Mobile lessons for us all - all six of them | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

Mobile lessons for us all – all six of them

June 17th, 2010

I had the benefit of getting to know Philip Sugai via Lars Cosh-Ishii from Mobikyo, and was very excited when Philip told me about his new book – The Six Immutable Laws of Mobile Business which are,

Immutable Law #1—Value Over Culture
Immutable Law #2—The Law of the Ecosystem
Immutable Law #3—Mobility Empowers
Immutable Law #4—The Value of Time Zones
Immutable Law #5—Mobile-Specific Business Models Are Essential
Immutable Law #6—The Future Is Simplexity

I found this to be a very insightful read especially Law #6 – Simplexity. When a service or device becomes more powerful but simpler to use because of the increasing ‘intelligence’ of the hidden back-end. They point to the iPhone (though the engineering of the iPhone according to some does suck up bandwidth), and of course we can add, I suggest, the BBC iPlayer to that list as well, as businesses like, TxtEagle, Layar, GrowVC, Local Motors and Ushahidi, which all use the harnessing of data and distributed intelligence to play a critical role in the performance of those businesses and services, as well as being ‘easy to use’ powerful tools and services. That is my personal opinion. I also very enjoyed the point they make that value in mobile is what counts, not culture. As many like to dismiss Japans mobile culture as an aberration. I would urge anyone thinking about the business of mobile to buy this book, read it, study it, re-read it and understand its message. I was speaking and running workshops in Helsinki last week at the Nokia Siemens Networks Marketing Forum and it was interesting to see a more engaged international audience looking for solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Lots of case studies and insight and the authors will tell you that Mobile Social Networking started in Japan.

The authors are Philip Sugai, Marco Koeder and Ludovico Ciferri. (more info here).

Bookmarks: