The time for 3GSM is approaching. What will be the major trends? I think quite clearly Mobile Instant Messaging will be big, with a dedicated stand area and many vendors and operators showing success stories. But what will be the other trends?

Where did IMS go? Will we see the IMS hype return? How about push to talk? Any success stories there?

Social networking and blogging on mobile is bound to be present… who’ll be presenting the most interesting stuff in that respect?

I’ll obviously be there and will try to report a bit about what’s happening… still 2 weeks to go though…

I really like the Apple TV box that Apple has presented. I have long thought that the best positioned companies to present such a solution have been Apple, Microsoft and Sony. Interestingly only Microsoft seems to have gone for a standard PVR type solution, while the others will have to be based on more on-demand TV. Maybe the first product I buy from Apple?

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I’ve been able to find quite a lot of good bloggers and researchers in the US who focus on instant messaging and social networking. I haven’t found much in Europe. Does anybody know of people in Europe who do research on this? Colibria held an operator summit last year in Lillehammer, and we asked Richard Ling from Telenor R&D to come and talk about IM and SMS, and he made some good points. Just ordered his books from amazon. Other people and sites?

Fred Stutzman just wrote a good blog article about what will happen in 2007 with social networking. His opinion is that social networks will not have success with going mobile in 2007. That may be true or not, but if they do, what sort of things will they have to consider? Social networks are now very web browser focussed. People long hours on these sites, editing their own profiles and viewing others. It isn’t given that a successful mobile social network would be exactly the same. These are some of the questions we have to ask:

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Telenor launched an MSN service on a few handsets some weeks ago. Not a very impressive client and user experience at all, in my opinion. It’ll be very interesting to see how successful this is in the Norwegian market, which has very high MSN penetration. It seems Telenor are cooperating with MSN at this point rather than launching their own IM service. Despite the much-too-basic user experience, I’m pretty sure this will be so succesful that it’ll hurt their SMS revenues.