The Future of Mobile - Industry Leader Interview: PICNIC08, Guy Laurence of Vodafone

After the disappointment of the previous Google presentation, this is a treat.

In fact, Kara starts by apologising for the ‘tasteful fascism’ line, noting that she should more accurately have referred to Steve Jobs as an ‘elegant benevolent dictator.’

Then it’s straight into the questioning. How is Vodafone looking at the current boom in smartphones, typified by the iPhone and Google’s G1?

The way Guy puts it is that three or four years ago there was a lack of innovation, and while Vodafone quite rightly see some threats in the disruptive innvation at work here (VOIP over 3G for example) they obviously welcome anything which drives usage and - Guy’s word -’dependency…’

There’s also a heavy focus on the traditional operator strategy of providing a walled-garden mobile content service, in this case Vodafone Live.

Guy is good on this, talking to his experience putting together the original VF Live business case in 2002, and recalling the UK’s infamous “WAP is Crap” newspaper headline at the time, but provides the bizarre defence of “training the content development industry” for why they’ve continued with a walled garden.

(He also can’t help dropping in the fact that his original 2002 business plan showed 50% of data revenues coming from on deck content by 2008, which is exactly how it’s played out.)

Kara however echoes all our thoughts and equates the maintenance of operator walled gardens to AOL patronising their audience in the 90s: “Does the user really need their hand held any more?” After all, it’s not a wild west out their anymore…

Kara’s keen to get Guy’s opinion on the next big thing, and pushes repeatedly - so what do we get?

- Kara suggests that multi-touch is going to be a big trend, and Guy agrees. He’s hoping to see a time when things “evolve to a point when it moves beyond the speed of two thumbs” and notes that his daughter can apparently type a text message with her hands behind her back (the saucy minx…)

- He’s predictably a big believer in location based services (something we touched on repeatedly in LBiQ 2), and gives a genuinely awesome Vodafone.nl example where GPS data from users in their cars is utilised to provide a live, real time map of traffic jams. Not the newest thing in the world though, but the tie up with TomTom to deliver it is great. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a great hook to keep customers from churning away from their network.

- He’s also a believer in a world where mobile social networking is going to be big (see LBiQ 2 for our take on this one…), and talks excitedly to the opportunities of presence. Kara quite rightly shoots this down a little with a reference to Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball - “A big flaming failure” as she delicately puts it.

- Guy also pushes snacking on TV content via the handset. Couldn’t agree more on the fact that it’s snacking content users want (certainly not Live Broadcast Mobile TV, see here for more on this one). In terms of the content that he sees working in this way, it’s no surprise that humour is deemed a winner: “No one does an Open University course standing at a tram stop…” (Oh, he also makes clear that adult content is absolutely huge and only getting bigger on mobile…)

- He stresses however that Vodafone is “Not in the content business” which will be an interesting statement to look back to in a couple of years. In fact, he’s quite prepared to push the ‘boring’ and unsexy part of their work, the actual build-out of infrastructure which is, he says, why he’s not worried about an Apple or a Google becoming a network operator (though the potential of either to do this as an MVNO isn’t mentioned…).

Finally, it’s onto opinions on the G1 Googlephone. Guy is polite: “As a concept it’s great but the hardware needs a lot of work.” Kara is less so: “It’s the Zune of Smartphones” (brilliant) and also “aggressively ugly.”

Great session.