mjelly mobile 2.0 blog

Mobile 2.0 Startups nominated for Mobile Monday awards

Rudy from mtrends pinged me to say that the nominees for the MobileMonday Peer Awards have been whittled down from 163 to 42 by the mobilemonday chapters around the world.  An international Jury will now select the 20 finalists to present at the Peer Awards event in Barcelona. These finalists chosen to present in Barcelona will be announced on January 26.

Great to see that quite a few of the nominees are already in the mjelly directory including:

• fring - (MobileMonday Tel Aviv)

• mobiSiteGalore - (MobileMonday Chennai)

• MocoSpace - (Mobile Monday Boston)
• Nimbuzz - (Mobile Monday Amsterdam)
• Xumii - MobileMonday Sydney

Here's the full list:

    * 7syntax - MobileMonday Portugal

    * Addict Digital Media - Mobile Monday Buenos Aires

    * aka-aki networks GmbH - MobileMonday Berlin

    * Anaeko - MobileMonday Belfast

    * Aradiom - MobileMonday Istanbul

    * Babajob.com - MobileMonday Bangalore

    * Beabloo - MobileMonday Barcelona

    * Big in Japan Inc. - MobileMonday Dallas

    * bioLocate - MobileMonday Jakarta

    * CIDWAY - MobileMonday Geneva

    * Cirius Technologies, Inc. - MobileMonday Los Angeles

    * Crave Mobile - MobileMonday Philadelphia

    * Creador Estudio Interactivo C.A. - MobileMonday Caracas

    * Dial2Do - MobileMonday Dublin

    * Dialy - Mobile Monday Maroc

    * DPGroup >> Product: SINDYK - MobileMonday Bogota

    * Fortumo - MobileMonday Estonia

    * fring - MobileMonday Tel Aviv

    * Getjar Networks - MobileMonday Lithuania

    * iKen Solutions - MobileMonday Mumbai

    * Keynetik - MobileMonday Washington DC

    * Liquid Air Lab GmbH / adplace.com - MobileMonday Frankfurt

    * Mob4Hire - MobileMonday Vancouver

    * Mobintech A/S - MobileMonday Copenhagen

    * mobiSiteGalore - MobileMonday Chennai

    * MocoSpace - Mobile Monday Boston

    * Nimbuzz B.V. - Mobile Monday Amsterdam

    * Orbster GmbH - MobileMonday Munich

    * Oxynade - MobileMonday Brussels

    * Palringo - MobileMonday London

    * rmbrME - MobileMonday New York

    * Secusmart GmbH - MobileMonday Dusseldorf

    * Smaato Inc. - MobileMonday Hamburg

    * Soonr - MobileMonday Silicon Valley

    * Tellmewhere - MobileMonday Paris

    * Unkasoft Advergaming - MobileMonday Madrid

    * Wapalta - MobileMonday St. Petersburg

    * Wapja.net - MobileMonday Sao Paulo

    * WorldMate, Inc. - MobileMonday Atlanta

    * Xumii - MobileMonday Sydney

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• Nimbuzz - a mobile 2.0 startup getting real traction
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• MobileMonday Peer Awards Nominations announced

Apple iphone app store TV ads show how to advertise new mobile services

At the last Mobile Monday London, Dan Applequist mentioned that Apple had started advertising the iphone app store in the US, with a screen by screen demo of how to download an app onto your phone.  The point he made was that Apple are very successfully presenting this as a "new thing" and a lot of people will think that they invented the idea of downloadable mobile applications and software, despite the fact that this capability has existed for years on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, not to mention Palms, Blackberries and handsets with Java and Brew built in. 

Here is the TV ad "Vicinity" which is also showing in the UK now and probably all the other countries the iphone is available in.  

