Mobile Entertainment

You might call it an architectural 'mash-up'. A fitting venue, then, for this week's NMS Connect, where mobile mash-ups were a hot topic.

What’s a mash-up? For anyone attending a north London senior school in the early-1990s, the term was street-talk for getting very, very drunk. Or worse. So to hear middle-aged mobile execs flinging the term around is quite jarring.

They're not talking about guzzling litre bottles of cider during the networking break. A mobile mash-up is an app or service that combines one or more sources into an integrated experience that can be shared with others. Think RSS on speed.

One speaker at Connect even talked of 'life stream aggregation', wherein every aspect of one's life - phone numbers, IM tags, emails, favourite sites and clips, pics, blogs - could be posted in one place and shared with others. Terrifying.

I'm not buying it. Social networking may be a powerful tool for bringing people together. But it's a means to an end, not the end itself. The majority of people don’t want to share their lives with the rest of the world. Most people are consumers, not producers. Not everyone’s a blogger, and anecdotally just one per cent of the users of even the most successful successful user-generated mobile services actually upload stuff to them. Let’s not get caught up in technologist hype.

Similar reasoning can be applied to the other big story of the week, Google's new Android open source software platform. The Hotel Puerta Americas analogy works here too. Like the hotel's owners, Google has provided a framework and told the designers to fill in the blanks (although Google is ensuring its own stuff's in there too).

A certain market segment is enthralled. "An open platform? Great, we can develop crazy apps without getting permission from the operators!" However, 90 per cent of all new apps and services fail. So, yes, Android could encourage content innovation, but the bottom line for content providers is RoI. Don’t forget, Symbian is a popular mobile app platform because it has 165 million devices in the market.

And how free-form will Android really be? Surely operators and handset manufacturers backing it will shape services to their own ends? Certainly any Android apps offered via operator portals will have to undergo QA and testing to make sure everything works properly.

I spent Tuesday night bathed in an insomnia-inducing glow because I couldn't figure how to turn out the bathroom lights in the Puerta America. Others had the same problem. You see, even the best minds in design can get it wrong...