Open thoughts, open world

It was also the official Twitter meet-up, known by Twitter users (tweeple), as a Tweetup. It's good to be able to put a face to a Twitter-er, but sometimes all these 'tw' words can get a little twiresome.

The Smaato Mobile Advertising Award was won by one of the few US mobile startups, DialPlus. It is a very clever application that provides dynamic, contextual visual information about the person being called or the person calling. So, as the phone is ringing, the call receiver will see social network status updates from the caller as well as other relevant information - such as what music they are listening to, the applications they are using on Facebook, and others.

There was an interesting presentation by a San Francisco-based Twitter user (@minxuan) about some of the amazing stories from, and tools that can be used, in the twitterverse. The one that caught my eye is TweetLater, a tool for busy tweeps that allows you to schedule your tweets - so you can appear on-the-ball, all the time.

MOCOM2020

An announcement from the event that I am really excited about was the introduction of MOCOM2020, an open, non-profit thing tank about the future of mobile media and communication worldwide. It hopes to bring together some of the brightest minds to ponder what the mobile future will look like between now and 2020.

There are a number of social media engagement platforms that allow interaction and collaboration for consolidate questions, thoughts, trends and innovations into an information hub. There is an advisory board of leading industry experts, visionaries and academics that, with the community, will publish a whitepaper, roadmap and video in mid-2009 as the first tangible output from MOCOM2020.

The immense power of approaching innovation and development from an 'open' perspective is clear from the MOCOM2020 initiative, but has also shown itself in many other forms here in Barcelona, as well as over the past few months.

Emulate Apple

Starting with the Apple iPhone App Store and hundreds of millions of downloads that followed, major handset manufacturers, network operators and software vendors have rushed to emulate Apple's success:

• Samsung: Samsung has launched the Samsung Mobile Innovator, a developer resource environment for the Samsung S60, Windows Mobile and Java operating platforms, as well as the Samsung Mobile Applications site, where apps can be traded.

• Nokia: On Monday 16 February, Nokia launched the Ovi store, a content and application marketplace. From his keynote on Monday night, Ansii Vanjoki from Nokia emphasised that it is fully aware that it will never have enough resources to develop the applications that the market wants. This is also the thinking behind Nokia's purchase of the shares of Symbian that it did not own, only to make it open source through the Symbian Foundation.

• Google and Android: Following the launch of Android last year, Google ran the Android Developer Challenge with a US$1 million bounty for the best Android-based applications. The Android Market is the application store that Google hopes will challenge Apple's dominance.

• Blackberry: RIM is planning on launching the target=_blank>Blackberry application store in March.

• Amdocs and Comverse: Amdocs and Comverse are billing and software vendors that sell large-scale systems to mobile operators. They are productising the concept of application stores and will be allowing operators to white label app stores for their own mobile subscribers. Picture this - an MTN App Store for the African market.

• Telecom Italia's Next Open Innovation: How is your Italian? Telecom Italia has created a good-looking site, Next Open Innnovation with all the right Web 2.0 and social media elements to encourage innovation, collaboration and support for people with great ideas (and often little capital).

The list goes on. The bandwagon travels forth. However, at last, it looks like the millions of brilliant application developers out there now have all the platforms and channels to markets that they need. Let's hope there are enough buyers for these apps.

It's time for some great South African and African apps.

More from Barcelona tomorrow. Also, follow me on Twitter - @angusrobinson - for on-the-go microblogging.

For more:

• Innovation wins. Again. [article]
  
• [Mobile] Mobile World Congress on the go [blog]