What is amazing is that in all the years downloadable applications have been available, no other company has every promoted them in this way and made the process easy to understand for the mass market of consumers.  The ad focuses on the device and actually shows you the process of downloading an app.  If you look back at the way 3G services and portals have been advertised by the big mobile operators they almost never do this - the ad may show a specific thing you can do with the phone but the whole thing is tied up in a glossy TV ad as if they are almost ashamed of showing the device.  See this one for example for Vodafone Live! in Greece:

This says it all really - a mobile ad that gives you virtually no idea what its about, and does not provide any value to the view in terms of user education etc.  I could post a whole load of similar commercials featuring David Beckham, cool music and good looking young people but never telling you what you can do with your phone or helping you to use it. 

There are loads of great apps Symbian and Windows Mobile devices such as Shozu, Opera Mini and Mig33 but at the moment its only really the early adopters and consumers in developing markets that are using them.  If T-Mobile ever gets its own app store off the ground let's see if they can advertise it the same way as Apple or whether they a) dont bother to advertise it or b) do a load of adverts with celebrities and pretty cinematography rather than a clear and useful demo of the service. 

MoMo London - Location Based Mobile Services

Wow, another cracking mobile monday last night, the place was packed and there was a great atmosphere.  Such a contrast from the dark days of 2006-7 - mobile really seems to be an exciting place right now with people from ad agencies, a new wave of mobile 2.0 startups and other assorted folk all making mobile monday the best event in London right now.

The presentation session had lots of speakers, was pretty fast paced and with lots of new stuff happening.  For the first time I began to "get" location and how it might fit into mobile and the wider digital lifestyle. 

Anyway, here's a quick write up of my notes from the evening, for anyone that missed it, or for those who attended and want to refresh their memory.  Btw - am blogging this with Zemanta a firefox plugin that helps you add links and stuff to your post easily - it's pretty good so trying to spread the word.  Oh and quick bit of housekeeping Helen Keegan of Beep Marketing the Mobile Marketing Agency, has joined the Momo London organising committee. 

Skyhook Wireless

The sponsor, Skyhook Wireless was first up to present.  They sound like a really interesting platform/ enabler play doing big things.  Props to them for also funding an after-party at a bar round the corner - not had that happen before at MoMo - good on them.  A nice quick and clear presentation, with some interesting nuggets:

- Skyhook wireless is a "hybrid" location platform that uses data from cell towers, wi-fi and GPS

- they have 50m wi-fi access points in their database, which are manually added by 500 people driving around finding them!

- they have a few startups like buddyping, rummble using their platform as well as AOL who are using it to location-enable the AIM instant messaging service (sounds interesting, mind you Meetro wasn't that successful with location based IM)

- a company called Eye Fi is now offering SD cards for cameras with wifi in them, linked to the Skyhook network this means that photos can be location-stamped when they are taken and automatically geo-tagged for uploading to flickr etc (this seems like a great idea)

Yahoo Fire Eagle - Ben Ward

Whereas Skyhook are trying to create the location infrastructure Fire Eagle seems to be sitting a bit further up the value chain, acting as an aggregator for location information from a range of sources.   

- LBS apps need to get location and use location, Fireagle provides a single service to translate location info, allow user to control how it is distributed and share it with services in a simple format

- Iamnear.net uses Fire Eagle and allows you to find local cashpoints, pubs etc (sounds like Findmynearest etc on Orange, hardly revolulionary)

- Two types of location info

- location (a point or boundary box)

- location hierarchy (e.g. a town, street, etc)

- Fire Eagle is linking to services like ambient orb and Nabaztag e.g. they can tell you when you're mate is round the corner

- real focus on allowing people to manage permission to their location data "so many sites are laying on location functionality, but disclosure an issue which Fire Eagle solves"

- also allow others to easily build location services, in beta, launching later this summer

Google

This presentation was all about Google Gears for mobile and was straight to the point and even featured a bit of code, which is always good to see on a ppt. They said a bit about gears for mobile in general then a bit on location. 

