The second prize was won by UK newcomer, Roulette Cricket, who walked away with €50,000.

Roulette Cricket started life as a way for the cricket-loving founders to decide the next person in their party to queue and pay for the beers at the matches they attended together. In those days, they marked up the cricket field on a paper plate and they would bet each other where the next ball would next cross the boundary. Realising they may be on to a winner, the team converted their rudimentary sketch into a successful iPhone app and will launch on other platforms shortly, including Android.

They hope that Roulette Cricket might be the first app in a portfolio of sports games that use the mobile to enhance live sports, with either fun wagers or betting for real money – they’re planning to license their games to the major betting companies. As such, they may be the first wave of a phenomenon christened “second screen gaming”, which I have to say is rather confusing as a term, as we’ve had the mobile called “third screen”, “fourth screen” and indeed the “seventh media” in the past and “second screen” seems to invite the “make up your minds, guys!” type of criticism from users and pundits alike.

Leaving that small bugbear aside, there were a couple of aspects to this service that I felt were noteworthy.

Firstly, they’re in a classic startup scenario where now the game is released, they’re going to need to run very, very fast to stay ahead of the competition. The team claim to have patents in place to protect their IP, but the way that that game is played is that you have to wait for someone to infringe the patent and then take them to court. Many years later and after much money has been spent on legal fees, you may just win and get damages.

It’s actually a better strategy to out-run and out-innovate competition, so that they have to work with you – or buy you. So I hope the team are running very fast with their €50,000 cheque and looking for more expansion funds, as I write.

The second area I think was very interesting about them and yet almost came as a throw-away comment in their presentation (actually, it was in response to a question that I asked) was how they sourced their content. In this case, their content is ball-by-ball commentary, in Tweet like length, including details of any boundary hits, to trigger the bets. This can be sourced professionally, but actually any match attendee could provide this information and get paid for it – or not, as I suspect many would quite like to do it for free, in return for some minor acknowledgment and the odd free ticket.

I wonder what other businesses could look to source information or content along these lines, possibly using the akvo validation tools that I wrote about yesterday?

The final area that I like is the whole concept of using a mobile to enhance another experience. In Cricket Roulette’s case, it’s not just about adding some fun and value to attendees at cricket matches – but for people watching from their TV at home. Clearly, if there’s a betting-for-money element to it, it’s only going to work for live broadcasting, but that shouldn’t let it limit our thinking.

As a few examples, the gaming-for-fun idea could be used in many non-sporting contexts, from predicting which Strictly contestant will be going home that show to what colour dress the winner will wear to how many time Brucie utters his famous catch phrase.

This could indeed be a rich seam for someone to mine. Providing we get away from that dreadful second screen nomenclature.

Picnic itself bills itself as “Burning Man meets TED” and attracts a mixed crowd of geeks and people working in various creative industries. No naked people though, so not terribly Burning Man! I wish I had more time to look around the exhibition and take in some more of the speakers. I did catch Cory Doctorow, who I’ve long admired and IDEO’s Tom Hulme, who had a fabulous app that allowed him to automatically Tweet key links and other information during his presentation. See here for more info if you want to try this little piece of magic yourself.

I also ran into Marije Vogelzang, who I met at TEDX Munich earlier in the year when she gave a fascinating talk about food design. She owned the cool little cafe/restaurant where the judging took place, which included quirky little effects like serving coffee in old jars and tea in mismatched tea cups, as well as delicious food. Yum.

There were four entries to Vodafone Mobile Clicks and all were notable in their own way and very worthy finalists. You can read about them here and find out who the winners were and I really recommend that you check it out and take some time to read and be inspired. However, I’d like to write a little about akvo.org, which didn’t end up a winner, but are still very worthy of your attention.

akvo is a not-for-profit run by a bunch of hardcore geeks and charity people, all of whom share the vision of trying to make the world a better place. The organisation allows potential donors to find specific projects to fund, mainly around building clean water and sanitation projects. Rather than giving money to a charity to do what it likes with it, including funding massive administration costs, you can chose exactly where your money goes and how it’s spent.

