The more digital we become, the more human we become

The more digital we become the more connected we become, the more human we demand.

And the more human we become.

I spoke at Mobile Content 08 in London yesterday. It was a great event with a stella line-up: fjord's Christian Lindholm, flirtomatic's Mark Curtis (author of Distraction), msearchgroove's Peggy Salz, Sean Kane from Bebo, Melissa Goodwin from ITV, Ray de Silva from Vodafone and Graham Thomas from T-mobile. Not to mention Day One's chair JonathanMacdonald (ogilvyone and chief node in the Every Single One of Us project - which you MUST check out) Day Two's Tomi Ahonen (Communities Dominate Brands and mobile legend) and in attendance, Day Three's Andrew Grill (London Calling). And many more, of course.

I opened with a talk on mobile's role in the eighth mass media - which is why the line about the more digital we become the more human we become was so appropriate.

Here's the accompanying slide deck - though you won't find the line in it.

Mobile's Role in Eighth Mass Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

But the fact that The Power of The Network equates to the power of humanity is written through the idea of the eighth mass media.

As we become the connections and the way the connections are made we are reconnecting with our human selves.

We connect in a network - in adhoc self-forming communities of purpose. There is nothing from the centre. And the centre has a tendancy to dehumanise.

• The government line is very different from an MP's opinion.
• Company policy is very different from an employee doing what seems right and reasonable.
• Brand voice can't compare to a human conversation with someone who cares about what they are doing.
• Search engine optimisation can't beat my friends' recommendation (and of course their friends' recommendations)?

Now that we have the ability to organize ourselves through the tools to connect, what we are demanding is more human interaction.

Our connectedness in, through and beyond silos is tearing off the hard corporate masks and revealing the soft human faces. And we're ready to reach out and touch that warm flesh.

The digital future is a very human place to be. And for this, it is ever truer to who we are.

How you can double the value of our network

One extra person added to a network doubles its value. That's a truth revealed by Reed's Law; group forming network theory.

I also find that inspiring. It means if I ever feel like I'm wading through a quagmire of resistance to change, I know that adding one more connection can literally redouble my network's efforts and effectiveness.

We are all made greater by the sum of our connections - all of us. Even the newest, loosest connection.

So, with all that in mind, who would you like to introduce to this network WE share?

Who doesn't yet know they they need to know us?

I'd love to hear your suggestions - either privately via email or publicly by posting below.

Ideally it'll be someone you know because the best five suggestions will be rewarded with two copies of my book The Power of the Network.

The idea is you get to keep one for yourself and one to pass on to the person you've suggested needs connecting to our network.

If you've already got The Power of the Network, great (and thanks!) you'll have two copies to pass one.

I hope handing over a tangible real-world book will act as a physical conversation starter for you - a social object around which your introduction to the network can begin.

Maybe you'll see this as something interesting we can do together? I hope so. And if so, please share.

The closing date for this is December 31, 2008.

• By the way, I'm presenting at Mobile Content in London today - talking about Mobile's role in the eighth mass media at 9am (The Big Question slot) and on a panel in the afternoon at 4.10p. Come and say hi if you get the chance.

Sony-Ericsson X1 developer competition NOW ON

The battle for hearts and minds of developers is well and truly on - and it's a battle all the major players are tackling head-on.

The iPhone has Itunes, Android is offering developers an apps marketplace too.

That's all well and good for the software houses, for the companies, for the bigger guys.

Now Sony-Ericsson's X1 is entering the fray with a competition for developers. I'll be able to share exact details of the prize later this week. They want you to create panels for the X1. Details here.

If you're one such, here's an early heads-up. The site hosting the competition doesn't go live until November 14.

UPDATE: In the meantime the competition site is live already AND the closing date is sooner than I'd been led to believe, Nov 30.

But take it from me, it's coming (I know, because the company I work for is building it right now!). Drop me an email for details when it goes live.


So, best get cracking!

In the meantime, get a lead by downloading the FREE Developer SDK.

