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Belinda Barnet is currently working as Service Delivery Manager (Music and Sport) for Ericsson Australia. She has also worked as eCommerce Producer for NRMA Insurance in Sydney, and has a PhD in Media and Communications from UNSW. (note: the following are Belinda's personal opinions and not those of Ericsson).
mo:life:
Right now, it seems like mobile companies are creating platforms to host information services. Can you expand on this. What is a mobile platform?
Belinda Barnet:
There are a couple of different definitions of mobile 'platform'. Sometimes it is used to refer to the mobile device itself. There are also ‘middleware’ platforms that companies use to write, run and deploy applications - I think that’s what you mean. These usually have application programming interfaces (API’s), which define how developers use particular features. More and more companies around the world are realising the benefits of deploying mobile services – and when they get around to doing it, they need a platform to write and run the services they dream up. I think we will be seeing more platforms with a multichannel architecture. Media are converging, there is no sense making distinctions between wired and wireless, you need to deliver to both.
Having said that, it’s important to realise that there are new issues and new requirements surrounding mobility. The environment is different; there are a lot more variables and use cases. For example, when you build a website you only have one site you need to deliver to the screen, and you test that on a few browsers and machines and you’re done, it’s cooked. But for mobile applications you need to render different content for a multiplicity of devices, it needs to work on dozens of handsets and contexts. The permutations are endless. So you need a flexible solution. Mobile platform development is a growing industry, and it will continue to grow.
mo:life:
Do you have any thoughts on Sony's plan to put 500 films on to flash memory for mobiles over the next five years? Do you see inserted memory cards as being the way mobile video will be used with mobile devices? Is device memory is a restriction?
Belinda Barnet:
Mobile video could go in a few different directions. You don’t have to physically store videos on your device or on a memory card; you can stream them from somewhere else. There are a couple of different models. After a certain point though, memory restrictions aren’t as much of a limitation as processing power, or even cultural restrictions. In fact, I think the latter is more of a restriction to mobile video than device memory. Mobile video is still at the beginning of a technology curve in Australia; we are still trying to work out what people will want to use and how it will fit into everyday life.
mo:life:
From your vantage point, can you signpost the next few years?
Belinda Barnet:
The next couple of years in Australia are obvious by now. Mobile devices will become portable media platforms. They already are for some people, but for the mass market this is still a novelty (when we don’t need to ask questions about mobile video, we will have arrived). Your phone will be your iPod, it will be a video player, it will be your connection to the web, it will be your source of community and news, but most importantly it will deliver information that is relevant to where you are and what you are interested in at that time. It will be stamped with your identity.
That is one of the advantages it has over TV, radio, a newspaper, the web; data can be personalized (or customized) to who you are and where you are. That is a crucial difference, and it will be leveraged in the delivery of services and applications. I see a profound impact on news and journalism for example. At the moment, when you browse the web or a newspaper, you need to mine for what you are interested in. Say I am only interested in arthouse film, computer security news, the futures market and women’s lacrosse. Very soon, when you access news on your device, the information you see will be what you are interested in, and relevant to the locale you are in. You are your own editor.
Further down the track, I think the internet will be seen as an adjunct to mobile devices. The idea that you need to be attached to a desk or a room or any particular place to access information will be something we tell our kids about. Oh, we had to sit down at a desk and dial up to get our news, and when we went camping we couldn’t just get information on the weather like that. It will just be self-evident that we take connectivity with us wherever we go, that places become ‘smart’ as soon as we walk into them. So I think the big change will be that cultural shift.
mo:life:
There are the obvious and predictable applications like street directories and soft porn. But is there any unusual mobile content around, or on the horizon?
Belinda Barnet:
Services that allow you to access relevant content, or have relevant content sent to you, whatever that happens to be, are obvious. We’ve inherited that model from the web. You can find stuff and stuff gets sent to you. For me, the interesting thing is how this content will get ‘smarter’ in the future and leverage the advantages of the mobile medium we talked about above. How it can be stamped with your identity, what you are interested in and where you are. I’ll use the example of news. I’m interested in women’s lacrosse (my sister played for Duke), so in the future, when I travel to North Carolina, I’d love editorial about the Blue Devils, a community function where I could talk to other fans and get all the gossip about her (sorry Meg), access related info on Iron Duke parties, meetings and pranks, maybe book a season ticket. I don’t care about all that while I’m in Melbourne though. Who cares where they are meeting right now.
I think interesting applications in the future will be around developing communities, putting you in touch with other people who are interested in the same thing at that particular point in time in that particular place. So it’s not the future of content itself I find interesting, but how this will be stamped with your individual identity, and how this connects you to other people. So to answer your question, in the future I see smarter content, but the important thing is not what that content – it’s how it relates to you in your current context. Right here, right now.
mo:life:
How did you get in to the industry? What kinds of skills do you need to work in these sectors?
Belinda Barnet:
The skills obviously depend on the role you are after. I worked as web producer for a while, and also taught media (I’ll be back at Swinburne next month actually). If you are going to work in content services, I think a background in media is useful, you need to have more than just technical knowledge. This will give you an understanding of te limitations of the medium, of your audience and what is appropriate in that space. On the other hand, if you are going to be a developer or service architect, an engineering background is obviously important.
The life cycles and processes in a mobile service production environment are also similar to web, the skills are portable. I'd encourage people to move into this industry if they can, it's an exciting space - WAP in particular is a bit like the web in 1994. There is change going on.
mo:life:How do you think i-mode will fare in Australia?
Belinda Barnet:
I’m not going to speculate on i-mode. I do want to say, however, that WAP and i-Mode can coexist. The idea that one must win and the other lose is very simplistic. i-Mode was extremely successful in Japan, but there were unique market conditions and unique cultural conditions surrounding that. Landline internet services never had mass-market penetration in Japan, so it could be argued that people discovered the web and information services via their mobiles. I’m going to wait and see what happens, but I do think that the market is ready for it now.
mo:life:
Is all this mobile talk a hullabaloo bubble?
Belinda Barnet:
There is certainly a lot of hype, but that surrounds the wide-scale introduction of any new technology. The 3G technology cycle in particular has only started in Australia. There is a lot of discussion about it, and I think that’s healthy. We need to work out how the medium is different, what benefits it offers, and most importantly, how it will fit into (and change) our lives. Think about the discussion surrounding the web ten years ago: there was a lot of hype then as well. The web will democratize education, it will redistribute knowledge, it will kill the book, long live the book. Well it has had a major impact, but we couldn’t have predicted what would happen. Books are still around thankfully, but who could have predicted amihotornot.com? We live in interesting times…
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