Archive for July, 2008
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
The FOM (Future of Mobile) website is up and it looks fantastic – Hats off to Dominic and the gang at Carsonified. Andrew our Founder/CEO will be speaking on location based services and how the approach to mobile needs to change the way we think about delivering services to users. It should be a great event, with a great line up of speakers including our good friends Helen Keegan, Rudy de Waele, Ewen MacLeod, Andrew Grill and Jemima Kiss from the Guardian.
…Not to mention the after party! Book now!
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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
I’m currently in the valley having a whole bunch of interesting meetings; but on the way I dropped into New York City for 24 hours and while i was there grabbed a coffee with Dan and Michael, the founders of Socialight. After waiting for the longest time ever for my latte at their local Joe’s Coffee (great latte, but it took its time!) we popped along to the office.
We chewed the fat about a lot of things and agreed in general that we were wonderful. No seriously, its great to meet people who’ve been had some similar ideas but got a slightly different route to seeing them realised. There is alot of overlap between Rummble and Socialight, but there are also a lot of areas we might be able to work together.
Whats most similar is that both their team and Rummbles have been working in this sector for a while and have achieved a lot with a little [funding wise]. We really appreciate how hard it has been (and in many ways continues to be) to deliver a pervasive user experience on mobile and rich platform online, with literally a handful of staff. With the iphone, things have become a little easier, but the iphone represents just a subset of the big wide world of mobile (see my personal blog rant about iphone and mobile web here).
Meanwhile, I have complete admiration for Michael for one reason more than any other: he uses this keyboard. Now I’ve oft had the mickey taken over the years for using an old ‘natural’ style keyboard in the office (OK OK, my Dad gave it to me for Christmas circa 1996 and it even has AT plug with PS/2 and now USB adapters stuck on it…yea so it even has a 9-pin serial extension socket on it for a mouse) and it has a funny split in the middle – BUT this is nothing compared to the beast which Michael uses… I’m not sure I’m man enough yet for this sort of change in my life….
Rummble CEO, Andrew, getting scared by a keyboard in Socialights office…
We’ll certainly be keeping in touch with Dan and Michael – and taking them out in London for beers next time they are our side of the pond.
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Monday, July 21st, 2008
Greetings to all Rummblers, my name is Gabriel Palomino and from today I will be bringing you hot news about Rummble, technology and of course places and people we love.
Let me introduce my self as a mobile technology fanatic. I started working in this amazing world in 2000, as videogames developer. Time flies…I remember as if it was yesterday, making a desperate hunt to buy the first Nokia smartphone (although I have to tell you that I suffered much more hunting down the new iPhone 
Nearly 8 years later, I’m proud, happy and extremely excited about offering all my knowledge and experience to Rummble as Head of Mobile. There is a lot to get involved with – iPhone, J2ME, Android, Symbian versions… and it’s gonna be a busy Summer! but at least I’m pretty sure that I will enjoy discovering all the excited places you good people are gonna share on the move.
Rummble, the intelligent, social, location based mobile software is opening up a new way to discover places, to know where the people are you love and record your favourite places whenever and wherever you are in the world.
Thanks to all the Rummble team for such a warm welcome and thanks to you for following this blog.
Rummble me at http://www.rummble.com/gabi2008
Gabriel.
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Sunday, July 20th, 2008
The crazed location obsessed bloggers (so the same as the team at Rummble then 
at GPS Obsessed have given Rummble a quick plug on their Location related blog. We’ll be over in the USA for Mobile 2.0 San Francisco and hope to hook up with many more bloggers that side of the pond.
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Sunday, July 20th, 2008
You can now view your Rummble-internal trust network. This is a portion of your extended friends network showing how much you trust the opinions of other members. Rummble calculates your personal trust network so it can decide which Rummbles it thinks fit your present opinions. For a particular Rummble, say a restaurant review, an aggregated trust for the Rummble can be derived by combining your trust in the users who made reviews for the restaurant. This data can be used effectively in constrained environments such as mobile to provide a filtered list of Rummbles for a geo-location.
On the display (activated from the “Network” menu) you can see how much you trust the opinions of people in your network and click through to their profile page if you want to find out more. Your personal trust network is cached and rebuilt every 6 hours.
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Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
4th July 2008, Centre Point, CBI Conference Centre
Rummble got a fantastic reception at the MomoLondon location event last night; with an excellent turn out the event had a real buzz and was a lot of fun. Congratulations to Daniel , Alex and Jo and not forgetting Helen – the latest lamb to the slaughter in the organising team! That might sound derogatory, but the comment is far from it – it is a whole bunch of hard work to organise these events and our hats come off to all the chapter founders both here and our friends Rudy (Barcelona), Lubna (New York) and Stuart (Washington DC) amongst others!
