What’s the buzz at 3GSM? A Women in Mobile Data Association Meet-Up

The Women in Mobile Data Association is having an informal meet-up to chat about the buzz at this year's 3GSM in Barcelona. It’s an informal event where you can have a coffee or a glass of wine and a chat with other women in the industry about what you’ve seen and experienced at 3GSM. It'll also be a chance to escape the testosterone fuelled exhibition and conference and chillout for an hour or two. We don’t have a sponsor this year (unless you’re offering) so it’s a case of buy your own drinks and food.

What: Women in Mobile Data meet-up

Where: Café Viennese, Casa Fuster . The nearest Metro station is Diagonal and it’s just a few stops from Congress, or a short taxi ride.

When: Wednesday 14^th February 2007, 3.30pm to 5.30pm

If you would like to come, please RSVP to Helen Keegan, putting WiMD in the subject field. This is so we can let the venue know roughly how many of us to expect on the day.

Please feel free to forward this invitation on to your female colleagues and friends who work in mobile data and content and associated sectors – we’d love to meet them too.

About the Women in Mobile Data Association

WiMD is a global association which started 3 years ago following a contentious speech by an un-named male executive at 3GSM when it was in Cannes, who claimed there wasn’t a market for mobile content for women. After that, a few of us got together and formed WiMD, led by Lisa Modisette, to champion mobile content, data and services for underserved markets, and to support and engage women working in the mobile data and related industries. The Association is a work in progress. We meet bi-monthly in London and on an ad-hoc basis in Europe and the US and our meetings vary from the simply social to networking lunches, seminar evenings and power breakfasts. It’s currently free to join. Members are from all areas of the industry – network operators, content creators, developers, aggregators, consultants, marketers, media owners, analysts, journalists, entrepreneurs and plenty more besides. And we're very friendly.

The Women in Mobile Data website will be re-launched in the next month or so as there isn’t much on there currently.

For more information, please contact me via email.

It’s Barcelona, it’s 3GSM, and the Swedish Beers Posse are in town 13th February 2007

Yes, it’s that time of year again when the world’s mobile executives land in Barcelona and take over the city for a few days of obsessing about all things mobile (well the bit by Congress anyway). So, of course, the Swedish Beers Crew will be there too and we'd love you to join us at our little Swedish/Belgian/Norwegian/Spanish Beers Mobile Networking do.

So if you fancy a beer (it’ll be Belgian beer on the night as we're in a Belgian bar just to confuse matters) and a chat and a mingle with the nice Swedish Beers folks, then come along and join in. You don’t have to talk about mobile and you don’t even have to drink beer if you don’t want to, but it would be nice if you were friendly and enjoyed mingling with other friendly folk who have a passing interest in things mobile.

And not only that, there’ll be a few FREE beers as well courtesy of our lovely sponsors Colibria and MyStrands. Alex from Colibria will be around to chat to you about any interesting applications you may have to include in his fabulous IM platform and there will be several MyStranders and we will have partyStrands running during the evening.

Where: Belchica, Villarroel 60, 08011 Barcelona. Entrance on Gran Via de Deputacion. Metro L1 Urguell (so very near Congress) for more info on the bar, and here's a map. We'll be in the back bar.

When: Tuesday 13^th February 2007 6.30pm to 8.30pm

What: Swedish Beers Mobile Networking drinks

skål

Helen, Steve, Alex and Rudy



About our lovely sponsors

Colibria, from Norway, provides next-generation messaging and instant messaging platforms, clients and apps for mobile operators worldwide. Specifically, their UK-based apps team works with mobile developers to integrate existing SMS/MMS/WAP products into next-gen IM/IMS systems. They would like to hear from companies or individuals who have innovative services and want to investigate partnering to produce demos/prototypes to present to their existing operator customers. Yes, that means you! For more info, talk to Alex Linde on +44 7966 204 616 or meet him on the night.

MyStrands develops behaviour-based recommendation technologies to help people organise and discover digital media. It works using internet connected devices (PC, mobile etc) to discover both content and people with similar tastes both on and off-line. MyStrands mobile solutions include MyStrands for Symbian, MyStrands for Windows Mobile and of course partyStrands which we'll be sampling on the night. Find out more from Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria on +34 665 5524 18 or meet him on the night.

