse, or the pulse of elderly people? This could vastly improve the collection of data.

Nick Hunn also gave us his thoughts on mHealth:

• mHealth won’t make healthcare less expensive.
• doctors don’t want it, nor do patients.
• mHealth is not about curing disease. It’s about how much people want to pay (to improve their quality of life…)

So how will we change society so that it wants to improve health care?

Well, to get mHealth going: stop thinking like doctors, start thinking like patients.

For the statisticians among us: the average person takes 50000 pills in a lifetime (200000 in the US). I put my spreadsheet to work and this is the result: if you reach the age of 70, you’ll have ingested an average of 2 pills a day.

Read up on more of his thoughts here.

Another Mobile Monday Amsterdam is in the can, this time in a new venue: De Duif. Not a bad location at all.

Topic: mHealth. What is it? What’s its state? Where are the opportunities?

Bart Collet (owner of an Elderly Home, and mobile addict) gave us his view of the subject. I summarize very lightly:
there are two opportunities for cost savings in the health industry:
appointment alerts: please don’t forget your dental appointment tomorrow.
Treatment alerts: did you measure you blood pressure today? Did you take your medication?
developing countries are making a lot of progress in mHealth. They have limited budgets and therefore think differently. They also have more spotty networks and must therefor make their software very reliable. Finally they have less regulation, less lobbyists than in developing countries.
‘Normal’ device manufacturers (like Nintendo) are starting to enter the medical market as well. These are potentially disruptive forces in the medical appliance world, because these new players are agile, have fresh ideas, less legacy. Of course they don’t have the maturity and experience in mHealth yet.

Interesting opening presentation.

Arno Aaldijk lived the uprise of Nokia as a mobile phone giant first hand. He compared the Location Based Services business then and now and came to the following conclusion: not a lot has changed, until very recently.

Everyone has been trying to monetize on LBS since the very beginning. But customers didn’t want to pay the exorbitant rates to be localized. Google has changed this game by offering free maps and more recently free turn-by-turn directions.

Of course the handsets and software have also improved, but the challenge remains gathering the right map data and qualitative poi information. But we’re reaching a tipping point.

Monday November 16th was MoMoAms day.

The premise: location is important for mobile applications.

This has always been the case, but now it has become easy to integrate location into mobile applications. Easy, because many handsets have become location aware, or because services like SkyHook make it easy for developers to integrate location in their applications.

However one crucial hurdle has been taken away: the cost of getting a handsets location. In the past operators asked up to 1 euro for each request a location based application made to determine the location of a handset. Thus making it way too expensive. And then they asked themselves: why are there so few location based services? Don’t customer think it is worth 1 euro a pop, to know their location? Nope

Four interesting presentations:

• Arno Aaldijk (LinkedIn) – Director Location Based Services at Logica
• Ted Morgan (LinkedIn) – CEO of Skyhook Wireless.
• Dennis Crowley(Site) – Founder of Foursquare and Dodgeball.

And one I’m not yet sure about. It was interesting, but too vague to know what the point really was (except if it was the idea to remain vague of course): Tish Shute (LinkedIn) – Writer and Consultant. Subjects: Augmented reality, beyond the end to end internet, everyware, and sustainable living.

I’ll cover each of these presentations shortly in follow-up posts. But it was again a pleasure to head north to join MoMoAms.

To many people the changes are not clear, but new mobile technology is going to transform society in this part of the world as it already did in some Asian countries (read: Digital Korea). These are exciting times, indeed.

The 8th MoMoAms was all about how this revolution will change our society. The speakers:

• Raymond Perrenet – EVP Strategy & Development at T-Mobile
• Johan Koolwaaij – IYOUIT, Scientific Researcher at Telematica Institute
• Teemu Arina – CEO at Dicole Oy
• Bruce Sterling – writes for Wired (beyond the beyond), Wikipedia, author of various books

The introductory note from Mr. Raimo van der Klein certainly deserves mentioning, as it got a number of ways of looking at the mobile context of people. One of the good insights was that it isn’t enough to know where someone is, you have to know why they’re there. For instance: are they in the Arena for a pop-concert or for a football match? Different crowd with very different needs.

Mr. Johan Koolwaaij presented IYOUIT a product that takes into account the location of a person and extra parameters like traveling speed of the person, and motion of the device to deduce whether that someone is -for instance- a passive participant of -say- MoMoAms or the presenter (i.e. when the mobile shakes a lot ). Very interesting indeed.

Before Mr. Koolwaaij’s presentation Mr. Raymond Perrenet talked about what a device like the iPhone can do in terms of stimulating the 3G usage: Have a look at the data it’s impressive!

Mr. Teemu Arina gave a presentation with incredibly beautiful slides. Slides with video that integrated seamlessly and didn’t look like dull embedded windows media player movies, and really added value and emotion to the text that was overlain.

The final speaker was Mr. Bruce Sterling (some say he’s a prophet, but he personally doesn’t like to think he is) who gave word of caution to all present: what kind of society may we be creating? Also a very telling presentation.

It was again a pleasure to be present in the packed Rooie Hoed. If I can rsvp in time once again I’ll certainly be going back.
You can find all the presentation material and the recorded presentations here

Mobile value

Yesterday it was MoMo Amsterdam time again, number 7.

It was all about creating value with mobile content and/or applications.

Before the break

During the first half three propositions were presented and put up for a vote to the audience:
• Disruptive mobile start-ups cannot mix end-user value with shareholder value. they have to go for the end-user value (or they will fail)
• There is no money in User Generated news gathering (as an example they gave skoop that went bust). Hm, the news site “OhmyNews ” in Korea is a huge hit and has managed to make some money (ok, they have competition now, but we all have to keep reinventing ourselves).
• Internet pages must be structured differently for mobile content. I hope no-one disagrees with this statement

This was again a new formula they tried out, but the discussion which they hoped it would spark didn’t catch fire.