Watch a video of how the phone and its touch panels works here.

From Gizmodo

Developers can use the Windows Mobile SDK, free of charge, to produce a wide variety of panels to meet the consumer’s demand for a rich, individualised multimedia experience on their phone. Users of the Xperia™ X1 will be spoilt for choice as they personalize their handset with panel applications to suit their mood and lifestyle. Whether it is a search engine, advanced calendar or social networking application, music or film catalogue, sports or news related content, the panels enable you to access any information – quickly and directly – with a simple tap on the 3” super high resolution touch screen.

The X1's panel interface runs on Windows Mobile 6.1

Testing qik live from a glider!

I've been playing with qik recently as anyone who has caught any videos from me will know.
Qik allows you to broadcast live streaming video from your mobile phone. There's usually a small delay before it'll appear in my live channel (see latest from the channel below) but it's close to live.

This evening from 6.30pm (UK, BST) I'm going gliding - and I'm taking my mobile and qik with me. I managed to broadcast on just a couple of bars of 2G signal recently from a forest in Norfolk. I reckon hundreds of feet above the Cambridgeshire countryside should offer an even tougher challenge! Here's what I've written about qik before.

UPDATE The rather disappointing outcome appears below:

Your flat-rate data plan is a sub-prime mortgage crisis waiting to happen

Here's a few highlights from the off portal vs on portal panel at MeM today.

Panel members:
jens begemann cop jamster
ray anderson ceo bango
russell buckley admob
paul meyes acme mobile
andrew bud, mef /mblox

Your flat-rate data plan is a sub-prime mortgage crisis waiting to happen.
Andrew Bud suggested that there is an inherent flaw in the mobile internet business model for operators. While they can offer unlimited voice and realistically expect there to be an upper limit on use, or unlimited text and assess their maximum exposure with some accuracy, the same is not true of data. If they sell you all-you-can-eat flat-rate data there is only an upwards spiral with no limit in the costs they will face to satisfy your never-ending demand for more and more data. And this, at the same time as the pressure on price pushes it ever downwards. Effectively the man selling you a flat-rate deal today is writing cheques that can't be cashed into the future.

Two responses from me:
1. The more people use data, the more operators can monetise the services they can offer to content providers: such as LBS, ID, payment mechanisms. If they offer that stuff for free, yes they'll be in trouble.
2. There is an assumption in Andrew's assertion that the cost of carrying data can't fall as fast as our desire and ability to consume it. While I appreciate that we are seeing something of this in the ISPs response to BBC I-player, Youtube and other bandwidth consuming services, isn't it possible that this is just a technology-playing-catch-up hic-cup.
The cost of delivering data has consistenly fallen in the past - why shouldn't it into the future?
The crisis Andrew predicts is also one predicated by who controls the pipes and their own particular business models. If their model was more driven by deriving value from connecting people with people and people with content the picture looks different. (Consider my white paper, communities of purpose are the business units of the 21st century by way of further exploration of that?)
Depending on the economics, far from leading lemming-like to content providers being billed for having their content delivered by the pipe owner (Andrew's prediction), a pipe owner with a a more networked-world business plan would simply welcome each and every additional node.

Q: When operators will switch to open: Services will migrate to the edge of the network. Numbers mean off portal will win and is already winning.
All operators can do is impede this. They cannot stop it.
Operators have to provide services which are useful to content providers and sell that instead (eg the lbs, payment and id stuff we referenced above).
Operators providing content is about growing revenue - but often by losing money. Services which enable off portal activity are about margin. As soon as the operators care more about margin than growth the switch will be instant.

Ray Anderson: 75% in the UK is already off portal, 25%. In the US it's already 50-50, in Japan it's all going off portal. The battle is already won.

Russell Buckley: The winners in mobile are not from old media or the internet, but from the likes of mobile-first businesses such as itsmy and pepperonity. Mobile is a different environment. We have seen huge growth of off portal driven by countries that surprise.
Half our users come from the US. They have adopted the mobile internet like you wouldn't believe.
Serbia has highest per capita consumption of mobile web pages. They are leapfrogging the pc generation. Where this is succeeding they all have flat rate data pricing which grows off portal revenue for all.

