Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Operators Unite To Build New Mobile Market

Today a GSM Association Press Release tells us that 40% of the Mobile Networks have come together to work on NFC as the solution for Mobile Payments alongside the Equipment manufacturers. My first reaction was NOOOOOOOOOOOO. What about the fact that the last time we saw Mobile Networks work on an interoperable standard we got the failure to launch service that was SIMPAY!

A few shots of coffee later, and I have become a little calmer. This is something under the remit of the trade association and at the moment they are just looking at standards to make the service work. One of the key goals is to build on a secure billing and identity relations that operators have with their customers through the SIM card. I guess this is going to be one of the hardest elements to crack in the development of standards as the system will have to work with the complex relationships between a number of software platforms.

Just hope that Vodafone will see the service for something other than Mobile Ticketing as it has already done in Germany with RMV earlier this year.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Carnival of the Mobilists 53 is Out

This week it is the turn Of C Enrique Ortiz to edit the Carnival, and he has been kind enough to include my post last week about MobIle Monday's 1st birthday in London. I wonder if this means that I might get some answers to what is Voice2.0?

Anyway click on the title and go and read some of the best writing on mobile on the web over the last seven days.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

allAfrica.com: Kenya: Safaricom to Revolutionise Microfinance

Vodafone Kenya has joined the money transfer trend in M-Payments. The Mobile payment solutions in South Africa and the Philipines see the majority of large payments being made at the expense of Western Union.

I wonder if we will see the same increase in banking uptake as Standard Bank has seen in South Africa. The Economist reported that the launch of payments by MTN has seen over 700,000 people have joined the banking system. It will be interesting to see if once again it will be the mobile phone that extends the middle class in the emerging markets.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

MoMo London is One year old

Last night I attended my fourth MoMo London event, it was also the groups first birthday and one of the three previous I had attended was the launch at Vodafone's offices last November.

Over the last year via MoMo I have made a number of new contacts as well as refreshed a number of others made from the dot com boom days at the turn of the century when I was active in Digital People. Interestingly the quality of MoMo is higher than a number of networks, in that a number of senior industry players attend not just to speak but also to listen, for which great qudos has to go to the band of five behind the group.

Last night we had a number of presentations from Bloggers some I knew and others I had only read thanks to Carnival of the Mobilists etc. All had something of interest to say to lesser or greater extents, but guys why do you need to use powerpoint? The last speak was Paul Goode from m:metrics who had a ton of interesting nuggets gained from the companies research. The soundbite from the night for me is that the average balance on a prepaid phone is less than £4, this goes someway to show just why mobile data services are slow to launch. I guess we can put those plans for mobile2.0 back in the draw for a few more years if thats what we are wishing to retire on.

They question I would have liked to ask but did not get the opportunity to was this, Should we not forget that what we have in our hands is a telephone and as such what will VOICE2.0 look like?

Looking forward to attending some of the events for 2007. Have to say that Shannon Maher and his team at Google London did yet another excellent job in hosting, its just a shame that someone from Orange/T-Mobile/O2/Nokia/Ericsson/Qualcomm does not have the ability to throw open the doors the way he has twice in the last year!