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MobHappy

Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino on mobile technology.

BT to Allow Local Authorities to “Adopt” a PayphoneYesterday

BT to Allow Local Authorities to “Adopt” a Payphone:

The UK’s dominant land-line operator, BT is to allow local authorities to “adopt” a payphone box in situations where the company would normally want to remove it due to lack of use. The iconic red payphone boxes have fallen out of favour thanks to the growth of mobile phones, but in many areas people want to keep them for cosmetic reasons - or as an emergency back up for mobile phones.

Local councils will be offered the chance to pay an annual fee of £500 (US$1,000) to keep a payphone in use - or about half to keep just the structure in place for cosmetic purposes. In some areas, payphone boxes are listed and cannot be removed without planning permission being granted by the council.

For just £500 per year, you too can help save payphones!

Tomi Ahonen’s ‘Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media’Yesterday

Our good friend Tomi Ahonen, blogger, speaker, consultant and highly prolific author has just announced his new book ‘Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media’, which you can order from Futuretext, Ajit Jaokar’s publishing vehicle.

I haven’t read it yet (it’s still being printed) but if it’s up to the standards of his previous one, it’ll be a must-read. Tomi tells me that AdMob, MobHappy and I all get mentioned and discussed, so it must be good

If you’d like me to send you a free copy of a two chapter excerpt, just drop me an email - the address is at the top on the left.

Anyone who knows Tomi’s work will appreciate that he’s a hardcore mobile man, not someone from a PC background struggling to fit mobile into their existing view of the world. There’ll be lots of stimuli to help your own thinking, plenty of case studies and some real and genuine insights into the AI (After iPhone) world that Tomi’s fascinated by.

Mobile Media Investor ConferenceYesterday

The Strategy Institute has just released details of the Mobile Media Investor Conference, taking place on 9th and 10th December 2008 in San Francisco.

It has a great line up of people from the media, marketing and venture worlds, including quite a few people I know, as it happens. Helen Keegan will also be pleased to note quite a few women on the agenda - 20% by my count, which is a great move in the right direction.

AdMob’s, Cheryl Dalrymple, is among those sharing her words of wisdom. Other people I know and are certainly worth listening to (in no particular order) are Louis Gump of The Weather Channel, Gene Keenan of Isobar, Vijay Chattha of VSC Consulting (AdMob’s US PR agency), Rich Wong of Accel, Nihal Mehta of Buzzd, Michael Becker of iLoop Mobile, Dorrian Porter of Mozes and Lubna Dajani of Mobile Monday NY. And that’s just the ones I know - add people I’ve met or heard speak like Sharon Wienbar of Scale Venture Partners and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat and you have a really great line up.

To paraphrase the late Victor Kiam, I liked the line up so much that we agreed to become an official media partner, which is a first for us. [I also just noticed that AdMob is some kind of sponsor in the interests of transparency]. What this actually means is that you ca

Bluetooth and the MMAAugust 28

I was lucky enough to be elected Global Chairman of the MMA a few months back, on top of my role as Chairman of EMEA. This is an unpaid and part time role, in case you wondered, and has to be squeezed into my day job, blogging, my involvement in Mobile Monday and any kind of leisure time I might foolishly aspire to.

Having said that, I take my MMA role very seriously and am thoroughly enjoying it - even the challenges and controversies that inevitably come with this kind of job.

Speaking of which….you might have seen that the MMA has just published in draft form its “European Bluetooth Guidelines” for public review. This has been greeted in some quarters, like The Register with accusations that the MMA is encouraging spam and many people have written to ask me what my stance is on this.

This is a complex question in reality, especially as I need to balance my own opinions and that of my Chairman role. But I’m happy to be lay out some of the thinking here and am very fortunate that I have the platform to do it.

Firstly, let me make absolutely clear that these guidelines are not the final document that we’ll be going with. The process within the MMA for this kind of work is that members who have a special interest in a topic get together and form a committee. This committee then debates the issues, develops a position and drafts a paper - in this case, these Guidelines

Would You Ever Willingly Ignore Insight Into Half Your Customers?August 27

Our good friend Helen Keegan, as you may have guessed, is a woman. She also works in the mobile industry — and is an authority on mobile marketing, and a frequent speaker at industry events. But she wants to know why there aren’t more women up there with her, and singles out three upcoming events for the lack of women on their speaking agendas:

Why so few women speakers, panellists or moderators?

And don’t tell me this is representative of the industry because I know it isn’t - we have good female representation at Mobile Mondays, more women come to Swedish Beers now (and growing) and the women in the Women in Mobile Data Association are plentiful! I even hear along the grapevine that the MMA has a strong female contingent.

And yes, this is a particular bugbear of mine. But with good reason. So bear with me.

I’m fed up to the back teeth of conference organisers and their sponsors ignoring women in the mobile industry (Informa being a recent obvious culprit, but they are certainly not alone) and coming up with lame excuses as to why women aren’t involved. And many of these events are actually organised by women which makes it even worse. Do women still defer to men? Do women need a license to speak up?

Underrepresentation of women is a big issue across all of business. I was surprised to find six women out of 21 students in