Interesting, this one: Vodafone are launching a snooping service which lets businesses record calls their employees are making. They're putting this onto every phone, except the iPhone:

"Vodafone tells us it's working on an iPhone version, but Apple doesn't allow interception of outgoing calls so we can't help thinking it's going to take them a while. The iPhone might not be the bankers' choice, but there are more than a few knocking around the City."

I guess "Apple exerts control over its platform" isn't much of a story any more, but I was quite surprised to read this. Voda didn't get the iPhone with any exclusivity, so on what basis did Apple get them to sign up to this - are Apple having any operator which sells the device limit what they do with it? I'd love to know more about what other restrictions there might be....

For the last few weeks, one of our offices has been resounding to the thwack of leather on willow. I'm pleased to announce that we received a note from Cupertino yesterday, informing us that our hard work has come to fruition: we've launched Roulette Cricket, an iPhone app which has kept one of our teams busy for the last couple of months.

It's quite an unusual app, and builds on principles which have been interesting us for the last few years. Designed to be used as a "second screen" when watching or listening to cricket matches, the game invites players to bet on where the next boundary will be. (If you're not a cricket fan, a boundary is where the ball hits the edge of the pitch). Tap or swipe along one or more positions around the edge of the ground, see what odds you'll get, and choose how much you want to bet... then wait and see if you were right. Right now all betting is in points and it's all "just for fun". Even with this virtual currency, we're seeing the leaderboards of players get quite competitive :)

The founders of Roulette Cricket are genuine cricket fans, and have been playing this game themselves at matches for a little while, using paper plates and piles of coins; early workshops saw us all playing along to matches on Youtube, to get a feel for it... and then thinking about how to build on this experience for mobile. Since then we've been working closely with our customer to develop and refine the gameplay.

As genuine enthusiasts, the RC team have been an unusually engaged customer; we've taken advantage of this to involve them very closely in their product development. They've spent a half-day at FPHQ every couple of weeks, during which our team have demonstrated progress from the previous fortnight and had feedback, we've looked at the big picture of the project as a whole, and planned in the coming fortnight of work. We've always made efforts to be transparent with customers, but having them in the room with the team has made a significant positive difference to the product, the process, and the relationship. In future I'm looking forward to this style of collaboration being the norm for us, rather than the exception.

There's a suite of game mechanics lurking inside the app, but a really interesting aspect of the product is its use of live data - in fact the game can only be played live. We've long felt there's something interesting about mobile as a second screen for broadcast or events, and in many ways this feels like a natural progression of the work we did with the Ghost Detector in the US a few years ago. We think there's a lot of mileage here, and you'll be seeing a lot of activity in mobile as a second screen in the next few years.

You'll notice that what we've launched is "Roulette Cricket Lite"; there's more to come and we're beavering away on the next release, which will bring a load more features and refinements. In the meantime, we and Roulette Cricket are very interested in feedback from players; so please do download, have a game, and let us know what you think!

Kudos must go to the folks at FP who've been putting their heart and soul into this for the last few months: Douglas Hoskins, James Hugman, John Revill, Ben Carias, Trevor May, and Sergio Falletti.

UXCampLondon 1.5 was quite fun. Held at the extravagantly spacious offices of LBi on Brick Lane, with security provided by elite attack badgers, attendance was down a little from last years event: ash stopped play for a few people.

I'd completely failed to write a presentation in time, so instead ran a little fishbowl-style discussion on something that's been gently nagging at me for a few months: what the intimacy of mobile as a medium might mean for the products and services we build on it. These physically close and available devices are simultaneously private (storing in-depth personal information) and public (as status symbols and loudspeakers); and as touch interfaces become more commonplace, the basic mechanisms for interacting with them become less intellectual and more instinctual: witness the speed with which any 4-year old gets to grip with an iPhone.

As a format, Fishbowl worked quite nicely: we heard opinion from across the 10 or so attendees without anyone jockeying to speak or being talked over. I found simultaneously facilitating and trying to contribute a bit icky (as usual). I've stuck my notes from the session here and here, but to put a bit more meat on their bones:

• Despite being intimate, mobile is often a proxy for intimacy - a means of avoiding or substituting for it.
• Sharing a mobile in the UK is something we're fairly uncomfortable with; in other cultures it's quite natural.
• As use of sensors for data capture increases and we start to gather, say, in-depth health information what happens to all this data? Who secures it, retains it, and how?
• We ended up splitting device ownership from account ownership. Wouldn't it be good to be able to half-lock a device so when handing it to a friend, they can use it in a restricted fashion? The analogy of private browser in modern web browsers was used.
• Teenage shared use of mobiles, and group conversations around a single device as speakerphone, was brought out.
• AdrianH told a tale of owning iQuarium, and being forced to kill his pet fish when upgrading from the lite to full version.
• Where *is* data anyway? Is the idea of data having any sort of geographical location a bit passé?
• We build relationships with software over time, as we do with people.

