I’ve been moderately successful, perhaps because of my combined product development and corporate development experiences, but as in many business initiatives, there’s a balance between the linear and logical combined with an artist’s vision or instinct.

From there I apply an integration perspective, examining current trends, iconoclasts, then combining with a hard edged business perspective on what can be pragmatically achieved, then harvested. Harvesting, aka, “How one can make money with this is?” is my lodestar.

I’ve come to calling this “Innovisioneering.” Essentially it requires a pre-disposition to innovation, the ability to identify what is adjacent opportunities in today’s market as well as identifying growing trends and wildfire events that will converge over the horizon. Then add the orienteering ability to plan a path, engineer and execute a strategy to harvest the opportunity. Hence, Innovisioneering.

Good innovisioneers look critically yet open mindedly; spanning the horizons for data, changes, feints and indicators of movement which indicate a congealing consensus of value in the marketplace. Sometimes it is an implied demand, sometimes overt. Sometimes a technical advancement in other fields which can be combined for value, sometimes direct epiphanies. Either way it requires an intimate understanding of the end consumer behavior, the process of serving the consumer, as well as the skills to operationalize innovation.

Many people have an inherent fear of innovation: that’s its too risky, sporadic and doesn’t pay. In my past I’ve been lucky to have been involved in real breakthroughs–SMS interoperability and voice activated technology–so I have some practice with tools to mitigate that risk and improve my batting average.

At CTIA I started looking at companies a month before Vegas and found two companies which caught my interest, one an enterprise mobile security play, Boxtone, and the other in the consumer space, Intelligent Spatial Technologiess. Turns out of the five companies I met with at CTIA, these two were in the Top 5 contestants for ATT’s Innovation contest. Intelligent Spatial Technologie won everything being knighted ATT’s Most Innovative Application, and Boxtone came in the Top 5 for enterprise applications. In subsequent posts I’ll provide more details on these innovative companies in the mobile space.

The Value of Innovation
The trouble with innovation is today’s business philosophy. Modern business thinking has led to the conclusion that organizations should focus on what they do best: that is, the day-to-day money-making activities that have won them their principal ‘customer mandate’. For most organizations - indeed, for almost all organizations - the most sensible course of action is indeed for them to stick to what they do best. After all, that is why customers come to them and are prepared to pay them money. Few major companies can afford to employ a team of full-time innovators. Modern business thinking has led to the conclusion that companies should focus on what they do best: that is, the day-to-day money-making activities that have won them their principal ‘customer mandate’.

But how should a company pursuing a sensible policy of sticking to what it does best and fulfilling its customer mandate deal with the danger that if it does not innovate it may sooner or later lose its customer mandate to more innovative competitors?

It can’t. Companies that don’t innovate die.

While successful innovation once was performed in sterile corporate R&D labs, today the broad distribution of knowledge makes such a process infertile. Competitive advantage comes from gaining vision, placing an educated bet on what you see, and leveraging the discoveries of others if your company is seeking new areas of technology or entering untapped markets.

The mandate of innovation is to seek it out from all sources, inside and outside of the company, connecting and developing partners, suppliers and even co-opting competitors–the more connections, the more ideas, the more solutions. That’s modern innovation. Look at IBM, Intel, and the revitalized Procter & Gamble. They know “what’s next.”

A company’s focus on innovation should be outside-in, requiring a transformation of both external perception and internal purposes, understanding what needs are to be met and how to connect the dots between the company’s capabilities and competencies—a mix of existing business lines and recently acquired companies—and bridging those to broader opportunities. In my view, innovation should be obsessed with end-user consumers in the ever changing mobile market, which can then be swiftly taken to full consequence.

Building sustainable competitive edge in a period of global competition is challenging corporations to utilize and leverage all available resources, whether internally or externally sourced. In Innovisioneering: Part 2, I’ll outline my thoughts on why periods of economic contraction are the best time for innovation development, why VCs fail at identifying innovation, and how resource rich companies are executing innovation through corporate development. Stay tuned….

Back in 1995, I worked a one-year internship at St. James University Hospital - one of Europe’s largest teaching hospitals - developing clinical software for neonatal infants and asthmatic children. In developing tools to help kids record asthmatic episodes, I was struck by the range of innocent causative factors - banana skins, carpeted flooring, upholstery - that could trigger an attack.