Lots of exciting events at the Dana Centre

I've just been checking out the Dana Centre's website and seen that there are some great events coming up in the next 2 or 3 months at their space in South Kensington. These include:

If Music Be the Food of Love - a pre-Valentine's dinner next Wednesday and discussion about how why music has such an impact on our emotions

Refashioned, from waste to wear - designers take on the recycling challenge. [I'd love to go to this one but it's on when I'm in Barcelona]

And for you mobilists out there, SexTxt, on 28th February, a live txtalogue where you can ask sexperts any question you like anonymously via text and the question and answer will be screened at the event. This event's also being run online simultaneously.

Cyberstatus tips from Trend Central

I teach mobile marketing to both professionals and students and the more I talk about the digital world we are now inhabiting and the more I observe the impact it's having on our day to day lives (including my own), the more I agree with Trend Central's latest findings around CyberStatus in conjunction with the launch of the Cassandra Report.

They have found that "personal 'cool' is being redefined by technology, and as a result, digital cool is spilling over into the real world and digital footprints are important". Think myspace, youtube, Second Life, Bebo et al and it's not just your profile that's important, it's the number of 'friends' you have, or comments you get or how many video views which all contribute to a very visible popularity meter. It's happening in the business world too, although to a lesser degree, with linkedin profiles, activity on industry forums and contributions to blogs as a writer or commenter.

This raises many challenges for the 21st Century marketer as, according to the Cassandra Report, they'll need to :

• Address their brand's own cyber status as young people (and not so young) turn to the web for first impressions
• Create engaging and informative websites (nothing new there really)
• Monitor the web for your brand's presence (so you'll need to lurk and inhabit forums and social media spaces)
• Stay up to date with the latest technologies (you don't need to know the finer details, but you do need to know what they do from a customer perspective)
• Expect an influx of services and experts like social networking profile designers (we're already seeing that happen in myspace), avatar stylists (think corporate presence in Second Life from the likes of Reuters, PA Consulting, Adidas, Radio 1), blog ghostwriters (well, I know a few of those already - if you'd like an intro, let me know) and online gaming coaches to help consumers up their digital cool

We're already seeing blog and social media service providers emerge like Perfect Path.. and this isn't just around the technology (which is not that hard to do unless you're planning something massive), it's how you actually use it and leverage it (I hate that word but can't think of another right now). And mobile being a communications technology, is all part and parcel of this digital social media revolution we're experiencing right here right now

Carnival Catch Up

Check out this week's and last week's carnival of the mobilists. Last week, Xen Mendolsohn did a great job of her Carnival and this week it's down to Rod McLaren at Mobbu. They're both worth a read. Enjoy.

To bluespam or not to bluespam, that is the question

I've just been catching up on my blog reading and quite a few of my regular reads are commenting about bluespam, or bluecasting if you're being posh.

First off, the Square Group is sending out free video clips from Avenue Q to passers by who happen to have their bluetooth switched on on their phone. The claim impressive results (well if you're in Direct Marketing or Sales Promotion they are). 9,595 active Bluetooth devices were detected and sent messages. Of these, 703 people accepted the offer of the video download – an average of 87 people each day. Seems good on the face of it. I applaud Square Group and Avenue Q for giving it a try. But how targeted was this audience if it was targeting passers-by? [of course, if it was aimed at fans of the show who were inside the theatre, then I could better understand it.]

Ewan shares his feelings about why bluetooth isn't designed for marketing or file sharing and is an, at best, clumsy user experience. Whilst David, from Mobile Marketing Magazine, wonders if these results are acceptable. David continues,

"Put another way, the campaign achieved a (positive) response rate of just over 7%. That, of course, is a response rate that any direct marketer would kill for, But that’s the point. Mobile marketing is not direct mail. It’s more personal than that, and brands that ignore this fact do so at their peril. And while Bluecasting may be legal, to my mind, if 93% of the people you offer a free download to decline the offer, that’s not really a success."

I actually doubt if 93% of people were annoyed at getting the bluetooth message. Some would have been mildly irritated, some would have ignored it completely, some would have left it to sort out later not realising that it was location specific and related to a bluetooth broadcasting system in the theatre, and for some, they may well have clicked on the system and it just didn't work (as in my Casino Royale experience), in which case the logs are likely to be inaccurate. And of course, there would be some people who would be annoyed and consider it as spam and completely evil. We just don't know what the breakdown is.

Putting the legalities aside which I discussed last week in relation to Virgin/Qwikker, I think this begs a larger question of marketing and advertising more generally which Carlo over at Mobhappy also hints at.

