Plans to build a mobile phone network on London Underground in time for the Olympic Games have been abandoned.The UK’s four mobile operators on Thursday said they had concluded it would not be possible to build the network in time for the Olympics starting next July.

via FT.com / UK – Olympic Tube phone plan dropped.

I’d have settled for mobile data access on the station platforms. That’d have been a start…

Have a read of this:

Some 55 per cent of 950 people questioned said they did not want Transport for London to go ahead with the programme, which was announced by Mayor Boris Johnson last week.

Of the opponents, 48 per cent cited concerns about privacy, including the potential for other passengers to see sensitive data over their shoulder. A further 31 per cent said they were worried that increased use of smartphones and laptops on the tube network would encourage thieves, and 14 per cent said it would make journeys more stressful.

via Londoners ‘oppose tube WiFi plans’ – Telegraph.

Clearly, the folk doing the survey spoke to a bunch of heathens.

Concerns about privacy? Privacy? That’s a stupid one. Ultra stupid. Privacy? Really?

Oh please. If that’s a valid concern, then we should rip out WiFi from every railway station in London. We should descend upon McDonalds and rip out every WiFi transmitter in every one of their restaurants. Yeah. No. Ridiculous.

And what’s this about ‘encouraging thieves’? Oh come on. People are ALREADY using their devices on the Underground. It’s just a flipping arse that you can’t actually *do* anything meaningful with them.

Just how many people are going to get more stressed by the introduction of WiFi on the Tube? 14% people actually specified that as a concern?

Presumably these are the same people who are worried about going on holiday to ‘somewhere foreign’ and are concerned about the possibility of the sky falling down.

Richard was there to talk about his organisation’s new arrangement with the upcoming Taxi service, TaxiStop (see the next video for more about that). Thank you for taking the time Richard!

And remember, next time you need a cab in London, why not Tweet one?

I checked-in to the event then headed straight over to Mr Smith to say hello. He was arsing around with his laptop. Looking up, he briefly said hi, before advising, “Never, ever get an integrated SIM module on a Dell, this thing never seems to work.”

The holding area began to fill up. A chap by the name of Gary Gale came by and handed me the obligatory sticker sheet.

“You might remember me,” says Gary, “We had a frank exchange of views over BlackBerry AppWorld on Twitter a while ago?”

“Shit!” I think, “Errr,” I say to Gary, “I… errr, was I a little bit direct?”

I began to remember the episode and actually, I think Gary did have a good point — I just disagreed. Turns out Gary was a speaker too. I hadn’t connected the Twitter name Vicchi with Gary Gale, top man at Yahoo Engineering for Geo Technologies. Gary’s presentation was all about WOEIDs, something I knew nothing about until he stood up and explained them. Fascinating — highly relevant to the Twitter developer audience and expertly delivered. You can catch Gary’s WOEID presentation here.

So Twitter developers — that’s what Devnest is all about — anyone who’s interested in creating services and mashups with Twitter would do well to go along. The Organisers had done a phenomenal job — the place was packed.

Michael Camilleri came bounding over to say hi. Michael is one of the chaps behind FooCall (See last week’s post: “International calling for… FooCall“). It was good to see him. As we were discussing the state of British Venture Capitalists (in the context of this post), Paul Webster of Critical Path arrived to give us a glimpse into what’s coming with ShoZu. I agreed not to spill the beans though. Steve Kennedy popped over to say hi and pointed out that he almost bought a ton of Critical Path email services when he was supervising business development for Demon back in the good old dotcom days. Steve presented his business, DBVU, to the audience later in the evening — the company provides centralised analytics and monitoring for MySQL database servers. Very smart indeed.

With oodles of pizza having arrived and been consumed along with a good amount of beers, we headed into the auditorium and got started. I was wondering precisely how my presentation would be received, given the copious amounts of iPhones on show.

