It's a chat-show format! Tim Green hosts.

First up: Mike Short, VP R&D, O2.

TG: How's mobile going to be affected by an economic slowdown?
MS: Anyone in the room feel a slowdown? It's still a growth industry; there's a lot left to do wrt content and applications.

TG: Isn't a discretionary spend on content threatened?
MS: There's bound to be some belt-tightening, but people are going wireless over fixed. We're seeing 38% year-on-year growth. Public sector are starting to show an interest - unheard of a few years ago. Some areas (e.g. some aspects of content) might slow down, but overall growth.

MS: Operators don't want to do content themselves, they want partnerships. They've not been happy w/slow growth of WAP, iPhone has shown that usability stimulates growth.

TG: O2 are not supporting all Nokias because of conflicts (with Ovi?)
MS: Yes, but operator ranges are always limited. We can't stock them all.

Helen Keegan: What's your top tip for what'll be big in the coming year?
MS: More of the same. More mobile/web combinations as web players come into the market.

HK: How can we get web and mobile side of our industry playing together?
MS: Education helps. Events like this help. Trialling things with the customer in mind helps - some web ideas don't fit well.

David Wood, Symbian: Will we seem more of the same delivered more efficiently thanks to companies being more cost sensitive?
MS: Efficiency will come, but we'll start thinking of new ways to do things. How can mobile help in new application areas? e.g. NFC trials with TfL embedding Oyster into handsets.

Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic: Did the NFC trials involve O2 taking 35% revenues, or normal content revenues?
MS: Normal commercial arrangement for Oyster (i.e. no huge revenue share for operators). We won't see a revolution in the next 2-3 years, but rather an increased range of devices to increase utility.

James, Truphone: Your team did well to secure the iPhone. What's the one thing you learned from the iPhone user experience?
MS: The Store - there's a lot of lessons in there as strong as the usability angle; which is why we're setting up O2 Litmus.

Will, D2C: We've battled fragmentation for the last few years, but it's getting worse and there's a trend towards applications. How do you see this moving?
MS: Fragmentation isn't O2's responsibility, but if customers want something new we won't stop them. We have some influence, but they're asking for different things. We're interested in global, not UK-centric standards.

Next up, Russell Buckley from Admob.

RB: iPhone is becoming #1 device worldwide (out of 12m sold worldwide).

TG: What are the form factors for advertising?
RB: CPM graphical banners are UK/US only, much volume comes from outside. 30/70 in favour of graphical and iPhone banners.

TG: How do you see the vocabulary of advertising changing? Banners are form the Internet and a bit lame, after all.
RB: New media tend to borrow from older ones. Same is true of the mobile Internet: we've borrowed formats from digital and this has worked well, but the iPhone lets us do new formats to play to mobile for the first time (e.g. click-to-call, location-based).

TG: How realistic is it to take the iPhone formats and profilerate them across handsets?
RB: Other models (e.g. RIM Blackberry) let us play to strengths of mobile. We're transitioning from old WAP to iPhone type experience, but whether the iPhone is the winner is moot: it's given the rest of the industry a vision.

TB: What about brand-building? Is the Carling iPhone app an advert?
RB: The old model of interruptive advertising is starting to fade. The people having big success (e.g. Jaguar) are more concerned with the overall customer journey.

TB: How many of your advertisers are mobile content/handset companies?
RB: We spoke to them first, if we can't sell to ourselves who can we sell to? The US is more receptive to new adverts/formats, the car sector in particular have taken off.

TB: Where's the line between advertising and marketing?
RB: CRM is untapped and important. Don't cancel my credit card when I spend abroad: send me texts re transactions to save me hassle and make it my responsibility.

Andy Walker, Geomoder: Asks about LBS.
RB: We're prenatal about LBS. We've not cracked delivering messages yet - we've tried LBS alerts via text, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Mapping shows us the way but it's a huge logistical problem to get this into the heads of the sales force.

Scott Beaumont, Mippin: What can we do to bring better quality brands onto mobile?
RB: I'm global chair of the MMA. P&G want to talk to their "next billion" customers, not the mobile industry... Admob have a lot of inventory in this part of developing world.