Our work largely focussed on recording patient histories after the fact - but what David Van Sickle’s experimental GPS-enabled inhalers allow, is for patients to capture the circumstances of their episode, at the time of occurence.

It isn’t difficult to see beyond this device to a point where using an inhaler could alert nearby first responders or family members in case of real distress, requiring medical assistance. Indeed, Apple’s recent preview of its iPhone 3.0 software was explicit in illustrating how the iPhone and iPod touch devices could control attached peripherals, notably Johnson & Johnson’s LifeScan glucose monitoring peripheral.

Both LifeScan and the inhaler represent two approaches to connected healthcare devices - LifeScan embeds itself within an existing communication platform and the inhaler embeds communication capability into the fabric of the device.

Read more at Cnet’s Disease detective plans GPS-enabled asthma inhaler.

Both devices are winners of Vodafone’s $600′000 Wireless Innovation prize and pioneers in the emerging field of telemicroscopy, turning a cellphone camera into a ‘clinical-quality light microscope that can transmit images of patient samples for remote diagnosis by healthcare professionals.

Both devices are being deployed across the developing world, in field trials, that will help determine whether lightweight equipment and remote diagnosis can help alleviate the limited resources of such communites.

CelloScope and Cellophone shre the same ability to ‘clip’ onto existing phone’s cameras, but where eCellScope utilised a directly captured optical image, Cellphone seeks to analyse the ’shadows’ of cells, which can indicate the presence of cells and bacteria.

The devices could be a boon to rural and less developed communities that lack sophisticated medical imaging equipment and also the skills to interpret images locally. Indeed, both devices can utilise MMS messages to request a diagnosis; some remote diagnosis are even performed by computer and returned as a text message!

Read more at SciDev.Net’s Mobile phone diagnosis approaches field trials…

In recent weeks, and on a smaller scale, at London’s G20 summit, the death of Ian Tomlinson, an innocent bystander simply making his way home through the protest area became another infamous example of the state’s official line becoming undone by citizen media.

During the conference, the government chose to close down CCTV coverage in one of the most surveillance-dense cities in the world, paradoxically for security reasons. What civic leaders didn’t anticipate was the extent to which a massively distributed, and democratised citizen-owned surveillance system had taken its place. Tens of thousands of G20 protestors equipped with cellphones and digital cameras were able to document what CCTV was blind to….what Wired called Little Brother.

Tomlinson’s death was initially pinned on a massive heart attack and ‘natural causes’ - when the video footage came to light, it was shown that the unprovoked Tomlinson was beaten by a police officer.

The published by the Guardian newspaper and propogated through sites such as YouTube, led to the arrest of a police officer, later charged with manslaughter - Tomlinson’s postmortem indicated that an abdominal haemorrhage was the cause of death.

Like the story of Pakistan’s government  and Bhutto’s assassination, the British authorities have had sunlight thrown on them by the distributed surveillance capabilities of their subjects. Britain is one of the most surveilled countries in the world - one of the consequences is that people are using consumer technologies, services and tools to scrutinise their rulers.

A couple years later and we’re seeing a groundswell of experimentation in this area. A couple of great examples include…

A Twitter-enabled cat flap - that invokes a Twitter message each time the homeowners cats enters or exits their home. The cars are equipped with RFID tags that ensure only they can use the door! Is Twitter giving a new voice to an old species? This isn’t too dissimilar to the Botanicalls project, covered by MM2.0 at the beginning of last year…

BakerTweet enables bakers to keep customers informed about the freshness of their products by Twittering a public message each time a new batch of baked goods is nearing readiness. The service consists of a durable, hygenic device that’s installed into a kitchen - bakers then list their items at an online account that configures the box. They then simple need to hit an item selector on the box and push a button to Twitter the message. It’s not difficult to envisage appliances sending this message themselves as appropriate data comes in…. watch a video of BakerTweet in action.

A confluence of cheap electronics kits such as the Arduino, coupled with the mobile+broadband messaging bus that is Twitter is giving voice to the objects around us. Bruce Sterling’s spimes and Julian Bleecker’s blogjects.

Korea’s Hyundai Merchant Marine is now offering to supply the location of its cargo, in real time, by SMS - from the point at which a container is loaded until its delivery to the final recipient. In essence, this is the embodiment of Bruce Sterling’s Spimes - devices that through pervasive GPS and RFID, can track its history of use an dinteract with the world.

