It promises to be a day full of great discussions and illuminating information — and best of all, we’ve still got free tickets to give away, so head over to the WIP site and register!

Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Conference is a one-day event in Barcelona on June 17, 2010 exploring the future of mobile development and innovation, presented by dotopen and the Mobile 2.0 Organizing Committee, with the support of Nokia, PayPal X, BlackBerry, bluenove, O2 Litmus, Orange, Vodafone, Microsoft and Skyhook Wireless.The conference is tailored to mobile developers who want to discover the latest tools and trends in mobile technology (DevTrack) and business (BizTrack).

We’ll kick-off the day with a couple of panels that will set the tone:  “Web vs. Native Apps” and “How to Make Money as a Developer”.

This year’s Developer Track will have 16 different workshop sessions and take place in four fully equipped rooms. Participants will get hands on insights into the latest in mobile development directly from the platform leaders and experts: Nokia, Vodafone, Blackberry, Mozilla, Opera, Paypal and more. Some DevTrack sessions will be:

- HTML5 for the iPad [with Julian Moreno Beltran]
- Mobile Mountains [with Tom Hume]
- OneSocialWeb Tutorial [with Laurent Eschenauer]
- Using Geolocation and Maps in Android [with Israel Ferrer]
- HTML5 Apps, The mobile web taking over? [with Wolfram Kriesing]
- Opera Mobile emulator [with Andreas Bovens]
- CouchDB [with Martin Higham]
- Mobile Web Evolution: HTML5, Video, Widgets and APIs [with François Daoust]

The Business Track will be all about the app economy with panels and talks from thought leaders such as Volker Hirsch who will talk about  ”How Social helps to Deliver Effective Freemium Mobile Games & Apps” and Chrisine Perey focusing on ”Generating Revenues with Mobile Augmented Reality”. Check the speakers’ page for more information and bio’s.

To celebrate the great community of mobile developers Mobile 2.0 Europe will close the day with a spectacular AppCircus showcasing 10 of the the most innovative apps live on stage! Apply here if you would like to present your app in front of your peers and industry experts!

The event will be held at the brand new Communication Campus of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Conference is the most open & complete mobile developer conference supported by the major industry players and providing an intense hands-on and engaging experience.

You can get a ticket to Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Conference for only 99€ for dotopen members. You can register for FREE here! Otherwise, standard ticket price for the event is 299€. Buy here.

Second, I’ve also joined the Wireless Industry Partnership as their new community manager! I’ve known Caroline Lewko from WIP for a long time and have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and I’m honored that she asked me to join her team. I’ll be working to build and support WIP’s community of developers and helping to carry out WIP’s mission of making developers as successful as they can be. I’m excited about the opportunity here, and I’m glad to be doing it as a part of WIP!

To that end, there are some events I want to tell you about — and if you’re in the neighborhood, stop in and say hi:
- On Wednesday June 9, I’ll be at the WIPJam in Berlin, that’s a part of the IT-Profits show. We’re currently working on the agenda, and we’re looking for some input on what developers want to hear about. If you submit your ideas to us by May 9, you could get a free pass to the event (a EUR99 value)!
- A few days later, on June 12, I’ll be in London for the Vodafone Betavine Mobile Technology for Social Entrepreneurs event. It’s part of the Betavine Social Exchange efforts, focused on using mobile technology to solve challenges in developing nations.
- I won’t be there, but the rest of the WIP team will be in Singapore for CommunicAsia, where they’ll be holding another WIPJam on June 16.

I’d also like to thank all of our lovely MH readers for your attention and support, your insights, emails, comments, conversations and connections have been a huge help to me!