Angus, one of the organisers, had asked me to give a kind of ‘state of the nation’ about mobile development, so I’d worked to create something like that, with due deference to the fact that most of the people in the room could write and deploy a desktop Twitter app in 180 seconds. Mobile might not be their forte, but I was working on the basis that they could easily adopt various mobile platforms with a low amount of friction, so I decided to keep it pretty high level.

The thrust of my argument was — yes, iPhone is great; Android..yeah… but please, please, please remember the fact that Nokia makes 1.4m handsets a day. A *DAY*. And don’t forget BlackBerry, either. And while you’re at it, a lot of the other platforms such as Vodafone 360 would be delighted to work with you.

Here’s the presentation:

The other presenter that evening, Paul Kinlan, was talking about Google Buzz. Paul is Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and, goodness me, he knew his stuff. I managed to keep up with most of the REST and CURL stuff — essentially he was outlining how Twitter developers could make use of the various Buzz APIs now becoming available. Very smart indeed.

I missed the majority of the buzzzy.com pitch, but essentially they’re providing a search interface for Google Buzz. I doubt it’ll be long before they’re snapped up.

Todd Chaffee delivered his pitch, “Social Media ROI in 140 seconds” and had me thinking carefully about the ROI issues with social media. Fascinating stuff. If you’re interested in the field, Todd’s presentation is here. Definitely talk to him.

There’s been some great feedback from the event — I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to write a tweet regarding the presentation. It’s very kind of you. Instead of flooding my Twitter feed with ‘thank you, thank you’ messages, I have decided to cut’n'paste your messages and put a link into your Twitter profiles here on the site:

bensmithuk @3mobilebuzz Yep. Listening to @ew4n now. #devnest

vicchi I want @ew4n‘s tee-shirt #devnest http://twitpic.com/17rh3j

chaffeet 30% of mobile apps are still developed for RIM according to @ew4n at #devnest 7.

richardBarley @ew4n banging the drum for Symbian at #devnest. Great stuff and good to hear

iamdanw Being pitched at to develop apps for symbian again. Shame symbian is an awful app environment, for both users and developers #devnest

(Dan, I agree, but do check out qt.nokia.com — Qt is really going to change things for the platform)

stevekennedyuk Great talk by @ew4n about mobile state of play – it’s all about Symbian #devnest

ketan @ew4n I would’ve stayed with nokia but ui and sync with my computer for email/music much easier on iPhone #devnest

(Fair point Ketan, but remember, you’re using the equivalent of a Fisher Price handset — capable, but the one-thing-at-a-time user model drives me nuts)

vicchi Just heard @ew4n equate Vodafone 360 with wife swapping. Never thought #devnest would be this much fun.

natts Amusing yet realistic talk by @ew4n at#devnest – iPhone only has 14% of world smartphone market in 2009 – http://bkite.com/3np10

michchapman At #devnest listening to @ew4n. Hmm when would be a good time to sneak out for more pizza?!

MarkABaker Fart apps is where its at. via @ew4n at #devnest

docstuart Enjoying first visit to #devnest, great first talk from @ew4n

ketan @ew4n great talk on mobile app development! Thanks. #devnest

MarkABaker missed recording @ew4n presentation at #devnest shame as execllent. Will ask him to do it again later on.

becva great first presentation from @ew4n #devnest

richardBarley Great talk from @ew4n on state of mobile development landscape. #devnest

nuxnix After @ew4n s talk at #devnest I am thinking the unthinkable – switching my iPhone. No not back to Symbian, but to give Android a try

@ew4n great presentation on #devnest yesterday

micrypt @ew4n Thanks for the splendid talk at #devnest yesterday. http://slidesha.re/9MRW10

Thank you everyone for your patience and attention — and thank you to the organisers for inviting me.

By the way: The organisers of Devnest have a 48-hour hackathon event coming soon, all focused on twitter. It’s called WarbleCamp and it’s on the 8th and 9th of May in London. Plus, it’s free. All the details you need are here: http://warblecamp.org/.

Finally, kudos to the sponsors of Devnest: PayPalX, Inuda, Sun Startup Essentials and Multizone Limited.

