Archive

Yesterday, the second floor of Molly Malones offered a nice and friendly environment for mobile people from all industries to connect with each others in the event organized by Mobile Monday (MoMo). The topic of the evening was Earning models in Mobile Entertainment, which is also an important question to many of our customers.

Our board member Alan Moore gave interesting insights into the big opportunity in utilizing the players with different roles in social networks. This topic is closely related to what we do here at Xtract for mobile operators and other customers.

Other speakers gave also fascinating presentations. Dr. Josef Noll from Norway spoke about privacy issues in entertainment business. He forecasted that privacy matters will be huge business in the future. Dr. Madanmohan Rao pointed out that in India, where Bollywood and cricket are the most popular forms of entertainment, the ones who will understand how to make money from mobile entertainment will earn a lot of money.

The place of yesterday’s event, Molly Malones in Helsinki, was also the place where the idea of MobileMonday was invented. The original founders of MoMo were present at the event and told about how no-one could believe at the beginning (Sep 2000) that eight years later MobileMonday events would be organized in tens of cities all over the world. It is exciting how a good concept, such as that of MobileMonday, has the power to spread all over the world, thanks to world-of-mouth and people networking with each other.

Yesterday was a long day. The long flight from Helsinki to San Francisco via Frankfurt wasn’t really enjoyable, but the OpenThread made up for that. OpenThread was an OpenSocial developer event organized by SocialMedia and held at their unique office in SF.

The event opened by overview of OpenSocial by Lane LiaBraaten from Google and continued with Paul Lindner from Hi5 giving an excellent hands-on tutorial on writing the first basic OpenSocial app. The crowd consisted of developers so the discussion frequently went to more into details. Somebody was asking Paul about a Hi5 specific problem where his app was having problems with the 5s time-out from Hi5. Paul was quick to reply that he can change it to 8s if that helps – how is that for supporting developers. OpenSocial is currently moving into v0.8 which is promising to give even more tools for developers to write rich and connected apps. One of the main ideas behind OpenSocial is to unify development across the different Social Networking sites. Currently the status seems to be “learn once, use everywhere.”

The following panel discussion revealed that the main problem currently in writing to a new container is to learn which viral channels to use and what and how the users like to use them. So it seems that OpenSocial is getting close to the goal. The discussion seem to concentrated also much around what kind of apps would be the top apps in years to come (are we still pinching and poking)? Some offered that it might be those apps that can be monetized – which still seems to be very difficult. A few claimed that they were profitable by using micropayments and many agreed that there is a difference between the different geographical areas when it comes to monetization.

In the end, I started thinking that as OpenSocial has persistence features and furthermore provides developers methods to make requests to their own servers through the container, it might be possible to write a full-fledged social network spanning over all existing OpenSocial sites. It would not matter where your users are originally logged in, they could still participate in your network. However, you would probably need to provide server capability and therefore the monetization comes to play an important part again.

The night ended with SUN sponsored OpenBar and some interesting discussions. Unfortunately I had to retire quite early after the long day. Overall, it was a good meeting, so if you have chance to visit future OpenSocial meet-ups, just go!

Yesterday we had the privilege to listen to Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi give an interesting presentation on the Science, Technology and Business of Digital Communications. He has been working in the middle of the mobile communications revolution and has left his mark in the field in many ways. Does the Viterbi algorithm sound familiar?

Dr. Viterbi is one of the Millennium Technology Prize Laureates for 2008. His lecture was a part of the Finalist Symposium that was held at the Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo, Finland. This year, the main Millennium Technology Prize, the largest technology prize in the world, was presented to Robert Langer from MIT for developing innovative biomaterials for controlled drug release.

The organizers of the symposium had also invited three promising Finnish companies to introduce themselves. All three companies combine science and technology with communication and are making solid business that aims “to someday repeat the success of Qualcomm”, as the organizers put it. One of these companies was Xtract and Jouko Ahvenainen gave the presentation that you can see below.

The presentation was about how to monetize digital communications and to deliver more relevant advertisements to end users at the same time guaranteeing more returns for the advertisers. In the audience was also Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of MIT Technology Review. He commented that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” Afterwards we had some good conversations around the subject over some coffee and other refreshments.

Tomi Ahonen has really an interesting post in Communities Dominate Brands blog. I agree very much with him. Anyway, I would like to emphasize that these digital identities work also on profile levels, so that you don’t have to know individuals or their phone numbers, but you can know customer profiles and then link or predict to which profile each individual belongs to. And this we have implemented many times.