Qik Mobile App Install: A Example of Best Practise

I rarely feel compelled to write a blog post because an install process for a web or mobile app is so good, but Qik has triggered just that compulsion. Qik allows you to easily record or live stream video from your mobile phone. The list of supported phones is growing fast; and you can expect the rate of engagement to explode once the iPhone 3GS is cleared for takeoff with Qik (currently you have to jail break your phone to get it working).

The point of this post though was to highlight the process they use to install onto your phone. In brief, you have the choice of being sent an SMS (supporting multiple countries), downloading it and then installing it via your PC (or “side loading” as the industry calls it), or visiting a WAP site (a mobile website) to download from a link.

However, the important bit comes once the install process starts on the phone. I click to receive the SMS, received it immediately; I think clicked the link in the SMS, it started downloading to my phone, but crucially, updated the page automatically to tick the box that install had begun, it then confirmed when install/download had completed and then when I had fired up the app.

Qik have an excellent mobile app install process from their website, closing the loop between PC and mobile & ensuring users complete the install there and then

This might seem simple but it is VERY rare this process is used; normally the site just sends you an SMS and you go on your merry way.  Closing this loop, provided you can guarantee speedy delivery of the SMS, encourages if not subtly forces the user to install the app there and then and to log in – making them feel comfortable and hand-held in the process to confirm that things are happening as they should.

A clever and slick way to help users get your mobile app onto a users handset.  When we have resource to make improvements to the Rummble website, my start-up which takes the vast majority of my attentions these days, we’ll be following this user experience as its one of the best I’ve seen yet. Well done Qik!

Peer Recommendation Is In Fashion, But There’s A Problem

With another article in last weekends Telegraph, with the Head of Bebo saying that peer recommendation is the way forward and the future no less of Social Networks, I can afford to feel very slightly smug that I’ve been barking up the right tree for the last 3 years, or more. Ms Burns says “I know and understand the power of search. However, social recommendations are the future…”

Kate Burns, Bebo Chief says peer recommendations are the future of social networking

My smugness should be short-lived however, as there are still two problems:

Firstly, institutional investors in Europe as yet seem unconvinced that now is the right time to invest in trust network technology or indeed associated consumer facing recommendation service optmised for mobile (Rummble has had lots of interest from VCs but thus far they’re yet to invest).  Business Angels have been very receptive, but the European VCs, in summary feel it is too early. We may yet move across the pond, to the sunny climbs of Silicon Valley, as a consequence.

Secondly and far more importantly, people (even the mainstream media, as the Telegraph article attests) are all talking about “peer recommendation” but forgetting a very important, indeed vital, factor: Trust.

There are a few problems with recommendations from your friends (i.e. your peers). Firstly, I have some fantastic friends whom I love dearly but with whom I do not share the same taste or opinions. That’s not a problem if I want to know from their newsfeed that they’ve gone on holiday, but it’s not so useful if I am recommended the Reiters Supreme Hotel they chose, in Austria, when I don’t golf and hate package holidays.  Secondly, even if ALL my 417 friends on Facebook, the 1400 contacts in my address book and the 500+ contacts on LinkedIn, ALL rated/recommended every place they went, there would still be 100’s of places in the world with no recommendations from them (and that is before you consider that they’d need to all use the same service or services between which recommendations were shared or collated).

While this does unquestionably serve to promote Rummbles trust platform technology as the answer to these problems, it is also the genuine flaw of peer recommendation services such as Geodilic and Whrrl, and of those services that blindly aggregate all data from your streams (e.g. FreindFeed).

Rummble Trust Network technology is not simply a social network, because it connects & infers trust (or lack of) between you and friends but also you and strangers

I am not saying the mentioned services are bad, I am saying simply that the focus needs to shift toward filtering information in a more intelligent way – reducing the noise.

Two of the Rummble team took 10 days out to build an experiment as a tentative step to help make sense of the burgeoning stream of data produced from Twitter; in reality the stream could have been from any social software. Tremors attempts to match Tweets with the venues they are from or referring to, to create a realtime feed of activity in venues across four major cities: London, New York and Austin Texas, with San Francisco to follow shortly.

Tremors is an experiment powered by Rummble

In this very basic first version, you can see what is going on at different venues in the city and it attempts to recognise some basic sentiment about the text. The next step, if we were to invest time in improving the accuracy, is that we could interpret the content as a recommendation (or otherwise) and ally this with content within the Rummble recommendation service.

