Forum Oxford Conference 2008

A lot of leading mobile industry visionaries and enthusiasts met under the banner of "Forum Oxford Conference 2008". Lots of ideas were generated and discussed. I was fortunate to attend this event for the second year running. For those who may not know, I started this blog after attending this event last year. I was a bit surprised to see far less attendance then last year even though the fees were peanuts compared to many other conferences. Maybe people dont realise the value of these kinds of events.

Here is summary of some presentations which is in my own words and that of other bloggers and people who have posted on this topic. You may want to read more on these here.

The first topic was - "Pictures are better on Radio" by Mark Selby, Vice President, Industry Collaborations, Nokia

A survey of what people use their mobiles threw some interesting results:

• Voice - 12%
• Browsing - 8%
• Games - 4%
• Messaging - 37%

It is interesting to realise that mobile usage for voice is decreasing.

Mobiles can be used for 4 reasons:

• Create
• Consume
• Interact
• Connect

The BBC has 200 journalists trained to use high end 3G cameraphones as personal broadcast-trucks-in-the-pocket. Radio is a social media ie where PC users might use the internet as a chat board, radio listeners can send in their comments via SMS and DJ's can comment on them, recognize new listeners who have not commented yet, etc.


How many people control their own wife/partner?
We don’t think of it in that way because it is a relationship. In the same way, we as an industry cannot hope to ever ‘control’ a customer

Back in the 70s, Convergence was a set of three arrows pointing to a yellow cloud (IT, Media and Telecoms) and everyone expected to ‘solve’ the problem in a matter of months

DRM is an odd concept. If you threw a device into a window, can you blame the manufacturer for the damage to the window? If not, how can we hope to legislate against devices?

OVI is an open platform customers can choose which feeds they can display on OVI(for instance CNN etc etc) – not necessarily from Nokia. Abolish the word user generated content!!

By 2012, 25% of stuff will be created, edited, etc by Mobile devices.

You can get an idea of Mark's presentation by checking out this and this.

The next presentation was Jonathan MacDonald on Blyk:

The biggest problem Blyk users complain about, is that they want more of the ads.
They have already 100,000 users.
To learn more about Blyk see this and this.

The next was "Browser extensions (DOM extensions) and accesssing device API's" - David Pollington, Vodafone:

You can download this presentation with comments on Mobile Monday site here.

The next one was "How to Integrate Facebook with IMS" by Niklas Blum, Fraunhofer FOKUS:

This was a very interesting presentation and there were some strong statements made like CS will dissaper and SIP centered platforms will be everywhere. The market will become open services centred and the result will be convergence.

A similar presentation to this one is available here.

The next one was "iPhone Applications" by William Volk, MyNuMo:

Apple created a new ecosystem. That’s the key difference. So should others(hear hear!)

The main thing people like iPhone is because it has browser that works.

The developers like iPhone because it has this discovery mechanism by which new applications and games get detected. Advertised sponsered games generate 11% click thru. Bowling Game (non advertised) generated 2.95% click thru.

Next was "Youth and Mobile and Music and TV" by Luciana Pavan, MTV:



Comments from their youth survey included "mobile is the symbol of coolness" and "mobile is my best friend". They have two camera crews shooting MTV content such as Jackass, one group shooting for the TV screen, the second for mobile. Same content, two approaches to producing, optimized for each screen type. (Clever...).
Flux on MyMTV in Japan - best user-generated videos will end up on broadcast MTV Japan.
MTV MVNO in Belgium has 16% of the subscriber base.
And at MTV Germany the FunkySexyCool mobile dating service had similarities to Flirtomatic.

Next was "Delivering Global Mobile Service" by Cameron Doherthy, Mobile Concierge:
There was some interesting demonstration of how Blackberry can be used for lots of services like booking airline tickets and golf games.

Then Alan Moore on belaf of Xtract spoke on "Social Marketing Intelligence, the Black Gold of the 21st Century":


Lines are made by man! Nature has networksCustomers connect, corporations broadcast!

His main focus was operators who have become more like bitpipes whereas if they are clever they can use this data and exploit it for their own benefit. Their product can help them with a lot of this analysis. You can get a gist of his presentation here.

Then there was this debate between Tomi Ahonen and Dean Bubley about "Will the future of internet be shaped by mobile or is the PC still in control".

Even though the conclusion was that the PC is still in control, personally i feel mobile will be the one that will dominate. See my earlier post here.

Simon Cavill from Mi-Pay spoke on "Mobile Initiated Financial Services in the Developing world":


This was the mind-boggling presentation. Not that they can move money on mobile, and that it can be done cross-borders, but that international transfer of airtime is emerging as a monetary instrument. Not only "printing money" but as Simon said, they are now creating a whole new currency. Simon also pointed out that where mobile phones are aspirational in the West, they are much more so in the developing world. A phone is the most desired item in Africa. Airtime could be the euro of the developing world!

Then we had "Mobile Social Networking" by Antonio Vince Stabyl of itsMY:

Do we ‘Caralize’ airlines? I.e. develop a new format based on an earlier format?Doctors and other demographics who have never heard of online social networks, are directly adopting mobile social networks. 4 seconds after an earthquake – they had the first images. That’s the power of mobile!New mediums have new leaders

Finally Christian Lindholm of Fjord spoke on "Dawn of New Mobility. Thoughts on the future of Mobiles, Services and Their Adoption"

Key design principles ..
How much can you do with one hand?
What’s the largest device that can fit inside a pocket
A ‘PC’ is a swear word in Nokia!

You may also be interested in a related presentation here.

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