Blogging to peak in 2007??

Gatner (they appear to be busy don't they!) states that the number of blogs will peak at 100 million (widely reported, but see BBC summary). It states that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

So Gartner sees a ceiling approaching. I disagree - I think we'll see an increasing number of people posting online (and not only via the internet, but mobile-based too), but 'blogging', in its current format, implies a continuous stream of thought, expressed freely to all.

But sharing of thoughts and ideas, images and video is both:

• directed (ie to particular people) and
  
• fractured (starts, may last a short period of time and then naturally dies, possibly starts again)

As always, the key is who's in the conversation and context & relevancy. Privacy (or at least the reassurance of the availability of privacy) is very important. That's why services like etribes and vox allow you to create 'channels' for you and your colleagues and friends. (An idea that I endorse - hence the domain that I use here: stream121.)

Barclays works with Oyster card for low value contactless payments

Barclays, the credit card company, will launch a 'wave & pay' card for low value purchases, such as newsagents, pub, vending machines, in late 2007.

For transactions less than £10, card owners will not need to use a signature or a PIN.

For purchases over £10, users will be required to enter their PIN (aka Chip and PIN).

The unique aspect of this annoucement is that the trial will combine the 'wave and pay' card from a bank with the existing and extremely successful Oyster card, the pre-paid contactless card for the London Underground and bus system.

A couple of years ago, insiders tell me that Oyster were threatening to go direct to consumers without the partnership of banks. Fortunately, they have seen sense...

SMS Volumes To Double by 2008 says Gartner

Worldwide SMS volumes will double by 2008, according to Gartner (nice summary here of the report).

Users in Asia will send the most messages, but North America will see the biggest compound annual growth rate between 2006 and 2010, as the medium embeds itself into the daily fabric of life, as it has done in the rest of the world. As a result, North America will become the second most important market globally.

The rest of the article emphasizes that Gartner hasn't seen anything that will push SMS off its perch in the mid-term.

Mobile Growth & our digital identity at risk

This article commenting on ITU's Internet Report 2006: Digital.Life ties the increasing penetration of mobile phones (approx 2 billion today, rising to 3 billion within 2 years) with identity and privacy:

But the report sounded a note of caution about the step into people's "digital lifestyles". Ms Srivastava said people were increasingly being tied into the flow of information over global electronic networks and were building a "digital identity".

"As our identity becomes a commodity so does our privacy. And that's where we are entering a dangerous area, making privacy only available at a cost," she said.

One substantial difference between internet and mobile technologies is that mobile phones have known identities (eg caller id and because they are more closely tied to billing relationships). However mobile devices become increasingly internet enabled, this advantage will become diluted.

I fear that it will be parts of the world that are newly enfranchised to the mobile phone that will be most at risk - areas where the mobile phone is likely to give rise to mobile banking industry and where the difference between subsistence and poverty is a fine line.

Actually, if you look at the Slide Show of the report, there are a number of slides on the significance of identity. Worth a read.

3's X-Series pricing announced

Given that 3 is smallest of the 5 operators in the UK and, being a 3G network, needs to differentiate itself, it certainly has made a splash with its announcement of its new X-Series prices. (See my previous comments on why I think its bundling strategies are naive.)

X-Series Silver (£5 per month)

• Free Skype calls with Skype PC users and to any other Skype 3 mobile customer.
• Unlimited instant messages, to or from Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, to another X-Series handset, or a PC.
• Unlimited Internet browsing
• 6 month minimum contract
  

X-Series Gold (£10 per month)

• Access to a home TV with Slingbox (watching TV on your phone, setting your VCR)
• Access home PC with Orb (access your files on your PC using your phone)
• 12 month minimum contract

Clearly this is a very aggressive policy - as per my previous comments, this bundling needs to be easy to try, without lock-in. I'd recommend "Free for first 2 months".

Buried in the press release is the announcement that from January 2007, there will be no international roaming voice call charges when using Skype on 3’s networks overseas.

Yahoo's Mixd - group text messaging

Yahoo provides us with Mixd - a group text messaging service.

Looks very similar to 3Jam (although it allows you to share photos from the phone - nice). See my previous comments on 3Jam. Do you really think consumers are going to be able to master all the commands?

Etribes in the UK has a much simpler and slicker solution.

Google to partner with triple-play BSkyB

Google and BSkyB get together to provide services that blend BSkyB's plays together (from the Times):

• BSkyB will use Google’s video content tools to launch a portal allowing users to share their own video content, including the facility to upload and download from a mobile phone.
  
• BSkyB customers can use BskyB-branded version of Google Mail.

Still on the negotation table: BskyB's use of Google Talk and their email service.