- mobile team were getting hassle from Eric Smidt about why they only release one app every 6 months, massive issues with dealing with device fragmentation, applications a nightmare to get out

- Google mobile are moving all development away from downloadable apps to the mobile web (wow! this is big news)

- but mobile web apps also suck at the moment:

  - can only support one javascript thread or the UI blocks

  - can't access location, camera, address book

  - high latency etc

- Google mobile gears improves on the mobile browser, providing storage, data resources, processing, running multiple queries, device access and secure access to user location features

- first API will be geolocation, providing simple access to user location (seems to overlap a bit with Fire Eagle)

- simple call, identical, standard API on mobile devices and can choose location provider (either Google or third party)

- mobile location API will provide positioning request, positioning updating, last known position

W3C

- working on a standard geolocation API to allow people to get location from any sources/ service and integrate in a standard fashion (sounds familiar)

- Join the mailing list if you are interested in contributing

Rummble

Have not seen a Rummble presentation before and it was pretty interesting to see what they are building at the B2C end of the market.  Big lightbulb moment when they talked about instant results e.g. location-aware info that just pops up on your phone without an active search e.g. it's persistent.  Can see how this would be valuable - the trick is making it work easily on your phone.

- Rummble has been around a while (previously it was playtxt), launched horribly early before 3/4 years before users and technology was ready! So have learnt a lot of things...

- developing mobile apps is painful, hardware is there but user epxerience is still slow

- Wisdom of the Crowds doesn't work for location, you end up with Wetherspoons (bland UK pub chain)

- ... users are lazy, they aren't going to make a massive effort to try and grapple with new services

- GPS proliferation good for mobile LBS industry as it has allowed people to get to grips with the concept

- Rummble instandly delivers relevant content that you can use on a daily basis

- LBS services need to be trusted, relevant, immediate, easy to access

Buddyping - Justin Davies

Buddyping is a product from Ninety Ten, who build social media platforms for major brands, one of which is Buddyping.  These guys have been working on mobile location based services for a long time and really know their stuff, in fact, they were probably one of the first to launch a mobile LBS 2.0 service. 

Buddyping was the only company to do a live demo, using a camera pointed at a handset which was worth risking as it helped to break up the presentations a bit.  Live demos are really important at Momo as they ensure that it isn't just death by powerpoint.  The demo was on the Buddyping Symbian client on an N95.  Key points:

- hardest thing for mobile LBS startups is getting lcoation data cheaply across lots of handsets, Skyhook are a good option!

- Buddyping lets you find friends' location, and integrates with facebook, twitter and finds relevant info like maps

- location must go beyond phonebook to include social network wherever that lives e.g. bebo, facebook, twitter, myspace and provide a contextual overlay

- there's not likely to be a mobile-only location based soc net that takes off, got to integrate with web-based soc nets

Locatrix

Locatrix is an Australian company that develops mobile LBS and mososo apps and aims at working with Mobile Network Operators (Telstra). 

- Uandme is their LBS service, with proximity alerts (sends you an sms if someone in the area)

- to make an end-to-end service you need lots of integration with billing, OSS, SMSC, MMSC, mapping, GPS etc

- location is the key element of the mobile experience, the one thing that changes compared to a fixed platforms

- need to make sure there's a business model (hence they are aiming at operators)

- the location ecology/ value chain has lots of different layers

PANEL

- some people really care a lot about privacy issue, some don't e.g. South Africa, no-one cares, regulator doesn't care about privacy, up to the individual to manage it (Rummble)

- location information needs to be made simpler, technically you can get location info but needs to be scaleable for users and as a business model (Buddyping)

- Cell ID can be "good enough" for a lot of use cases, even though it isn't that accurate

- location is being commoditised, what you do with it is important, got to be part of a wider picture/ service

- first stage issues are currently largely around power, market is at an early stage

- business models emerging, advertisers very interested, Loopt in the US is running a subscription service

Right that's it! Thanks again to the organisers and the sponsor for the drinks.  Shouts to @technokitten, @deidre, @tarek, @mbites, @justindavies, Google mobile crew, Racepoint, Mint Digital, Sirish.