However, some of the key issues with charity these days are accountability and trust and it’s imperative that ways are found to resolve them. The donor must be convinced that their hard-earned dollars end up doing what they’re meant to, rather than being siphoned off by middle-men and administration fees. As an example, I think that perhaps the reluctance to give aid to Pakistan recently after the flooding tragedy is because donors just don’t believe that their funds end up in the right place. In akvo’s case, they must be able to show that the water pump that was paid for was installed and working, so they needed a tool that did this.

akvo have therefore developed a mobile solution to help solve this problem. Basically, when the field worker has completed the project for which the monies have been allocated, she takes a photo with her mobile. The photo is then validated by a combination of location (GPS), time stamp, text and phone ID, so that in these days of Photoshop, you can be pretty sure that the photo is true and that the project was actually finished. The validated photo can then be used by the charity for audit purposes and the prove to the donors that their money was well spent.

It’s a very simple idea, but one which solves a real problem and will change people’s lives all round the world. Well done, guys!

It’s also worth noting that this technique can be used in a variety of other use cases (not just other charities) where it’s important that an image is verified as being true. During the presentation I was scribbling a list of these, until they said that they’d already thought of that! They plan to launch a for-profit arm of the organisation, wholly owned by akvo, to exploit these and thus raise more funds. Examples of these applications included citizen journalism and the media, insurance claims and reporting infrastructure problems to local authorities.

Amsterdam always impresses me with its unique combination of creativity, tech savvy and passion and I’m already looking forward to my next trip, whenever that might be.

If you’re a blogger, you should volunteer to host a Carnival in the next month or two. It’s interesting to do, but it also boosts your profile and increases your traffic – what more could you want? If that floats your boat, drop me a line or leave a comment.

Russel & Carlo,

[company we thought was reputable, and which you've definitely heard of]‘s partner and developer team is interested in purchasing email lists from MobHappy. Could you please provide me with the following information?

* Number of unique monthly visitors to your site
* Email list community size
* Newsletter list community size
* Audience breakdown, including number of developers
* How developers are segmented (iPhone, etc.); if they not segmented, can they be?
* Geographic breakdown
* Pricing information

I am currently unable to access my [company we thought was reputable, and which you've definitely heard of] email, so if you could please reply to all when you respond, I would appreciate it.

Thank you!

First, It’s Russell, with two Ls, but nice try. Second, this email brings to mind some of my rather ham-fisted attempts to pick up girls in college, because it, like me back then, elicited a certain response: “Do you find this approach to actually be successful?”

So just to make things clear: we don’t sell our email list. And we don’t “rent” it, either.

Congrats to Russell and the rest of the AdMob team, especially its founder, Omar. It’s been exciting watching them bounce from strength to strength and see the ad impressions pile up, and witness how they’ve supported so many publishers and developers by giving them an easy and effective way to monetize their content.

And I also wanted to say welcome to all our new readers who are coming to us from the WSJ’s Venture Capital Dispatch blog, which had a nice little writeup on Omar (and Russell), highlighting the series of posts Russell put together based on Omar’s lessons learned from his work building AdMob. They’re full of some great lessons, so I’ll link to them again here:
- Omar Hamoui on Ideas and Company Launches
- Omar Hamoui on Sales and Marketing
- Omar Hamoui on Deals and Negotiations
- Omar Hamoui on Competitive Threats and Team
- Omar Hamoui on Communication and A Final Thought

Notable by their absence is real brands telling us about real campaigns that they’ve been running, which is really what it’s all about. And agency folk have sometimes been a little thin on the ground too.

The Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Forum (bit of a mouthful) in Berlin this Autumn has changed all that. No less than 10 brands are confirmed speakers so far and this includes the likes of Nike, Lufthansa, BMW Nestle and Coke.

So if you’re into mobile marketing and you only go to one event in the next 6 months, this should be it.

I’m not sure I’m actually allowed to do this, but if you won’t tell, neither will I. I have a code that gives you 15% of the ticket price (15%MMF09) when you book here.

Berlin is a very groovy place too, so I hope to see you there.

Full disclosure: I’m Global Chairman Emeritus of the MMA.

One area that demonstrates this is their introduction and usage of virtual gifting. While advertising is certainly a key part of their revenue model, getting their members to hand over hard cash for bolt-on services is also very important. As such, it’s developed into a classic Freemium model, with members using the basic free service, but sending each other virtual gifts too, ranging from rings to flowers to virtual boob jobs.