The where-are-you question is very, very relevant in the context of business so I’ve been trying to solve that with the use of a Where Am I function on my personal site, Ewan.net.

I was previously using BlogLoc for this function… but it was getting a little bit annoying having to manually update every time I remembered.

So instead I’ve decided to try out Google’s Latitude facility. Latitude allows you to see the locations of your friends on a Google Map (either on your phone or online) and it works pretty well.

Recently the Google Latitude team announced that they’ve added a public ‘badge’ facility that you can place anywhere on the web to show off your current location. This definitely isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re a little bit suspicious or concerned about your privacy. But I like the concept myself and I thought it was worth a try. Google have been particularly direct with their warnings — which I heeded — so I haven’t displayed by actual street level GPS location. Instead I’ve displayed my general ‘city level’ location.

Here’s what it looks like on the blog:

Nifty.

If you’d like to do the same, get your Google Latitude Public Location Badge here.

Jag héter Ewan!

Hello to the tens of thousands of readers visiting from Sweden this evening.

God kväll [Good Evening] and welcome to Mobile Industry Review.

This is the link you’ll probably be wanting:

- Peter Lindgren of Visiarc demonstrating Mobile Documents

Jag to Mats Lewan of Ny Teknik, Sweden’s biggest weekly technology magazine who wrote this piece featuring Peter today.

I’ve been on to DeviceAnywhere and asked if they’d agree to cover the cost of producing a Mobile Industry Review mobile developer networking event both in London and in Paris. Based on good response we’ll aim to do this as part of our European Tour and take the events to other cities across the region.

The concept? I want to meet developers. And I want to put a huge big spotlight on them and their work. What’s more, I’ve decided to take it a bit further with these events. I’m aiming to profile every single attendee and put up a screenshot/overview of at least one of their applications with associated links and background. I think it’s doable.

So if you’re a mobile developer and you can get to London or Paris, you’re invited to feature.

BUT — and this is a key point — because I want to meet everyone personally (not just a handshake at the front door a la MIR Unlimited Drinks), I’m going to limit the number to 15 people. Possibly 20 if you’re going to bring a friend.

The deal I’ve done with DeviceAnywhere to cover the cost of hosting the events also includes a free time-limited account extended beyond the normal one they offer, for every developer. It took some wangling but I’m pleased — the service is shit hot, especially if you’re trying to develop on international devices that you don’t want to purchase. (Read my DeviceAnywhere overview here).

There’s no limit to your size. If you’re a one-man developer, or a 500+ organisation of mobile geniuses, no problem.

We’re aiming for the London event to take place toward the end of this month, with Paris in early February before the Mobile World Cup Congress.

So here’s the value proposition:

I want to profile mobile developers. I’d like to meet 15 or so in London and another 15 from the burgeoning Parisian mobile scene. 15 is the upper number I reckon I can handle as I need to write a profile on each for the site.

It will involve about 2 hours of your time in a centrally located hotel bar or club. I’m thinking of holding the London one at private members’ club, One Alfred Place, just off Tottenham Court Road in the West End. Nice and relaxed there. I could use some suggestions for Paris.

It will involve:

* Meeting and chatting with the Mobile Industry Review team including me, Dan Lane, Ben Smith and quite possibly the uber-effervescent James Whatley. We might even be able to get Jonathan Jensen along depending on schedules.

* Drinks on the house. Or, more accurately, drinks on my pocket. And a bit of food.

* Meeting with other mobile developers. Bring some cards.

* The opportunity to knock about with DeviceAnywhere and actually play with the service.

* A one-to-one with me on camera, telling us what you do. Each interview should take about 5 minutes.

We’ll then publish the videos and overviews here on Mobile Industry Review during the proceeding week after the event.

So if you’d like to come along, drop me an email with the subject ‘MIR Developer Event’ and we’ll get you on the list.

It’s gonna be good.

For those who are international, or national-but-London-is-an-Arse-to-get-to, I have a set of interview questions that I’m readying for you. I’ll publish them here shortly.

