Mobile 2.0 Europa - It Takes Two To Tango

In case you didn’t know, telecom operators and software startups developing mobile services are still in full-combat battle. If this is something that means nothing to you because you live the happy life of not caring about who develops videogames or the next Jamba ringtone, then give this post a miss, really. But if you are part of this quest or feel curious about why not, at this stage of the game, you cannot pretty much watch TV on your mobile or fry Sunday eggs on it or print money from it - some even dared to say back in 1999 “surf the Internet”!, then stay on because this post brings news to all of us Earthlings….

Mobile 2.0 barcelona promised to be just another cute, small-sized but good, conference. And in Barcelona, with its weather and nightlife and culture, hard to miss. So we all schlepped down there and had great debates about how entrepreneurs could obtain funding for their startups, until the panel with the operators began. I don’t know why it started on a bad note - the moderator presenting them like Christian meat to the circus lions, at which point the audience half-jokingly began to wolf-whistle and to make strange beasty sounds as if some carnage was going to occur. And I still wonder wny-oh-why one of the operator representatives had the bad idea to challenge the audience, a young, mostly geeky, software developing audience with zero clue as to how to calculate financials in their heads. The guessing question was a Monty Python Holy Grail gimmick: how much would it cost to revamp all the mobile networks to allow for high traffic, massive data upload things like youTube on your mobile, to happen today. If this was the scene from Monty Python, every single member of the audience would have been sling-catapulted over the blue skies for failing to guess the answer. Because the answer was so out-of-this-world, that I will also not mention it, but think billions - Euro, Dollars, at this point it does not matter, and several. We all sat there in half-shock, half - “Santa Claus are your parents?”, that it felt as if someone had dropped cold water on our heads. Even the other operator members of the panel froze up there in disbelief.

I am one that avoids conflicts at all costs in normal life, but I don’t know why academic debate puts like a Joan of Arc shield on me, and driven by the “no BS” mantra, I don’t let a head on its pin if it deserves to roll down the hill. I reckon I must have fought with the Templars in a former life. So I challenged the question, and I gave examples to back up my argument, and I pretty much started the firecracker, because this time the audiences expressed themselves as if a female version of Russell Crowe in Gladiator had jumped on the arena and this circus afternoon was going to have real bloodbath after all. And for this sin I will pay forever but this is what emerged from it:

1. Tango Couple One: Operators & Logistics. We don’t have more cool mobile services not because the networks will go down like an old donkey, but because launching a new service on a huge network, with all its hundreds of thousands of customers is logistically D-day. Think call centres, billing systems in place, the software and the servers where it lives ready to get bombarded with requests, et cetera. Things don’t happen overnight.

2. Tango Couple Two: Operators & Startups. Operators are indeed working with software developers in bringing you great mobile services, music for example and photosharing and all SMS based ones that today work like a charm - but it has taken almost 10 years to become a mainstream service - and you know when this has happened when your mother sends you pictures from her mobile…. So an industry does not get built overnight.

3. Tango Couple Three: Operators & Handset manufacturers. What do we really want our mobiles to do? email? photo & video upload?

Until the arrival of the iPhone, mobile services were pretty much a geeky thing. Now that every Mary-Jane and Joe-Dude has spent awesome money on their pretty iPhones, and developing software for it seems like a walk in the park because the APIs are sweet-as-pie, are we to witness the rise of the big kahuna wave of mobile video traffic? This industry is full of “buts” and “maybes”, and paradigms are being broken, but not all operators are derranged and avoid new services, and not all mobile services are operator-ready. And us mere mortals, what real daily use will we make of the services we don’t even know we want?

Entry Filed under: Counterculture In technology, Marketing, Mobile