Hyundai’s system displaces email and fax communication which would ordinarily signal the status of an item.

Ultimately, insurance companies might insist on the ‘trackability’ of shipped goods in order to mitigate their own risks of piracy. Of course, Somali pirates are just as likely to employ this service against itself, by bribing port authority officials to signal the departure time of boats to pirates-in-waiting…

@deanwhitbread Twitter Suggestion: start calling Followers "Flowers" - it’s shorter, saves 2 characters!

First of all, the thought this tweet sparked needed to have somewhere that I could write about in more depth, but somewhere that I could raise a little flag that sends a link back to Twitter to let everyone know about it!

One of the initial complaints, certainly from the US press about Twitter, was the restriction of only having 140 characters. The reason for that was using the mobile phone and the text message as a lowest common denominator to get a message out to people, and looking back, that was probably the smartest decision they made.

Not to use the phone, as such, but by placing a limit on the message length, it forced people to think about what they said, but still allowed those messages a spontaneity that makes the service so personal and emotional.

Friendfeed and Facebook both provide a similar commenting function to Twitter, but at the same time with no message length limit. Many third party services have tried to use Twitter to build a blog-like system, but none have taken off.

It’s no surprise that other services have popped up with limits (such as the very short video message board 12seconds), but none of them have that magic something that Twitter has built up. They’ve found a sweet spot, almost straight out the gate between enough room for clear thoughts, and short enough that people didn’t have to spend even a minute on what they were composing?

That scarcity of letters resulted in a rich eco-system that continues to give value. Just like in any market economy, a scarcity increases the value of the product. And unlike digital media, the scarcity is not in the volume (because copying 1’s and 0’s is what computers do), it’s in the information.

At a fundamental level, Twitter is the classic capitalist model – it’s just a different approach to the idea of creating value.

Android vs iphone

So admob have their most recent mobile metrics out for the month of March and it’s all themed around Android vs iphone.  This follows the debate on platforms kicked off at the admob developer event which we covered here a couple of weeks ago.

Android continues to gain traction on the admob network…

• The HTC Dream (G1) was the number 10 device in the US with 2.0% share in March up slightly by 0.2% and the number 4 smartphone behind only the iPhone, Blackberry Curve, and Blackberry Pearl.
• Android accounts for 6% share of the smartphone market in the US and is level with Palm as the fourth largest smartphone OS behind iPhone, RIM, and Windows Mobile
• Requests from the G1 increased 2.6 times from January to March following AdMob’s launch of ads in applications
• 50% of android ad requests coming from apps - the same proportion as the iphone

… but iphone is still the top platform and continues to gain share

The latest figures on iphone from admob show that it continues to dominate the admob network, especially in the UK and US markets:

• worldwide iphone has a 22% share of mobile browsing, up 4.2% on the month
• top 2 worldwide handsets are iphone and ipod touch
• iphone is taking 1/3 of admob internet traffic in the US
• in the UK iphone accounts for 47% of all admob requests and is up a massive 13.2%!

Android and iphone comparisons

The admob data does show that Android, whilst it is growing fast, has not matched the early traction gained by the iphone and still remains much lower in overall scale:

• In the first five months after appstore launch Android requests increased an average of 47% per month, iPhone increased an average of 88% per month.
• In March, the iPhone had 8 times more requests in the US than Android, worldwide, Apple devices (iPhones and iPod touch) had 23 times more requests than Android

iphone sales growing at 100%+

Apple’s own recent earnings reports show that the device and the wider platform around it are still growing incredibly strongly, so we can expect it to continue to dominate the mobile internet and mobile applications space for the foreseable future - in fact, its importance is likely to increase:

• iphone sold more than 3.79 million units worldwide in the first three months of the 2009; a 123 per cent increase on 2008
• iPhone revenues hit $2.2 billion for the quarter
• 37m ipod touch and iphone units sold to date
• 1 bn iphone app store downloads to date

More android device launches could tip the balance

Of course Android isn’t standing still on the device front and this is going to help boost its share of the mobile internet market which at the moment is only driven off A SINGLE DEVICE - the HTC Dream G1.  Already, the Android G2 or HTC Magic with a full touch screen interface is set to launch on a number of carriers including Vodafone UK and it’s been getting rave reviews - Gizmodo calls it ‘close to perfection’.   Meanwhile Samsung is beginning to roll out a range of android phones.  Unlike the iphone, Android devices have a real chance of become real mass market devices across the globe, so whilst it has a long way to go Android could still overtake the iphone as the key platform for developers and mobile services providers to build for.  Watch this space.

