Several people asked me about the implications of Google’s launch of Android this week. Here’s my take on it.

• Google is finding it hard to replicate its successful desktop search model in the mobile world.
• One of the big barriers, as Google see it, is the continued presence of walled gardens erected by the mobile operators which interfere with Google’s ability to reach out to consumers directly with an optimised search experience.
• Another key barrier Google sees is a lack of understanding by handset manufacturers of what it takes to truly turn the handset into a useful mobile internet device.
• Google see a more capable mobile browser across the widest possible range of handsets as a key enabler for better mobile search. Not just on high end devices like the iPhone and N95, but right across the handset market.
• Android is an initiative that if successful would break down a number of these barriers in one fell swoop.

Will Android be successful? I wouldn’t completely rule it out, but I remain cautious…

Not very much has been said about exactly what Android contains and what it doesn’t contain. Does it have a complete user interface layer? Does it integrate a full set of phone applications (SMS, MMS, IM etc)? Does it include a 3G protocol stack? The lack of a complete solution would make it very expensive to bring an Android handset to market compared to Symbian and Microsoft.

From a technical perspective Google’s platform reminds me of Savaje (US-based mobile OS startup, now defunct) and the operator-led Open Mobile Terminal Platform Alliance (Java-based OS, initially implemented on HTC devices).

With the OMTP Alliance, the operators wanted to weaken the grip of Nokia and Microsoft on the phone OS, and get control over the user experience. Google’s Open Handset Alliance is an attempt to build similar industry support, but has notably fewer operators participating.

Getting a new OS into significant volume i.e. 10s of millions of new handsets is a massive engineering undertaking. Are Google resourced to deliver this? They have plenty of software engineers, but not too many mobile software engineers.

Android is an initiative without a business model. In my experience, these kinds of strategic initiatives don’t get sustained unless the business model is clearly defined.

This morning, I woke up to find that Robert Scoble posted his review of our mobile search engine. I was convinced that Robert would enjoy using Taptu, but the review is simply glowing!

James Q. Pearce at MocoNews points us to a report by The Age which claims that Australian youngsters are having to declare themselves bankrupt due to overspending their meagre revenue on mobile bills.

“Fair Trading Minister Linda Burney said a survey conducted by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) had highlighted concerns about “premium” mobile phone content and the massive bills being racked up - often unknowingly - by users.

“Suddenly they have got bills of $3,000 to $4,000 AUD because they thought services they were getting in term of downloads and ringtones, and voting on Big Brother, were free,” Ms Burney told reporters.”

Normally, my attitude would be that someone should give them a dollar to go buy a clue and that these teens should get themselves out of the trouble they got in. Learning responsibility, character building and what not.

But when it comes to mobile, there are some very grey zones. In theory, providers of mobile services are obliged to clearly explain cost of use in plain English. In practice, they’ll often use convoluted terminology and small print to pass a quick one while the user isn’t paying attention. With no experience in escalating issues with customer service in a telco, the teens find themselves backed against a wall and declaring bankruptcy crops up as a potential way out.

In my ideal world of rainbows and unicorns, every service would be morally correct and would not attempt to fool consumers. There would be no headline shouting “Only £1 for the ringtone” shadowing over small print whispering that a minimum of half a dozen ringtones a month must be purchased.

As James suggests, “surely a little flag saying ‘hey, this person has spent $200 on mobile content, we should let them know’ isn’t that hard to implement?” This should be a requirement where any service provider is required to update customers regularly on their spending.

For example, T-Mobile UK sent me a free SMS every Friday at lunchtime to let me know how many of my monthly minutes I had left and how long I had to use them up. After a few weeks, I stopped the automated SMS since I had a pretty good idea of my phone use, but it was extremely useful in the early days. Networks are also taking a step in the right direction by notifying you of roaming charges via SMS when entering a new European country.

To the suggestion of widening the net to all paid-for mobile services, the default reaction for operators would most likely be that it’ll cause users to hold back on using their services - having realised how much money they’re blowing on Crazy Frog ringtones - promptly eating into their high profit margins.

That being said, I’m convinced that for nine out of 10 users, it would have quite the opposite effect. The most common reservation we continually hear during user testing sessions for Taptu is that most consumers have no concept of how much a song download or a quick browse of the mobile web is costing them. As a result, they choose to avoid using it altogether for fear of racking up immense bills. For these users, I’m willing to bet my place in the iPhone queue this Friday that they’d be pleasantly surprised at the low cost of their mobile web use.

Do other services offer this kind of triggered courtesy notices to let you track your spending? Would you welcome such a service?

If these automated messages were sent to the teens The Age reported on, they couldn’t claim innocence when the bills start rolling in, forcing them to decide to either pay up, shape up their habits in the future or disconnect and find a different hobby. Maybe knitting or paperclip collecting.