Ultimately, we’ll be able to construct a trust network between users on Twitter whom may not even know each other, but share similar tastes or opinons, based upon an existing user behaviour. For now, it remains a fun experiment until we can resource improvements. You can read more about Tremors in the Tremors launch blog post.

Kate Burns of Bebo is probably right. Unsurprisingly, technology will evolve to build on and exaggerate existing human behaviour. We cherish personal recommendations because we usually have a basis on which to embrace or reject that recommendation. With social networks, I don’t always know how or whether to trust an acquaintance or a friend who may be outside of my core circle of trust, or whom I may respect but whom I may not know well enough to know if we share the same taste in restaurants or music.

In 2006 I presented a slide deck about “trust networking” and nobody seemed to understand what I was waffling on about; in 2009 I’ve presented a very similar a decks including trust networking and I often get nods of agreement and sometimes even yelps of excitement (see what I did there?

Our lives are built on trust and understanding (or lack thereof). Lets hope the Internet of the future is built on the trust and understanding part, not blind recommendations and lack of understanding.

Remember, “its about the data, stupid!”

Latitude: Googles Trojan Horse (or Why “Who’s Nearby?” Is Not A Business)

This post was published on Friday 6th February 2009 as a guest post on Mobile Industry Review

For the last 3 years now I’ve been crowing at conferences that “Who’s nearby” is not a business. I drew this conclusion from running playtxt, Europes first location-based mobile social network.

It started in 2002 and we had an Alpha launch in 2003. It was ridiculously early to market. Back in 2002 most normal people (i.e. those for whom a “tweet” today is still something only birds do) did not know what a social network was, let alone a mobile location-based social network. Thanks to MySpace, Facebook and the inevitable march of technology, even my own mother is now aware of social networking, SMS and GPS.

By 2005 Google had bought our main competitor Dodgeball and although the mobile operators were still charging for Cell ID lookups (ludicrously, they are STILL trying to!) I already believed it was only a matter of time before location became a commodity. It would too easy to do for start-ups to do and even easier for others such as Facebook, which was on its ascent.

I decided that “who’s nearby?” was never going to create a multi-million pound business and I made three predictions, some which are still relevant today:

• GPS will be in every phone as cameras were then becoming. (GPS chipsets are extremely cheap, power consumption is becoming lower, processing power higher and Galileo is on the horizon -literally, haha).
• One of the gorillas (Google, Yahoo et al) will release a free Cell ID/Location API. (Google have and its excellent).
• “Who’s nearby” will also become a commodity

For the last 2 years I’ve been telling any start-up which is building its own Cell ID database, that it must be mad. I see no business model. Google about as likely to charge for Cell ID lookup as it is for its maps API; and that likelihood is slim.

There was (and is) money to be made with tracking and Cell ID technology, but both industries begin with “S” and neither spell the world “Social”. Instead, it is Security (child tracking, staff tracking) and of course Sex (proximity dating, adult services); infact any vertical where a premium can be demanded – we know that fear and shagging both command strong emotions which can result in a buying decision. Wondering “Where are my friends?” does not; unless of course you’re intensely paranoid or have VERY accommodating friends.

There is no mobile internet: there is only the internet.

This has been my other crusade for the last 2 years; and this is probably what Google believes too. What I mean is, that fix-line world-wide-web access is the black & white TV of the internet. Amazing in itself, but without the full functionality of what we recognise as “television” today.

Location, portability and the need for personalisation (a mobile being such a small, personal device) are the three missing dwarfs which give us our Seven Dwarfs of the modern internet. (The first four were IMHO: the web browser as user interface, freedom to publish without government or minority corporate control, always-on fixed cost access, and broadband bandwidth; Snow White being the internet itself).

So in the near future (3-5years?) no one will talk of the “mobile” internet but simply, the internet. You will have an iphonesque device (in size & looks if not in O/S which you take home and plug into your 24 inch screen and keyboard …we’ve still a decade to go before we type goodbye to Mr Qwerty and say hello to HAL.

Be under no delusion, Latitude is Googles Trojan horse into the social networking space.

After Googles purchase of Dodgeball it was clear they had every intention to roll out a service such as Latitude and they are perfectly positioned to do so.

