Mobile 2.0 Europe-roundup

BARCELONA -Mobile 2.0 Europe has come and gone again this year, attracting once again some of the finest mobile minds and entrepreneurs to Barcelona.

The (now 2-day) European showcase of mobile startups and trends in mobile this year gave everyone some extra food for thought with Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability and Regine Debatty on Mobile Culture.

Tom gave a thought-provoking presentation on why most telcos are not doing enough about achieving sustainability (with some squirming in the front seat from Carlos Domingo of Telefonica but pleased faces from Vodafone, with Tom's thumbs-up of their corporate web policy on green issues).

Regine offered a visually pleasing interlude of examples of not-for-profit mobile art and culture, with examples of giant SMS mobile screen projections (SMS Guerilla Projector) on the backs of innocent pedestrians (check out www.we-make-money-not-art.com) .

The panel on 'Beyond Free' managed to top last year's after lunch panel (on the role of Mobile Operators in fostering innovation) in terms of provocative debate, fuelled by some diverging points of view between Inma Martinez (Moderator) and Ian Ginn (seasoned web/mobile entrepreneur).

The conclusion from the panel, if there was one, is that mobile startups are still seen as an (un)necessary evil by most VC's but are treated as misunderstood children because they don't fit in the VC's risk/return equations.

You can find all the links to the presentations on the official event site here. A big round of applause to Rudy,Carles and the rest of the Mobile 2.0 Committee for organising (and pulling off) yet another great mobile event in Barcelona.

I will post some of my videos of the presentations by Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless and Priya Prakash of Nokia, starting with this one below:

Location in Mobile Social Networks

London-Location is at the very heart of the next generation of mobile services and the future mobile web. Last year, both Nokia and Google made big announcements highlighting location as one of their key strategic axes. Now Vodafone is keen to position itself in this space and its recent acquisition of Swedish navigation software provider Wayfinder is but the first step in that direction.

I presented the experience of GeoMe in launching a location-enabled mobile social network at the Informa Mobile Location Services 09 Conference in London on the 12th May, describing how to overcome some of the barriers to adoption, especially privacy, and new distribution channels that can be exploited for getting the product to market.

I was also priviliged to be in good company on a speaker panel on the next generation of location services together with o2, TIM, Qualcomm and content provider Spoonfed. The conclusion? To create demand, you need to offer a good product with a clear value proposition. Will 2010 be 'the' year of location based services? The answer: 'probably'.

You can see my presentation on Slidespace below:

Location Based Social Networking by Ric Ferraro

View more presentations from Ric Ferraro.

Google Mobile Phone will start ringing in Q4 2008

According to the Wall Street Journal, the first of the new Google phones developed on the Android platform, will become available by the end of 2008, at least 3 months behind the original planned launch.

Taiwanese firm HTC is expected to be the first manufacturer to release a G-phone and will be met with high expectations, given the claims by Google that Android-powered phones will make the internet as easy to use on a mobile phone as it is on a PC.

Google's aspirations to become a leading force in telecommunications should not be under-estimated -via the Android Developer Challenge, the internet powerhouse is tempting developers into its fold by offering $10m in prize money to savvy programmers able to come up with the best applications.

Android consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications and is available under an open-source license, which has been praised for setting a new industry standard.

However, detractors comment that Google is not moving fast enough to be taken seriously and that its partner line-up for Android is missing some of the key industry players, notably Vodafone and Nokia.