Conference season! Telco 2.0, Open Mobile and others. Discounts available....

Looks like April and May will be Powerpoint central for me.... numerous events that I've been asked to speak at or help develop.

Unfortunately I won't be at next week's eComm in San Francisco, but if you're interested in the most cutting edge innovations around the whole "next communications" arena, from cloud voice to social networks to augmented reality, it will be there.

The big event of the month is undoubtedly the Telco 2.0 9th Brainstorm here in London. I'm going to be running sessions on Mobile Broadband Network Economics, and telcos' ability to gain additional revenue streams via New Devices.

In May I'll be at the Open Mobile Summit from May 26-27, chairing the stream on "Open Mobile Networks".

For any of these, if you tell 'em I sent you, there should be a discount available on delegate fees. Email me for details if you need them.

In addition, I'm also at upcoming events on
- Telecom Cloud Services
- IMS (I'll be wearing my bulletproof vest)
- LTE
- Indoor Wireless

Get in touch if you'd like to arrange a meeting to discuss Disruptive Analysis consultancy services and published research at any of these - information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com.

Oh, and lastly a I'm speaking at next week in a personal capacity, although it's organised by a name many in the mobile industry will find familiar, David Wood, former SVP at Symbian. The UK Humanity+ event is all about ways we may change both our species and our planet over the coming decades, from cognitive enhancement to anti-ageing to the "singularity". Should be an utterly fascinating day, and if you're in London I'd exhort you to come along.

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Mobile social networking doesn't really deal with networks very well

For the last six months or so, I've been feeling that the mobile industry is looking at social networking in the wrong way, but I've been finding it hard to articulate exactly why - it's just been a feeling that something is a bit wrong.

In particular, I've been having a lot of doubts about the million different attempts to bridge between social networks, so you have a single "active phonebook", or "active homescreen" which aggregates email and SMS and Facebook and Twitter and Ovi and Gmail and Skype and Vodafone 360 and Orange On and Apple MobileMe and all the rest.

The usual metaphor is to have an icon or picture of a particular contact, with some form of showing all the various ways to message them, get status updates and so forth. In particular, there's usually an over-riding expectation that somehow the mobile phone address book remains the natural "hub" for all of this, either still resident on the device, or abstracted to the cloud for your supposed benefit.

To me, that doesn't gel. It's yet another way of trying to push "unified communications" rather clunkily onto something it doesn't fit, with a good dose of unfriendly "customer lock-in" as well.

Now I'm not a human interactions or useability expert, but I'd like to think I'm reasonably well-attuned to the ways in which people use both mobile and Internet communications. I can talk about "social value" and easily describe why stupid concepts like SMS-to-the-TV destroy the inherent, implicit value in a particular form of communications.

My thoughts are starting to resolve into a couple of separate areas here:

- Mobile phones - and especially the inbuilt address book - are great for person-to-person communications. But they tend to be lousy for orchestrating groups of people or events.

- The web tends to be good for free-form communications, but only between selected groups. With the exception of email, most web-based comms is within rich but limited "islands" - chat rooms, fan pages, blogs and comments, IM communities, VoIP peers and so forth

- A lot of the value in social networks involves the interaction of individuals with groups. Sending a party invitation to 50 people on Facebook with directions. Messaging your community of blog followers via RSS and so forth.

- Certain forms of communication integrate better than others. Emails have attachments and embedded links and are easy to "cc". Skype video and file-sharing. SMS for ubiquity. But *all are different* and risk losing their individual characteristics if they are blended.

- People like to keep their communities segregated by default. Work contacts, personal contacts, very personal contacts... but they are too lazy to administer that segregation actively. It's much easier just to have silo'd islands of acquaintances and groups, even if they overlap, because you don't have to *actively administer* membership. If you just know all your work contacts are on Skype, then you quickly learn not to use Skype for certain types of messaging - you don't change your status to "feels very hungover this morning".

- The mobile handset address-book metaphor is useless for things like group membership and events, as it's usually too oriented around a number and specific "communications sessions" that it's hoping to enable. This is especially true for IMS-based variants, where the whole underlying premise it creating billable events. Do you expect to be charged to "like" someone else's status, or to RSVP to an event invitation?

- Increasingly, messages are duplicated through different channels for notification purposes. Facebook updates are sent to email. Event reminders are sent by SMS as well. Do you want to de-duplicate your active, aggregated homescreen whenever any of your contacts does anything?

