First ever Mobile App Stores conference (?)

My friend Ajit Jaokar is running what he believes is the first ever Mobile App Stores Conference, at CTIA in San Diego on October 8.

Great timing, since Apple just announced its billionth AppStore download.

The Mobile Application Stores, Strategy and Deployment conference is a
partner seminar of International CTIA WIRELESS I.T. and Entertainment.

Ajit reckons (and he should know) it is the only conference to focus exclusively
on the business of mobile applications - the opportunities in the mobile apps stores ecosystem.

Featured speakers include:

• Dr. Jin-Sung Choi Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Head MC Global
Product Planning Team, LG Electronics Korea
• George Linardos Vice President, Product Management, Media, Nokia
• Ilja Laurs Founder & CEO, GetJar.
• Tim Haysom, Chief Marketing Officer,OMTP
• Mike Merril, CEO-Smart Phone Technologies
• Ajit Jaokar, President-futuretext
• Chetan Sharma, CEO, Chetan Sharma Consulting
• Jouko Ahvenainen, Founder, Grow VC International
• William Volk, CEO, PlayScreen
• Sena Gbeckor-Kove, Chief Technology Officer, imKon

Tickets and details here.

It's easy to think it's all about Apple, but everyone and their mother is busily setting up mobile appstores.
Recent additions include LG’s Applications Store and Windows
Marketplace for Mobile as well as Android and the Blackberry App World.

It's all come a long way since the likes of Nokia's Widsets blazed a trail.

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• I've Got Productized by Nokia (cloudave.com)
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• Motorola's Androidpowered Dext will be 'first of many' smartphones (telegraph.co.uk)
• Smartphones and low-cost handsets to dominate market (news.cnet.com)
• First Dell, now Philips: Invasion of the iPhone clones in China begins (digital.venturebeat.com)
• LG Aims For Larger Mobile Share by 2012 (mrgadget.com.au)

Snakes and Widgets

New blogpost just added to /message. All contributions to the conversation welcome!

What do you pay for when you use ITunes?

I was on a panel at Digital Asset Management in London yesterday and threw into the ring that perhaps the 'assets' that we aim to manage don't have value (at least not in and of themselves).
I was talking, of course, about the Because Effect. You might not make money with content but you're likely to because of it.
In other words Prince understands that his music is freely shared so he gives it away for free. That which was scarce has become abundant.
The because effect is that more people hear his music and he creates more demand for the thing that he does have that is still in limited supply - live concert tickets/ merchandise/limited edition this and that...

Someone asked, but what about ITunes? People pay for content there - and the success appears to continue to grow.

I don't think its the content we are paying for on Itunes - it is the service (with the experience intertwined in this).
You could go and find the same music freely shared somewhere else. You could. It might take you a while. You could find ways to get it on to your ipod. You could.
But it's all time consuming and clunky.
You pay itunes to take all that hassle away and make the download quick, easy and beautifully done.

Services around the effective delivery of the right content? Now there's a thought for media.

By the way, I've posted this from an I-google gadget (in other words without leaving my google homepage).

Cool little widget. A service I have taken with me on my journey - one which treats the user as the destination. Neat.