This is only the beginning - we should expect more glue between the multi-plays once they have sured up their M&A.

Google does click to call for free

Google Maps has added Click to Call to their results. Briefly, as you browse Google Maps, you see a store that you want to call, you click on the 'Call' link and a dialog pops up. Enter your telephone number and press Call. Google calls your number first, when you answer, it dials the store, connecting both of you. More details here.

Here's an example of hardware stores in Seattle. I don't know how international this is.

The fascination is that Google is providing this service for free. It does, of course, give all stores / anything on Google maps a freephone number.

The opportunity for pranks is unending - you could besiege your next door neighbor anonymously. As for getting the local pizza company’s phone to ring off the hook with puzzled customers on the other end of the line ... well, you can see the possibilities for a malicious script....

The Rise of Social Relationship Mining and its implications

Social software is maturing out of simply 'connecting'. We’re seeing the start of relationship mining existing across services:

• LinkedIn, the most successful business relationship network have added their ‘I recommend this person / company to the community’ feature (blogged previously). They are definitely going up the personal directory flagpole. With public profiles, LinkedIn represent an aggregator for other services.
  
• Submit a name to Zoominfo and it will return a picture and relevant articles on containing that name.
• Spock does something similar (Still in beta, but 100 million profiles mined apparently).
  
• Proxpro does something similar, but to your cell phone (very handy) - much improved on their previous business models.
  
• Hoover has partnered with Visible Path to create Hoovers Connect to allows users to mine their personal networks to find experts who might be able to help them whilst researching a topic.
  

By the way, what HAS happened to FOAF (Friend of a Friend) – the project that allowed people to define their friends in secure protected format. Was it a solution looking for a problem? Please comment if you know the answer.

One can mirror the development of these services with the development of the www:

• metadata in each Webpage (page level)
  
• Directories from Yahoo (directories)
  
• Cross Linking from Google (search via relevancy)
  

The next generation has already started to occur: privacy private investigators. In the same way that you have pay be to alerted whenever your credit report is checked, garik is monitoring service that finds, tracks and monitors your personal information online. I can’t help thinking that this indexing service falls into the path of the mighty Google.

All of these services are ultimately half-way houses to fully fledged identity management where one manages one’s own information and who has access to it, when and why. Those in the industry can see the advantages of it, but really struggle with how to implement something that's easy for the mass market to understand.

Are microformats & semantic web the key to take us to the next level? I believe so.

Mobile Operators pin hopes on Mobile TV and HSDPA

Mike Grenville over at 160 Chars critiques Informa's 'Mobile Industry Outlook 2007' Report here. Informa concludes:

The industry thought that 3G would be the ARPU driver but now it is pinning its hopes on mobile TV and HSDPA.

Mike comments that there was no mention of SMS - still growing at 30% per year in the UK for example.

What about WAP or mobile internet? This I think is the undiscovered gem (or rather discredited years ago in WAP's case).

See stats indicating the penetration of internet browsing at Mobile Internet Access Grows (thanks to 160 chars again).

3 launches X-Series - Mobile Broadband bundle - when will they learn??

3 announced the upcoming availability of the ‘X-Series’ bundle – a mobile broadband offering that includes:

• Skype – unlimited calls from their mobile phone (using data tariff, rather than voice minutes). On further reading, Skype service is NOT wVoIP - it's a circuit-switched call from the phone into a Skype VoIP gateway in 3's network according to this post.
  
• MSN Messenger

Guideline cost per month is £15-20. Each country can set their own price tariff. To be launched in the UK on 1st December with other countries to follow in the New Year.

For an additional premium, 3 customers can use:

• Sling – watch their home television on their mobile (and set their home recorder - nice)
  
• Orb – access music, video and other content their home PC remotely
  

Plus there’s an announcement of a relationship with Google and Yahoo – search, of course, being the key enabler of the mobile internet.

Love this sound bite from Frank Sixt, Group Finance Director of Hutchison Whampoa:

"We are tearing down the wall around the garden and going naked into the world outside."

I can’t see this being a massive success for 3. Sure, it sounds cool and all and early adopters will point at this announcement excitedly, pontificating that the mobile internet has arrived and that one operator has seen the light etc.

But, it’s too early for this type of bundling – much better to drip feed these features onto the market. For the mass market, is there any precedent indicating the requirement for these features? For some, yes; for all, no; for all together: NO.

Users don’t want all these features – they want to trial a couple of them (with low barriers to entry, of course) and then to sign-up to the ones that are relevant to their needs. Presenting them as a bundle means that consumers think that they’ll be paying for features they don’t want - and won't try any ('Too much, too complicated, don't have time'), leaving a sour taste in everyone's mouth.

