Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecomsMobile, Roaming and Social Media

I went along to the Vodafone 360 launch at Bentley’s with an open mind and a sense of excitement on Thursday, you see I have been a fan of Vodafone 360 since it was called Zyb and founded by my friend Tommy Ahlers, I met with Tommy recently in Barcelona and was told to “watch this space” so I did. Funny video from Dennis Howlett from this event
Let’s get the silliest part of the day out of the way first, Dita Von Teese arrived, left without saying a word or allowing a picture so that was really that.
Vodafone Ireland CEO Charles Butterworth made a speech and then it was on to product demo’s

So what is Vodafone 360?
I think we are in the realms of what I like to call “Cloud Mobile” or what we called many years ago in San Francisco “Ken’s phone”.
I obviously due to my zyb experience had a rough idea of what was coming but this operating system connects at a network level that has been previously unseen.
Social networks, it has it, Presence, it has it, IM, it has that too.
This will change mobile in my opinion, the ability to drill this deep and to interconnect, social networks, location, presence has been around for quite a bit now but for a mobile carrier to get it at this level hasn’t and if we see the voice side of it being pushed onto 2G we may be looking at the future data pipe of mobile.

For Vodafone to take the first step indicates a brave new world at vodafone and you have to applaud it.
One small tip for Vodafone- lets know the prices before you guys announce anything, I have no idea on device costs or service costs.