The Limitless Applications of Non-P2P Mobile Messaging

This was the subject of the second afternoon's sessions in Track B. Closing with a panel discussion on the subject of interactive mobile messaging.

First up were Atos Origin and Swiftpass talking about mobile ticketing for the UK rail industry. The system they were developing had had to overcome, and was still overcoming, several major hurdles in terms of handset support, forward locking of messaging and payment processing but it presented a tantalising vision of travel ticketing in the future. If they get it to work, all credit should be due, it will have been a long and arduous journey.

Incidently, the European travel industry seems to standardising on the 2D Aztec barcode which presents an exciting opportunity for single ticketing across Europe, or at least a big piece of the jigsaw.

The opportunity is really put into context if you look at the Japanese experience. Apparently this is the first year ever that the Japanese have had less physical money in circulation. The reason, mcommerce. The phone as payment, ticketing and identification device is so far ahead in Japan, people just don't need to carry as much money.

Michael Kowalzik of TynTec followed this with what I can only describe as a thinly veiled sales presentation under the title 'Examining the Growth Curve of Corporate Message from a Global Viewpoint'.

Enter Alex Meisl of Sponge to give us a lift before we broke for coffee. He's an accomplished presentator who also benefited from some great material. Basically he gave us lots of examples of interactive mobile campaigns that they'd been involved with.

My personal favourite was the Audi R8 campaign that involved 28 billboards in central London with an instruction to text in to hear the car. Send your text and you would receive a sound file of the car starting up and driving off. As I'm sure you can imagine the R8 sounds like beast.

I missed the next presentation after coffee, catching up with emails, but was eagerly waiting for the panel session. Unfortunately very few people stayed for it, I think there were 2 operator representives one from Telenor of Norway and the other from KTF of Korea.

Erik Rosén from Ericsson was outspokenly gobsmacked that this session wasn't better attended by the operators. This was, in his view, one of most important sessions of the event and represented where the growth was going to come from in messaging in the coming years.

So we all agreed that the operators should be doing more and were missing a trick, except in Norway and Korea of course.

Presence, it's pretty binary

Mathieu Saccharin of Bouyges Telecom made a great point today I felt I should share with you.

Presence is either ON or OFF. Anything else, eg: Busy, Out to Lunch, Scratching my Rear, etc, is just nonsense. I only want to know if the person I am going to send an instant message to is ON-line or OFF-line, ie are they likely to respond.

This has some interesting ramifications for the mobile world.

• Are we always online because our phone is always on? I'm not
• If not, how do we signify whether we're on or off line?

SMS 2.0 and beyond

The future of SMS services was the subject of a talk by Jeff Wilson, Chairman of Telsis as well as Andrew Tobin, Head of Messaging Platforms at O2 UK.

Seemed supplier and client were singing from the same hymn sheet, although I think was a by product of a shared vision rather than something more orchestrated.

The thrust was that advanced SMS services were restricted by the current SMS delivery architecture.

When an SMS is sent the local network SMSC looks up the current location of the handset in the operator's HLR (Hardware Location Register) the message is sent directly via the host network MSC (Mobile Switch Centre) and not by the subscribers' network SMSC. A message sent to a O2 subscriber from another network would never be seen by the O2 SMSC.

While this could be desirable from a load distribution point of view, it means there is a set of advanced services that cannot be offered because not all the mssages (around 40% apparently) pass through the messaging platform. These services could include:

• Copy or audit trail recording for business compliance purposes
• SPAM and other desirable message filtering, eg bullying
• Auto response services like email Out of Office attendants

The vision is to patch the HLR to always return the home network's SMSC and have this reference a local rules database to enact the appropriate functionality.

I think this is great stuff. It will take a while, changes to operators networks always do, but it has some awesome potential. The question is, will the operators give 3rd parties access to this functionality and allow some real innovation in SMS services to develop?

Mobile IM vs SMS or the 'My community's bigger than yours' wars

The morning at Global Messaging is given over to keynotes and broader strategic presentations while the afternoon gets a little more down and dirty.

John Delaney from Ovum was the first session I caught. One of the key aspects of mobile messaging he was predicting was the abstraction of the user from the decision about bearer.

He attests that someone wants to send a message to someone and they don't really care about, or shouldn't have to care, how it gets there. I may be a committed techie but I think we make decisions about the types of messages we send according to the type of information we're sending and the capabilities of the recipient. I've blogged about this previously in The BlackBerry Threat.