It's harder and harder to generate interest in products and services via *any* marketing methods - new or old or mobile or whatever. It's a law of diminishing returns and the youth of today don't understand the economics behind it all - i.e. that advertising has funded the majority of our entertainment for the last 50 years. So what do you do? Of course, there are clearly some wonderful success stories out there, but they are few and far between. If it was *that* easy, then we'd all be rich, but we're not - even when we have fabulous products and services to promote. It's not an easy equation to work out, even when you have the goods to start with.

I also understand why Avenue Q would use something like bluecasting - there's no messaging cost to the network operator. This makes it hugely attractive financially. And it is marginally less intrusive than a text message as your mobile number is kept private. And for any marketing campaign, 7% is a good response rate. And after all, we live in a commercial world and if the maths adds up, then the maths adds up.

But you know what, bluecasting will be an interim technology at best. At some point in the near distant future, we will be always on on our mobiles with wap access, flat rate data charges, pre-installed QR code readers and phones that just work. In that scenario, we won't need bluetooth to file share, we'll just do it over the air, like we do from our PCs. We'll take a picture of a QRcode, it will link us to the wapsite and we'll download away to our heart's content and maybe even share with a friend via the 'send to a friend's phone' link.

So traditional marketers, take heart, we'll still need magazines and posters and audio and video communication in our digital nirvana, it's just we'll be more seamlessly connected so you need to understand how this digital jigsaw fits together rather than looking at channels in isolation. So you could do worse than check out the mobile marketing course next month from e-consultancy.

Maybe I'm dreaming of a future that's 20 years away but hey, a girl can dream. I do know that in the future, we'll also have a lot less tolerance for any kind of push messaging as it will be considered spam and unwanted and will have a negative effect on the brand. And we'll be even better at ignoring it all, which we're already pretty good at as the Avenue Q campaign demonstrates - 93% of the potential audience ignored it.

Right now, we're in a transition phase. The laws are still being worked out. The technology is still flaky some of the time and we're still in a trial and error stage. But try and err you must in order to learn. We're still not quite sure how this mobile game will pan out. But in this 21st Century age of blogging, file sharing, instant access, always on digital overload, there are no easy answers. You will never be able to please all of the people all of the time, but you'd better do your best because if they're unhappy, they're going to tell all their mates pretty quickly with all these new-fangled communications methods flying around.

Ignore new technology at your peril. It really is changing our lives.

[off topic] RIP Mimi

As some of you probably know, I'm a bit of a luvvie at heart and this emanated from a) living very close to a theatre (the Swan Theatre in Worcester) and b) living next door to a theatrical boarding house in Britannia Square where all the actors stayed when they were in Rep at Worcester Swan Theatre (oh and for historical accuracy, it was also where Edward Elgar went to school).

I've just heard today that the landlady of said boarding house, Mimi Hewitt, died peacefully earlier this month. Much loved by the likes of Michael Palin and Derek Nimmo who both stayed with her, she will be much missed by her very large extended family and many friends and also the many actors who stayed with her - Chris Corcoran, Gary Sharkey, Bill Gaminara, Deborah Makepeace and many many more. She even gets a mention on Just a Minute on Radio 4.

I spent half my childhood in her house and not only did I get to hang out with loads of actors, she also taught me French from the age of six which is why I have a great French accent (I've forgotten a lot of the vocabulary though but I sound good!), and I had my first date in her house with a very handsome young Parisien. Where are you now Laurent Roussel-Bert?! So thank you Mimi, I'll remember you always.

I've unfortunately missed Mimi's funeral which was on Friday but I know that some of my readers are friends of mine from Worcester days and would want to know. RIP Mimi.

HEWITT
Mireille (Mimi) Regine Primrose
Aged 88 years. Peacefully on Friday, January 12th, at Worcestershire Royal Hospital. Beloved mother to Feriel, Theresa, Jenni and Anne, much loved grandmother to fourteen and special great grandmother to twenty three. She will always be remembered. The funeral service for Mimi will be held at St. Georges Roman Catholic Church, Sansome Place, Worcester, at 12 noon on Friday, January 26th. Flowers or a donation to The Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Coronary Care Unit Trust Fund, may be sent to A V Band, 41 St Nicholas Street, Worcester. WR1 1UW.