I attended a few other sessions, all of them enjoyable, and walked away (after a post-event beer on Brick Lane) with a few tasty things to think about... Many thanks to all the organisers, attendees, and LBi for making it the day it was!

I've been meaning to blog these... over the next couple of months I'll be out and about, speaking at a few events:

• Telco 2.0 on the 28/29 April, where I'll be presenting a comparison of what it's like to launch products on various platforms and through operator portals and app stores;
• The mighty LIFT2010 on 5-7 May, where I'm running our Mobile Mountains workshop as part of the open programme - the sign up is here if you're interested in attending;
• Eduserv Symposium on 13th May, where I'll be giving a general introduction to developing for mobile: what's different about the mobile value chain vs fixed-internet, approaches to design and development, and a few trends we've seen here;
• At M-Publishing in June, I shall be flying the flag for free content in a debate with Stephen Pinches of the Financial Times;

All that, and I'll be out and about at these fine events too:

• UXCampLondon tomorrow, where I think I'll try to paper over a lack of preparedness by running a discussion session;
• Geek'n'Rolla this coming Tuesday, a startup-focused event which was excellent last year;
• Brighton Festival Hack Day, which looks low-key, but the sentiment is a good one. Would love to see Brighton Council do a similar event...
• A little further out but worth marking in the diary: Mobile 2.0 Europe on June 16-17, which was absolutely top last year and dovetails all-too-conveniently with Sonar...

Apple kicking off with Adobe; Twitter buying Atebits. Powerful companies protecting themselves in both cases, but in slightly different ways.

The best summaries I can find of the Apple/Adobe situation are Jean-Louis Gassée, Steve Jobs via Greg Slapek, and of course John Gruber - though Joe Berkovitz gets an honorable mention for raising the prospect of "metaphysical outrage". In summary: Adobe and other vendors of cross-platform tools threaten Apple by providing lowest-common-denomination abstraction layers on top of iPhone and other platforms, degrading Apple's ability to differentiate their products. As John Gruber puts it, "I’m not saying you have to like this. I’m not arguing that it’s anything other than ruthless competitiveness. I’m not arguing (up to this point) that it benefits anyone other than Apple itself. I’m just arguing that it makes sense from Apple’s perspective — and it was Apple’s decision to make".

What will this mean for the other tool vendors out there, the plethora of port-to-iPhone tools? The web-based ones like PhoneGap seem to stand the best chance of navigating through the new T&Cs, I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the others. If anything, this all leaves the web strengthened as "the one way to go cross-platform on mobile", a direction it's been heading in for some time, thanks to good HTML5 support on iPhone and Android, and Canvas/video support.

If you need to go native, the Apple Way is now to build apps which take full advantage of the platform they're running on. That doesn't sound like a bad thing for the apps, their users, or to those creating them; and there are increasingly credible alternatives to the unpleasantly controlled Apple ecosystem if you find that unconscionable.

So that's Apple. Oh, and we should probably shed a tear for all those "social gaming platform" companies whilst we're at it; quite a few of them look like they've become commoditised. Is it me or does the way Big Steve said Apple "won't necessarily supplant" these guys sound a bit... chilly? And I wonder what Apple will do with the social networks they start building off the back of gaming...

The other interesting one was Twitter, who've purchased Atebits, the makers of Tweetie, to help them "provide the best possible Twitter experience on all of the major mobile platforms". Again, not good news for any of the other vendors of Twitter clients for mobile devices, whose best outcome now is that they can flog themselves or their products to Twitter before their out-distributed; I should imagine that as Twitter goes more mainstream, an "official" client will steal audience from any unofficial ones.

Some of the unofficial clients feel like labours-of-love, but some of them are businesses. Let's not consider how advisable it is to build a business on top of a platform provide you're completely locked into, who's not themselves worked out how to make money...

I think there's a particular problem with web businesses opening up APIs right now. The issue is that large chunks of audience are starting to come from mobile; that these APIs let third parties service these audiences; and that at some point most businesses don't want a significant percentage of their audience being serviced by a third party they have no control over - particularly when this "servicing" involves the bits which end-users engage with and build loyalty to, the user experience.

This is, of course, a subset of what you might do with an API (combining data from multiple sources is a different case) - but it's a big subset, particularly given the rise of mobile at the moment. I think we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing; what will Yahoo do should the lovely unofficial Upcoming app for iPhone prove popular, say?