Almost by-passing online social networking entirely (aside from Orkut which only took hold in Brazil) I believe Google will pursue a wide-reaching mobile social play. Google will build up a critical mass of users on Latitude; and they will join because:

• It is Google (so its trustworthy; yes still)
• Its easy to use – simple UI and simple privacy model: Automatic, Manual or Hide your location (or as I prefer: Honest, Lie or Paranoia)
• It has reach (27 countries at launch, lots of handsets, no GPS required)
• Its free

They will then likely launch an API (in the process solving some of the standardisation and interconnectivity problems – possibly using the new OAuth hybrid or equivalent) but also roll out other functionality enhancements. Although the latter may take longer than you think.

Latitude has lots wrong with it too e.g. Gmail import only (where is XFN Social Graph import or device address book comparison?) status update is crying out for Twitter integration and a hook into FireEagle (with which Latitude does not compete, yet) would all be very welcome (the last two are unlikely for political reasons but would be a fantastic nod to the open ecosystem) and dont forget part of Latitudes beauty is its simplicity; and Google have time on their side.

Many of us have been waiting for location-based services to come of age for YEARS! but in reality we’re still in the early adopter curve. Infact, I’d go even further than that. At BeingDigital in 2008 I stated on stage to a deluge of ridicule, that Social Networking wasn’t yet main stream. The laughing continued until I asked how many parents AND siblings of delegates had email? The answer was predictable: virtually everyone. Then I asked how many parents and siblings were also on a social network; over 75% of the hands dropped.

150 million people on Facebook is a lot, but 3.2 billion people have mobile phones: that’s a lot more. Email is mainstream, social networking is still maturing. Eventually it will of course become part of everything we do “online” rather than be a destination, with your social graph becoming portable and also actually owned by you, not FaceSpace.

So what does this all mean?

1) Location is already commodity AND your friends location will become a commodity.

Any service will be able to plug in and use this data (with the right permissions). Its already happening – checkout Yahoo’s FireEagle which is an aggregator of location between services.

2) If you’re a start-up building LBS, Cell ID, friends nearby services, or anything else which is being commoditised as we speak, see above.

Loopt; west coast startup run by a bright 24 year old entrepreneur – nice guy, flawed business plan. $13million+ in funding, nudging just 1 million users after 3 years with low engagement metrics. Differentiator? There isn’t one. Case closed, game over.

3) If you’re running anything with the words “mobile social network” in the title, lock yourself in a room with your team and work out how you’re going to save your business.

That means innovate. Mobile is not a differentiator, its an inevitability.

At Le Web 07 I met with Christian Wiklund, Founder of Skout. He had built a cool location based mobile social network (LoMoSoSo anyone?). By Q1 2008 when I met him in San Francisco, he’d already realised that competition was fierce and the concept was flawed — and that was before the gorillas had waded in. I implored him to change strategy (something which infact he’d already started doing). He chose dating. It’s a smart move. Dating generates money—and lots of it. Proximity dating, or infact “mobile dating” in general has never been done really well (even Mr Arrington agrees).

As a LBS start-up, you need to think about adding distinctive value for users; differentiating on location is an oxymoron. I know some of you are making money, some of the pure play mobile social networks are even profitable – great. But there’s an iceberg ahead and it may be bigger than it looks: just ask Captain Edward John Smith.

The future is relevance; the context of not only where I am but what I’m doing, who I am, where I will be. In summary: It’s about the data, stupid.

..and that will be what I write about in my next post; if they’ll have me back!

FireEagle releases beta access to their “Friends on Fire” for Facebook app

Not a new way to inflict pain on your best mates, but yet another entrant into the already fraught and busy “who’s nearby” space. I’ve pontificated often about how this is no basis for a business, but with Tom and his gang at FireEagle it makes perfect sense as aggregation of location is their business.

I’m unconvinced of the UI they’ve built for this iteration – but who are we to talk when our Web UI still needs it new upgrade rolled out   and essentially this is a technology beta, so I’ve on doubt they will do some polishing.

The biggest complaint I have is that after choosing who to share my location with from my FB fiends list, I then had to go through the process again, to invite them to use it and of course hit the stupid Facebook 20 invites limit. I simply don’t have time to go back and do it all again with the invites (requiring me to do it 10 times to invite the 200 I wanted to of my circa 300 friends). The biggest annoyance is that this limit doesn’t seem to have affected the number of crappy notifications I get for rubbish apps … my personal profile currently sits at 262 requests since my last purge a few months ago; but I digress.