Make your Mark with a Tenner

Ok, so this is off-topic as it's not about mobile marketing or media, but I still think it's worth mentioning especially as Ewan from smstextnews is involved and I got a lovely email from Oli Barrett to tell me all about the 'Make your Mark with a Tenner initiative.

Starting today, 10k young people across the UK will get a tenner and one month to see what they can achieve with it. Over 110 schools are taking part and participants can work alone or in groups. There are awards for those who make the most money and also who has the greatest social impact.

There is a blog to keep up with progress (although there's nothing there yet) and of course the main site where you can read all about it. I think this is a really interesting one to watch and should be more engaging and more accessible than programs like the Princes Trust (which has its place but is a *lot* of work for those involved) so I wish all the participants and sponsors the best of luck and hope it's a huge success.

Mobile Data usage is up in the UK

The Mobile Data Association (MDA) has just released it's figures for Q4 2006 and they're impressive. In the final quarter of last year, a total of 45.6m users were recorded as having used their phones for downloads and browsing the mobile internet and this averages about 15m each month up from 13m in the previous quarter. December boasts the highest average with 15.9m during that month - I wonder if getting a new handset at Christmas had anything to do with it - I expect so. And the trend is on the up so it looks like 2007 will be a year for mobile internet.

The MDA has lots of useful information about phones and the mobile internet so it's worth checking out. If you're after some help to set up your mobile phone for wap or mobile internet, then go here. And if you're after some useful or entertaining wap sites to view on your handset, then you could do worse than checking this list out.

Don't forget to watch your data charges though and if you're planning to use data services, then it's worth changing to t-mobile's web 'n walk or Three's x-series to avoid billshock.

A few links for you 26 January 2007

I'm a bit pushed for time at the moment so I'm not able to write anything in depth but I have a few links that you may be interested in checking out.

The New York Times has a good article on what's happening in mobile marketing and advertising and is worth a look.

Technomarketer explains mobile ad formats and audience for mobile marketing and mobile advertising.

Five Blogs Before Lunch highlights a study that demonstrates youth is still the primary audience for mobile marketing. I suspect the research may be a little skewed. I do few 'yoof' campaigns and don't have a problem with running campaigns for oldies (ie the over 30s) and in fact, m:metrics research suggests that oldies is where the mobile money is anyway.

Kuwait is embracing mobile marketing and this article explains what Wataniya is doing out there with the help from their friends at Satama.

The Archbishop of Canterbury goes mobile with a Lenten text message service.

And the video and podcasts are up from Mobile Mondays including the one in November where I talked about 10 trends in mobile marketing (3gp file).

Mobile Advertising Guidelines published

If you're reading this blog, then the chances are that you have some kind of interest in mobile advertising. In which case, it's worth checking out the Mobile Marketing Asssociation's Mobile Advertising Guidelines document (pdf). It's US focussed but most of the rules apply over here in the UK and Europe. There are tips there about the different type of banner or click through campaigns you can do and some examples of how you might use them so well worth a look.

I've been using mobile advertising successfully for some of my clients in the last 6 months or so and I've been impressed with the results and conversion rates. Why not try it for yourself here with Admob who are one of the largest mobile advertising firms.

And finally, if you're after some new case studies to check out, then it's worth you have a look at the 2006 MMA Annual Mobile Marketing Guide in Association with Advertising Age (pdf). It was published in December 2006 so the information is still recent enough and it covers case studies from across the world, not just the USA.

Where are the women in mobile?

or digital or marketing or whatever...?!

I've just been looking at the speakers list for ihollywood which is running concurrently with 3GSM. At least there are *3* female speakers during the day (out of 27!) but I wonder how many women will attend? At least having 3 speakers is better than the zero female speakers at MediaTech as run by LibraryHouse in December last year and the very low attendance by women at the event (I counted maybe 10 women throughout the day - Library House admits they're stumped as to how to attract more women). Even at my own Swedish Beers event, men probably outnumbered the women by about 9 to 1. And no doubt it will be the same at 3GSM next month in Barcelona (with the exception of the Women in Mobile Data Event I'll be running - you see, I know they're out there, they just seem to be invisible...). Russell at Mobhappy's noticed it too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no man-hater by *any* stretch of the imagination and clearly much innovation has been from men. But women do make up roughly half the population and allegedly are as bright and productive and as important as men (at least in Western Society). And i-mode was born of woman not man*. Except we're not (generally) represented in the digital world. This worries me. Technology is moving *seriously* fast and I believe womens voices should be heard when it comes to creating, developing, running and marketing new technology services (mobile, web 2.0 or whatever). I don't want men exclusively running my digital life thanks or my future digital life. Not least because women, in soooo many studies, are better at this communications thing than men. And let's face it, mobile is predominantly about communication. So ladies, where are you? (Clearly busy doing other important things). Stand up and be heard. Have your say and let's make this new digital world a better and balanced place by adding our 2p.

