(Very) rough notes from last night’s launch of the iSociety report into “mobiles and everyday life” I haven’t had a chance to read the report properly yet but you can get it from there.

I turned up a little late and didn’t catch all of the opening remarks, and this is by no means a complete transcript. The debate didn’t really get going IMHO. It needed another hour or so, and some more aggressive chairing: could have really done with looking into the social aspects of the tech, rather than posturing on the business prospects of the telcos.

The only person representing the user experience side of things, Amy Brampton, didn’t get a fair crack of the whip at all.

My mumblings are in [square brackets] as per usual.

iSociety “mobile phones in everyday life”: 31.03.03

Opening remarks: james crabtree of iSociety
[missed some of these due to being late]

• cost – cost is hugely important, with designers/mobile firms underestimating demand for ‘added-value’: people were prefer added reliability and lessened cost more. habits like making sure pay-as-you-go credits are used up by swapping handets; messing with common assumption that phones are intensily personal devices, and reinforcing the fact they are intensly social devices (see below)
• practicality -close association with task and function (wiltshire tree surgeons with free camphones taking pictures of tree they are woking on: telepresence)
• sociability – phones are surprisingly social devices rather than individual intimate devices – can you share/show?
• simplicity – complexity is an extra barrier to entry

skybluepink: amy brampton

symbian background. interaction designer. [phone companies can be an enviroment where people are] designing from the point of view of someone who had a free phone. from the point of view of a techie enthusiast.

features and functions only appeal to early adopters – 3g companies will have to look beyond that niche. products design based on context

difficult to change peoples minds in companies. management and software developers particularly. presumption about how people use tech can be very costly… (cf. WAP)

social use should be the driver. desire can make cost less of an issue. [ethic? cf. B.J Fogg / Captology – Jakob on ‘Captology’]

john fletcher – analysis consultants

do we need 3g – no and yes… “none of us has ever gone out an consciously gone and purchased a technology” – we buy things that satisfy a need. “we’ve never gone into Dixons and asked for a cathode ray tube” [i wonder if i *have* done this – i think i may have done with bluetooth… borderline need, more experiment]

people are cynical about advancements now – got burnt with WAP. people felt let down by over-promise and hype of technology.

hutch 3g – marketing a wow factor… it’s challenge – but they are first mover. no-one is interested in the speed of 3g… no mention of data services. business users are being discriminated against in the sign up for first wave of phones.. they want consumers to create a buzz… not biz early adopters.

yes case for 3g: “we are going to run out of spectrum” [hmmm – is this true? cf. david reed/software-radio] compares demand to that for multichannel tv [this is apples and oranges surely – he is looking at the content argument/data services]

no reference points in new environments – how do you balance value of data services against tangible goods mp3 file vs cd. no comparison in mainstream [is this true?]

Dr. Ben Anderson, Chimera.

hard to find anything interesting to say about 3g… just like it’s hard to say anything interesting about the internet it’s just a delivery channel [Blimey!]

passing comment on WAP – misconceptions were based on the sell of internet users of internet on the move. if it has been sold as telephony+ then it might have worked. see .jp/imode experience – almost complete flip around i.e. sold as a phone with an ‘i-mode’ not internet experience on the move.

far more people coming at 3g from telephony experience, than from internet experience… that should be the positioning.

pay as you go is not about cost per se, it’s about managing risk (same as gas meters etc) people who can’t afford the stuff actually pay the most as a proportion of their household income as a result for managing risk.

time poor/cash rich… time rich /cash poor : m-commerce. [cf. mike lee’s shopshifting]

interpersonal communication – you want network externalities/exponential growth, let people talk to each other (interoperability) moblogging as killer app?

for moblogging, aggregation is a need. peer2peer… model

death of business case – adapting tech to the circumstances moment by moment. as it becomes more of a universal tool, it becomes less predictable … can’t think about services to provide cos people mutate them. “beta world” – watch what emerges then improve and market it.

why not make voice free – you would kill competition… while voice is the thing that people understand. then get people hooked and ween them onto profit making data services when they are comfortable.

make money from the marketing/data mining opportunity of location reference, data about individuals spending, data traffic and movement. [wow… that’s *evil*]

neil holloway – MSFT

go out 10 years – debate about 2.5g/3g will be obsolete – blurring of protocols connection types and devices.

[uses the overestimate.underestimate quote attrib. to bill gates usually, without attribution… hoho]

pinpoints marketing hype of tech.

“would i bet on 3g?” – 3 types of tech to bet on… wireless LAN for biz. wifi -hotspots… [what’s his basis for distinction between wireless LAN and wifi???] and 3g says focussed on consumer [ugh].. wouldn’t bet on 3g in shortterm.

chairman – consumers don’t buy tech they buy services.

[everyone here… using the f*cking word CONSUMER all the time, rather than ‘people’ or ‘personal’ use… my kneejerk reaction kicks in]

seeing at a distance – telepresence.

interoperability is key to make this thing work.
location based services [key to social use, and telepresence]
mobile arbitrage… [hmm]

grps will serve the biz community ably in the shortterm [crackberry]
[patch work… crackberry nearlynet, wifi permanet CF Clay’s latest NEC piece]

JC: plumber was very keen on picturephone… take picture of a pipe

q: what will take up curve be like? lead-fuel effect – no one upgraded, just old cars died and new ones were unleaded… will 3g be like that?

JF: coverage is issue, leaded fuel analogy of natural wastage and gradual replacement is likely. scale economies will come quickly, and that will hasten the take-up. likely to be mostly 3g usage and ownership in 5-7 years.

from floor: not a fight to the death between 3g/wifi etc – look at it as an ecology. most important asset of telco is billing system / relationship. create ecologies of transparent tech 3g/wifi/gprs which is billed seamlessly to me, to suit my context.

JF: split in mindset of biz user and ordinary people about devices. biz users will have 3/4 devices that can connect (crackberry etc) whereas personal use is about having one, stylish, expressive device. no-one goes clubbing with a laptop [!]

from-floor: but your phone could use wifi in the nightclub.

Neil MSFT: chipset is key – one authentication needs to happen to connect and roam through diff tech and be billed simply.

from floor: platform needs to be reliable.

JF: Issue with WAP was not the application but the reliability of the platform.

from floor: non-question about “killer apps” – we don’t know what we don’t know [go read some karl popper dude] counterpoint: go buy the tech and play [!]

porn drives tech cliche brought up… then debate about how porn would work on mobile devices. how would people use this? remark from floor: most 3g companies have someone looking at adult content [!]

nico: 3‘s position is ludricous. the ppl they are targeting cannot afford 1k gbp a year for these things. look at biz mkt. the working world, logistics. learn from wap, not just make fun of it. everyone here has a wap phone as it’s now just baked into most handsets but there’s still no-one using them [good point]

beta world [where companies release product for the market to mutate/womble/adapt then manufacture/market the successful results] is an evasion of companies responsibilty to innovate… Nico thinks that consumers / geeks making things is not innovation [eh?] cites henry ford/andrew carnegie/then steve jobs [surely woz and jobs were part of the Berkeley Homebrew computer club scene, and were the classic garage entrepreneurs??? after hewlett/packard] thinks companies should takes risks and that if companies harness consumer innovation then we will not have as much progress.

chair: expectations of what people will pay for in terms of info/comms changes over time. ludicrous to suggest years ago that you would pay 40 quid a month to watch TV.

point from floor… don’t assume that you can’t predict the future, and that tech change is what drives societal change… it’s conceivable that a sociologist could have come up with a scenario where something like TXTing would have arisen out of observing societal trends… [??!!]