This can only be good to accelerate take up of location based services and therefore we’re all fully behind it at Rummble;  just those startups focusing on “whos nearby” as a core service, unless they have an existing big userbase (such as people like WAYN for whom its an obvious value add), should think carefully about where they are excerpting their efforts – but again, I’ve been preaching this for 3 years already and so I have little sympathy … a quick look at Loopts -lack- of progress, should give you any answer you need; and they have blown $15m+ up the wall trying to do so, with precious little traction to show for it.

Still, I wish Loopt and their young -but clearly very bright- founder (I met him at Mobile Browser Wars last August) all the best and maybe they will yet rise from the ashes like a Phoenix … but then again, some other bods have a rather more appropriate name to achieve that particular feat…

You can signup to the Friends on Fire beta here at: http://apps.new.facebook.com/on-fire/

Chinwag Podcast on Search & Location, now available

For those that missed the Chinwag Live: Search & Location Based Services on 7th Oct 2008, the PODCAST is now online, so if you missed it you can listen to myself and these other purveyors of all this locational, at via Feedburner, and also on iTunes. (in 3 parts) RSS & iTunes: http://tinyurl.com/57wuqh

In order, left to right:

Felix Petersen – Co-founder, Plazes / Head of Product Management, Social Activities, Nokia
Adrian Drury – Head of Commercial Strategy & Business Development, The Cloud
Chris Moisan – Product & Market Development Manager, Taptu / blog
Andrew Scott – Co-founder, Rummble
Peggy-Anne Salz – Chief Analyst & Producer, MSearchGroove
CHAIR: Jo Rabin – Consultant & Co-Founder of MoMo London

The Mobile Web existed without the iphone …and still does

This is an extended article, to an original shorter response I made to Roberts post here.

The iphone is without question, a game changer for mobile internet. It has woken up not only VCs to the mobile internet, but given the often arrogant and lacklustre stakeholders of the entrenched mobile industry a serious kick up the arse. I think the iphone is great; but you cannot get away from the fact it will remain a tiny percentage of the mobile market for many years to come.

Should VCs invest in iphone-only startups?

What I took away from the Mobile Web Wars last Friday, before the August Capital party, was that VCs might not invest in an iphone-ONLY startup. Im not surprised. They estimate 10 million units by early next year? Thats very small numbers if you’re going to ONLY serve those customers. It’s less than 10% of Facebooks user base. Infact, name one company which has sold for big bucks which has only 10 million users? That would mean a startup would have to reach 100% user takeup for their app to be highly valuable.

I have been frustrated, as many before me, that VCs have the particulars they do about investing in certain types of businesses and have the expectations they do for success – which in turn demand a big market and big ideas which can make big money; but I understand, because that is the game they are in. If you have to make your money back on your fund from only 5% of your portfolio, you have to make sure that probably 100% of your portfolio has atleast the probable chance of making it big – i.e. a 20, 50 or 100 times return.

We [my company, Rummble] are developing an iphone app for Rummble. Why? because we know we can deliver a compelling user experience, that it will work when users install it and that iphone users are typically early adopters or gadget lovers who embrace new technology. They are IT literate and are heavy web users. With an iphone, they take that mobile.

However, we’re also launching a Java app, to serve a vast block of the mobile user base out there, who have phones which will run Java apps.

Startups must consider carefully what I call the three R’s of mobile development: Reach, Resources, Return.

1. What reach does the platform youve chosen to develop on, give you?
2. What of your precious resources will it take to develop and support that platform? How does that Reach/Resources calculation look?
3. What return does your target platform represent? i.e. how will you realise a return, where is the platform most popular, will stakeholders of that platform prevent you from (or take commission from) you realizing a return?

Consequently, bloggers – especially those with the ear of the startup community – should encourage startups to invest their development resources VERY carefully; for example, Google Gears will be supporting many platforms – I guess including iphone – and if they deliver on their promise, provide standardised hooks into the hardware, from the browsers, to access location api, camera, filesystem, etc, from the phone web browser.

The Valley cant afford to be so introspective with mobile, as it has been able to with the traditional Internet

Lastly, as a European, the valley – and many of its bloggers – are notoriously U.S. or atleast Western centric. The iphone IS FANTASTIC! I agree it is! But look outside your own back yard – Japan has been doing amazing stuff on mobile, without Apple, for a long time. India is skipping fixed line internet and doing all sorts of stuff from their non-Apple mobile phones. I’ve been using the mobile web on my Blackberry and before that on my other phones, for years.