PS You can read another write up at http://puddingrelations.blogspot.com/2008/07/pr-event-mobile-monday-enabling.html

and here's another http://www.dw2-0.com/2008/07/momo-london-momentum-continues.html

Momo London June - Whassup in Mobile Media and Marketing

Right this is becoming a bit of a habit, following write ups of the Momo London May - Advertising and Momo London April - User experience here comes a quick review of the June momo london on Mobile Media and Marketing.  This month MoMo London was held in a charming venue The Royal Institute of Statistics which made a nice change.  The refreshments were also excellent - very cold beer and even can-apes served by friendly people.  The sponsors were Wireless Foundry.

Looking back on it there was a lot of useful stuff coming out of this panel in terms of current thinking about mobile web sites vs apps, mobile marketing, and where mobile is in terms of user adoption.  All of the panel had some interesting things to say and they kept up the energy over quite a long period.  Anyway here's the notes:

Panel + what they used their mobile phone for today

- Moderator - Helen of Mobile marketing agency Beep Marketing - used twitter, sms, voice, google maps

- Marek Pawlowski - PNM / Mex - google maps, sports tracker

- Richard Thurner - Incentivated - sms, lots of voice, google maps

- Matthew Postgate - BBC - email, sms, voice, browsed google, bluetoothed an swf file

- Stephen Pinches  - FT - facebook mobile on blackberry

By way of an intro, Dan Applequist of Vodafone did a quick presentation including his top 11 mobile 2.0 trends, which were ... smart mobile browsers, mobile ajax and widgets, mobile search, mobile advertising, mashups and APIs, RFID and 2D barcodes, location and geocaching, mobile social networks, mobile UGC and smart web devices

Here's the notes from the panel - some good stuff in here:

- sms is not going away, more sms sent per day than google searches but the main thing at the moment for mobile marketing is building mobile internet sites and driving people to them

- there's a big campaign about to start for strongbow with a mobile voucher (I think it is going in The Sun, which is pretty big)

- applications are becoming more popular with advertisers and agencies - it's all kicking off!

- FT have run mobile coupon trials but there's a real problem with infrastructure, it's easier for people like Evening Standard who have their own payment systems etc

- benefits of mobile applications (symbian, java etc) over mobile web apps are quite small in most cases and the mobile browser experience is closing the gap

- however, a lot of agencies are pushing for apps because they look cool and they can show them off to the client not necessarily because people are using them

- blackberry has a lively, diverse, fast-growing applications ecosystem

- one way of looking at it is mobile web for the masses, applications for the "hardcore" (i liked this idea a lot - think it came from the FT dude, better than the usual zero-sum approach to the issue)

- BBC guy - realized mobile is quite simple really it just needs to be personal, location aware, immediate (im not completely convinced by this but every example i run past the framework seems to work)

- huge culture gap between mobile peeps and "web agency" types - web people quite attached to dogma, already become blinkered cant see beyond PC screen

- Incentivated Dude - last year e.g. 2007 was The Year of Mobile, it's already happened, for the first year in 2007 UK mobile ad spend (4th Screen) was greater than Cinema (1st screen)

- last year Scottish and Newcastle (big UK brewer), Jaguar etc started using mobile to prove the concept and can now go back to the FD with data, ROI evidence and get more money for mobile ads, those that didn't invest realizing they have to start using mobile - British Airways are already seeking to use it across the whole customer journey

- brands need to earn the right to be on mobile, whereas email/ PC is flooded with crap only 25% of emails get opened vs 95% of SMS

- FT isn't really seeing "the year of mobile" no enthusiasm from agencies yet in the B2B space

- BBC PC service reaches 17m people a month (UK only?) the mobile service reaches 3m, 40% of those only access the BBC through mobile

- everything web will end up on mobile somehow or other e.g. people are going to access PC-centric sites on mobiles

- it will be a long process - colour TV took 20 years 1950-70 to get any good and it's still evolving

- mobile search is competing against "The Trusted Uncle" e.g. asking someone!