Andrew presented a very quick overview of Rummble followed by some thoughts on the ancillary location functionality which Rummble provides for those not lucky enough to have GPS, aGPS or a phone on which they can use CellID or another automated location service.
Image by Alex Clayton
Currently, for those who cant run our [soon to be released] Java app or dont have an iphone, you can set location by SMS txting “GO <place name> <country>” to your Rummble incoming number (sent to you when you register the phone), or you can set your location on the web, OR you can add a future trip or schedule, and let Rummble do the work for you!
Our iphone application (due September 08) will take advantage of the location functionalities of the iphone, brought to Apple by SkyHooks, who sponsored the MomoLondon event as part of their Launch into Europe. We’re working with Kate and her clan at Skyhooks to take advantage of their very useful service, whereever we can in the Rummble platform. Combing a database of wifi sites worldwide plus [soon] cellid, they offer a surprisingly comprehensive service.
Life is set to get easy for users and application developers around location awareness, but we’ve still got a way to go. Thankfully, the big boys like Google and Yahoo have both invested in initiatives to make life a whole lot easier – and Rummble embraces both.
Yahoo and its excellent FireEagle service (soon to come out of Beta) acts as a Location aggregator (Andrew wrote about it in a post about Fireeagle here). Its been built by Tom and his gang at Brickhouse in San Francisco, with X now representing them in London.
Google has already some of ours lives better with their MyLocation maps service – When it first launched in Nov 07 it had a T&Cs on the opening screen “location is accurate to within 4000m” … That is now long gone and it seems to be getting more accurate by the day. Off the record I spoke to a Google man who said they were increasing accuracy by 4% every week, simply by people using the service.
Google will be releasing their first location API as part of Google Gears; more on this in the near future.
We also met a whole bunch of interesting people, who we’ll be talking to and sharing with our pains and passions around mobile services.
Afterwards we all headed for a quick drink at Bar 101 around the corner; everyone looked like they had a good time and we’re looking forward to the next event in September.
If you came and complimented us on Rummble after the event, thank you so much – your encouragement and recognition means alot to us!
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
The cherry on the cake at the Mobile 2.0 Barcelona event, Rummble came top in the Pre-Series A category for startups and was selected by the judging panel to be one of just three companies to be invited to Mobile 2.0 2008 in San Francisco on 3rd November; one from Seed Funding, one from Pre-Series A (Rummble) and one from post Series A.
We’re really very excited about this – so another big thank you to Mobile 2.0 and especially Gregory Gorman, Daniel Applequist, Mike Rowehl, Peter Vesterbacka and Rudy de Waele for this opportunity. We’ve got something exciting up our sleeve to launch there, so if you haven’t already book your ticket now here www.mobile2event.com
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
Rudy and the gang at Mobile 2.0 did Europe proud with a very good 1-day conference last Friday. The attendance was good, with balance of startups, entrepreneurs, VCs and operators.
Although I missed the morning sessions (I was at Downing Street on Thursday – see our blog post once I rescue the photos off my camera!) Gabriel Palomino our new Head of Mobile pitched the VCs at the Thursday closed event and I joined him to present Rummble on the Friday pre-Series A panel.
The reaction to Rummble was thoroughly positive – infact, quite over whelming. We had interest from major operators and alot of encouraging feedback. As a boot strapping startup, life is tough and presenting at events is an opportunity to receive some recognition for the teams hard work; so thank you to all those who took a moment to give feedback and express their thoughts – it really is valued by me and the team, thanks !
Mobile 2.0 take-aways
So what did we take away from the event (apart from strong endorsement of Rummble!) Well, it was clear that there is no shortage of passion surrounding mobile services. The Mobile Operators panel – for once – was my favourite. So often we hear the same old things from MNO’s at these conferences – and its often not the fault of the messenger, but simply the policy that they have to defend because its handed down on high.
I remember speaking to an unnamed Technical Director of a major UK MNO last November (2007) who told me he was leaving to operator, not because he didnt like his job, but because he was sick of banging his head against a wall with regard to exploring new business models and accepting the reality of mobile internet, flat rate data and the changes this would demand of MNOs to turn themselves into a new type of business. So as Gregory Gorman of Mobile 2.0 rightly pointed out, we shouldnt make the arguments personal; however, I think in general the discussion was on the right side of fair. Nobody was attacking the individuals, they are just frustrated that the Mobile Internet is being held back by a handful of large, rich, mobile network operators.