I feel that I'm a bit closer to having a holistic view on how all this should work, but I'm not there yet. It is interesting that some of the most significant growthand behavioural trends (and viral buzz) are in new, completely-isolated islands like BlackBerry BBM, rather than aggregated platforms like 360 or Ovi.

Comments very definitely welcome....

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An interesting angle on mobile broadband offload

Since the demise of mobile TV, the word "multicast" has pretty much gone out of the wireless industry. The idea of increasing efficiency of networks, by stopping the same content being transferred multiple times has pretty much dissipated. Yes, there is some discussion of cacheing certain files at various points in the network, but it would still need to be transmitted multiple times over the radio.

Obviously, side-loading between devices is an option, either via Bluetooth or memory card, but it can be a pretty clunky experience, and obviously iPhones don't have card slots anyway. It's also not good for realtime sharing.

The LoKast application from NearVerse looks like it might have some interesting potential. Although the initial use case has been local sharing of music (eg promos at SXSW in Austin), there appears to be a more general option to use it as a way of "offloading" mobile broadband traffic *to other handsets*. I'm pretty convinced that peer-to-peer connectivity among mobile devices is going to be a disruptor, whether it's MiFi-type products or virtual hotspots like Joiku's.

The CEO's phrase "unifying carrier and short-range wireless networks into a holistic, optimized system" in the funding announcement is an interesting comment that is evocative of various forms of cellular/WiFi (or in this case cellular/Bluetooth) hybrids.

Automated local sharing of content has some interesting implications for the UK's new and much-hated Digital Economy Bill too.

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The secret social network success: RIM now advertising its BBM messenger direct to consumers

I've been researching the BlackBerry business model quite deeply recently, including a detailed briefing document for Telco 2.0's executive briefing service.

My general view is that the end to end RIM ecosystem tends to get underestimated in potential by operators, for example in terms of the potential for two sided revenue streams. I think that both the App World and BES could be interesting platforms to enable operators to interact with enterprise customers, for example for generating revenue from APIs.

But it is the consumer side of BlackBerry that is still really poorly understood - particularly its growing adoption among youth. My own anecdotal experience in London is that ownership has two separate peaks in age - business users around 40 and consumers about 22, the latter predominantly female.

The sheer number of students with BlackBerries is unexpected to many - there seems to be an assumption that the iPhone would be the device of choice, while in fact RIM has a "secret weapon"

The proprietary BBM messaging service seems to have evolved into a new social network purely by chance - and it has gone unnoticed by most commentators. Yet it has suddenly evolved into a quite exclusive club - pretty much acting as a mobile version to replace MSN, with what seems like viral uptake.

As usual, the social media industry gets hung up on newcomers like FourSquare and obviously Twitter, ignoring what looks like an old-school IM service. The mobile operators assume (wrongly) that people want all their social networks converged and bundled together with the handset phonebook. In fact, it makes perfect sense to have separate (and good) capabilities for Facebook, BBM, email and SMS in the same device.

Yet to my mind, BBM seems to have the most underground "viral" uptake of anything I see in the real world. Yes, I'm in London, which creates its own technology microclimate. But evidence suggests that BBM is also driving BlackBerry sales in places like Indonesia and Venezuela as well.

So it is with great interest that I noticed yesterday some saturation-advertising specifically for BBM on the Tube, on the platforms and escalators. Good to see RIM actually promoting it actively.

For all the hype about apps, it is wrong to underestimate the power of a messaging service or social network in device choice. Most apps are only appealing to individual users. But messaging gets the n-squared factor. Give an average teenager or student a choice between a must-have app.... or missing out on their friends' gossip.

As always, two maxims hold true:
- Divergence is more important than convergence
- Communications is more important than content

A side-issue here is that RIM (unlike Apple, or in the past Symbian) has been directly targeting prepaid users with low-end devices. Given the youth market outside the US tends to be 80%+ prepay, this is a completely open field that other smartphone platforms have abdicated, although Android is catching up now).

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The incumbent telcos' attack on YouTube looks like a suicide pact

There is a right way and a wrong way to go about finding new business models for broadband services. Having just published a report jointly with Telco 2.0, I've been spending a lot of time delving beneath the surface of two-sided business models, and the opportunities for operators to make additional revenue from "upstream" companies like media and Internet properties.

Picking a fight with Google about YouTube traffic is categorically the wrong way to go about it.