- mobile can ACTIVATE other media channels through short-codes, it's "the glue that ties together the marketing mix" (nice line from Incentivated)

- Killer app for mobile is email - FT have developed some smart approaches round this e.g. when you click an email link on mobile e.g. blackberry they make sure they provide a mobile formatted view of the link

- mobile operators are spending ££££s promoting the mobile internet now (see! they aren't all bad!)

- the key test is "Does this look shit on your phone?"

Ha! a good way to end.  Thanks for the organisers for another good event and the guys serving the drinks and food for being friendly and efficient.  Shouts to Technokitten for moderation skillz, Chris from Minick, MoMo Manchester and whatleydude. 

 

Mobile advertising statistics - MoMo London

So Mobile Monday London took place this week on the topic of Mobile Advertising and here is a write up of what went down.  Overall it was another good MoMo with a good line up of speakers, with different perspectives and a lively, engaged crowd.  There are quite a few stats in here on mobile advertising so hope it's a useful write up for people. 

The Agency View

First up was Claire Voloti of Mindshare, the media planning agency, providing her perspective on what ad clients are looking for from mobile and its role within the media plan and schedule. 

- Mobile has two roles as an ad delivery platform and as an interactive "bolt-on channel"

- important to see how mobile can interact with other media to make them more engaging

- mobile can also play a role in helping to make other media more measurable e.g. through putting a short-code on a poster, print or TV ad

- Claire was bored of hearing that mobile advertising is "going to take off this year" but things DO seem to be moving forward at last!

    - industry bodies like the MMA are pushing standards and measurement systems

    - consumers are starting to use mobile internet

    - networks and devices are improving

    - social networking is starting to move onto mobile

- although a lot of focus is on younger consumers, older age groups are also an opportunity as they typically have contract phones with better data plans, are affluent and have the best phones!

- events are driving mobile through search e.g. sports matches

- however, it can still be PAINFUL to do anything on mobile e.g. took Claire two days just to get a £40k mobile plan in place, the fragmented value chain is a problem and a real barrier to growing budgets

- some good successes e.g. Pepsi campaign generated 400k view of pepsi content, 2000 votes and 20 video uploads (although this seems really low Claire was really happy with this level of engagement given the 1:100 ratio typically seen between user uploads and viewing

- really excited about mobile coupons - could open up LOADSA MONEY for mobile but need to ensure the distribution chain is in place to take the coupons!

- mobile needs to be viewed within the context of an overall media plan, provide relevant content that adds value and have real KPIs e.g. sales, awareness

Key challenges

- Reach: only 10% of users use mobile internet, targeting isn't there yet in any scale, mobile search yet to scale (hard to spend £1k on mobile search!)

- Measurement: no standard way to measure or value mobile advertising, no socio-demographic info, too many proprietary ad serving systems, need to integrate more into existing online services

- Speed: really need fast networks e.g. HSDPA to support things like video

The Operator View

Shaun Henderson is the bigwig for mobile advertising at Vodafone, and an ex ad agency man.  He opened with a few jokes and went on to outline what Voda are up to, namely:

- building inventory in terms of impressions, users, clicks

- moving beyond age, gender, postcode, handset segmentation to session length, location, behaviour

- sizeable audience but not enough scale yet to "slice and dice" too finely - need to keep things simple

- Money follows measurement in media, in order to grow the business, need to put in place measurement systems, show ROI, compete with other media etc (apparently the big guys at Voda HQ get very excited at this point with the mention of big money)

- trying to make it more efficient to buy, sell and report on mobile advertising and put in place standards and formats e.g. GSMA mobile ad metrics, auditing etc

- for Renault Twingo campaign on Vodafone mobile portal, brand awareness went up from 37% to 56%, purchase intent went up from 9% to 11% so MOBILE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

The Mobile Ad Platform View

Russell Buckley from Admob was back at momo London after a year and a half when he last did a presentation and demo in the very early days of admob.  What a difference a year and half makes! - admob is now no longer a small experimental mobile ad network but is actually beating Google in the mobile ad market.  Admob have a great policy of "open sourcing" information and data (as Russell put it) and this presentation was all about sharing information about admob.