Iphone and Android not the only game in town - Opera Mini browser showing explosive growth

It’s worth noting amongst all the android and iphone stuff that other phones are also driving a lot of growth in the world of mobile internet and mobile applications.  Opera has also released data from its own mobile research report, based on the opera mini browser showing that usage of the app is up a massive 157% year on year. In March 2009, more than 23 million people used Opera Mini, a 12.1% increase month on month and 157% increase year on year.  8.6 billion pages were viewed in March 2009 up 17.4% month on month and 255% year on year.  So don’t forget, it’s not all about the iphone!

and finally… free mobile market maps

First Partner is an interesting looking market research and product development company.   Anyway they have released some nice free stuff on their site which is well worth downloading - a couple of “market maps’ which provide a graphical view of the mobile marketing and mobile enterprise value chains and industry structures.

That’s it for this week see you next time for another MM 2.0 Roundup

Following up the inspiring event last week, I was excited to find out that evidence to support the strength of the mobile market continues to flow.

Recent statistics released by Mobile Monday Boston revealed that Massachusetts’ mobile market experienced significant growth in the first quarter despite the recession, reporting $215 million in investment in local mobile companies for the three-month period.

This news, which struck a local chord being covered by Efrain Viscarolasaga of Mass High Tech and Chris Reidy of the Boston Globe, is definitely a testament to the innovation and opportunity in mobile telecommunications in Massachusetts.

Speaking specifically about Boston market, cofounder and organizer of Mobile Monday Boston, Kate Imbach, stated “Boston is quickly establishing itself as the worldwide hub of mobile and wireless.”

If you agree that Massachusetts has what it takes to be the mobile powerhouse, I’d love to hear from you. Even if you think we can’t carve a leadership position – as a state – in this market, let me know…..

Twitter Statistics

As usual comscore has some more great mobile market data this time the latest twitter statistics. Comscore suggest a MASSIVE jump in twitter usage for March 2009:

-    up 131% month on month
-    9 m US monthly uniques up from 5m in February 2009

This probably underestimates the total audience as it does not include traffic from third party twitter clients.  However, it does show the big jump in mainstream users (who are less likely to use third party twitter apps), as a result of the increased publicity around twitter in the mass media.

How to promote your iphone app

The mobile analytics firm Flurry has released some nice info on ways to promote your iphone app or game on the appstore.  Now that there’s over 30,000 apps in total, and 6000 games on the appstore it’s become more and more important for developers to actively promote their offering.  Flurry offer a number of suggestions including:

Free Trials

According to Flurry one of the “strongest marketing plays” available to developers on the app store is to offer a free version with an upgrade path to paid.  Their data suggests that offering a free trial version following the launch of a paid app can increase paid sales by 85% beyond a certain point.  Flurry point out this is a particularly good strategy for unknown brands.

Cross Selling

In a similar way, launching multiple free or paid apps and cross promoting between them is another approach that Flurry recommend.  They give an example of a 51% uplift from cross-selling between two apps where a call to action was included to drive users between the two.  This is likely to work best where the apps have similar user bases or target customers

Keywords

Using keywords in your app description ensures that an app or game will get more traffic on the appstore via searches.  The research process for this is more difficult than for traditional SEO as there are no keyword tools available at present for the app store.  This is probably the sort of tool that flurry will be looking to offer going forward.   In the meantime, it’s a case of using common sense plus the information that’s out there to “guestimate” what popular searches are likely to be.

Testing the app stores

A couple of nice features recently which do a side by side comparison of the various app stores available.

Gizmodo has a nice range of screenshots of the various stores including Ovi on a Nokia 5800 and a great feature comparison table:

-    minimum non-free prices are typically $.99 with Blackberry app world the highest at $2.99
-    the cost to developers ranges from free (Ovi) to $200 (Blackberry app world)
-    Rev shares are 70% across the board except Blackberry app world (uses paypal for billing)

Meanwhile Moconews has listed the “pros and cons” of each of the various stores.

