I was watching a TV programme about the great Victorian industrialists who developed entire towns to meet their industrial expansion. These people had more power over the lives of their employees than governments do today. Yet, a number of them seem to develop towns which contain more open space, leisure facilities and infrastructure than we plan or even build into our towns today.
These entrepreneurs understood than creating wealth for yourself is about building a network of people around you. This means developing your network or team members, especially: employees, customers, suppliers, support organisations and even competitors.
All of these groups are important for your success and their demise can result in your own demise. So understand the eco-system you/they live and work in is very important in building your success.
Developing employees is often seen as wasteful when the average length of employment is only 18 months. However, if spending time and money on developing that person means they stay 36 months, then you have halved you staff turnover and more importantly reduced you own workload in having to recruit and train another employee.
Everyone should be thinking about how they make their job theirs, so the governments mantra “Take a Job or Make a Job” is both applicable to entrepreneur or employee. Everyone should be thinking about what they can provide to society and maybe a job is the first step.

We love the iPhone, everyone who is anyone has one. People talk about them, show them off, and twitter about them ever hour of the day. Yet we all know they are not the best mobile phone ever, do have all the features we want or even provide the support we as loyal customer deserve. Yet we love them.

We are all hearing about ‘cloud computing’ and how fantastic this is going to be. No one knows what it is and when any form of standard will be made which will mean at least as customers we can have one flavour and transferable version of a cloud. At least we can touch an iphone, a cloud is just one step too far. So why are we falling in love with this thing, no one knows what it is and how it will truly help us.

The cloud and the iPhone are two classic (MBA type) examples of technology sales. Create the demand and then develop the technology based on this demand. Build it in beta first, call it beta, make people pay for it and test it for free for you and then create the version that works, make even more people pay for it, make another version and so on until you run out of people or version numbers. Its a standard formula.

Apple, Microsoft, Google and others are expert at this. You can be too, so what is the recipe?

1.       Create the demand via low cost internet social media hype

2.       Build a prototype, soft launch the beta version into your social group

3.       Segment the market and add more social networking using key user groups

4.       Listen every day on what people are saying, answer with their comments will be incorporated into an upcoming version

5.       Create next version x.y.z,

The real trick here is to be fast in providing updates, so agile type development is important, this then gives people something to be involved with and as your testers you will need to be responsive.

Remember, that people like new things and therefore in providing updates and changes based on their requirements, testing or involvement creates a sense of belonging.

When I look at the development of composite apps I see that we require two important factors to make them successful,

•  Mobile Phone api’s

•  Real time information via the internet

Both of these are available today for mass market application distribution. The current leaders in this market are google (maps) and yahoo (go!), who provide very stable and useable applications which enable all mobile subscribers to download and use.

As a customer I want the application to work on my phone and network. Just as a windows application works on any PC(Dell, Acer..etc) on any ISP (BT, Virgin,..etc)?

So what role does the mobile operator have?

Data Pipe – Yes

With my 3G data service I can use mobile data as I please in almost any part of the world. The reliability is consistent in most western parts of the GSM world and as such only have one competitor, Wifi, which has limited availability.

Location – No

After using google maps, I have found that the location based on the nearest base station is good enough. It puts me within 10’ish metres in London. From this I can locate the services and places I require. Most of the time I am using it for direction (North/South). Some people may need GPS but I would guess that will be for more rural adventures and this is well covered by Tom Tom and also the handset manufacturers.

Advertising Revenue – No

Admob. Smaato, etc. provide this better on a global scale which fits with the business model of mobile applications. Now that we see some serious metrics on the subject this will become a major source of revenue and statistics for the mobile applications.

Distribution – No

The ability to find the world’s best applications and use them would be a great service from the operators, however they would force so many conflicting rules upon the developer (ref: J2ME games) that the logistics would be remove any benefits. Therefore sites such as getjar.com and Handango are provide the global depositary for mobile applications.

So besides being a data pipe what is the value added by mobile operators in this world of mobile applications?