- admob took 6 months to do 30m impressions, 6 months to do 1 bn impressions, and are now doing 3.5bn every 6 months!  (nice growth curve)

- mobile advertising plays different roles for different players:

    - brands and advertisers can target consumers
    - mobile web site owners can promote their mobile sites
    - operators and publishers can monetise their traffic
    - mobile content owners can use mobile as a marketing channel (very effective as promoting to users           already on their phone)

- admob are seeing the range of advertisers broadening moving from mobile content players to retail and services, financial and media businesses, internet sites and consumer products

- US brands are more willing to experiment on mobile and the US is really embracing mobile due to flat rate data

- 47% of admob traffic is from the US, Germany not even in the top 10 due to high data costs, South Africa also punches massively above its weight to do data

- 70% of handsets picked up by admob are capable of viewing video, in the UK this is as high as 95%!

- the MTV Music Awards site used very relevant, fresh ads and got a 300% traffic increase and a 400% increase in downloads

- Landrover saw the following post-click actions on its admob campaign
    - 88% downloaded a video
    - 3% made a call (50% of calls were >30 seconds, 20% > 1 minute)
    - 9% used the dealer locator

- Coke got a 130% playrate for a video on its mobile site from admob users (each user watched the video an average of 1.3 times)

- Russell also showed a lot of stats showing that mobile internet users are "influencers" and early adopters of other products

- Overall the presentation was focused a lot on the idea that mobile needs to move beyond clicks and towards thinking about where users are driven post click e.g. to a sale, action etc

The Veteran View

Last but not least was Ray Anderson from Bango, a guy who deserves huge respect for really helping to build the mobile internet right through the dark days of wap and beyond.  Bango are now moving beyond payments into mobile web analytics and mobile advertising solutions.  Some interesting points Ray made below:

- a lot of ad agencies and web companies are inexperienced with mobile

- google search hosted by Telefonica is very different from Vodafone or from google's own mobile search service - no consistency !

- Ray had some great data showing the importance of operators opening up and enabling off-portal content discovery through mobile advertising
    - Orange added search to their portal in Sept 05 and their revenue through Bango payments (e.g. their           share of off-portal content sales) doubled (because content providers could advertise on Orange search       and target their users
    - in Sept 06 Orange moved the search box into a better position and saw another 70% growth in                    payments through Bango
    - Vodafone at this point was doing much less revenue through Bango but in July 07 they  added search       too and since then Vodafone revenue have shot up and caught up Orange

-  Overall this is a great case study of why open beats closed - pay attention Novarra!

-  In terms of mobile advertising the key will be to optimise the user experience - this is hard to do at the moment because mobile analytics systems aren't really there (difficult to measure mobile users due to IP address issues, can't use javascript on mobile)

- Bango has built a mobile analytics solution to help test things like goal seeking, conversions, ROI etc and optimise the user experience

Phew! Right that's it... thanks again to the organisers of Momo London for another great event :-)  You can get all the presentations and so on here.

Mobile Monday London 7 April 2008 - Mobile User Experience

Went along to Mobile Monday last night (April 2008) in London on Mobile User Experience.  Probably one of the best Mobile Monday's I've been to - great speakers and interesting topic.  Here are a few notes of the key points for anyone interested:

Steve Ives - CEO Taptu

Taptu is a Cambridge UK based mobile search startup where you can search myspace, wikis and other stuff. Steve previously started Trigenix and Taptu has raised £5m of VC money.  Steve gave a great presentation with interesting slides and lots of good tips. 

