tilefile is an interesting application. Motorola invested in tilefie and their site says ..

“Motorola’s investment will enable us to continue to strengthen the Tilefile vision and meet the needs of our rapidly-growing user base,” said David Bolliger, chief executive officer, Tilefile Limited. “A Tilefile is a piece of media wrapped in people. For this we had to build the foundations for an entire new platform. The Tilefile .com web application is just the beginning. We intend to see the Tilefile format make its way to at least three types of screens.”

The Tilefile platform wraps videos, photos and audio into a single content-neutral format called a “Tile.” Social activity gathers around each Tile. The “front” of a Tile is the media; the “back” of a Tile is the community. This clear distinction results in a less fractured media experience. Rather than navigating through Internet pages, users have a non-linear view of multiple “social media packages” suitable for both phone and web. Tiles can be joined with others to form combinations that can be easily shared or launched to other locations on the Internet. The social activity centered around the Tiles “travels with” them. Through their centralized principle for organizing experiences, Tilefile aims to link people and their communities in an endless play of messaging, sharing and publishing.

I can see some interesting potential especially for mobile .. and it spans the Web and the Mobile Web worlds well.

Another reminder .. and also to say that you get a certificate from Oxford for attendance!

I am conducting my courses at Oxford university in December.

The urls and dates are as below

If you are interested, please register for them through the Oxford university site

Dec 13 User Generated Content and Web 2.0

Dec 14 Mobile Web 2.0 and IMS:

Blog Blog Friends v1 Public Beta is now live. Well done Luke and team

The 100th edition of the Carnival of the mobilists is at Abhishek Tiwari’s blog.

Its great as usual

As a long term carnival contributor, let me take this opportunity to congratulate Russell and Carlo for this fantastic idea which they started back in Oct 2005. Also, many thanks to Rudy, Judy and Troy for keeping this going ..

Like me (No SIP/IMS stack for Android?) , my friend Andreas has been following Android ..(Andreas .. Android .. has a certain feel to it ..) – but anyway .. he posts an insightful post called Google’s Android: boring, exciting or breakthrough ? – which is a great read as usual ..

He says ..

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The Android brings you your entire connected world of services onto your mobile – in the same way that Facebook brings it onto your ’me-portal’ on the web.

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Yes, very much so ..

It is always a pleasure to be invited to speak at Stanford .. and the last time when I spoke at the Digital Visions Program, I made many great friends.

Since then, I have kept in touch with Stanford’s programs and here is another interesting event .. although this time I cant make it it looks very interesting including a free report on the topic – which I am contributing to as well. My friend Chetan Sharma is speaking as well.

Stanford University graduate student Mohit Gundecha and Prof. Tom Kosnik along with BDA are organizing an event on December 5th, 6:00 PM,

“Why Mobile? Why India? Why now?” at Stanford University .

It promises to be an evening to discuss how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can participate in the explosively growing Indian Mobile market which is adding India 7-8 million mobile subscribers every month.

Speakers include who’s who of the Mobile industry including,

Jeffrey Belk – Senior Vice President, Strategy & Market Development, QUALCOMM

Ashok Narasimhan – CEO, July Systems

Ojas Rege – Vice President, Global Mobile Products, Yahoo! Inc.

Vin Dham — Executive Managing Director — NEA-IndoUS Ventures

Chetan Sharma – President, Chetan Sharma Consulting

Niren Shah – Managing Director – India, Norwest Venture Partners

The event is the culmination of a research project on “Future of Mobile Value Added services(VAS) in India” done by Mohit Gundecha and Prof. Tom Kosnik in association with BDA, a leading telecom consulting and research firm in India. The study is targeted at entrepreneurs/ VC’s /angel investors/ students and will encompass different components of the Indian Mobile VAS Value chain. The study evaluates the competitive landscape and offer detailed profiles of established as well as emerging players across the value chain. This event will bring together a variety of leaders in the industry from both India and North America, along with budding entrepreneurs, aspiring students and prominent authors and bloggers. The output of the project would be a report available in the public domain and I will post it here as well.

To attend the event: Please RSVP: mohitgundecha@gmail.com Limited entries!

To see more details: http://stanford.edu/~mohitsg/IndiaMobileVAS/

It’s nice to see Mr Wu’s thinking being acknowledged by business week. Nice article.

I also follow Tim’s thinking and he has commented on my articles on the OpenGardens blog -

OpenGardens, Walled Gardens, Tim Wu, Net Neutrality, Carterfone and IMS

From businessweek

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Google’s brain trust was again trying to change the rules of the game. Behind the scenes, they owe a sizable debt to a man nearly unknown outside the geeky confines of cyberlaw. He is Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who provided the intellectual framework that inspired Google’s mobile phone strategy. One of the school’s edgier profs, Wu attends the artfest Burning Man, and admits to having hacked his iPhone to make it work on the T-Mobile (DT) network.

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In response to my thread: No SIP/IMS stack for Android?, Dean Bubley of Disruptive wireless comes up with this very insightful analysis at forumoxford – which I have reproduced exactly as is.

Very insightful!

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I reckon that the entire Internet & IT community is negative towards IMS – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype et al.

IMS = walled-garden SIP, or perhaps more amusingly an “Internet Monetisation System”.

The problem is that IMS views everything as a billable ‘service’ – it doesn’t seem to accept that certain applications are based on the customer owning or operating their own software. In the real world, customers want certain capabilities delivered as ongoing sbillable ervices (opex) and certain things bought, owned & used outright (capex)

The current setup of the Internet is that centrally-controlled QoS and charging is anathema. IMS harks back to the legacy days of bundling access & service. That’s fine for certain things, but totally inappropriate for the Internet, as that control adds latency & friction to development & innovation. I’ve heard IMS vendors talk about developers and “2 men & a dog in a garage”, when what they actually meant was “2 men, a dog & a 30-person legal department”.

As a simple example – could you imagine that anything as mindbogglingly useful as PDF would have evolved had the Internet been based on IMS principles? Download the client for free & then use it in perpetuity as a browser plug-in? No, we would all have been charged for a usage-based ‘document viewing service’, and it would never have got the traction.

The one thing that could change the situation is if one of the vendors – perhaps Cisco or Avaya – invented a private IMS architecture, that enterprises or large Internet firms could own. It would be deeply amusing if Merrill Lynch or GlaxoSmithKline deployed their own IMS’s, and started charging interconnect fees to the telcos.

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