James, mJelly.com: Much of your traffic is in India, Indonesia, etc... not that much value to advertisers though. What's going to happen?
RB: Our biggest market is the US; UK is in the top-5. 1.5bn in Indonesia leaves lots of potential: a few clicks will matter (sounds to me like the old "we just need 1% of the market" play to me tho). A click today in the UK/US is worth more than in Indonesia, but for brands wanting to talk to these customers for the first time it's got potential.

Half-time with the Mobile Industry Review team. Fairly harsh slagging to the G1: "it's really shit hardware, but Android is really amazing. The screen is crooked. Good points: browser is nice, stable."

Next: Madhuban from Irini (sp?).

TG:
M: Investors are looking beyond applications to investments in IP rights.

TG: If there's no liquidity in financial markets, can we expect money to flow (in mobile)?
M: Trade buyers are coming from the US, UAE and India.

TG: Are India and China looking to invest outside their home territories?
M: In markets like this you'll see some bargains. Mobile is high-growth and in overdrive. India and the UK have common themes: from an operator POV they're the most competitive markets, but in terms of ARPU they're the opposite: so in one you play a volume game, in the other value-add.

TG: Russell, you've had your share of VC money. How do you feel about the situation?
RB: You've seen the Sequioa "RIP" presentation. Investment now would have been on different terms to a few months back. Cost of doing a startup is much lower now than 10y ago, you can work on a shoestring and build value in the downturn so that when the market recovers you're well positioned.

TG: What companies are you looking at?
M: The fundamentals of investment haven't changed. Using mobile as a means to deliver a piece of technology is interesting; cites example of an Ecuadoran community using mobile without operators, or mobile used as card reader/scanner for couponing.

TG: Some of the technologies are disruptive - doesn't that make for a high risk investment?
M: Yes, good VCs can see opportunities before they become mainstream. Skype etc were disruptive investments.

And now, Bill Thompson, "a hairy man".

BT: I get to play with things and see how they might be useful. Mobile has been the most interesting area for the last 8-9 years. It's like a waterwheel: someone is always drowning, it certainly has it's downside.

BT: I have seen 1 videocall in the wild, in a bar in Barcelona. It reminded me of cable where the cable companies tried to get us to buy TV, when we wanted IP connectivity. All the talk of advertising etc., masks a reality: phones will become Just Another IP Device. Many of the models built around its affordances as a phone will stop being workable and new things become possible. People challenging the status quo of operators etc. will have a difficult time, but will prevail. We will change handsets and expect portability of UI. Portability will bring audience loyalty.

TG: What timeframe for this to be a mainstream consumer choice?
BT: Vested interests tend to decay. As technologies emerge, so do new possibility of making money. Incumbents either self-cannibalise (rare) or die. (He's talking about strategy tax I think). New entrants with nothing to preserve can offer something fantastic - e.g. a handset that clones the UI of your current phone?

TG: If the handset companies become clones and networks become pipes, who are the big forces?
BT: The OS developers (if they're lucky) or the applications and services. It's all IP in the long-term, all bits on a processor. Phones become commodities, but no-one has a "right" to make a profit.

TG: How can Vodafone reposition for this?
BT: Buy a foundry. Make chipsets. Be Qualcomm. Support the multiplicity of handsets in software as well as hardware.

BT: Binge drinking is a side-effect of mobile phones. My daughter will arrange to go out, but not to a venue - just-in-time socialising. Landlords need to offer cheap beer in happy hours to keep customers, hence binge drinking.

Dan Applequist, Vodafone: There's a lot of entrenched cynicism in the industry, that real people don't want these services, preferring hand-holding. What do you say to people who take that view?
BT: Good UI design is like a new sexual partner: revealing him/herself slowly. As you explore you discover new opportunities for pleasure, ideally at minimum cost. I'd like big, thrusting bandwidth.

DA: Where's the balance point between disruption and disrupting yourself out of business?
BT: In next 4-5 years we'll see failed disruptions ("peaked too early"), have their ideas picked up on, giving them an opportunity to build new businesses. The worst thing is that someone large (Google) sees your business as their marketing expense.

TG: What will move people in this direction? Most people still only want voice and text.
BT: Imagine Nokia 8600 running Android. You don't need to give people interfaces today, but you do need to give them platforms which support what they want - so when they want these services, they're there.

