6 Dec 2012

Mobile Miscellany, 6th December 2012, Peeking at 2013, Survey, Apply for a slot at Demo Night ...


A short Yuletide note from MoMoLo towers wishing everyone a Happy Christmas and hoping for a very successful New Year all round. It's been quite a year for us, with our 11 or so events on topics as wide ranging as "Big Data, Small Screen" and "Inclusive and Accessible Design".  The events we've run this year have been more than ever sold out, so as mentioned before, on the one hand we're really happy that people want to come, but on the other hand really sorry if you missed out on stuff you wanted to attend.

We have broken new ground in a number of areas, new formats, our joint hosting of The Mobile Academy with UCL, and our rounds of feedback of what you, the community, like, want more of and so on. In fact, we've just opened our latest survey which is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/momoloPlease check it out and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you - plus it really helps us to know what you think ...

7th Anniversary unPanel

We closed our events this year with our 7th Anniversary unPanel. We were really delighted that everyone said they enjoyed it so much and found it a lot of fun, as well as being informative! Many thanks, once again, to the unPanellists for taking part - and to the audience (is there a difference, in this case?) for such lively and interesting questions. Viji Pathy wrote a great piece about the content which you'll find on the blog. http://www.mobilemonday.org.uk/2012/11/7th-birthday-unpanel-annual-round-up.html
I'm looking forward to the next event we run in that format ...

Upcoming Events … Starting with Demo Night

… Talking of that, we're planning our programme for the next year. Always a bit difficult, since we like to be topical and since it's hard to see very many months in advance what will be topical. However, there are some signature events that everyone seems to love and we'll be doing one of those, namely Demo Night, on the 21 January and which once again we’re running in partnership with the folks from ICTKTN. We're not ready to open registration to attend that quite yet, but we are looking for people to step forward to say they're interested in doing a demo. We usually get quite a lot of interest for this, so please let us know asap if you would like to be considered to demo - enter your details here: http://j.mp/momolo-demonight-2013-jan - we’ll be closing applications to demo no later than 14th Jan ...

If you're not familiar with the demo night format, well, it looks like this. Each of roughly 10 participants gets to speak about their idea, product or service for exactly three minutes and field questions from the audience for a couple more minutes. There are no special qualifications, you may have an interesting idea, you may have a ready to roll product, you may be a large company or small company … check out last April's demo night write up for an idea of what it is all about. http://www.mobilemonday.org.uk/2012/04/event-round-up-2nd-april-demo-night.html. Past demoers have gone on to all kinds of interesting journeys, so we'll ask a couple of them to talk about their experiences too.

Importantly, if you'd like to do a demo, then please fill in the form at http://j.mp/momolo-demonight-2013-jan asap. Lots of past demoers have found the experience of having to put their message across in 3 mins very helpful, but even more helpful has the the feedback, encouragement and suggestions from members of the community that they get. Apply now!

As to what's happening later in the year, well, that's a secret for now. If you're interested in supporting an event with some sponsorship, you have a topic that you'd like us to cover, then we'd love to hear from you. By the way, did I mention that we're running survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/momolo that we’d love you to fill in to tell us about that kind of thing?

The Mobile Academy

I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention The Mobile Academy, which is the programme we ran jointly with UCL - "A 36 hour masterclass on making it mobile". Many thanks to the expert members of the community who taught this. The feedback we got on it from attendees was extremely heartwarming.

So here is the news, we're going to be running a further course starting in March next year. We've got a waiting list that you can put your name on, and it's not yet full up. So check out more about The Mobile Academy and put your name on the list: http://themobileacademy.org.uk/

Texting is 20

And to close on a further anniversary note, it was widely reported on Monday this week that we celebrate 20 years of  SMS. I suppose that while you can argue exactly what is meant by "the sending of the first SMS" whichever way you look at it it's been quite a success. According to Wikipedia (where else?) "SMS is the most widely used data application in the world, with 3.6 billion active users, or 78% of all mobile phone subscribers." That quote referencing Tomi Ahonen's blog. Tomi's love of all things SMS is of course well known, and if you're even slightly interested you should check it out at http://j.mp/SPer5Q.

By contrast, perhaps, news from November seems to indicate that operator revenues from SMS have declined for the first time ever, the rise of IP based messaging systems being cited as the cause. That's really quite interesting, and one to watch. Meanwhile, unwise though it may be to predict the future in our mobile industry, I do expect SMS to be around in another 10 years time, though it will remain an interesting journey to see how the landscape unfolds in other respects.

Looking forward to catching up in the new year!

Jo