On the value to consumers of location-based ads:

“For consumers, that’s a simple answer: context. Location is a way to put messages in a relevant and immediate context that makes the consumer’s life easier and better… On the surface, I would love more targeted ads! With trusted brands and the right controls in place I would have no problem letting a brand locate me to give me a better ad experience. The key is the controls, however. Just visiting the brand’s mobile site is not explicit consent to locate me in real time. I would want to dictate how often and in what hours a brand can locate me. In the messaging world, users give consent to receive text messages, and can stipulate a certain number of messages per day/week/month… Regarding getting a real-time location before messaging, that should require additional consent. This is the old concept of permission-based marketing where you must ask me for permission before getting closer to me. Well, gaining my real-time location from the carrier is extremely personal so I am only going to give that up if a brand can offer me some significant value in return.”

On using location simply as an excuse to message customers:

“If a brand doesn’t have something compelling to say in a text message they are better off not sending it. Period. All the user has to do is reply STOP and then that customer is lost. Again, context is everything. Location by itself is not an excuse to message. Brands should tread lightly in the LBS space, because they may soon find they don’t have compelling enough content, or the resources to manage the campaigns, to really do the hype justice. We’ll get there, but we need to take some baby steps first.”

On using geofencing vs. “range searching” (i.e. “location all users within distance X of point Y” for message targeting:

“Geofencing is a specific use case within the realm of location. You need to be locating a phone (with high frequency) to trigger a geofence, because one is totally dependent on the other. Same goes for the “range search” functionality. By “range search” I mean “send a message to all phones within X meters of location Y.” Again, range search requires either high frequency pinging (aka tracking) so you know where the phones are at a given time, or a single massive “locate everyone” investment. In other words, both geofencing and range search depend on frequent location pinging.

High frequency location pinging has implications on device battery life. That’s certainly a downside. End user having to download a tag [an app that runs in the background of smartphones to provide updated location info] is also a downside. Also, device coverage is limited here; while the number of smartphones or open handsets is growing quickly, it’s not near a majority.

However, if the end user has controls to manage his or her privacy and they have visibility into how their location is being used and which brands can track them, and when they get messages, I envision a whole new ecosystem of brands giving their customers incentives to be tracked. The brand says, “we can send you more relevant, highly contextual messages about deals, etc. if we know where you are.” The users either will or will not accept those terms. The benefit is that brands develop location profiles of their customers, and customers get better service.

In the near term, I think a good middle ground for marketers is pinging the carrier networks for real-time location prior to doing a marketing blast, and then tailoring the outbound messages accordingly. Take a big retailer for example: they could craft a blast for their entire list, with default more generic messages for people not near a store. People near a store get a very targeted message, and everyone else gets the normal marketing message.”

Now while I’m not sure I completely agree with everything in there , I think there’s a very valuable point at the end of Matt’s comments: location is a tool for marketers, not a shortcut. Location information needs to supplement the rest of the mobile marketing toolkit, not supplant it.

Anyhow, there are a number of great mobile panels this year, so be sure to check out the full schedule for details on all of them. One highlight is the Wireless Future15 set on Saturday, March 13, from 11:00am-1:30pm. It’s a series of short talks on a number of different topics, and features a couple of old MH pals: David Gill of Nielsen Mobile, and Dan Appelquist from Vodafone.

If you’re going to be around SXSW and want to get together, drop me a line in the comments, via email or Twitter — I’m always happy to meet readers, and if there’s enough interest, I’ll set a meetup for coffee, beer, barbecue, breakfast tacos or something else Austin-y.

And finally, Enrique Ortiz has asked me to moderate the Mobile Monday Austin event on Monday, March 15. We are still working on getting together panelists and topics, but it should be a great bunch of visitors in town and locals. For more details and to register, visit the Mobile Monday Austin site.

I’m really looking forward to my visit and hope to meet many of you. If you’re also going, what events are you looking forward to? And if you’re speaking, drop a note in the comments so we can be sure to hit your panel!

The article says that users who come within a half-mile of one of TNF’s urban stores (or 1 mile of its suburban stores) will get sent some sort of come-hither message (like “The new spring running apparel has hit the stores! Check it out @ TNF Downtown Seattle.”), and eventually, they’ll send messages to people who visit certain hiking trails or ski slopes with weather conditions or other info. Placecast has evidently set up 1,000 geofenced areas across the US that will trigger messages from The North Face to users.