The point is that people talk as is the mobile internet didnt exist before the iphone; and maybe for those people as individuals it didnt. But for millions of people it has – and although without question the iphone provides a fantastic user experience (its main reason for its success IMHO), it is expensive, proprietary and has a small install base. That said, I’m waiting for my upgrade to the 3G version

The mobile internet IS the internet of the future

The mobile internet will, in the future, dwarf the fixed line internet and become the norm. It will make the fixed line internet (and I believe, most laptops) seem like the quaint anomalies of history – where the internet began. You’ll come home, plug in your 1 terabyte iphone-equivalent to a large screen and keyboard and simply unplug it and leave the house or office when you go. I believe I’ll be doing this within 5-7 years.

Those startups keen on building a global – or even U.S. – dominating consumer brand for their service, would be wise to look at what is going on in the rest of the world, where in some places the mobile internet is already ahead of both the U.S. and Europe.

Mobile Operators need to wake up and smell the Content Coffee

I had a conversation about Mobile Operators approach to dealing with bad content, after EDM08 last week, which I spoke at along with Steve Ives (CEO Taptu), Carl Taylor (Strategist at 3) and Helen Keegan (Beepmarketing).

The issue is that the operators are digging their own graves on the issue of content moderation. I understand it’s a complex area but the MNOs are making their own lives more difficult by perpetuating the idea with users that they are the one-stop shop for users for handset, content and applications.

Atleast traditional fixed line ISPs had the sense to say – “We are your pipe; we give you access to the internet; we are not responsible for everything that is on it.”

MNO’s seem to think that by taking that position, suddenly they devalue themselves completely. This is not the case. While its inevitable data services on mobile will become commoditised (its already happening) this does not prevent MNOs from doing something innovative to provide added value, or generate revenue. Revenue generators could include:

* An area on the screen for ads which the MNO controls, which is context relevant to the data being fed to the other 80% of screen area.
* Providing priority to apps/partners/their own content with in the UI and their own on-deck directories (which is what they already partially do)
* Provide faster data services for a premium
* Partner with content providers to deliver their services faster, in return for revenue share from the content

..and that’s just off the top of my head.

If MNOs begin promise (and continue to perpetuate) the idea that somehow they are going to be able to control and deliver “clean” content on mobile, they will make the entire situation ten times worse. Users realise that the internet is offered down a pipe by their broadband provider – the jump from that to mobile internet, is an easy one to make in terms of understanding that their phone provider now provides access to the internet.

MNOs would do far better to get out of the way of internet services, stop transcoding and blocking services; provide a best of breed 3rd party application to filter content (which could be bundled on handsets and turned on by default for under 18 year olds or something) and educate parents and others that the same risks on mobile are on the computer screens and console screens every day.

As for the press, they should grow up and stop using mobile as another opportunity to spin and blow out of proportion the same rubbish they did when the internet came along and they said that everyone was going to get raped because of internet dating. Its just not true. Humans can be evil, and they manage that quite well going down the local pub and date raping someone – with or without the mobile internet.

Rant over.

London Events I’m Speaking At This Week

Busy week for me coming up on the events front, speaking at 3 conferences in the smoke; if you’re at any of these events, please drop me a line by phone, email, facebook or twitter – the usuals!

On Monday 8th June I’ll be on the Content panel at EDM 08, with Tommy Ahlers, CEO, Founder, Member of the Board, ZYB, Steve Ives, CEO, Taptu and Annie Mullins, Global Head of Content Standards, Vodafone. This year EDM is all about “Search in the Mobile Era”. With some good speakers it should be a good event.

On Tuesday 9th June I’m at Simon Grice’s BEING-DIGITAL conference at BAFTA. I’ll be speaking in the “Social” theme, alongside Loïc Le Meur (Founder, Seesmic), Chris Seth (Managing Director Pizco Europe), and Jerome Touze (Co Founder & Co CEO of WAYN.com) amongst many others!

On Friday 13th June (unlucky for some!) I’ll be speaking about API’s at Carsonified’s FUEL conference. After seeing Cal Hendersons superb talk at FOWA Miami earlier this year, I attend with trepidation as I’m unconvinced I’ll be able to combine as many laughs AND technical information as he succeeded in doing. I think the Carsonified gang are yet to put up his video, but when they do it’s definitely worth a watch. Anyway, if you’re going to FUEL, I’ll do my best to amuse and inform!

Hope to see you there!