RB: Opportunity is for incumbents to be disruptive (e.g. O2).

David Wood, Symbian: On the question of UIs changing according to your mood. Have you seen what QT do?
BT: This is the way things will go - it's a question of how much functionality you reveal to the user and when?

James, Truphone: Network operators annoy me when they tell me what I can do - e.g. the Blackberry Storm with Wi-Fi taken out for Vodafone. I want a phone with everything open.

I've just gotten back from a wonderful little event at Sussex University, called Enterprising Engineers.

It's organised the luxuriantly bearded Jonathan Markwell of Inuda, who seems to have mastered the dual skills of fitting 36 hours into the working day and either attending or organising every digital media event in town. The format was good fun: nibbles and booze followed by a 3-person panel taking turns to talk for 10-20 minutes, and taking questions from the audience.

Tonight it was myself, Dan from Angry Amoeba, and Glenn from Madgex - all talking about products.

Dan held forth on his philosophies towards startups, how it's affected his working life, and finished with a demonstration of his product, Tails (a beautifully simple-looking bug tracking system).

Glenn followed up with a roundhouse presentation to the face, giving the back-story to Backnetwork, a product Madgex built to connect folks at events which is nowadays languishing without further development, but nonetheless earning its keep as a tool for bartering in exchange for sponsorship.

And then I wibbled somewhat - for my Macbook decided to crash, preventing me from showing the Ghost Detector video that should have introduced my skit. I rambled on about our experiences launching Ghosty in the US, then Flirtomatic and Twitchr: the unifying theme being the complexity and engineering problems which can be lurk behind even the inane, the lewd, or the playful.

Depressing thought: if social networking tools bring us all closer together, what happens when a generation that grew up hyper-connected starts to pass on. How will all this affect the grieving process?

Too many links to write about and Netnewswire is creaking at the seams (well, not really - but navigating 400 tabs gets boring) so here they go - out into the wild.

First off, a load of design-related stories:

• Clive Grinyer: technology doesn't work and design basics>; I was fortunate enough to work with Clive when he was at Orange - a very smart chap;
• Building the UX dreamteam;
• Multi-touch in Safari
• Applying Turings ideas to search;
• Interactions Magazine, which is frankly fantastic;
• Information architecture for audio
• Swype, a new mechanism for text entry on phones
• When not to listen to your customers

Then a pile of development-related stuff I've never gotten around to commenting on:

• Writing testable code
• Circular Dependency in constructors and Dependency Injection
• Singletons are pathological liars
• Where have all the singletons gone?
• Sleeping != synchronisation
• Root cause of singletons
• GrailsCrowd a Groovy/Grails community site;
• Data driven traps
• Test first is fun
• Location-enabling web applications and using OpenCellID
• Yet more GeoWeb with Geode
• Checking code pre-submission
• Where to test?
• Packaging Flash Lite for S40
• Testing all the fucking time: "sometimes you’ll come to a point where you can’t TDD. At that point, I’ll offer some advice… you most likely don’t understand the problem as well as you think you do. What you may need to do is try it again from a different angle or maybe you need to think larger and stop scoping so small."
• How Flickr does queueing
• Lessons learned building an iPhone site
• James has noticed more Vodafone proxy nastiness - minify and downgrading images, something I think Orange has done for a while now too...
• Mocking out your environment

...mobile industry bits and bobs worth noting:

• Google CEO Schmidt: ‘We Can Make More Money In Mobile Than We Do On The Desktop’
• 8 million iPhones and counting!
• Nice Guardian article on the Flip
• The US overtakes Europe in 3G takeup
• Independent app store Phoload launches
• Nice piece from David Wood on Opera Mini and mobile web browsing;
• Google still dreams of mobile money-making; my favourite quote: "we've been waiting 13 years now for real mobile Internet monetization, and we're still not seeing where it's going to come from"
• ...and the big G is bundling barcode readers into Samsung devices
• iPhone vs Kindle!
• Mobile banking RSN
• Hutch are launching a handset business focused purely on social networking
• Will the Web 2.0 industry move to pro accounts?
• Opera's state of the mobile web
• Flickr and Geolocation - really interesting piece...