After the break

The second half promised to be more lively, with speakers like Rudy de Waele (.dotopen) and Ajit Jaokar (Futuretext) and Yme Bosma (Hyves).

15 tips for mobile start-ups – Rudy Dewaele

A couple of interesting tips:
• select the one platform most relevant to your users and develop your application to work on that particular platform (it’s true, one can easily waste tons of valuable time making an application cross-platform from the very start, just to notice that the target audience only uses, say Series 40 devices).
• make sure you select your monetization strategy wisely (brand licensing, api licensing, ad-supported…)

Ajit Jaokar – New radio techniques and open source software will change the mobile world

“Why is it,” Ajit Jaokar asks “that there are currently only 5 major device vendors and not 55 or more?” Interesting question indeed. He argues that this is because of the relatively high fixed costs that come with making mobile devices. Thus, lowering fixed costs will increase competition in the mobile device space.
Fixed costs can be reduced by using open source software and new techniques that combine different radio technologies into one chip.

I didn’t get the chance to ask him, but I believe that he meant that the open source software also had to be freely available (how could it otherwise lower the fixed costs?).

More on the subject here: http://www.slideshare.net/momoams/ajit-jaokar-the-asus-effect-presentation/

Yme Bosma – the mobile strategy of Hyves

The people at Hyves consider their platform a facilitator in making people communicate better whatever the channel, whatever the task.

So mobile seems a natural extension. But surprisingly Yme said that it wouldn’t surprise him that Hyves Mobile would become the primary channel in say 5 years, and that the PC site yet another channel.

They are currently working really hard to make a downloadable application.

Also an Open Social implementation is on its way, so that every developer will soon be able to create their own application (fixed or mobile).

More information here: http://www.slideshare.net/momoams/yme-bosma-hyves-presentation

Conclusion

It was again an interesting afternoon indeed. For companies like ours that have fun working in the mobile space it was interesting to see the many possible monetization opportunities, as well as the mobile value we can bring to our users.

Looking forward to subscribe to the 8th MoMo Amsterdam.

Here’s an impressive example:

Pictures speak more than a thousand words, and also more than a two dimensional square of specks like this two-dimensional bar-code:
.

The concept is so intuitive and so simple that it is certainly one of the killing applications of the near future: take a picture of anything you’d like to know more about (be it a person, be it a logo, be it a movie poster), send it by any means (be it MMS, e-mail, IM) to a Visual Search Engine and wait for the information, coupon or whatever to come back.

Some companies in the VSE market:

• kooaba
• ViPR from Evolution Robotics (nothing on their site, but here’s a demo from their VSE)
• Daem Interactive (here’s a demo of their product a,d here’s an interesting presentation they gave on MoMoAms #6)
• SnapNow
• Mobot

Visual Search Engines are not that new, but only now we’ve reached a point where the “common” phones are being equipped with reasonable cameras and internet usage on mobile phones is increasing; the combination makes MVSE a powerfull tool in many areas: marketing, policing (think face recognition), social networking. For the latter MVSE could mean less maintenance for SN users: they can upload pictures and the MVSE can automatically annotate them with relevant information and links, thanks to this information the pictures can then be sent to the relevant people in your social network for instance.

We’re bound to see MVSE boom

It was again a very interesting afternoon with interesting speakers indeed. There have been many events on mobile marketing already, yet this one added something to the topic again.

The “Rooie Hoed” was packed as always. And imho this MoMoAms was waaay better than the previous one.

Some highlights:

Ben van der Burg from WebAds

Ben argues that the triangle “customer”, “operator”, “content provider” should actually be a rectangle “customer”, “operator”, “content provider”, “advertiser”.

I’m not sure which source told him that the triangle is the reality today, to my knowledge there are advertisers in the
mobile space. Anyway, his presentation was very fun to watch and his point about the rectangle is of course correct.

Antti Öhrling from Blyk

“Give the people what they want” is the populist thought behind Blyk, an advertisement funded operator that targets youngster aged 16-24.

According to Antti these youngster want three things of a mobile phone:

1. Voice
2. Text
3. Alarm Clock

So that’s what he gives them.

All you need to sign-up is to provide a bank account number so Blyk can to know that you really are who you claim to be.
And of course you have to be in the age bracket.

A second credo of his is “give the advertisers what they need”; and a precisely targeted group (youngster) is exactly what advertisers need.

What’s more, these advertisers interact with the Blyk subscribers through sms campaigns. And according to the figures in the presentation these campaigns have a very high response rate (average of 29%).

Ignacio Mondine from Daem Interactive

This was a very cool presentation on bar code reading with your mobile phone without ugly bar codes.

have a look at this Youtube movie to see how they recognize the Coca-cola icon and send the user a coupon. But off course this can be used to get more information on a movie by photographing the face of an actress on a advertisement poster of the movie (instead of an ugly 2D dotted bar code)

They do all sorts of fun stuff with it.

Doc Searls from Harvard Berkman center

He gave a very insightful view into the future of CRM VRM (Vendor Relationship Management): “It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.”

If you’re tired of being targeted by advertisers and spammed by all sorts of mailing list using companies, then you
should really read more about his work. The idea is that somewhere up the road in a -not so- near future we’ll be able
to tell companies what we’re interested in and not to bug us with other unwanted “information”.

Read more on the VRM project wiki