I’m also on the hunt for some ShoZu Grand Masters like Roland Tanglao. After posting 21,000+ photos to Flickr with ShoZu, Roland, based in Vancouver, is flying the flag for any normobs needing assistance with ShoZu. (You can see his photos here!). More details about Grand Mastering here.

PLUS I am looking for ShoZu stories like this one.

It was a super honour to be asked to film a segment of the MIR Show on-stage during the event — thank you chiefly to Helen Keegan for suggesting the concept and inviting us — and thank you to the rest of the MoMo/Swedish Beers team for their patience and good grace.

I didn’t get to say anything I was too busy holding the camera. But after the main MoMo event, I was delighted to meet as many people as possible.

I was surprised to see Omar Hamoui, founder of AdMob, in the audience and as Swedish Beers got underway we got Omar on camera talking about the company and the way ahead. It’s really good stuff. Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic was chatting away with Andy from AdMob (whom I unfortunately didn’t manage to say hi to) but I managed to grab Mark and we got him on camera.

The blood-sugar level of the MIR Show team began to plummet around this point and James Whatley fell first — leaving to head off to another engagement. Then Ben and Dan had to head off — so I grabbed both the camera and the microphone and went hunting!

I got some really good footage of a ton of people — a veritable ton. If I filmed you, thank you very much indeed for taking the time — your starring role will be online shortly. If I didn’t manage to capture you on camera — and you’re public (i.e. able to discuss what you’re doing) — drop me a mail and let’s arrange to meet up soon?

I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com and I really like capturing good stuff on camera. A case in point — a few weeks ago, Andy from HulloMail (“Voicemail that’s yours to keep”) dropped me a note to ask if I’d be interested in doing a piece on his company. We hooked up on one of the MIR filming days (we tend to film most Friday afternoons at One Alfred Place in the West End) and bish, bash, bosh — we got HulloMail up and out to the world here. If you’d like the same, drop me a note.

(And if you’re a public relations professional representing an interesting mobile-related company, the same applies — drop me a note too!)

Swedish Beers, the networking event, is 7 years old.

MoMo London (Mobile Monday London) is 3 years old.

And they’re having a joint-birthday celebration.

And we’re doing our first ever MIR Show LIVE tonight.

The chaps are excited. Dan is wearing his pearls. James will be sporting his shades, and I’m pretty sure Ben will be wearing one of his sharp suits.

Tonight’s event is a chat show featuring industry luminaries such as Mike Short of o2, Russell Buckley of AdMob and Bill Thompson from the BBC’s Digital Planet. They’re going to be managed — or hosted — by Tim Green, Editor of Mobile Entertainment Magazine. And in the middle — slap bang in the middle — we’re going to be filming a live segment on stage.

We’re also on the hunt for interesting mobile related stuff and I’m going to get James to do a Normob walkabout, so if you’d like to get on camera, look for us and say hi…

To be clear this is the…er.. ‘Smartphone Show‘. Although it’s referred to as the ‘Symbian Smartphone Show’. Are they the sponsors now? I originally thought it was all about symbian only. But Blackberry are exhibiting. So are Motorola, Sony and Samsung. Nokia’s unusually nowhere to be seen. Not quite a full turn out, it seems.

Apart from my incessant wails about the innovation coming out of Helsinki (I’m looking at you, Nokia), the Symbian operating system is one of the world’s most influential platforms.

Some would say that it’s lost the initiative — that the attention, the buzz, the future is all about the next generation of systems. Think Android, think iPhone, think Qualcomm (well, if you screw up your eyes tightly).

What of the behemoth from Redmond? Microsoft, however you look at it, is making continued headway with the likes of Sony Ericsson turning to them with the Xperia. And Blackberry, rushing headlong for the consumer whilst defending it’s business heritage isn’t letting Nokia away with much.

Nokia and Symbian are one, their futures are highly intertwined on a downward slope. Can the operating system and the manufacturer — both the steeped in *telephones* as apposed to the instant consumer focused connectivity of the next generation — turn it about?