...and finally some related to project management:

• Planning Poker cards from Mountain Goat Software;
• Establishing a common baseline for story points - starting to do our estimation and planning with story points rather than ideal hours is on my TODO list for FP;
• On our project, we're always 90% done;
• How to launch software
• How I learned to love middle managers
• Doing the impossible
• David Wood asks who says design by committee is bad?
• The product managers' lament
• Lean startups vs lean companies

Back in September, I mentioned that I've been invited to work with the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, specifically to help with Content Transformation (CT).

It's a really contentious topic. The event which I think provoked the whole discussion was Vodafone foolishly deploying a transcoder which prevented mobile sites from identifying the device used to access them: effectively breaking large chunks of the mobile web. A particularly nasty aspect of this was that the sites most badly affected were the ones which had been specifically written to deliver the best mobile experience.

The W3C CT group is creating a set of guidelines that deployers of transcoding proxies and developers can use to ensure end-users get the best possible experience of mobile content. Involved in this effort are parties from across the mobile value chain, though mostly from larger organisations which tend to participate in these sorts of things. I'm there to try and ensure that smaller parties - content owners and mobile developers - are better represented.

There have been other attempts to put together similar guidelines - the most prominent being Luca Passani's Rules for Responsible Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto, which has quite a few signatures from the development community, as well as a number of transcoder vendors. There's a great deal of overlap between the contents of Manifesto and the CT document. I think this is because the two are concerned with a quite specific set of technologies, neither are trying to invent any new technology, and both have the same aim in mind: to ensure that a repeat of the Vodafone/Novarra debacle, or similar, doesn't recur.

What I like most about the CT document is the responsibilities it places upon transcoder installations, if they're to be compliant - and with Vodafone in the CT group, I think it's reasonable for us to expect them to move their transcoders to compliance at some point. The document is still work-in-progress, but right now some of these (with references) include:

• Leaving content alone when a Cache-control: no-transform header is included in a request or response (4.1.2);
• Never altering the User-Agent (or indeed other) headers, unless the user has specifically asked for a "restructured desktop experience" (4.1.5);
• Always telling the user when there's a mobile-specific version of content available - even if they've specifically asked for a transcoded version of the site (4.1.5.3). I think this is lovely: as long as made-for-mobile services are better than transcoded versions (and in my experience it's not hard to make them so), users will be gently guided towards them wherever they exist;
• Making testing interfaces available to developers, so that content providers can check how their sites behave when accessed via a transcoder (5)

There's also a nice set of heuristics referred to, which gives a hint to content providers of what they can do to avoid transcoding.

The big bugbear for me (since joining the group) has been the prospect of transcoders rewriting HTTPS links, which I believe many do today. I've been told that in practice Vodafone maintain a list of financial institutions whose sites they will not transcode, presumably to avoid security-related problems and subsequent lawsuits - which would seem to support the notion that this is a legal minefield.

The argument for transcoding HTTPS is that it opens up access to a larger pool of content, including not only financial institutions like banks which absolutely need security, but also any site that uses HTTPS for login forms. Some HTTPS-accessible resources do have less stringent requirements than others (I care more about my bank account than my Twitter login, say), but it's not a transcoders place to decide when and what security is required, overriding the decisions a content provider may have made.

The CT group has agreed that the current document needs to be strengthened. Right now it is explicit that if a proxy does break end-to-end security, end-users need to be alerted to this fact and given the option of a fully secure experience. Educating the mass market about these sort of security issues is likely to be difficult at best; I take small comfort from the fact that they'll be given a choice of not being forced into an insecure experience, but this still feels iffy to me.

And security isn't just for end-users: content providers need to be sure they're secure, and beyond prohibiting transformation of their content using a no-transform directive there's not much they can currently do. So I suspect there's more work cut out for us on the topic - and the amount of feedback around HTTPS would seem to confirm this.

The fact that we need to have either the CT document or the Manifesto is a problem in itself, of course: infrastructure providers shouldn't be messing with the plumbing of the mobile web in the way that they have been. But given where we are right now, what are we to do? Luca's already done an excellent job of representing the anger this has caused in the mobile development community; I hope the CT work can complement his approach.

I'm also going to write separately about the process of participating in the group; I've found the tools and approach quite interesting and it's my first experience of such a thing.