I went to the 4th monthly Mobile Monday London (aka momolondon), my third one. I missed the one last month at Yahoo's offices because I was in Turkey.

Google really laid on a slick hosting job. They had nice printed signage, including a label on the elevator button for the floor to go to, coat check, free t-shirts and pens*, plenty of free booze and food handed out by catering staff wandering the floor. The presentation equipment was also tops, dual projectors and the presenters' slide shows were technically seamless.

* Figuring out how to open the free pen may be an example of the infamous Google recruiting tests, it took about 3 or 4 different approaches before I figured it out. Maybe not something to brag about.

Oh yeah, the presentations themselves were pretty interesting as well. The theme for the evening was payment systems, in other words, ways for content providers to make enough money to make it worth doing. This probably is the biggest thing holding back the content industry, shady ring-tone clubs aside.

Shannon Maher from Google gave the first talk, and although it was the one least targeted to the theme, I think that most of the attendees, sated with Google-booze and delicious toothpick-meat, didn't mind. Google is building a new London-based mobile engineering team to complement their team in California. It sounds like their main reasons for doing this are to tap into the European mobile scene, given that as Mr. Maher said, the UK now has 100% penetration versus 70% in the US; and for partnerships with external organizations, including carriers (mobile network operators, as I usually call them), OEM's, and "industry", whatever that means.

Maher was fairly cagey on the specifics of Google's product plans, at one point begging that he hopes not to see his offhand musings blasted onto front pages the next day as announcements of new Google services. He said the first step is to bring existing properties onto mobile, then step 2 would be to innovate, and design for the mobile experience.

One thing he mentioned that I think resonated well with attendees is that Google considers small content providers as being of key importance, and wants to help them out. In an industry which cripples itself with walled garden strategies, breaking down the walls is the only way to get the kind of success people keep claiming is inevitable. Google is an ideal company to help with this.

An interesting point that Mr. Maher made was the fact that search is very different on the mobile. The mobile web is not nearly as well-linked as the regular web, so Google is struggling with finding all of the content that's out there so people can search it.

Other attendees raised questions about how people are actually going to "discover" mobile services. Very few people whip out their phone and go to Google to find things the way we do on the regular web. The operator portals can be a major source of traffic, but the most popular is the old fashioned texting a keyword to a shortcode approach. I believe that mixing non-mobile and mobile is the key, both for this discovery/marketing process and for most applications. There was some discussion on the floor about mobilized adwords and adsense, but I think there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of using normal Google Adwords to drive people to mobile applications.

Margaret Gold presented Luup, which is Yet Another Payment Scheme (my term, not hers), basically a mobile-oriented Paypal. She used a new-fangled presentation style, rapid-fire slides with just a word or two or a picture, which was pretty cool. But when someone asked why Luup will succeed where others have failed, especially given that Paypal can easily move into mobile, her answer was pretty weak, basically saying there's room for more than one. The Network Effect suggests that there probably isn't room for more than one, and Paypal already has a massive head start. I don't think being the first into mobile will matter.

One thing a lot of mobile dotcom wannabees don't appreciate is that mobile is not an entirely new playground, it's just an extension of the web. There's a parallel here with the original dotcom bubble, where entrepreneurs thought the web was an entirely new economy, separate from the old one. It turned out to be just another facet of the old economy.

Jeremy Flyn from Vodafone talked about xPay, which sounds like a set of standards which is trying to pick up the pieces left from the crash of SimPay. One of the reasons SimPay failed was that it used a single model across Europe, but different European countries have very different economics for mobile content, including how much they pay out. Flyn repeatedly emphasized that the UK has the highest payout to content providers for premium SMS messages. So xPay is a UK-specific standard, which the operators and SMS aggregators will hopefully all sign onto.

Richard Watney from Reporo gave a fairly brief demo, using a phone, of their service, which basically seems to be a custom J2ME shopping applicaiton. Users browse shops that have signed up with Reporo, and Reporo stores credit card details and uses them to charge purchases.

So the talks were fairly interesting, although in a lot of ways there didn't seem to be anything very new. I think this demonstrates that online mobile services, although it's becoming very hot at the moment, is still struggling to find it's place in peoples' everyday life. I'd say we're basically at a similar stage to the 1996 Web, where very few people were actually making money outside of porn and ripoffs, and it's still difficult to make an unshakable argument that it will become a real, profitable, mature market. Personally, that's what makes it fun to me, just like then, it's uncharted territory.

Networked mobile apps are really heating up these days, with a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Yahoo and Google, plus of course many independent companies, including the one I work for. Grr. I'm checking out Yahoo Mobile, but I'm annoyed by their phone selection when I go to "what's on my mobile". They have a list of Nokia phones, and then "I don't know". I actually do know the model of my phone (N70), but it's not on the list, so what am I supposed to choose? "I don't know" causes it to ask me again when I try to check on each application. I'm sure I can get to them by just going straight in on my phone.

Gmail works nicely and intuitively when I hit it on my phone. My only complaint so far is it seems to take a least common denominator approach to phone capabilities, so when I go to read an email, it doesn't show the whole mail on one page. I don't know whether this is a fallback because Gmail doesn't know that the N70 can handle larger pages, or if it does this for all phones as a strategy for faster page loading. But it's annoying, because it means several clicks and several page loads to read an entire email, even a short one.

We're in the middle of our second week on holiday here in Istanbul, enjoying what will probably be our last holiday trip for a while.

The economy seems to be doing very well, certainly the exchange rate has held steady for a few years now. I originally came to Turkey in early 2001, just after the devaluation which kicked off a serious recession.