UIQ anyone? NEXT!

Nokia certainly pulled Comes With Music out the hat. It’s almost comparable to iTunes in terms of user experience. Is it enough to always play second fiddle to the innovators? 10 million handsets a day says yes. The dire, dire user experience compared against the likes of the iPhone says no.

Nokia had this year to get it right. They’ve got, what, another six months before the innovation of their competitors and the market impetus begins to move sweep them into the big-but-also-rans — the dangerous territory of the Motorola RAZR syndrome.

Even now I can hear the avalance of hate mail gathering at the gates like the proverbial barbarians.

“How dare you make such a statement. Nokia/Symbian is [amazing|brilliant|the best] and you know [flock all|nothing|nothing at all].”

To those people who email (I had over 100 flames last time), I pick a random Nokia function out of the air and point to just how stupidly conceived it is now. It was acceptable in 1999 to have a handset that came out of the factory not working properly (that could only be fixed by a tortuous update). It was acceptable to have 5 different APNs. What the flock is an APN, anyway? I know. I just… what the hell is it doing in front of the consumer? Much of your average Nokia device operation is flatly appalling. A historical ball and chain.

We’ll take a measure of the positivity of the marketplace tomorrow.

I’ll be your Nokia cynic. The rest of the MIR team will, I suspect, be at their Nokia/Symbian rocks heights, ready to be neutered by a ‘Connection required?’ message from the operating system.

Looking down the list of attendees, there’s quite a lot to see.

Let’s have a look down the names that catch my attention from the list.

Accenture? Uh huh. What exactly are they doing with smartphones? We’ll find out.

Interesting to see Blackberry have a stand.

We’ll pop by Mobile Industry Review favourites, DeviceAnywhere and say hi, definitely.

F-Secure’s chaps will, I’ve no doubt, be trying to tell us all about how our Nokias are about to get nailed by viruses. Would this be the right point to yell ‘AS IF’ very loudly?

Fujitsu? Aye. Well known developer of innovative Symbian phones since 2002, it says here. I wouldn’t know a Fujitsu handset if it slapped me with a 100ft wide kipper.

Handango will be there. I wonder if the mobile operators across the planet are falling over them hunting for their very own application stores?

Who else? LG. Aye. They’ll be there with the Renoir I’m sure.

Microsoft? No. No show. That’s a conspicuous omission.

Motorola are there. They might as well put up a big sign saying WE HAVE NO MORE INFORMATION ON THE ANDROID DEVICE. SORRY. We’ll nevertheless see if we can stick the camera in somebody’s face and get some news on that.

NEC will be rubbing everyone’s noses in the fact that they don’t really manufacturer 2/3G devices anymore on the basis that it’s hugely old (compared to the trilobit speeds that Japan operates on).

Interesting to see that Orange are making an appearance. No Vodafone. No other operators.

And they’re generally impressed.

Our man on the ground is rather excited.

Here’s our man’s quick summary:

Just seen an Android demo. OS is very slick and iPhone-y. Browser appeared a bit slow (over wifi). Hardware was definatley the HTC Dream. Will try to get more pics later

The Near Field Communications (NFC) which O2 had been trialling with Nokia has had some optimistic results. Apparently nine out of ten (90%) of the five hundred trialists said they were happy using the technology.

The Oyster Card is a hassle, and personally I hate the thing. Along with having to remember it, place it somewhere safe, but accessible is highly inconvenient.
Ewan said back in January “Integrating it into a mobile handset makes sense to me” and I have to say, I agree.

The results of this trial don’t come as much of a surprise really, when similar uses of technology have been implemented in Japan for example. I hope that this won’t be the end of the line for NFC technology; it’s taken long enough to get here, and from the results of this small, but useful trial scream that there is a strong desire, and liking towards it.

Eighty-nine percent of the trialists said they were interested in having their Oyster Card integrated into their mobile phone.

