3UK’s mobile internet seminar – an overview

So I was at the 3UK mobile internet seminar this morning at One Aldwych. You know, I’d never been in there before. I’ve always walked by it. My friend Natasha used to go there for the gym all the time. Apparently they play music underwater in the pool. Nifty.

Anyway upstairs in meeting room one and two, all the action was kicking off.

It featured presentations from 3, Yahoo, Skype, Jaiku and the London School of Economics. It also featured toast, coffee, tea, orange juice and croissants. I just had toast. There is some truth to the rumour that I also had a croissant.

If you’d like to know exactly what transpired, Stuart Dredge of TechDigest has got it ALL here. He took his laptop along. I got it wrong, see. I just took a pad of paper. Not good. Stuart was typing the whole time! It shows, he’s captured pretty much everything. Although he didn’t cover the choak-into-cornflakes moment when Tony Saigh of Skype inadvertently mentioned Google in front of James Tipple who heads up Yahoo Connected Life.

Ergo as Stuart has done such a good job already, I thought I’d document the folk round the table rather than the content.

A note 3UK. I’m delighted for them, I really am. It’s so refreshing to speak to a team of individuals from a mobile operator who are clearly excited and motivated at the prospect of delivering great service to their customers. They really have got it right — pricing the internet service at a wholly appropriate £5/10 a month. It’s working. In May 2007, 3UK users sent 118 million instant messages via MSN Mobile. More stats? From July 2006 to January 2007, Yahoo Mobile did 82m page impressions on 3. March 2007 to present? 62m. It’s working….!

Here, then, is a picture courtesy of my new E61i. On the right is Jyri Engestrom, co-foudner of Jaiku, one of the best mobile services I’ve seen in years (read the SMS Text News Jaiku coverage so far).

On the left is Mike Roberts of 3G Wireless Broadband. I didn’t get his card though so I’m not entirely sure what his site is.

I glanced to my left and found James Sherwood of The Register sat next to me. ‘Shit!’ I thought, ‘A proper journalist..’ He was a nice chap though. Beyond him, I caught sight of a person’s notepad with three — COUNT’EM — THREE! — mobile phones arrayed round it. A Nokia N70 and two Sony Ericssons. And a dictaphone.

‘Geez. That person’s a class-A geek like me,’ I thought, ‘You don’t see many of them around.’

Who was it? None other than Bena Roberts, Founder and Chief Analyst of BKI Media — and also Editor of GoMo News! GoMo’s been in my feeds for a while so it was nice to actually say hi to Bena. Interestingly, Bena made a point about Orange and mobile data. She didn’t elabourate though. Big things in the works for next week apparently. I tell you, if Orange dribble out another stupid, stupid, mindnumbingly THICK mobile data plan anywhere in the vicinity of a ‘unlimited off peak data plan’, I will go and buy an Orange Pay As You Go phone and BURN it outside their headquarters in protest. Here’s hoping we get a 7.50 a month data plan from them, eh?

Bumping into Dr Carsten Sørensen from the London School of Economics was thought-provoking. He delivered a brilliant speech — here’s a wee bit of it:

Stuart covered Dr Carsten’s presentation thus (PS that’s Stuart typing there in the video):

Organisations and families spend all our time trying to cultivate boundaries. Who do I want to spend time with? Who do I want to talk to to innovate? Who’s allowed to have my mobile number and who’s not? The problem is, once you give it out, you can’t take it back. So when mobile technology erodes these boundaries, it’s good and bad news – thus, we need to cultivate and organise our contacts – which is where things like buddy lists come in. That’s the gist.

I caught up with Dr Carsten and asked him about his first handset. It’s an interesting answer. He was a late adopter — and eventually got one of those Nokia 8200s — the tiny one — because it was one of the only phones capable of data at the time. He paid over a grand for it too. Right now he’s sporting a Nokia E65 on Vodafone and absolutely loving it. It’s a handsome device.

I then put the same question to John Penberthy-Smith (everyone seems to call him “JPS”), 3UK Marketing Director. His first handset was a Sony. The small squarish one with the boom microphone — with next to no screen. Or no screen. Do you remember it? It was the precursor to the brilliant CMD-Z5 (which, by the way, came with an Internet Explorer wap browser and an on-board answering machine — a genius handset). Now, though, JPS is sporting an LG Shine 3G — not, because, as my friend Ilana commented, ‘it’s great because you always have a mirror in your bag,’ but because of the browser. Apparently the LG Shine 3G web browser is one of the best on the planet. I’ll need to check that out and have a look.

Kudos to James Tipple and Chloe Graf of Yahoo Connected Life. I really enjoyed their perspective. While James was speaking, I made a mental note to get hold of Yahoo Go 2.0 because I particularly want to have a look at their Flickr support. I’m going to do a ton on Yahoo Go. I cooked up some plans with Chloe. I’d like to set Ben Harvey lose on it for a week or so to see how a normal user takes to it. I was holding back from looking at Yahoo Go whilst it fully launches on a ton of handsets.

Tony Saigh is Business Development Manager, Mobile, for Skype. He deilvered a wicked overview of where Skype’s heading. I particularly liked how Tony humanised the service. Rather than knocking on about how many geeks are using Skype, he talked about his mum — and how she doesn’t really like having to ‘go upstairs’ to make a call via the PC. Instead she’s loving using her Skype wi-fi phone. (Mental note: I need to get one.) He also talked about a couple in a long distance relationship who frequently use Skype Video conferencing — although they’re on different continents, they’d keep Skype Video open for hours on end across the weekend so they can ‘share time’, even though the other might be doing the washing or reading the paper. Heh. Wicked.

Speaking of wicked. Then we got on to Jaiku and Jyri’s presentation. I had to stop myself from jumping on to the table, pompoms in hand and cheering GO YURI, GO YURI, GIVE ME A J

JAYYYYYYY

GIVE ME A AAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAA

GIVE ME AN IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

AYEEEEEEEEEEE

GIVE ME A KAYYYYYYY

KAYYYYYYYYYY

GIVE ME A YOUUUUUUUUUUU

YOUUUUUUUU

WHAT’S IT SPELL?

JAIKU!!!!

😉

I am loving Jaiku and I tell you what, the next Symbian version, which I’m hopefully going to get on beta shortly, is a piece of hotness.