Impressions from the MoMo Global Summit

The 3rd annual MobileMonday Global Summit was held in Helsinki, Finland, on 10 September with an estimated 1,500 attendees; this year included a bonus side-trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, the following evening. WWJ was there once again, as founders of the MoMo Tokyo chapter, along with representatives from over 20 MoMo cities around the world. In addition to our Trip Report, WWJ’s ed-in-chief Daniel Scuka offers these thoughts about the experience.

MoMo Global Summit panels

The event panels included a nice cross-section of ‘insidery’ mobile folks. One of the best was definitely the Executive Panel, including Gartner’s Lars Persson, KDDI’s Hitomi Murakami, CEO Veli-Matti Mattila, from Finnish No. 2 carrier Elisa, Senior VP Ville Mujunen, from Sulake Dynamoid, and Director Mark Ollila, from Nokia. It was nice to see Murakami-sensei asking questions back to the audience (”Most Japanese think our next-generation mobile business will be based on mobile TV. What do you think?”), to elicit a little interactive feedback, and the Nokia guy was pleasantly down-to-earth (they aren’t always) and humble, mentioning that he sees one of the big challenges in answering, “How do we obtain and access content via mobile?” Maybe we’ll finally see Japan’s track-proven QR code application get more serious consideration in at least some of Nokia’s markets (note this upcoming event by MoMo in Barcelona!).

While I was interviewing KDDI’s Murakami-sensei - video excerpt - I was once again struck by how odd the Japanese find the rest of us out there (here?) in the world - and I’m not just talking food. His comments were a genuine expression of how surprising it is for a Japanese mobile-phone user - of any age - to find that folks elsewhere don’t use their phones for email, don’t use their phones for buying stuff at the convenience store and don’t use their phones for getting on the train. WWJ subscribers login for our full-length video interview: run-time 15:27

It’s as if the Japanese car makers back in the 80’s had gone ahead and developed their kick-ass, world-beating technology and production methods, but the only place you could buy their cars was in Japan itself. That’s how weird it is and that’s how far behind the rest of the mobile world seems to be falling.

Tags: DoCoMo, flash, kddi, music, nec, Nokia, QR, video, Vodafone, WiMax

Posted: 26 September 2007 | Filed: Video Programs, Viewpoint | Feedback | Print |