mobile monday--coming soon to a city near you!

Mobile monday comes to Denmark—and soon to a city near you!

by Scott Hill M.E.E.
Frontier sciences group
Copenhagen
frontiersciences@gmail.com
www.myspace.com/frontiersciences


Monday the 4th of June 2007 was a special day in Denmark—the day the mobile monday came to Copenhagen. I was invited to the first meeting of the Copenhagen chapter of the mobile monday network, and showed up not knowing what exactly to expect at the IT University in Copenhagen to see what it was all about. The program was sponsored by Crossroads Copenhagen (www.copenhagencrossroads.dk) and Danish Computerworld (www.cw.dk).and attracted about
60 guests, including students from Copenhagen University and the IT University as well as
participants from industry in Denmark and Sweden. .

One of the founders of Mobile Monday in Finland, Jari Tammisto, held the keynote address and explained the background for the network.

What is mobile monday?

Mobile monday was started in Finland last year with telecomms companies like Nokia and Sony-Ericsson as corporate sponsors. A grassroots movement, with no paid salaries to anyone, and run entirely on volunteer labor, has spread like wildfire throughout Europe and the rest of the world, with chapters springing up weekely in new member countries. Jari explained that in 2007 mobile monday
will arrange over 500 events in different cities with a planned attendence of over 100,000 participants.
The local chapter arranges the event, and local customs are included so that each MoMo event is differnt. Jari showed slides from a MoMo event in India, where participants say on cushions on the floor, with their mobile phones at their sides, sitting around and drinking chai and dressed in saris and local dress, a rather informal setting compared to the IT University lecture theater.

The main goal of the MoMo network is to help mobile entrepeneurs on their way to the international market and attract venture and development capital to the new mobile digital market. Several of the speakers at the Copenhagen event focussed on industry-related digital content, such as
location-based services, mobile services accross borders, WLAN (wireless LAN) telephony, 3G and EDGE mobile education and free hotspots for metropolitan area networks, such as are being implemented in the U.S. , U.K. Germany and Sweden including Karlskrona, Stuttgart, London and San Francisco where the city provides free hotspots for citizens. With the proliferation of smartphones, WLAN PDA's and mobile devices with built-in GPS, these services are of interest to an increasing number of subscribers and is clearly the wave of the future.

Information on the different activities of the MoMo chapters can be found on the homepage
www.mobilemonday.net

The homepage is available in several European languages.




Mobility in Denmark

The speakers at the first MoMo event in Denmark came from several sectors, including the telecoms industry, university research , and mobile content providers.

Pauline Middelton, driector of Crossroads Copenhagen and co-sponsor of the conference, talked about the future of digital content in our lives, and expects that the MoMo concept will take off in Denmark, as it has in other countries, when people hear more about it.

Morten Christensen, CEO for ”3” in Denmark, talked about 3's plans for a turbo 3G net in Denmark, which is already being rolled out in major cities. Present tests indicate a bandwidth of 7.2 Mbit/sec can be reached in areas with good coverage, and this may be increased in the future. However, the penetration of 3G phones has had a slow start in Denmark, due to the high cost of the handsets.

Kelly Ann Kenan from TeleDanmark (TDC) announed that they have now 750 active hotspots in Denmark, in airports, hotels, coffeshops and municipal areas, but as these are paid services, they are of course not used by everybody yet. However, in response to qustions she assured us that TDC would provide the infrastructure for free hotspots ”if somebody was willing to pay for it”.

Johann Tilly from The Cloud taleked about an open business model for public WiFi hotspots, and about The Cloud's plans for 10.000 hotspots worldwide. Lars Lannuan from 3rd Person, talked about mobile gaming innovation and interactive mobile soaps produced by his company which are a hit among teenagers. An increasing number of mobile digital content providers are springing up in Europe, such as O2, Gameloft, and Misselead, and mobile service providers such as British Telecom (BT) Vonage, and Vodaphone are already offering such mobile content to subscribers.

Presentations from the speakers can be seen on the Copenhagen chapter homepage, www.mobilemonday.dk

The next mobile monday in Copenhagen will be held on 3 September at the IT University
(www.itu.dk)



The Jaiku project

One of the spinoffs of MoMo which I find interesting is the Jaiku project (www.jaiku.com) which is a free community service for exchanging informaton between computers, mobile phones, smartphones, PDA's and other handsets. If you have a smartphone or smart mobile device, such as WLAN PDA's, the Nokia E-series phones or S60 symbian phones, or a handset which supports SMS and MMS messages, you can send messages for free to any member in the Jaiku net, no matter which telephone or operator you have. Normally it is difficult, if not impossible, to send text messages (SMS) to phones outside your own country, where your local operator has no coverage or roaming agreement.
For example, just sending an SMS from Denmark to Sweden—a distance of only a few miles—requires a paid service or an SMS-to-email server to work!

Jaiku also includes blogs from major mobile leaders in the industry and reasearch, and, of course all the latest gossip on new phones such as the Nokia 800 Linux tablet with WLAN (VoiP works without SIM-card or operator account!), the iPhone, and the latest in 3G phones and PDA's. Jaiku's ”bloghive” is a gold mine of information for potential mobile developers and investors. There is also a debate section, newsletters, and information from the different MoMo chapters.


The Flocboard

During the MoMo conference a large computer screen was set up on the wall behind the speaker's podium, a so-called ”Flocboard”. Floc is a service which allows people with SMS-enabled mobile phones to communicate with the speakers – and other participants-- including those visiting the conference on the internet, by displaying SMS messages on the Flocboard. A rotating display frame ensures that the latest messages are posted first, and then replaced on the display as new messages are received.

Pauline Middelton explained that it was not allowed to raise your hand and ask questions in the usual way, and that only questions sent to the Flocboard would be answered. This resulted in a flurry of activity from the participants, including myself, to be the first to get a message up on the Flocboard.
An interesting way to interact with the audience, which may find its way into the eLearning sector, where cheap mobile handsets (the 10$ PDA) can be used instead of expensive computers and cabled networks with limited range.

Links:

international mobile monday site:
www.mobilemonday.net

the Copenhagen Crossroads project:
www.crossroadscopenhagen.com

the Flocboard:
www.floc.eu/projects/floc-board/

the Jaiku project:
www.jaiku.com

Danish mobile monday site:
www.mobilemonday.dk

The IT University in Copenhagen:
www.itu.dk

The University of Copenhagen:
www.ku.dk

About the author: Scott Hill is an American scientist living in Denmark.
The frontier sciences group is developing advanced digital technologies for eHealth and eLearning
applications in Europe in connection with an EU program on digital mobile content and location-dependent mobile services. You can read more about the Frontier Sciences Group on myspace.com and MSN live spaces, under ”frontiersciences”