Apple

• Pros – wide range of apps, ability to browse on PC, billing integration with itunes
• Cons – hard to find apps in the huge range they have

Android

• Pros – easy to browse the store
• Cons – poor selection, lack of big name brands

Blackberry App world

• Pros – lots of brand names
• Cons – need to download the store to the phone, focus on enterprise apps

They also point out that the Apple store has by far the greatest liquidity at 30k apps, with Blackberry at only 700 and Google android market in the middle.  Also prices for the same app can range vastly – one example they give was $1.99 to $9.99 depending on the store!

Moconews give a nice analogy which summarises the article nicely:

“Apple is like a big-box retailer, with one-stop shopping and very competitive prices; BlackBerry is like a high-end boutique, with a brand-name selection but higher prices; and Android’s kitschiness is like a thrift store, where you never know what you are going to find, but it will likely be a bargain.”

Mobile competitions and awards opportunities

There are suddenly a load of competitions and awards out there for mobile startups and developers.

The Mex mobile user experience awards close on the 8th of May and are for any app or mobile service which delivers a compelling user experience.

The Vodafone mobile clicks competition is offering a €150k prize for UK and Netherlands-based mobile startups.   It’s basically for early stage mobile apps and sites or anything with a mobility/ mobile-internet aspect to it.

The Mobile Entertainment Forum Awards or Meffys have extended their closing data for entries to 24 April so there’s still just about time to enter these long-running awards focused on mobile content.

The Betavine Mobile Widgets Competition is designed to encourage the development of mobile widgets or Mobile Web RT apps.  You can win a $20k prize.

That’s it for now – see you next week…

The great platform debate

There’s been a great debate going on in the mobile blogosphere this week around the issue of the iphone appstore and alternative platforms.

Ewan from Mobile Industry Review kicked it off with a really funny and insightful review of an admob event in Silicon Valley where all of the developers were uber-focused on iphone and were aghast at the idea of developing for Symbian/Nokia/ Ovi.  Here’s a typical exchange from the event where Ewan asks the assembled iphone developers whether they were considering building for platforms apart from iphone:

‘ “What about Ovi?” I asked. Hopeful. I was expecting either a venomous “GET OUT” or a knowing nod.

“Ovi? What’s that?” he looked at me confused.

“Er, the Nokia offering — their app store?”

He and his two colleagues who’d now joined us looked horrified. As though I’d taken their iphone and nailed it to the wall.

“Nohhhkeeaaaa?” They asked. I’m sure their minds were drifting to the $29.99 bollocks-handsets they see on display in the mobile operator stores…

“Er LIKE NO,” said the chap’s colleague, as the other two nodded vigorously ‘

Ewan’s post was written up in Venture Beat which pushed the view that Silicon Valley was being “blinded” by the iphone.  This led Mike Rowell of Mobile Monday San Fransisco and a real long-time mobile developer to state that he was “amazed’ that anyone was even debating the merits of focusing outside of the iphone, given that he had the scars on his back from trying:

“How can anyone seriously say “well, you’re ignoring all those potential millions of handsets out there running Symbian” and keep a straight face? I’ve been working, for years and years. And years and years and years and years, trying to get out to all those handsets, trying to build applications or websites that were able to hit a critical mass of users on all those handsets out there”

Mike is someone I really respect in the mobile industry - he was one of the key people behind the launch of admob in the early days and really knows his mobile stuff - definitely not your typical band-waggon jumping iphone developer.  Mike goes on to point out that just because the incumbents are finally getting around to launching app stores means nothing - until they deliver a proven channel to market for developers:

“Is the Nokia store supposed to challenge Apple? Or Microsoft supposed to? Or RIM? You know what folks, you had your chances. If you want to impress me, if you want me to start developing for your platforms again, get your houses in order. Once things change, once you get your stores developed, released, and proven as a good commercial channels to end users - then we can talk again. Until then we’re all just going to keep laughing at you and developing for iPhone.”

Mike’s post has generated a load of great comments and it’s well worth checking out.

On a similar theme, Richard, from the mobile startup mippin with a sideline in android development has also written a good post pointing out that the value of the iphone and the first iteration of android was simplicity. He notes that this is increasingly being lost as the likes of Blackberry (4 screen resolutions, multiple devices) and Nokia Ovi (choice of Java, Symbian, flash, WRT widget platforms plus a huge number of different devices) enter the market.