It’s great that the system is opt-in; that answers one of the major criticisms of the Starbucks example. The geofencing is a slightly more advanced location technology; adding in areas other than the stores is definitely new. But do these additions make the overall concept any stronger?

That’s not totally clear. Placecast says they won’t send a user more than 3 messages per week, but it’s the content of those messages that’s more important than their frequency. If you go to downtown Seattle and get messages you aren’t interested in from TNF every time you’re near their store, how long will you stay opted in? What will be the effect on your perception of the brand? And further, what value does a “come into the store to see some new stuff we want to sell you” message offer to the recipient? Not much, I’d say — even less if it’s not well-targeted.

What seems to often be forgotten in the discussion around LBS advertising — especially models like this — is what they offer the recipient. Simply delivering better targeted ads is a benefit for marketers, and is not inherently one for customers, too. If a customer opts in to receive messages from a brand or retailer, they’ve got to offer something of value. That doesn’t mean that every message has to be a hugely valuable coupon or be something else of tangible value, but they have to be worthwhile in some way.

Every message sent out has a negative value potential. That is, each time you contact a customer there’s the potential that the message is hurting your relationship with them, rather than helping it. If you’re setting up all these geofences that will trigger your messages, and thereby increasing the volume you’re sending, it puts quite a burden on you to ensure that each message is meaningful and valuable. Location targeting doesn’t help you get around this, regardless of how well it works.

Predictably, there’s been plenty of news about app stores. The biggest news was the announcement of the Wholesale Applications Community, a consortium of about 30 operators and device vendors that are going to work together on a common app store platform. Sounds good, right? Making it easier for developers to get their apps to market (a market of some 3 billion users represented by these operators) is a great thing. But why leave well enough alone?

In addition, the alliance will utilise existing technical standards, rather than creating new ones to allow developers to access operators’ assets, for example network capabilities or API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) more easily. In practice this means that developers will only have to create one version of their application and this can be used on multiple types of devices and operating systems (such as Symbian, Android, Windows etc) which is not the case today.

(Fill in your own comment here.) I’ll have some more thoughts on WAC in a later post, for sure.

There’s been some news on the mobile OS front as well. Microsoft announced the latest version (7) of Windows Mobile — now, it’s Windows Phone — and Intel and Nokia annouced they were merging their Moblin and Maemo mobile Linux projects to form “MeeGo”.

Windows Phone 7 looks pretty slick, but I don’t find that too surprising. The big challenge will be convincing handset vendors to devote resources to building great devices with it, and to successfully navigate the shift from an enterprise-focused product to a consumer-based one. They also face a Palm-like challenge in drawing developers back to the platform.

I don’t find the MeeGo news all that interesting on one level (Nokia’s Ari Jaaksi has a good rundown of how he sees the project), but on another level, the growing collaboration between Nokia and Intel is a little more fascinating. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

And what would MWC be without some new devices? These four caught my eye:
- The Puma Phone, made by Sagem. There have been plenty of branded devices before, but most of them haven’t been very impressive. I like this one a lot, though, because it doesn’t seem to be relying so heavily on the Puma brand as it’s only attraction. It’s got a lot of fun features and applications, and a solar charger on the back. I like this direction — making the UI of a mobile device fun. Interesting.
- HTC unveiled its latest Android devices, the Desire and the Legend. Check out the specs and features if you like, but I think the design of the two handsets is the real attraction here.
- And at the opposite end of the market, Vodafone’s $15 handset, aimed at developing markets in Africa and India. Pretty amazing that a $15 device can be profitable, and the VF150 also supports m-payments, given its buyers what’s essentially a bank account as well as a mobile phone.

Network capacity remains an issue. Dean Bubley has his usual adept roundup of what’s been said about it, while the CEO of RIM says networks would be a lot less crowded if we all bought BlackBerrys. Vodafone’s CEO is pretty worried about bandwidth-hungry content eating up his networks, too — unless he’s allowed to charge content providers for access to his customers.

