Swedish Beers next mobile networking event Tuesday 4th April 06

We'll be at the usual venue - The Nordic Bar in Newman St, W1 - and the drinks for the first hour or two are courtesy of the lovely recruitment folks over at Major Players. You'll find us in the back bar.

If you've not been before or just need a reminder of what Swedish Beers is about, it's for anyone with a passing interest in mobile. We get all kinds of folks along from developers to aggregators, film makers to publishers, content creators to network operators, consultants to journalists and lots more besides.

It's not a formal affair - no powerpoint, no speeches, just turn up and mingle and be prepared to talk to strangers!

Hope to see you there.

skål

Buy Coke without coins

Buy Coke without coins
Originally uploaded by shimmertje.

I just spotted this picture on flickr advertising the fact that you can buy Coca-Cola using your mobile down in Singapore. I wonder how popular the service is and whether or not the network operators take a huge chunk of revenue.

Anyone know?

We luv 2 txt

Yup, it's official, us Brits are still in love with texting according to the latest press release from the MDA (Mobile Data Association)...

"February’s text messaging total reached 2.7 billion messages. Person-to-person texts sent across the UK GSM network operators last month show an increase of 26% on the total sent during the same period in 2005.

February’s figure provides an average of 99 million messages being sent per day in the UK. However on February 14th handsets proved to be the red-hot choice for confirming those 3 little words 'I love you' as romantics across the UK chose to send 120 million text messages compared with the 10 million cards estimated to have been delivered by the Post Office."

So, with a population of 59.8m, and you take away very young people, very old people and people with big fingers and thumbs, that's a lot of text messages per person every day. With that much texting going on, I think it's time that the network operators reviewed their text charges. Find out more over at Ewan's 'Make Texting Cheaper' campaign website.

Photo from flickr.

Are friends electric?

Well they are at the Electric Picnic in Ireland. Despite the misery of vertigo + slipped disc, the line-up announcement for the fabulous Electric Picnic certainly put a smile on my face - even more so as I already have my tickets and the numbers are limited to 30,000.

There are going to be 7 stages this year. The line-up includes New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Massive Attack, Graham Coxon, Bloc Party, Gary Numan and Belle and Sebastian with more annoucements soon. Lost Vagueness will be there again with a bigger area and more attractions including the fabulous Laundrettas. There are a few new areas coming up like The Big Tree which is an organic and carbon neutral music, arts and food fest courtesy of Damien Rice and Foggy Notions which will be an eclectic mix of all kinds of exotic music and arts. The Body and Soul area will be even bigger and there will also be a cinema, comedy stage and wonderful Silent Disco like last year and lots of other stuff besides.

Tickets go on sale at 9am tomorrow morning at Ticketmaster Ireland.

Blogs and Social Media Forum - 17 May 2006

If you're reading this blog, the chances are you know at least a little about the blogosphere and what's going on it. But do you also know about wikis? And how both blogs and wikis and other social media are being used by big businesses to communicate with their customers, staff, suppliers etc?

Well, if you're interested to know more, my good friend, Lloyd Davis over at Perfect Path is facilitating a session at the Blogs and Social Media Forum in London in May and he's blogged about it here. It's a conference with a difference as there'll be an open space session facilitated by Lloyd and you'll also get to hear about how it is (and isn't) from those in the know at blogging companies and big brands alike. Check it out.

Normal service resumes today

And whilst I'm gathering my mobile musings, I thought I'd share with you a project I'm working on with my friends over at Stock-pot Productions. It's a short film entitled 'One Day' with some famous TV names in it such as Toby Stevens, Anton Lesser, Tanya Franks and Thusitha Jayasundera. It's being directed by James Barriscale who is an old Youth Theatre chum of mine. Shooting starts this weekend in Blackpool and we hope to have the whole thing finished in a few weeks. It's amazing the effort required to put together just a few minutes of entertainment. And of course, I'm looking at mobile distribution for them. There's more info about the film on their production website including a synopsis and some good pictures of the cast.

Normal service will resume shortly..

..when I've recovered from the flu. Yes, it's the real deal. Not man flu or a bad cold but the genuine article. Hopefully happy reader, you don't have it too! Off to take some more vitamin c, echinacea, zinc, olbas pastilles etc etc.