Ray Anderson: "Its the internet, stupid, you can't fight about it."
The opertors will win by providing services which connect you anywhere you go. they can offer services by taking payments, knowing id and location, they need a way of getting this to content providers efficiently.
The operator home page won't last very long just as it didn't on the internet.

Russell Buckley: If operators are to offer third party data services to admob etc they need to get on with it. We will find other ways. We already have teams of phds working on solving the issue.

Andrew Bud: If they sit on their backsides long enough and force the content community to work around them they will themselves destroy the future of their own business model

Mobile Entertainment Market: Cannes - first update

I'm at the Mobile Entertainment Market in Cannes and would be posting live tweets BUT once again there's no free wifi in the conference room.

To be fair, there is in the lobby – but that's not where the speakers are. I think the word I'm looking for is doh! No back channel here!

So here's my compromise – a few highlights from the first session. I know it means you can't join in with the conversation but at least you can latch on to the broadcast of ideas and maybe join in the comments here. Gah! I'd rather be twittering.

Anyways a few highlights:

Lee Fenton COO at Jamba reveals his animated rabbit ringtone has become the biggest sellng physical cd in Germany.

Love to know what the demographics are. My daughter is 3 and pesters for princess comics. I'll make a wild bet she won't buy her own newspapers when she's older.

Jamba is also going to offer downloads from MySpace artist pages.

Jamba spends $100m on marketing. Less than 10% is spent marketing on mobile yet it is their most efficent ad channel. They'd do more but they can't get the inventory.

During Alistair Mitchell's (RIM, ie Blackberry) keynote someone pointed out how poor the Iphone is for typing (and therefore text). Much prompting about a touchscreen blackberry with a keyboard led to no confirmation.

Interesting to me this fascination with typing – given the increasingly less text heavy internet and increasing numbers of new mobile users globally who can't read, much less type their queries. I guess that may not be relevant in the business user smart phone world?

Brief discussion of the long tail of places people seek content from makes me think that this alone should make operators tear down their walls.

What do operators make money from? Conversation. What prompts conversation online, peer-to-peer, by voice or text or IM or etc? Content.

It's another example of the because effect. Operators can make money because of content but not with it.

Finally, BBC's controller of mobile Matthew Postgate says Beeb is both a content and and an engineering company. Early adopters are into news which is why its popular on mobile internet. Mobile will be mainstream for Beeb before too long.

News translates well across different platforms. Drama may not (on tv well shot and lavish, etc) take that and put it on mobile and it can't elicit the same emotional response). It will take time for people to use the medium most effectively in its own right.

BBC has about 17m uu on fixed line a month, 2.8m on mobile. He thinks 40% are a new audience which they hadn't reached before.

He says Beeb is planning to roll out the iplayer on mobile and that devices like the iphone bring the fixed and mobile internet closer together.

A version of iplayer is in beta on iphone and itouch. Plan is to roll it out on more handsets this year.

Beeb worked closely with the isps for iplayer to be "sensitive to their issues" about demand on bandwidth, that same dialogue is going on with the mobile operators.

"We can create demand, which drives Britain towards a digital economy," says Matthew.

More to come later today.

Why your mobile strategy is more important than ever

And while we're looking at some mobile stats... How about this one? 38% growth in sms messages in the UK last year. The number sent topped 40 billion.
Yes, that's right, 40 billion. Or an average of 138million a day - that's well over two texts per man, woman and child (no matter what their age) in the UK - every day. And each one involves money changing hands.
There are 50 million plus mobile phones in the UK.
That's about 3 times as many phones as there are PCs - and PCs are considerably less accessible and personal to the individual.

And you think your mobile strategy is how important?

So if you're ready for the migration of web content to mobile content... catch up on Tomi T Ahonen's latest thinking HERE