Yet Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Telefonica are all trying to tweak the lion's tail. According to the FT, they're even suggesting that regulators could "supervise a settlement" if they can't persuade the Big G to hand over a slice of its advertising and application revenues.

Google's recent stance with China over censorship doesn't suggest that it is going to be happy playing that sort of game. But what bemuses me most is that the operators seem to be chasing after the wrong target. Google pays for its network connections like anyone else. That's the way the Internet works. It's not like phone calls, where there are originating and terminating ends to a connection. If end users start *uploading* traffic to Google's servers, are the operators going to be happy to pay for the traffic to be terminated in Mountain View?

There certainly are potential revenue-earning opportunities for the large telcos - either from Google or other players (Governments, application developers, other operators, media companies and so on). There are already signs that two-sided models are emerging to serve specific device types, specific customer groups, or "third-party paid" data traffic. But for those type of services to work, the operator needs to add value above and beyond connectivity.

Some form of toll-gate is not a value-add.

Payment mechanisms, authentication, managed security, guaranteed SLAs, device management and numerous other options represent value-adds. Partitioning a broadband connection and giving absolute guarantees of speed, latency, jitter and so forth might qualify. But simply attempting to gain a "free ride" on Google's skillful aggregation of services will not.

My view is that it will be extremely difficult for operators to derive additional monetisation from services that terminate on PCs. Smartphones, TVs and other devices are different - and those are some of the areas where they should be focusing their marketing and executive firepower. It is possible that this is just an opening skirmish before YouTube starts trying to pitch full HD-quality video for living room TV sets, in which case there is definitely a discussion to be had.

But otherwise, it wouldn't surprise me to see Google start to think about charging operators for carrying its content: after all, as DT's CEO says "There is not a single Google service that is not reliant on network service"... which could well be inverted to say "There's not a single broadband user that isn't reliant on Google's service".

It would also be remarkably easy for Google to offer free advertising to a given operator's competitors, less inclined to consider forms of extortion. Of course, in a properly competitive broadband market, there should be no barriers to operators trying whatever strategy they like - as long as there are no unfair attempts to block subscriber churn.

If operators are really going to push for non-neutral Internet connections, are they also prepared to deal with the fallout from non-neutral Internet services as a response.

If you are interested in the new Broadband Business Models report, which identifies a multi-$bn amount of Telco revenue opportunity via much less-confrontational approaches, then more details are here. Or email information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com.

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iPad impact on mobile networks likely to be negligible

OK, I'm making myself a hostage to fortune here, but my expectation is that the Apple iPad should be very low on the list of operators' worries when considering mobile broadband traffic patterns.

There's been a lot of speculation that it could cause additional problems above and beyond the iPhone and 3G dongle-equipped PCs, but I'm really unconvinced it's worth other than some cursory monitoring.

Firstly, even the optimists (I'm not one of them) expect the iPad to sell in far smaller numbers than the iPhone.

Secondly, not all of them (or even most of them) are likely to come with 3G modems. They're optional and not even on sale yet.

Thirdly, they are unlikely to be used for many of the "quick hit" on-the-go access to maps, email, Facebook and so forth that are characteristic of iPhones.

Fourth, they are being sold with the benefit of hindsight - and at least nascent offload / traffic management strategies. It wouldn't surprise me if operators adopt some very specific iPad policy and enforcement techniques.

Fifth, a proportion are likely to be used almost exclusively as "stay at home" tablet devices, plus the occasional trip out of WiFi range.

Sixth, most iPad owners are likely to have an iPhone, which will probably be used for applications that need to be "always on" or most frequently-checked and generate much
of the signalling load. For networks like AT&T's it has been the iPhone's constant setting-up and tearing-down of data connections that has been at least as much a problem as the sheer bulk of data downloaded.

Seventh, it lacks a camera, which means that uplink traffic may well be much lower.

The main variable is the potential of the device to be used to consume large amounts of video over the 3G connection. Frankly, in comparison, the downloads of newspapers or a few apps is trivial in data volume.

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RIP Guy Kewney

Sad news this morning that UK tech journalist Guy Kewney has passed away. I'd spoken to him, or met him at conferences and press events, on numerous occasions over the last 15 years or so.

He was witty, erudite, intensely knowledgeable and a totally unique character known by pretty much everyone in the UK IT and telecoms industry.

My condolences to his family and friends.

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