AOL and Microsoft were next up saying how much they loved mobile and that they were doing deals with operators left right and centre to bring the IM experience to Mobile.

The man from Microsoft and the brass neck to say they weren't interested in monetisation and were thinking purely about the user experience. This clashed somewhat with Paulo Simões of Portugal Telecom who was talking of the 'draconian' contract approaches from the big global ISPs.

Portugal Telecom have looked at their market and partnered with the national leaders in IM, who are not MSN, AOL, Yahoo or Google. They are taking the approach that anything really does go. They provide a unified IM client but are happy for their users to user other 3rd party IM clients.

This was during a panel session and at this point the MS and AOL guys started shifting uneasily in their seats and talking about carrots and sticks. They really wanted to encourage developers of these 'unlicensed' clients to be part of their development programs. MS in particular were quite clear that they were happy to use the big legal stick for all those who corrupted the brand.

Enter Steven van Zanen of Acision, the newly divested mobile products division of LogicaCMG.

The thrust of his presentation was that the mobile operators were acting like rabbits in headlights in the face of the Mobile IM hype. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL where playing the ‘my community’s bigger than yours’ game and trying to wade into the mobile market by essentially replicating the IM experience in mobile.

This went down well with the operator crowd, at least those who have resisted the advances of the 'global' ISPs. I quote global because I think the problem is these companies are used to a pre-eminent position in the US. The US carriers have welcomed them with open arms because they've never got SMS to work. So they've come to Europe expecting the same treatment and some operators have given it to them.

They seem to have forgotten why SMS has been successful. It's not because it's a sub-IM experience and people have learned to make do, it's because it's a great service that ticks all the boxes.

• It works on every handset, apparently 25,000 handsets are sold every hour in Asia that only support text or voice
• It works cross-network, one community the global MSISDN community
• It doesn't require a seperate client. I don't download Java clients can't be bothered with the hassles of getting it working and I'm one of the techies.
• It works when someone is online or is not. Forget presence if someone responds I know they're online if not I know they'll get back to me, meanwhile I can get on with my life.

Good news is, if I'm right, Mobile IM will not cannablise SMS revenues. It will appeal to some people, but most will prefer the SMS experience to the Mobile IM alternative.

Interestingly enough Mathieu Saccharin of Bouygues Telecom reports that in their trial with launching MSN, voice and SMS traffic actually went up for the users with Mobile IM. Though he put this down to two reasons

1. Texting your buddy to tell them to login to MSN, and
2. Calling your buddy because you couldn't be bothered typing anymore

Couple of quotes to end this post with, both from Stefan van Zanen:

SMS is the biggest brand in the world

SMS is the only mobile data service that has been successful

I'm in Monte Carlo and the sun is shining

Arrived in Monte Carlo now. In need of a coffee but otherwise ready to go.

The bed was comfortable, wasn't too hot or too cold and my fellow passengers were quiet sleepers.

Would I do it again? Yes

While it felt a but awkward sharing at first in reality it didn't make a bit of difference to my sleep. That said I did spy some individual cabins as I got off the train which didn't come up as option when I booked. Will definitely try and find out what they cost next time

The Corea Lunea train I was on was probably reaching the end of it's life so fittings were a but tired but everything I needed was there. Except perhaps a shower.

Down to the business of the conference, will post later on what's happening the world of Global Messaging.

UPDATE: it's occured to me subsequently that I'm happy to sleep on a plane to the US or Australia with hundreds of strangers, 3 is positively discrete.

Sleeping to Monte Carlo on the Corail Lunea

Travelling to Global Messaging in Monte Carlo, I've decided to try the sleeper service from Paris. The cost wasn't much different, once you factor in the hotel savings, and it meant I am away for slightly less time. Also, in these carbon conscious times I thought I should try an alternative to flying.

The last time I travelled in a couchette was in my youth while touring Europe. In those days money was the main priority so it was always a rough and ready affair.

This time I'm going first class but that still means sharing with 3 other people but at least it's a proper bed and I've got the top bunk.

More info as the journey progresses but so far it is certainly an adventure.

EPiServer CMS: UPDATE

Early indications from my development team are that the boxes are being ticked by the EPiServer solution.

It was a bit tricky to get setup up, but once in place the real potential is being slowly revealed.

We're going to attempt to build our new website with this system. Nothing like a real set of requirements to put a system through it's paces.

Here's hoping it's up to the challenge.