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I attended a Nokia Developer's conference last week and drew the following three conclusions from it.

Firstly, Nokia realized that it really screwed up when it seemingly dropped Symbian last year. Regardless of whether this was actually its intention or not, it's what the industry read into their move and so it was not terribly surprising that open source developers did not rush to get involved in the Symbian Foundation as a result - who wants to become an expert in a technology you believe has no future, after all?

Of course, Nokia has now corrected this misunderstanding, and to underline this, spent most of the first hour of the conference discussing how Symbian was still core to Nokia's future - "the lady doth protest too much", came to mind.

Secondly, of...

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It really was only a matter of time.

Tech journalists have actually been waiting with bated breath for the emergence of mobile exploits, viruses and Trojans, but we needed for two things to happen first; firstly that the technology get sophisticated enough to support such malware, but also that the environment reach a critical mass that would allow their spread in the mobile ecosystem.

The first really began with the introduction of phones that allowed the running of third party software. In it's truest form this probably meant on OS's such as Nokia's Symbian, however exploits have been possible since WAP phones first came out over ten years ago. Around then, many phones included rushed and often flawed implementations of the various WAP stack of API's, and in a number of these cases exploits were theoretically possible.

I found one example of this in 2000 with the More...

Well, it was roughly ten years ago that I started up a site devoted to the nascent mobile Internet industry, largely because in my own quest to learn more on the subject, I had found precious few resources on the subject. I say roughly, as the domain name really only came later and I had the original site hosted on Tripod. Finally I got round to registering a domain name (just after the .com was registered, naturally) and the rest is history - or archived, the image here is actually from a 2001 Web Archive copy.

Looking back on the last ten years, the mobile Internet has changed greatly in terms of technology, but commercially...

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I remember a late night, drunken conversation with the CEO of an Irish mobile technologies firm, the day we had all been allotted our initial premium rate SMS shortcodes. He was saying how it was the future; micropayments and all that. The truth is that the mobile technologies industry needed this; WAP had pretty much flopped and we knew it, so we desperately needed a viable revinue stream.

A few weeks later the operators began to reveal their T&C's - and rates. We had to sign NDA's for this - in retrospect possibly because they were too embarrassed to let the wider public know they were gouging everyone - charging crazy set-up and recurring fees, imposing unrealistic conditions and, most importantly, keeping the lion's share of revenue.

The problem with this is that as a result it killed the micropayment idea outright (and with it the product my company had been developing) and the only way anyone could make money from PSMS as a result was with worthless junk,...

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I've finally recovered from my few days the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which I'll have to admit were amongst the most gruelling I've ever had to endure. Less said about my hotel the better... Of all the people I met up with there, one worth mentioning is the creator and present maintainer of the WURFL, Luca Passani (with me in the photo on my left). I've known Luca virtually since 2000, throughout the ups and downs of WAP and the mobile Internet, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him in the flesh.

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