Mobile Web 2.0 Workshop and Conference

We are talking at the Mobile Web 2.0 conference today (Mobile TV seminar) and on Wednesday (panels on Standards and on Next Things).

The Mobile Web TV session is part of a more detailed workshop session on trends in the Mobile Web 2.0 world.

Our talk was on Mobile Web 2.0, how it may pan out, and who will make (any) money. In essence our views are that:

Mobile TV today is a small market and cannot afford the current friction in its supply chain
- High cost of doing business along chain from storage standards to on-phone rendering
- Limited takeup outside of S E Asian models (clear supply chain based or regulated standards)

Operator behaviour in EU, N America not helpful for growth
- Changing, but slowly and in fits and starts (AT&T/iPhone is a game change)
- Lack of recognition of risk of other avenues (Threats from outside parties)

However, the market potential is large
- Very tempting for new players with fresh approaches - Google, Apple etc
(Apple already took mobile music away from the operators)
- Colliding business models - Telco asset+subscription vs media advertising based
- “Getting advertising right” - until a customer centric model is found, Ad movement onto Mobile Web will underperform

Also presenting (and a quick synopsis) were:

Ken Blakeslee (Webmobility Ventures) - talking about Web Centric services, and the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 based on moving power to the user.

Alan Moore (SMLXL) - focus on the way we will use communities online - a good run through of a lot of the memes in the space, but with a good undertone of heavy thinking - anyone who quotes Carlota Perez is clearly doing their homework.

Sam Sethi (Blognation) - about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. In Sam's view Web 3.0 is an Intelligent web, but which will possibly use its extra knowledge of you and your context not to serve you better but to flog more advertising to you.

(There was quite a strong audience reaction to this thesis, I can see that the putative punters are not going to take privacy pilfering lying down)

Tony Fish (AMF Ventures and co author of Mobile Web 2.0) summed up, also talked about his concept of the 4 screens of life (Cinema, TV, PC, Mobile) and how what we call "content" is increasing - the metadata, the context etc all become part of the content. He also took us through some of the thinking in the book

Interesting day...if anyone is at the conference on Wednesday look us up.