Product announcements

A few things caught my eye over the last week in terms of product announcements including:

-    the admob iphone download exchange
-    Yahoo’s new mobile home-page
-    A new ad network launch from jumptap
-    the 1.5 android software upgrade (including widget support!)

Admob download exchange

I mentioned quickly a week or so ago that admob had launched its new download exchange system which provides a way for iphone app developers to share advertising inventory with each other.  Anyway, admob have been promoting the service over the last week with their developer event in San Fransisco and a few interviews here and there.  Russel Buckley the CEO of admob did an interview which generated a few interesting nuggets:

-    admob serving ads on 7.2m iphones and 3.9 ipod touches a month
-    in total admob serving an ad on 1 out of every three iphone devices
-    admob has relationships with 33 of the top 100 iphone developers

New Yahoo mobile home-page

Yahoo just relaunched it’s mobile home-page.  Mobile has been a real strategic priority for Yahoo! and they’ve built some great stuff recently – arguably the Yahoo Onesearch  mobile search service is better than Google mobile search.  The new home page is over at http://new.m.yahoo.com and is focused around providing a single interface to a range of content and feeds from both Yahoo! and external sources.  The idea is that users are suffering from “app fatigue” on mobile with the need to open multiple apps all the time – the new home page provides a single source for updates from multiple sources e.g. twitter, facebook etc.  Users can customise the home-page with widgets for things like weather and add bookmarks, email accounts and so on.  The home-page works on virtually any mobile browser but Yahoo! have also launched an iphone app as well.

Android 1.5 upgrade

Google have announced an upgrade to the Android operating system which fixes a few bugs in the first release and also adds some nice new features like an on-screen keyboard.  The big news for developers though is that the new software will support home-screen widgets i.e. apps which are linked to the home-page and don’t need to be fired up every time.  The general view is that whilst a lot of the new software release is stuff that should have been in the first place, it’s still a welcome development.

Jumptap mobile ad network

Jumptap started off as a white-label mobile search provider, basically offering a search front-end for carrier portals as an alternative to Google.  They have raised a big pile of cash to date ($70m) and have changed direction recently to position themselves in the mobile advertising space.  The first thing they developed was a “premium” mobile advertising network, focused around selling high cost CPM-based ad inventory on operator portals and so on.  They just announced the launch of tapmatch, a new mobile ad network which they are claiming has much better targeting capabilities than existing solutions (e.g. google adwords mobile or admob).  Acccording to tapmatch their system generates 3 times the level of clicks as competitor solutions.

Peggy Anne Saltz over at the excellent msearchgroove has an interview with the Jumtap CEO.  According to her interview, Jumptap are positioning this at the upper end of the market as a way of premium mobile publishers filling spare inventory “our goal is not to run billions and billions of impressions”.  The system uses data from the 17 carrier relationships Jumtap has to help targeting.  They are claiming that the network is really different from admob but that seems to be the obvious major competitor.  The mobile ad space is getting pretty crowded but there may well be room for a number of different types of system in the market.  Jumptap’s system will be one to watch to see how the market is shaking out.

That’s it for this week – see you next time for more news and views.

Cue a wibbly-wobbly “time passes” effect to last month, as I opened up a demo unit of the Nokia E75, a vertically sliding phone with both an ABC keypad and a Qwerty keyboard available for input. Going through the application screen I counted over 55 icons available to a new user. I’m pretty proficient with Nokia’s S60 interface, but the E75 left me bewildered when I first started using it.

The application screen isn’t even the main application screen, there’s a home screen that sits above it in the UI hierarchy that users need to get to grips to as well.

The layout is complicated even more as there is a folder hierarchy, so you can have some of those 55 icons sitting underneath other icons. And are there any indications what is a folder, what is an application, and what is a shortcut leading to a specific screen in an application? No.

Feature creep, and expecting smartphones to do even more out the box lead to a huge headache in the first few moments with the new phone – which must also (naturally) mirror the experience of someone browsing for a new phone in a store.

I’ve picked up the Nokia here, but a multitude of devices have this problem, from Symbian OS devices and Windows Mobile, to Blackberries, Androids and iPhones. It gets even worse when you start adding third party applications into the mix.