/rant

*Anyone know where I can get the 'mother of i-mode' book in English?

Qwikker and Virgin Bites are up for a 3GSM Award

Qwikker, the mobile content distribution company, is up for an award for its work with Virgin Mobile (who incidentally 'don't believe in mobile marketing' or so it was claimed at a Virgin meeting I attended a few months ago!). The award they're up for is 'Best Mobile Advertising' category.

To keep Virgin Mobile customers amused, Qwikker created 'boredom busters' for Virgin BITES service. Also part of the promotion, Virgin Mobile wanted to reach beyond their own subscriber base and also promote acts at the V-Festivals by distributing mobile content via bluetooth.

Qwikker’s service enabled consumers to download the non-intrusive [sic], branded Virgin Bites mobile channel, via Bluetooth, and browse and select music-related mobile content, which was relevant to them. Critically the Virgin content channel remained on the consumers’ handset, which is updateable over-the-air (OTA) – further extending the brand relationship.

As the service is for Virgin customers only, I can't try it out to tell you exactly how it works. Nor was I at V-Festival to try it. And I'm wondering how many people actually played around with the system when they could be seeing live bands or drinking instead? Now *that* would be interesting to know more about rather than the concept per se.

If the O2 wireless festival is anything to go by, or FourDocs bluetooth poster campaign or the Casino Royale bluetooth cinema campaigns are anything to go by, there could be a high failure rate - none of the afore-mentioned campaigns worked on my phone :( - none of them were run by Qwikker AFAIK.

Having looked at the Qwikker website, I'm guessing it's a java based download which updates over the air in a similar way to mobizines.If you're in a Qwikker location (pub or London Underground station) then you may get a bluetooth message asking you if you want to receive the content and at that point you 'opt-in'. The trouble is, in sending the message to your phone at all, you haven't opted-in. Having spoken to some people in this area, because that initial message *isn't* stored on the phone, it's ok to send it and isn't covered by the European Data Privacy rules. I have *no* idea why that is acceptable rather than a text message per se. It's just as intrusive, it's just as time-consuming to deal with (or not) as a text message and it's still an electronic message. And I am yet to see a reliable bluetooth delivery system. Hmm, I'm not convinced. Come on Qwikker - convince me that bluetooth is ready for the masses and that my personal experiences are not the norm. I want to be convinced...

I wish Qwikker the best of luck with the award and with their service, but I don't see why it should be one rule for bluespam and another for text spam (equally odious IMHO). The direct mail analogy is that Junk Mail is equivalent to a text message but a Bluetooth notification is the equivalent of a door-drop - the difference being that you don't have the address (mobile number) of the recipient. You still end up with junk on your doormat (phone). Hmm, the vagaries of European law!

The GSM Association’s Global Mobile awards will be presented at 3GSM 2007, Barcelona on the 13^th February. More information is available at GSM Awards.

Infospace being sued by EMI for $100m

The music division of EMI is suing Infospace for unpaid royalties on ringtones and selling ringtones on properties they don't have the rights for such as John Lennon's Imagine. EMI claims that Infospace has been obstructive when they asked to audit the books. In return, Infospace claims that EMI's allegations have no substance. This could well be a lawsuit to watch.
via MobileIndustry.biz

some links to keep you going 22 Jan 07

The Carnival of the Mobilists No 58 is up at TomSoft this week and includes the great review and discussion about the iphone from Michael Mace. Well worth a read.

A mock up of what a Tag Heuer phone might look like.

T-Mobile responds to my criticisms of Club Zone at Christmas over at SMS Text News. Good to see that the powers that be really do read blogs.

I'm speaking at the Changing Media Summit held by the Guardian on 22nd March 2007 - get your tickets now! I'm on the panel in the afternoon talking about "From mashups to money: leveraging location based technologies for brand advantage". More on this later.

On this day in history...