GeoLocation finds its place in the ecosystem

This is an expanded comment which I posted at here originally, but disappeared.

So, for the uninitiated the location based services field – and specifically the technologies surrounding the ability to find yours, or anothers, location – is a convoluted one.

I often find it both incredible and ridiculous that so much energy and time is expended trying to solve a problem, often for good reasons, which is clearly going be solved later on when the market, technology, or both, are ready.

Finding ones location (and all the functionality surrounding that) is a very good example. At Rummble, we “wasted” some considerable time early on, either looking at location or researching ways to solve it – including building our own DB of cellIDs etc. Thankfully, we didnt waste as much time as we could, and eventually excepted that we should stay focused on our core efforts in the knowledge (well, our own belief) that this would be solved well (and probably with access for free) by someone else.

Confirmation of this came in late 2007 when Google released its “My Location” function for mobile phones; a fantastically simple (atleast to the user, but not most likely technically) piece of software that shows on Google maps, on your phone, where you are.

Over the coming weeks I used in on my Blackberry 8800 (with GPS turned OFF) as it was often accurate enough, and quicker, than using the built in GPS. The GPS on the 8800 is great btw, it often locates in as little as 10 or 15 seconds – compare this to the N95 which at best takes 30 seconds but more often takes up to 2 minutes.

I’m told with the latest firmware the N95 has improved alot; but not enough. I gave up after the first two months – GPS was unseable slow and the overall battery life appalling. The N95 was the location-based services King-of-phones which never was. Its combination of functionality, size and specification (on paper atleast) should have made it a king to be admired in the anals of mobile phones for years to come – much like some of its predecessors, the Nokia 8310 or 6210; but it was not to be. Anyway, I digress, thats another post…

So, I’ve found myself 8/10 times using Googles MyLocation maps; its instant and has improved over time (as their database of cell towers improves and usage by hundreds of thousands of users enables the service to become more accurate). I was recently told by a Googler at a recent conference which is improving by 4% a week – that may have simply been an illustrative figure, but certainly using it I noticed this.

Last week I was walking down a main thoroughfair in London and could watch myself moving on the map as I walked – even HE was suprised to hear that. It was truly impressive – and again, that was without GPS turned on.

So LBS on phones are fast becoming a reality – it is the last peice of the jigsaw in my mind, to enable the mobile internet to take off in a proper mass market way. That still wont be until Q4 2009, but the table is laid and now we await the food!

There have been rummblings recently of Google releasing a MyLocation API. My personal opinion is that this is a very obvious one for Google to leverage their infrastructure to get a buy-in from the developer community.

Releasing this API but providing people/developers use GoogleGears – or more likely, Android (their mobile operating system) would add to the momentum of Android and getting developers aboard.

There are a handful of startup open projects trying to pull together Cell ID information, these include http://celldb.org/ and http://www.opencellid.org/ but with atleast 3 other location based startups I know trying to do this, I think the openDBs and the startups may be late to the party. I actually emailed both to suggest they work together and that I would help, but got no reply from either.

With Google (and others – Yahoo has a vast DB it could give access to in conjunction with Fireeagle, and the resources and reach to instigate a CellID effort) location, by GPS built into phones (I believe GPS will be the next “camera” in phones, i.e. the next ubiquitous standard piece of functionality) location is something that is both important but also fast being solved. Startups putting significant effort into solving this problem, are making a mistake in my view, as thankfully, its being solved by the big boys.

This time next year, if not before, there will be a geolocation service SDK/API available to all; and most likely, free.

The iphone has location built in, using Skyhooks in licensed form as I understand it, and a combination of cellid and wifi hotspots is used by their service to provide location.

Mobile IS the future of advertising – as Eric Schmidt was recently recording as stating, as if it wasnt obvious already; and for Google, with much riding on Android as its way to grasp an influencial foothold in the mobile landscape, they need to do everything they can to ensure its success. Making LBS easy (as it is on the iphone) is one obvious way to accelerate interest and takeup.

As an entrepreneur who has pitched more than one company to VCs, one is often faced with the inevitable question “And what if Google* decides to do this” (* replace Google with any analogous large blue chip organisation with much resource).

It is a fair question, but sometimes we do tend to over estimate the ability of large incumbants to react and innovate, or enter and then dominate new markets or sectors. Despite its prescence on mobile, I’d argue that thus far Google has not impressed on Mobile. It’s not as bad as Microsofts failure to embrace the internet early on; but I feel there is a “could do better” report card due.