Lively Interactive Panel Debate with the Mobile Network Operators
Thanks largely to Anastassia Lauterbach (Executive VP Group Strategy, T-mobile) the panel discussion soon opened up to be an interactive debate. Yes it was lively, but why shouldnt it be? Anyone who has seen the UK’s BBC Question Time program will know that the best debates and answers come from the most lively interactions.
MNO panel – they took a bit of a grilling
She asked some important questions of the delegates, which put in perspective the infrastructure challenges facing all MNO’s over the coming years. The cost of upgrading the networks in one major European country, to cope with demand by 2012? An estimated 70 billion euros. That is alot of money, even if its a few billion wrong.
I’m actually optimistic about wireless data services – Technology, compression techniques, new protocols and advances in efficiency will continue to accelerate; but it is true that major investment is required by the MNOs over the coming years and they are concerned as to where that revenue stream should come from. The point is not that operators should make a loss, not make a profit or not be concerned – The point is that they should accept NOW, through the organisation, that mobile internet -open, flat rate and cross-country- is the goal and inevitable, ASAP, and that they need to fundamentally rethink their own business models.
The iphone is a closed party
User expectations will not change, consumer behavior will not change – they expect freedom of choice and flat rate access without nasty billing surprises. The iphone has proven (as we all knew) that this means usage, which can mean revenue for all (yes despite it being a tightly controlled system – its WHERE the control is asserted which is important).
The iphone does control apps for example; the big difference is that if I have an app which generates no revenue, I can still publish it. How many MNOs are interested in talking to us if our app has no significant revenue stream? And in their eyes, “significant” means ALOT of money.
Its about communication…
Also, MNOs need to give us the dream of being the “owner” of the customer and psychologically their point of contact. They are causing their own problems – They understandably dont want to field support calls about handsets, other peoples websites etc, so they need to stop promoting themselve as the point of contact. I dont see positioning themselves more as ISPs, is incompatible with generating further revenue or being part of the content value chain, or partnering with mobile internet content companies in order to do so.
All in all, the whole day was both engaging and entertaining and we’ll certainly be going en masse to Mobile 2.0 Europe in 2009.
Last but not least – The After Party!
Lastly, congratulations to Techcrunch for sponsoring the after-party, along with Nimbuzz, Fjord and my247.mobi, with open bar until the early hours at the Shoku Lounge; Gabriel and I staggered off the beach at some point in the early hours after leaving the TC party at 3am with the founders of Aka Aki -amongst others- and headed to the club next door. Saturday was not a pleasent experience but it was worth it !
See you all in San Francisco in November!
The reason why mobile phone cameras never should have been invented. More embarrassing photos at Mike Butchers Mobile 2.0 Europe photostream here…
Posted in Events | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
Clive our CTO was at the 2nd International Trust Management conference in Trondheim, Norway. Rummble provided one of the demos at the conference.
The conference was an eclectic mix of papers on computational trust, security and privacy. Rummble itself is situated in the emerging area of combining trust network analysis with recommendation systems. Two themes seemed to stand out.
Firstly, the more negative aspects: how to handle malicious users destroying or manipulating communities of trust; how to ensure information is only available to the people who are allowed to use it without making systems unusable; or how to ensure fairness in computational trust. The more optimistic side pushes the added benefits that trust networks give to provide personalised and useful information to people which was not so readily available in more global and objective systems.
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Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
The Webmissionites at Number ten Downing street.
Kristofer Mansson from Silobreaker, David Bailey from Moviestorm, Jack Fairhall of Kwiqq, David Langer of Groupspaces, Sokratis Papafloratos of Trustedplaces, Andy McLoughlin of Huddle, Iain Millar of MyDeo, Andrew Scott of Rummble, Damon Oldcorn of Zebtab, Peter Ward of Wayn, Irfon Watkins of Coull, Ashley Norris of Shiny Media,
So this merry band of Crusaders, the cream of the London startup entrepreneur crop we invited by Mr Brown for tea and biscuits (well, drinks and canapes) to Downing Street to hang out and accept some general praise and slaps on back for invading Silicon Valley a few months earlier.
Andrew was invited to say a few words by Oli, to say why Web Mission was important and what we can learn from the way things are done in the tech scene in San Francisco.
Tom X MP kept order at the event and it was very much his enthusiasm with helped, with Oli, to bring the exploits of this entrepid band of startups to Downing Streets attention.
The European scene is really beginning to pick up pace. In many areas we still have a long way to go to acheive the ecosystem of Silicon Valley – but we’re certainly on the right track.
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