I want to know, do we ever expect a release date for this technology to be rolled out completely within London’s transport systems?

This week we’re bringing you an absolute WHOPPER of a show. A veritable whopper.

1. We’re committed to bringing you our show from different, unusual and picturesque locations around London. I think we’ve beaten everything so far by filming from the Tower of London. Special thanks to Tim at the Historic Royal Palaces publicity department. As you might imagine, with almost 1,000 years of history to play with, Ben had a field day with his facts segment. ( 00:47 )

2. We take a look at the 3 Skypephone S2. ( 02:19 )

3. We’ve got lots of news and commentary on last week’s happenings. ( 05:15 )

Lastminute Labs, Google Gears ( 05:16 ), Orange hiring iPhone-fans ( 08:40 ), Nokia Maps

( 09:16 )/Lonely Planet ( 09:37 ), Blackberry Bold’s browser issues ( 10:26 ), IKEA MVNO ( 11:51 ).

4. James Body of Truphone makes an appearance. ( 07:03 )

5. Review of Etymotics Headphones. ( 13:47 )

6. Mobile Industry Review website news… including quick overviews of our upcoming jobs section. Plus: We’ll be at the Future of Mobile conference coming up soon. ( 17:20 )

7. Future of Mobile Conference.  ( 18:58 )

8. Special Sony Ericsson News.  Very special stuff. ( 19:18 )

9. The first EVER Whatley Goes Wild segment.  Including a special N95 8GB-protective-strap.           ( 19:40 )

10. We announce the winners of our competitions.  ( 22:48 )

11. Dan get’s his present. There’s almost a tear shed…( 24:37 )

12. James talks about the Nokia N78.  ( 25:36 )

Video Feeds:

- 3GP mobile video feed
- Downloadable video feed (roughly 190mb)

I wouldn’t mind one of those connections in my place, actually. I once had a 155mb connection installed in my place in Charlton Street, just above Euston Road, in London. It was 155mb for about 20 minutes whilst the engineers tested it. Then they switched it back to 0.5mb as that’s what I was paying for. Joy. This was before broadband.

We get sent a lot of releases here at Mobile Industry Review — not all of them are relevant and not all of them fit into our sphere of interest — but this one caught my eye.

Firstly, it’s about lotsa-meg. Any mobile genius worth his or her salt will have an interest in megs-per-second. Or, in Geo’s case, gigs-per-second. It’s all about the speed, right?

Second, the press release title was simply: Fibre, network, london, sewer.

Gifted. A gifted title. Does-wot-it-sayz-on-the-tin.

A little more info:

Geo, a leading provider of bespoke fibre networks, today announced a refresh of their Geo.Metro product portfolio which includes the launch of Geo.ONE PLUS (1Gbit/s plus), Geo.TEN (10Gbit/s) and Geo.TEN PLUS (2 x 10Gbit/s), all scalable Managed Network Service solutions for businesses in London. The company is the only network provider to have deployed optical fibre via the Thames Water sewer system.

Geo’s high speed solution has been designed for medium to large sized organisations that require a secure and reliable network to connect multiple sites across the capital. Geo also offers dedicated fibre for customers who prefer to manage and own their own network infrastructure.

Fibre, network, London, sewer, yes, please. Although I don’t expect it will compete very effectively on price with o2′s recently announced £20/month mobile and home broadband solution.

There is a video of the Geo CEO talking about the concept on their front page. I’d have linked it here if it was embeddable.

I’m going to ask Steve O’Donnell of The Hot Aisle and Martin MacLeod (ye Brother and fellow data speed nut) of BladeWatch for their viewpoints. I reckon they’ll be overwhelmingly positive of the concept.

The repeaters will be installed on all 52 of Virgin’s Pendolino trains on the London to Glasgow route by November of this year, and Vodafone says it will improve the rate of dropped calls by 60 percent.

Having attempted to use a data card several times on the Eurostar and found a frightening drop out rate, here’s hoping the repeaters find themselves passing through the Channel Tunnel sometime soon.