We’re focussed here on Mobile Messaging 2.0 on looking at new ways messaging with our mobile devices, which is primarily smartphones. And while there are new ways of messaging maturing every day (witness the rise of Twitter and the Facebook status message), the interface of the phone is the gateway to these services. If the interface hides away the existing methods such as MMS, SMS and email, then what hope the tweets, status updates, nudges, pokes, gps locations and packets of information that are just over the horizon?

25 million mobile handsets may turn into paper weights in India on April 15, 2009.

Chinese handset manufacturers have flooded the Indian market with over 25 million handsets over the last few years and these phones do not have IMEIs. What is an IMEI you say?

An IMEI is a unique 15-digit code that identifies the handset. Each time a call is made, the mobile network operator uses the IMEI to identify the caller via a universal registry of phones. If a phone lacks an IMEI, the telecommunications company can still route the number to the destination, but it does not know which phone is making the call. Therein, rests the problem: India’s Department of Telecommunications in the Ministry of Communications and I.T. believes these anonymous IMEI phones could be used by terrorists of any stripe or color.

India’s Dept of Telecomm relayed to mobile operators in India that in ” the interest of national security, all Indian telecom operators should focus on implementing checks of IMEI within two months.” That was in October 2008. Now April 15 is the deadline. Wireless service providers in India are expected to disconnect mobile phones that lack IMEI on April 15.

While Indian mobile phone users can verify their own IMEI numbers by pressing *#06# on their handsets, what if the consumer is among the unlucky 25 million who are holding one of these 25 million handsets lacking an IMEI? The DoT estimates the 25 million phones lacking IMEI in India account for about 10% of the total phones used in the country.

Indian users are clearly concerned.

And what of the Chinese mobile phone manufacturers, are they inclined to remedy this? Seems nothing at the moment for or from both. Indeed, where is the responsible action from the Indian operators in the first place? And the ripple effect could spread to financial markets: consider both Vodafone and Airtel could have their stock price effected if suddently these phones turn into bricks. Considering that it is likely these phones are used more by bottom of the pyramid consumers than top, to get these users back, the mobile operators will have to subsidize ever more new phone purchases. A continuing drag could develop.

Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

On April 14^th The Massachusetts Network Communications Council will recognize the innovators of 2008 and this year, we are thrilled that Airwide Solutions has joined the ranks of forward thinking network communications leaders with two nominations!

Airwide’s CEO Kevin Wood has been nominated for CEO of the Year and the company as a whole has been nominated for Company of the Year.

MassNetComms has always promoted Massachusetts as a global center for telecommunications and networking and we are fortunate to be a part of the innovative technology that comes out of the region.

MassNetComms Annual Award Ceremony will take place at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, MA and it should be an amazing event.

Mobile messaging is past puberty and is now the homecoming queen. It has managed to become the major force in mobile marketing and the simplest, easiest entry to market for mobile.

But back to the point of couture – there are several etiquette skills associated with messaging. Also, the ability of the enterprise and corporate market to rise to mobile messaging means that the old clichés of “don’t dump your boyfriend via SMS” are replaced with cleverly crafted texts that can sell any product in less than 160 characters.

One might not realise it, but the art of messaging is a real talent. Getting it right is difficult, but if done properly revenues will swim in.

Examples of GREAT messages:

“Sign up to zPizza for 5 dollars and get free pizza coupons for 1 year”

The type of message above is nothing special – it’s a general message to consumers but it’s completely understandable and simple. Any organic pizza fans would love this!

“Click to win USD 2000 – 1 in 10 win”

This plays on the laws of probability chance and gambling. For the price of USD 25 – it  might just be worth the risk

But it is not just about the ability to text an advert. It is also about the ability to enforce interaction. A company called YellowPin just launched social networking via SMS, saying “who needs GPS when you can just say where you are”. Even though I do like geo location, I don’t like the cost of roaming - and SMS updates are actually extremely compelling.

I received an advert similar to this one recently and I thought it was great.

It read: “You use our banking services – so get mobile access instantly by registering your phone in one click”

I clicked and now I have mobile banking and I love it.

I hate “SMS speak” in corporate SMS but simple, clear and concise messages are the couture of messaging. It has to be easy and it has to be simple. No-brainer messages may be boring, but they are the essence of communication.