This opinion is of course voiced without the insider knowledge of the Googleplex in Mountain View, or Googles London centre of mobile development. I am sure they have plenty more up their sleave than MyLocation. It is also fair to say, that Android could yet have huge impact. I have high hopes for Android, which is headed up by Google and a selection of other mobile industry stake holders. All I am saying is, that its going to be a much tougher fight for Android than people realise.

The mobile industry – or atleast, its traditional “owners”, are responsible for the delayed and continued painful transition from traditional mobile voice and text, to “the mobile internet”. The MNOs are directly responsible both for the more recent acceleration towards mobile internet adoption (e.g. Vodafone UK’s recent bundling of data on all its tarifs) and the false start WAP debacle in 5 years ago and the wall garden, niave “we want to be content providers” falacy, ever since.

One should not underestimate the MNO’s continued determination not to see their grip on cell phone users slip into the hands of others – including Google – and its this reason which has strangled location based services until now. Expensive, un-unified access to Cell tower information (MNOs still charge for lookups – 12 pence each on last time I had the conversation) and the handset manufacturers have failed (as usual) to provide a sensible reliable way to retrieve GPS information from the handsets (the J2ME GPS implimentation works but is buggy across handsets and I wasnt aware that it was possible via a mobile browser – although in Mike Butchers recent post these guys claim to do it).

So, in summary, obtaining a location on mobile if you want to automate it into a cross-handset application, is still rather convoluted, but its about to get much much easier. The biggest Google can do to the mobile internet industry is provide a comprehensive -and free- API for developers to leverage their MyLocation platform.

Whats important though, is that this is made available for all mainstream platforms, not simply GoogleGears on Windows Mobile, or only Android; given the advantages to Google of using the LBS as a hook to pull users in to using exclusively Google technologies, I suspect releasing it to work on non-related Google platforms, will not be a priority.

The other problem is one of maps. Many location based services want to use maps; currently Google maps Microsoft maps can be used on mobile – and this isnt their decision. Its dictated by the license agreements from the map providers. Currently the only solutions are paid for maps, from companies such as Navteq, now part of Nokia.

I’d argue that it will be one of the single most important contributions to the success of mobile applications, in the last 3 years.

Off the record recently*, I spoke with a Google employee who confirmed that an SDK/API will become available – but gave no time frame. It wasnt a suprise to hear this – its an obvious decision; but it was good to get confirmation; and certainly dilute any negativity I’ve recently had towards Google for other decisions, which perhaps were not as helpful as this one will be.

As soon as its available, Rummble will certainly be taking advantage of it.

* and I only mention this now having read posts in Techcrunch UK and Techcrunch.com – for which I was not the source!

Mobile Internet tipping point yet to arrive … but it’s close

So for the last 2 years I’ve been saying that the end of 2009 will be the Mobile Internet’s real growth spurt; that is when we will see a growth and hype somewhat akin to the hey-day of “The internet is going to change the world hype”.

Of course we all know now that the internet IS changing the word, but some of the claims at the time were a little misguided.

However, I stand by my end-of-2009 date because to kick-start the mobile internet it will require that EVERYONE has bundled inclusive data on their tariff – EVERY tariff. Doest matter which tariff; EVERY tariff.

To truly kick-off, it will also have to happen over large expanses of the developed world (e.g. the U.S. and the whole of Europe) and ultimately for many service to work (which are, afterall, global services such as Rummble) then data roaming is going to have to be bundled too.  Thats still a little way off, and perhaps why even end of 2009 might be slightly eager on my part; but, I’m an optomist. I already get 100mb globally of bundled data with my Blackberry – so this stuff is possible.

Anyway, the reason that triggered this post was Vodafone’s announcement that it’s bundling unlimted (well, 500mb) data as part of ALL its tarrifs. Three cheers for Vodafone (there’s something I never thought I’d write). Seriously, its a major step forward and one that is long overdue but extremely welcome.

Well done Vodafone; brownie points from me.   Lastly, the UKs alleged most visited mobile sites (on Vodafone handsets) make for interesting reading:

Top 10 mobile internet sites on VMI (ranked by most visited first)

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. BBC
4. MSN
5. Bebo
6. Sony Ericsson
7. Yahoo
8. MySpace
9. Windows live Hotmail
10. YouTube

Facebook above the Beeb?  What is the world coming too…