Much better to launch ‘Any two for £5 per month, free for the first 2 months’ or even catchier, ‘3 for 3 months for free’.

Will the other operators be impressed by 3’s announcement?

Nope, bundling too early means that everyone has to produce bigger and better bundles at ever lower costs OR other operators have to hope that this will be a damp squib (think of 3’s previous too-early-to-launch of video calling) and they can reset the market 9 months or a year later.

Overall result is that this may well stymie the market before it even exists.

Conclusion: Amateur marketing - 3 has p*ssed in its own pot and soiled it for everyone, including themselves.

Update on Loopt - the geo-tagging service

Loopt launches on Monday 20th November - download available from www.boostlive.com. It's a location-based social mapping service that's only available in the US on the Boost network that I have mentioned before.

The system automatically updates the location of everyone in a private network of Boost customers and displays that information directly on a map on the phone. When a friend in the network is nearby, it sends an alert. It's the first geo-tagging mobile service.

The service is free for the rest of this year and $2.99 per month from 2007. We'll watch this with interest...... it looks darned good... gettin' jiggy to switch over to Boost just for this.

Missed Digital Identity Forum in London last week

Looks like it was an cracking conference in London last week - I'm looking forward to the presentations being posted.

General rant about mobile internet - good

Mike Rowehl has some excellent rants at the bottom of his post on this week's Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this week. He's bang on.

Skype 3.0 beta is out

Here are my headlines

• Significantly bigger installation file (from 10Mb to 19Mb)
• The most immediate change is a new UI - much nicer I think. Here's some of the details.
  
• Public chats - basically Skyecasts but for instant messages (don't worry, there are moderation controls to allow you to kick people out of chats and to let them join in etc).
  
• The promised browser extensions that allow you to simply click on a any telephone number on a webpage and for that to trigger a Skype out call (IE or Firefox only)
  
• Access to Skype add-ins got easier too.

Verizon has OTA sync with Plaxo for phone contacts

Verizon customers can now synch their phone contacts with an online directory using Plaxo's Java-based application, according to MobileCrunch. It costs $4.49 per month.

Interesting that Plaxo has gone for its own Java solution, rather than using SyncML.

Incidentally, Plaxo's membership has grown from 10m to 15m in the last 6 months - see their press release.

2D Bar Codes in fields

In July, I posted about making 2D bar codes in fields and on skyscrapers.

Well, someone did it in Germany in May this year using Semacodes. See the flickr photostream or even using Google Earth.

Thanks for alerting me, Oleg!

LinkedIn addes service recommendations

LinkedIn have added a 'Services' tab to their main menu bar. It allows people to publicly recommend their contacts to the network.

You can recommend people that aren't LinkedIn members yet - they will of course receive an email inviting them to complete their profile so that they can control what others see of them. Effectively, this creates a trusted company directory. And a method of usurping Directory Enquiry services. Ecademy have had a 'Marketplace' for ages.

One wonders what happens when you dispute a ranking. Ecademy had a 'jail' and an arbitration process, I seem to recall.

Microsoft releases Windows Live Barcode

OK, the headline got me excited: Microsoft is getting in 2D barcodes and has chosen QR codes (in comparison to Datamatrix or a host of other barcode standards) and has slapped the "Live" moniker on it. Cool.... I jumped to their site (has an expired security certificate and only works in IE) and discovered some basic information + QR code generators that don't work + a tour with a dismal implementation demonstration. Nice one, Microsoft, that was useful. Further browsing revealed that it has come out of their Shanghai offices. Apparently the technology has been running in Spaces in Japan for a while. No sign of a mobile client yet (assume only on Windows Mobile, n'est-ce pas), but coming soon according to this post. So what ARE Microsoft doing? I'm none the wiser....

UK Insurance agency provides pay-as-you-drive insurance

Norwich Union, one of the UK's largest insurers, has launched its pay-as-you-drive insurance using GPS tracking. It's prefect for Sunday drivers and non-commuters.

The trial has been running since 2004. Speaking to the programme manager at a Cambridge Wireless event back in the UK, then it is actually more of a marketing ploy to allow insurers to communicate with their members more frequently than once a year at renewal time.

But the interesting part is the usage and demographic data that the service provides. Here's a snapshot:

• serious accidents are more likely to occur at night
• motorway driving is up to 10 times safer than driving on local roads
• driving during the weekday morning rush hour is 50 per cent more likely to result in an accident than driving at the weekend or evening.

I am sure, this will permit tighter segmentation of users. For example, with Norwich Union, a young driver will be charged £1 per mile during the "high risk" accident period of 23:00 to 06:00 to encourage them to leave their cars at home.