This Valentine’s Day though, they’ve again branched out into something new, allowing members to send each other real gifts in the analogue world, currently limited to chocolates and “panty-roses” (knickers packaged to look like a rose, if you were wondering) during the trial.

I really believe that this concept will succeed and is a great example of what I was writing about in my Prediction for this year that mCommerce would start to take off, over and above mobile content. Obviously, not all orders will be via mobile, but some will be and that’s a great start.

Having just spoken to Mark Curtis, CEO and Founder of Flirtomatic, I can confirm that they’re already sold out of their stock, having just launched last weekend. So things look very promising for this type of idea for Flirtomatic and perhaps for mCommerce generally, as I suggested.

[In the interests of full disclosure, Flirtomatic are a key publishing partner of AdMob, which is my day job.]

The portfolio consists of 1.5 million free books that are in the public domain (ie out of copyright), which normally means pretty old, or “classics” if you’re an optimist. Copyright is hugely complicated and varies from country to country, but a rough rule of thumb is that books are in copyright for the author’s life plus 70 years – so writers who died pre-1939 generally speaking. So you won’t find John Grishams or Stephenie Meyers, but there’s a rich cornucopia of Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain (no relation to Shania), which should keep you busy for a while.

I had a bit of a read of Dickens’s Hard Times last night (and you thought we had it tough) and it works pretty well as a reader, though it’s no comparison to the real thing – the Kindle – or the old real thing, a book. You can’t download it per se, just view it online, 15 pages at a time, which means that the size of the screen means an awful lot of scrolling down. It would also be hard to read a whole book in snack sessions, as it would mean a little bit of clumsy navigation to return to your place every time. I think that could be a little irritating.

Having said that, Dickens especially, lends itself well to snack reading as he wrote most of his novels in installments, not books. This means that each chapter builds to a crescendo, designed to get you to originally buy the next one and these days, navigate to the next chapter. This led to a famous real scene in the US where the quay was lined with people waiting to hear the news of Little Nell, the desperately ill heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. As the ship approached the harbour, it was hailed with shouts of “What news of Little Nell???!!”.

She died, by the way.

Anyway, back to Book Search. Strangely, given the parent of the project, the one main criticism I have of it is that it’s actually not very good for ummm…searching for a book – or displaying its wares for discovery either.

As far as discovery is concerned, there’s a category called “Featured Books”, which in principle should be used to whet your appetite for hidden gems or popular choices. In reality, the same 5 books are featured every time you visit the page or refresh it, or click the “Load More” button.

In search, books are presented pretty randomly – or perhaps I couldn’t see a pattern – with critiques of works often ranked higher than the original book, as an example. Maybe it’s in order of popularity of download so far and maybe lots of English majors use the service, swatting up for exams. But it seems unlikely.

Finally, and I don’t want to be picky, but an awful lot of books that are free and available online aren’t available for mobile. So the 1.5 million books used in the headline is rather misleading at this stage. I’m assuming (and hoping) that they’ve rushed out to market with a very limited selection at this stage and will be adding to the portfolio on an ongoing basis.

Having said that, the logical approach would be to load popular works first, and then round out the portfolio. This doesn’t seem to be the case, with some really obscure stuff already there and some great works unavailable for mobile at the moment. We should be told.

So, nice one, Google. Thanks for what we have so far, I’m sure I’ll be using it from time to time and I look forward to enjoying it get better.

So if you’re not following us on Twitter (MobHappy is the user name), now is your chance to sign up. If you don’t “do” Twitter, you’ll just have to be more patient than the Twitterati, or start following. Remember, if you follow either Carlo or me personally (ie not “MobHappy”), you won’t get these previews.

Actually, I very rarely use my personal Twitter account these days, so you’ll be waiting in vain most of the time anyway.

In fairness, the list is probably more controversial than Maradona’s Hand of God goal in 1986 because it’s just so hard to choose such a list in the first place – and anyway, it does tend to be Euro/UK-centric.

You can download the mag here and start you very own “we wuz robbed” debate.

Congrats to all the people I know who made it, along with a fair smattering of MobHappy readers I’m delighted to report. Now the pressure is on for the third year.