Finally, what would MWC be without some of the usual suspects, those stories and topics that come around year after year without ever really seeming to get anywhere. Two great examples so far:
- “Symbian joins Adobe’s Open Screen Project for Flash compatibility”. I think it was the first 3GSM I went to, I met with Macromedia (the then-owners of Flash) and bought into the idea of Flash on mobiles. Sounded great, but we all know how it’s turned out. I’ve seen some stuff with it here and there (including its success in Japan), but it seems like nary a mobile event goes by without this sort of partnership press release. We’re well past that generating any excitement — time for some results.
- You could probably file widgets in the same category. Still there, but maybe there’s a little movement.

So with that background, I’ve been keeping an eye on what Symbian’s been up to, including its recent announcement that it had completed open-sourcing its code. That’s a big achievement, especially doing so four months ahead of schedule. But going open source in and of itself doesn’t solve any of the problems or threats facing Symbian at this point, and again, in and of itself won’t help take down the roadblocks to developers that have sprouted up in the OS over the last several years.

But what the move to open source does mean is that there’s an opportunity for the community to help rectify that (if they’re so inclined). A case in point is the Social Media Framework for the Symbian^4 release, proposed by a company called Sasken. Rafe over at All About Symbian has a great rundown of the SMF and some video about it. Basically, the SMF acts as a middleman between applications on a device and social networks. It interacts with social networking services on one side through service-specific plug-ins, then makes their information available to any application on through the use of generic, built-in APIs.

So, in practice, the SMF would have a plug-in for, say, Facebook, which would link it with, say a contacts API and image-sharing API in the SMF. The SMF server then becomes a single point of contact for applications, and the data it’s pulled in from the social networks are accessed by applications through a common interface. In layman’s terms, it’s sort of like your cable set-top box: instead of having to go out and get separate connections to CNN, ESPN, Disney Channel and so on, then connecting them to your TV, you just connect the box to the TV, and it then makes all the channels available.

That’s a great strategy for Symbian to take, and one which could let it build a strong advantage over some other platforms. Given Apple’s penchant for control, it’s very difficult to see it building such openness and interoperability into its platform; given Google’s myriad services, and its constant attempts to usurp other social networks, it’s hard to see such functionality making its way into Android. So a platform like Symbian (or Palm), that’s not attached to social-networking services via a corporate parent, can really seize this space and take real advantage of its ability to be the best middleman between social networks and devices, hopefully leading to the best integration for users, and the ability for developers to easily create the most compelling social applications.

“Ah, but what about Ovi?” I hear you asking. Nokia obviously gets the importance of integrating social services into handsets, even if the services it integrates aren’t necessarily the best ones. This middleman strategy I’ve highlighted would dictate that the platform provider doesn’t play favorites, and then hopefully the handset vendor would go along with it. If not, they’ve undermined it, and reincarnated the walled garden. Which, really, is more of the same, and not a way for success going forward.

Some good did come out of .mobi in the form of Mobiforge, its developer arm, which created a large number of resources for mobile web developers. A blog post there says business will carry on as usual. Hopefully that’s the case.

And in case you were wondering, my favorite .mobi site, flowers.mobi — you remember, the one that was purchased for $200,000 in 2006 and was supposed to be developed into a legit site with “relevant content” — is still just a parked domain with ads. And it’s still not compliant with .mobi’s rules for its sites. Big surprise there.

It’s another example of what I labeled co-browsing a while back: following along on your mobile or PC while watching a sporting event live or on TV. Football3s runs through a Flash-based interface, so it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be seeing it on mobiles very soon, but this is just the tip of the iceberg for this sort of thing, with a huge number of potential applications — particularly for mobile users.

Along similar lines, a couple of casinos here in Vegas are offering in-game betting via dedicated mobile devices, which even let people wager on the outcome of specific plays.

(As an aside, I heard about Football3s via the wonderful Football Ramble podcast, which is definitely worth the download if you like football and have a sense of humor.)