the future of mobile

January 21st, 2006

I spoke at an event at Simmons and Simmons in the City on Thursday to about 185 people.

The topic – The future of mobile.

Tony Fish of AMF Ventures brought a crowd of enterprises, entrepreneurs and investors, many part of the Momo community, to the auditorium of Simmons & Simmons in the city. The investment part of the crowd apparently representing some ?20bn of private equity. Phew.

I was joined by Chris Burke, former CTO of Vodafone UK and Thomas Wheadon, of Simmons & Simmons, looked at the legal impliciations of becoming an MVNO.

My stint addressed the issues of community audiences and creation of meaningful and valuable services in a web/mobile space vs. the Red Herring of video to mobile. Just because you can doesn’t mean people will want it.

Ben Godfrey Has written I think a very good summary of the event which you can read here

His summary

Conclusions
The message of the day was there’s a coming shift in the mobile space, the accepted hierarchy is going to change, innovation has been stifled and huge profits soaked up. Chris Burke was most damning of his former employer, though equally of the other networks. Tony Fish began his talk by warning people that what he was about to say might include ideas the big players would not like. Many of the ideas raised by Fish and Moore are widely accepted in the blogosphere and the core community of innovators on the web (of which I count myself a fanboy), but whilst they’re relatively simple technical problems, they’re huge shifts in the way people do business. The labels attached to suits today bore both sides of the divide, Vodafone were just in front of me, I saw Orange on the way out. I hope those representatives took some food for thought away with them too.

I have to say I really enjoyed myself and also a big thank you to Tony Fish for inviting me

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