Well, it's my birthday today so after this post, there will be no more blogging today! However, you might be interested to know that today is also Winnie the Pooh Day (to commemorate AA Milne's birthday), that it's Cary Grant's, Danny Kaye's, Philp Starck's and Jane Horrocks' birthday too, so it seems I'm in good company. Also on this day, The Boston Strangler was jailed and the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal broke (via wikipedia and the bbc).

It seems January is also a popular month for mobilistic birthdays - Russell's was a week or so ago, Rudy's was yesterday and it's Admob's 1st birthday today and they're about to publish their billionth ad as well as being featured on the front page (pdf) of the Wall Street Journal. Way to go!

Right, I'm off to go and have some fun!

Five things tag..

Thank you to Tomi and Tom and Sheila for tagging me. I've already posted this on the Oxford Forum but am reposting here.

1. I have two nicknames - the first is technokitten, given to me by a friend who thought I was the least unlikely of our gang to get their heads round using computers back in 1994 - he thought I'd become a right technokitten - it stuck, and I now use it as a moniker for this blog and my digital life generally; the second is raindrop which is my brownie name as I run a brownie pack in Tooting on Wednesday nights;

2. I made a record in 1982 (as part of my school choir) to celebrate Pope John Paul II's visit to the UK. We got to sing it on telly and also, more importantly, on the podium, with the Pope when he said Mass at Coventry Airport.

3. I have something in common with Madonna - we were both directed by Laurence Boswell - me back in the 80s at the Swan Theatre in Worcester where I played The Queen of Spain in Fuenteovejuna (which also starred Rufus Norris who's now a hotshot West End Director most recently directing Cabaret), and Madonna in Up for Grabs at the Albemarle.

4. I enjoy needlework and dressmaking when I'm not painting the town red, listening to music, going to the Electric Picnic in Ireland, mooching on the internet (also known as shopping on ebay), buying shoes or watching TV!

5. Some of you may already know that I run Swedish Beers with Steve Flaherty but you may not know that I'm also a founder member of the Women in Mobile Data Association (if you're interested in knowing more about that, contact me as the site's very out of date). And I've been messing around with mobile marketing and media since 2000 when I worked with Russell Buckley at ZagMe, but that's a whole other story.

6. In case you already knew number 5, here's an extra one.. I already have my ticket booked for the Electric Picnic in September :) Thank you Sarah!

As for tagging other people

Rudy de Waele, Ewan MacLeod, Russell Buckley, Jan Kuczynski and Deirdre Molloy

Honey I'm home

Apologies for the blogging silence, technology woes have got the better of me pre and post the holiday period and I'm only just recovering with the arrival of my shiny new laptop. Of course I'm now going through the hell of setting everything up again and transferring data to the new system. But I'm nearly there now so I'll be blogging again now.

So what's been happening in my mobile world...

I celebrated Christmas with Women in Mobile Data (feels like a lifetime ago) at our annual Christmas Lunch at the Sloane Club.

I'm currently planning my trip to Barcelona (what a wonderful city) to 3GSM for next month and wondering if it's worth investing in a roam4free sim card but it's not clear what the data charges may or may not be or whether it supports data. Also has anyone got any cheap/reduced expo passes by any chance for 3GSM? I'm in need of a couple. And anyone want to meet up whilst we're out there - it would be great to meet some fellow mobilists who I wouldn't normally get chance to meet in Blighty? We'll be running a Swedish Beers event on Tuesday 13th February too - watch out for more details coming soon but do put the date in your diary.

I have done and am about to do quite a few training sessions for the IDM, e-consultancy and the University of Westminster.

I've been on the receiving end of more sms marketing efforts from Lakeside - seems they haven't learnt any lessons and are still doing the same old same old.

I've signed up to the Club t-zones from T-mobile as run by Buongiorno and it's a bit rubbish. A joined up out of curiosity (it's free) in January and they were still touting Christmas ringtones. Either they're very early for Christmas 2007 or no-one updated the club for new content after Christmas. A missed opportunity surely to reach those new handset owners and those trying wap and downloading content for the first time.

I've worked out how to use MSN on my phone. It's clunky, it's slow, but good for emergencies! Ditto gmail. Although gmail is quite a bit faster than MSN. It's very dull typing using the phone's keypad though after a few minutes.

I have yet to work out how the 'top scorer's' system works on Mobizines fab free daily Sudoku. I haven't been appearing as often as I think I should have...

Someone has a crush on me it seems. Feeling very flattered!

And I'm underwhelmed (as others are too) by the hype around Apple's iphone.