This week, Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity hosts the Carnival, filled with tricks, treats and loads of good posts. As one would expect, the buzz last week revolved very much around Google’s announcement of the Gphone which, as it turns out, is a mobile platform with Android at its core. Plenty of interesting posts, so go have a read!

All About Symbian points out this morning that the Nokia Music Store is now live for UK users. Or some UK users anyways. Those with an N95 8GB, N81 or Internet Explorer only. Not me*.

When I visited Nokia in September, I asked the PR person whether purchasing music would be widely available to existing devices, as well as Mac users - since the demo clearly worked fine on Windows in Internet Explorer. She skirted around the existing devices question, but seemed perfectly confident that the store would work happily on a Mac. Not so just yet.

I appreciate that Internet Explorer represents a fair chunk of the population, but Firefox, Safari and other non-IE users probably make up most of the gadget-using crowd they’re targetting - ie. those who use their phones for more than just banal calls. It’s also early days and things will evolve, but universality and ease of use regardless of what device you’re using is something we treat as essential here at Taptu, and I’m surprised it wasn’t a priority for Nokia.

That issue aside, the store looks reasonably good, but is only differentiated from other online stores by the application which comes pre-installed on the new N95 8GB and the N81, as the transfer to mobile needs to be done from a computer on any other Nokia device.

Music on mobile is clearly an area where we’ll see a lot of activity in the next few months, and I’m thrilled to be here to watch it all happen!

[* Yes, I could launch Parallels but that’s not the point… ]

From the archives, this is an impromptu video of the Nokia Music Store beta, taken back in September at the Nokia offices in Finland.

Julia Palatovska invited me to present on the topic of “Social-assisted search: a new approach to mobile search?” at the inaugural Mobile Monday in Moscow earlier this week. I’ve never been to Russia before, plus this was a good opportunity to talk about Taptu to a completely new audience in a big mobile market (pop = 141.2m, subs = 140.4m, 99.4% penetration). Travelwise, the 9am BA flight out of Heathrow would get me there around 4pm Moscow time. Then I had to get from the airport to the venue near the Olympic Stadium by 6pm.

There were nearly 1000 people in the arrival hall when I arrived, and I joined the back of a 30 person queue. Yet, I was checked through within 10 minutes. What a super-efficient process compared to my San Francisco visit the week before! Russian visas are now machine-readable, and it just took 30 seconds for the officials to check each passenger through.

I met some really smart people at the MoMo event. There is a very active community of mobile developers now in Moscow, with many investments in startups being made mainly by private individuals. There are over 5000 mobile sites in Russia, I learned. Mobile internet infrastructure is still at an embryonic stage with most base stations still plain vanilla GPRS, some with EDGE, with 3G to come in 2008. Yet there are millions of 3G handsets in the market, as consumers buy the latest Nokia models. My presentation on mobile search was well-received, and several people in the audience told me afterwards that Taptu was working fine on the Russian networks, from their own handsets.

Some other first impressions. My hotel, the Marriott Teverskya, was top notch, one of the best I’ve stayed in. Russia has a vibrant economy powered by oil and gas money. It manifests itself in countless cranes, building sites, brand new hotels, shops, Mercedes and Astons. The old GUM department store refurbished with scores of high-end stores, boutiques and cafes. All sitting somewhat incongruously side-by-side with the old Soviet edifices.

It became crystal clear to me after my Moscow trip that we should make the Taptu platform as open as possible to 3rd party developers and other collaborators so that we can offer country-specific versions of Taptu in as many markets as possible in the shortest possible time frame.

This week, the Mobile Carnival is hosted by Rudy at mTrends. There’s tons of interesting posts, ranging from coverage of Mobile 2.0 conference and the Symbian Smartphone show, to some of the week’s news highlights.

Well… What are you waiting for? Go have a read!

[Update 8:32pm: Google Maps also offers its support by showing the state of the fires, as well as the emergency services and evacuated areas. Via Digg.]

Reading about the Californian fires from across the ocean, reading Tweets and looking at Flickr pics, I feel sick and wish there was a way to stop it all. But at the same time, I’m fascinated to see what use people make of technology that’s available.

Chris Messina has been throwing around the idea of hashtags to help identify relevant content on Twitter and other social networks for some time now, and while Twitter hasn’t implimented the hash-based tags per se, they’ve enabled users to track all discussion on any given keyword, whether it’s “NYC”, “Steve Jobs” or “earthquakes”.

In time of crisis, people organise quickly, and this one seems to have picked up. Really, what a useful tool to catch the latest news when you’ve been evacuated from home and want to keep a check on your loved ones as well as the evolution of the situation?