- search needs to be different for mobile (constraints of screens, inputs, latency)

- Google mobile, Yahoo onesearch are trying to take web search to mobile, Taptu is trying to start with a "blank slate"

- Taptu has done loads of User experience testing (14 user studies in a year, 133 tests of 1 hour per user)

- Taptu aimed at four types of people

• ipod generation (gen Y, like shiny things)
• careerist power user (25+, functional uses)
• unwired social (dont have PC access at work, out and about all the time, includes users in India, SA
• Digerati (bloggers and influencers)

- Taptu built for three main types of devices with customized UI for each

• low end - RAZR
• mid - N95
• Hi - iphone and more to follow...

- Taptu  go through "paper prototyping" (drawing the mobile screens on paper) and "device prototyping" stages and usability testing before they start actually building anything

- A portable usability lab is used for testing out Taptu with people using the service, they have a nifty setup with two cameras (one on the phone and one on the user) which they splice together.

Scott Weiss - Executive Director, EMEA, Human Factors International www.humanfactors.com

Basically Taptu follow a user-experience design process similar to that recommended by Human Factors which is a UE consulting firm.   This was another presentation which went over the methods and processes in a bit more detail.  Key points:

- people can react to things very differently depending on which country they are in

- you need to understand the audience and their goals and iterate based on their feedback

- aim is "persuasive design" get people to love the service, come back and enjoy using it (like Apple stuff)

Key stages of user-centered design

- Design Strategy - goals, scope of project, tech constraints, marketing goals, key success factors

- Personas and Profiles - basic characteristics of users as used by Taptu

- Scenarios - how are people going to use the mobile service, what's it for?

- Task flows - map out steps and decisions in a flow diagram, try and think of the key "nouns" that describe the main functions of the app e.g. for email "account, messages, contact"

- Prototyping - use paper, mockups

- Usability testing - get users to perform tasks using the demo, see where they  "struggle" and try and improve it

Bryan Rieger - Future Platforms Creative director www.futureplatforms.com

Future Platforms are a mobile design company behind cool stuff like Locomatrix.  Great presentation that went into a lot of detail on mobile design tips and really challenged the audience a bit. 

- implementing designs on mobile can be hard due to memory issues etc

- try and simplify and hone design as much as possible (system fonts, flat colour) - break it down to the bare bones!

- composite images are a good way of keeping down the size of the app

- developers and designers need to work more closely together

Marek Pawlowski - MEX www.pmn.co.uk/mex/

- there's a user experience conference going on looks pretty good 

- also a competition for cool mobile designs http://www.mobileuserexperience.com

Alex Craxton - Mobile Monday - Over the Air Mobile Developer Event

Alex did a rundown on the Over the Air mobile event that happened at the weekend.  Sounded pretty good.  Great video of one of the hacks built during the weekend by Future Platforms. 

Panel Session

Panel Panel was also pretty good with some interesting points cropping up:

- UI often involves a lot of management stuff (e.g. trying to convince your boss its important) - sometimes top management need to go "back to the floor" to get how important it is

- Cost of user-experience testing etc justified by looking at the cost of additional engineering time to re-do the site if there's problems - simple ROI!

- one of the most successful mobile services Pepperonity has a basic UI but between 2 and 8m users ... (good to hear people checking the mobile underground!)

- user experience goes beyond the app itself, retail experience, the tariffs people are on etc

- at Apple the chief designer reports into Steve Jobs

- Motorola RAZR is an example of what can go really wrong if you cock-up user-experience design (Moto sold loads of RAZR phones which looked great but were terrible to use, putting off everyone from ever getting another Motorola phone)

Final Demo - Phone Fight!

A great demo of a mobile sword game built by the lastminute.com team, using bluetooth built at the OTA event.   This won awards for Best Hardware hack, Best design / user experience prototype and (best of all) the Fun Award.   Look out on their blog for photos and pictures. 

So all in all a great Mobile Monday - many thanks to the organizers.  If anyone has any video or pictures of the event send us an email or leave a comment and we'll incorporate them into the post.