Even Wired’s Compiler blog covers the situation:

Twitter users can enter “track sandiegofire” in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.

Here’s an excellent real-world example of the usefulness of Twitter’s limited scope and feature set — Reporting breaking news quickly. They’re certainly filing updates more frequently than most mainstream media outlets.

Social networks and mobiles form such an ideal way to quickly organise vast numbers of people, a Twitteresque emergency service should exist everywhere, as some universities have started making compulsory. Some will shout and scream about privacy and Big Brother, but personally, if it means I get advance warning and can pick up my husband and my cats before the fire’s on my doorstep, the SMS will be a very welcome one.

Welcome to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists, I’m thrilled to be hosting it here on the Taptu blog.

The turnout in posts has been great, and we’re covering a wide range of topics today; from web3.0 to free speech, and from Burmese dissent to UFO sightings. There’s also a sneak preview surprise for all Carnival readers at the bottom of this post… So what are you waiting for? Read on!

Innovation in Developing Markets

From Mobile Active, guest writer Abi Jagun from the University of Manchester deconstructs the hype on mobiles in civil society, in particular in developing countries. Kevin Smith from Vodafone Betavine touches on the inventiveness of some African services when faced with a problem, from “beeping” each other to transferring funds via a mobile payment service. In a similar thread, Paul Ruppert at Mobile Point View posts the first of a two-part series on mobile transactions, interviewing Michele Scanlon, an expert on mobile payments in global emerging markets.

Controversy in America

Abhishek Tiwari discusses the seemingly game-changing decisions Sprint has made over their wireless offering in the US, moving away from the binding contracting model and transitioning to a subscription model without users being tied to a specific device. Echoing some of the Sprint news mentioned by Abhishek, Jason Devitt from Skydeck tells us about Verizon Wireless (almost) declining to allow Pro-Choice America send messages, explicitly requested by users, about abortion, on the grounds that the subject matter was too controversial.

Ian Welsh of The Agonist questions net neutrality in the current oligo/monopoly of the telecoms landscape, putting out red flags around AT&T and Verizon’s questionable termination clauses.

Learning From the Past

Reflecting on the launch of the Sputnik 50 years ago, Judy Breck reminds us that today’s educators should use mobiles to support lessons in a positive way rather than resort to banning them from classrooms.

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words

Mark van ‘t Hooft at Ubiquitous Thoughts posts his observations on the dilemma military generals are facing in the current Burma/Myanmar protests with regards to the use of mobile phones and information virality. Also musing on the impact of new technologies, Krisse from All About Symbian wonders about UFOs and the effect of cameraphones on the sightings. Quick, get your camera out, there’s something weird up there!

The Web Is Abuzz…

Meanwhile, C. Enrique Ortiz from …about mobility comments on Jason Calacanis’ “official” definition of Web 3.0, and Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens writes on the “Phonetop”, mobile equivalent to the desktop, ODP and widgets as the possible future of mobile apps.

Dennis from Wapreview looks at the mobile version of Gawker Media sites I’m a big fan of; Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Valleywag, Wonkette and Defamer. Verdict? “It’s nice to see that a big publisher like Gawker is thinking of mobile, but these really aren’t very good mobile sites.” Read on to find out why. Tarek Esber from tarek speaks mobile… takes us through how the mobile web saved the day twice by allowing him to connect to important information in a quickie, taking him to destination.

Mobile Conference

This week, Rudy De Waele points us to the Mobile 2.0 Conference, which is taking place in San Francisco next Monday, 15th October. Presented by Mobile Monday and The Open Group, the event brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of mobile; investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, application developers and web technologists.

Coincidentally, Taptu will be presenting in one of the Mobile Launch Pads and showing some pretty exciting stuff! Have a look at the agenda and the speakers list and come tell me you don’t want to be there? I’ve been informed there are a few places left for those who’d like to attend.

And Finally… The Sneak Preview!

This brings me to the sneak preview you’ve been waiting for; we’ve decided to invite Carnival readers to have an early look at the Taptu mobile search beta, before we launch publicly. Want to have a look? Just leave a comment using a legitimate email address or email me on hello@taptu.com and you’ll get access to our private beta tomorrow.

Next week, the spotlight for the Carnival will be on the Symbian Smartphone Show, so see you there!

It’s been a few weeks since we last linked to the Carnival of the Mobilists, but we’re quickly approaching the 100th!

This week, it’s hosted by Tomi Ahonen of Communities Dominate Brands, with topics ranging from the Blyk launch to Smart Mobs’ satirical Scroogled piece.

Next week, the Carnival is hosted by yours truly, right here on the Taptu blog! Looking forward to reading everyone’s best entries. (Want to contribute? Details are here)