Last year the Turkish government finally took my suggestion (which I made to friends in a cafe several years ago, obviously the word trickled up) to re-issue their currency, dropping the last 6 zeroes. So the 20 million Turkish Lira note (the highest demonomination note in the world) is now the 20 YTL (New Turkish Lira) note.

With the 1 million lira note being just a bit less than a dollar in value, I always considered it to be the basic currency unit. Of course, for people who'd been living here before the devaluation, inflation was a constant, so they didn't have the same perception of 1.3 million lira to the dollar as being about the natural rate.

It's interesting that even a year after the redonomination of the currency, people still talk about millions and billions of lira. I wonder how long it will take people to get used to it.

The other thing I have to note about the economy is that Istanbul is not nearly the bargain it used to be. A nice dinner at a fancy restaurant, with starters, wine, and deserts used to run at less than $20 or so each, now it's around $60, closer to London prices. Groceries, clothes, and property are all not really that cheap.

I suppose that's good, in that it must mean the economy is OK, but I'm not sure whether peoples' salaries have kept up. I don't think teachers and other public servants have an easy time of it.

I'm kicking myself for not buying an apartment in the development where Ozlem's parents live. A $60,000 investment would now be worth at least triple that. With my 20/20 hindsight, I have to say I was a moron. Unfortunately prices have leveled off.

It will be interesting to see whether the economy holds strong. Discussing it with my brother in law, it seems Turkey tends to have a cycle of a few years of stability, followed by a crash. A lot depends on politics. The election next year will probably see the current government's huge majority in parliament shrink, although probably not disappear. One of the factors most likely to disrupt the economy would be political change.

Of course earthquakes, terrorism, further wars next door in Iraq, Syria, or Iran, or a falling out with the EU would not help things either.

If you're ever in Taksim in Istanbul and want a place to chill out for a bit, I recommend the Peripetie Bistro. We went there last week to meet one of Ozlem's best friends, one who always knows the best new places in Taksim. For those not familiar with Istanbul, Taksim is the main place for the bars, clubs, and cafes, although there are others like Kadikoy.

We drank mulled wine (well, Ozlem had a nice herbal tea), ate a brownie desert, and generally chilled. The decor is very nice, and they've got a lot of classy touches, like cinamon sticks in the mulled wine. A lot of the other people in there seemed to be youngish couples enjoying alone-time.

Ozlem and I have been asking parents we run into about their experiences raising kids with different languages, to get an idea of what we'll do ourselves. I'm now poking around on the Net a bit to see what's out there on the subject.

One of the more common situations we hear from parents who have different native languages is that it's important that each parent consistently use their own language with the child. An article by Marsha Rosenberg Raising Bilingual Children expands on this a bit, according to her the importance is consistency of situation. So it's not that the parent has to only and always speak the same language, but that they have consistent boundaries about the speaking of each language.

This fits with some people we've met recently, who both speak Portugese fluently (although the mother is not a native speaker) and speak it consistently with their daughter at home, but use English when outside. Rosenberg also suggests parents might alternate based on the day of the week, but that seems weird to me. The important thing, though, is that parents don't mix languages in a single conversation, otherwise the children will tend to learn it as a hybrid language - they won't easily distinguish the two lanuages.

Parents we've met who both speak the same language, but a different one than the community they live in, don't seem worried about speaking the local language at home. Certainly by the time the kids start school they will pick up the local language, and end up speaking it, possibly better than the parents' language. I do know one person raised in England by Greek-speaking parents, whose parents decided that one of them would use English with him, but it doesn't sound like that's strictly necessary.

One useful not from Rosenberg is that children should be exposed to the non-local language "in a variety of situations and with a variety of speakers. Rich language experiences in both languages are essential for good bilingual development." So for us, if the kid only speaks Turkish at home with Ozlem, over time (especially after starting school) their Turkish won't develop as well. I have a friend raised in Germany whose father speaks Danish with him, but he tells me when he visits Denmark people think he's retarded. I think we'll have an easy time of it since we know plenty of Turkish speakers in London, and hopefully we'll also get fairly frequent visits to Turkey to spend time with family.

One thing I haven't yet found any comments on, but is a concern of ours, is how we communicate with each other. Ozlem and I speak English to each other, because my Turkish sucks (and that phrase can also be turned the other way around - my Turkish sucks because I don't use it). Will this confuse the kid? Maybe not, but when Ozlem says something to the both of us, she'll want to use Turkish, which I may not understand, rather than English, which will dilute her use of it with the kid. The answer will probably be for me to raise my game. I should be able to improve my Turkish along with our kid!

More links:

• the bilingual families web page, is maintained by Cindy Kandolf, apparently in conjunction with a mailing list, looks to have useful resources.

Something to think about when designing a site or application is how you write your error messages. This grokdotcom article (which I can't find a byline for) encourages you to write messages that don't chastise the user for not understanding how your app works. The one comment I would make on this article is that any application developer (web or otherwise) who needs to think of the best way to phrase an error like "Phone number cannot contain dashes" should be shot.

I don't understand developers who take the time to check that a phone number has dashes (or credit card number has spaces) and chastise the user for it, rather than just stripping them out and getting on with it.

Vodafone, a British mobile operator, has bought Telsim, the second largest Turkish mobile operator. This is interesting to me since I spent some time working for the third largest mobile operator in Turkey, and currently work on the UK mobile industry. Telsim has a rocky past, they've always been a distant second to Turkcell, and has suffered from seriously dodgy owners, the Uzan family. The Uzan brothers founded Telsim, getting a ton of credit from the likes of Nokia to build their network, then refused to pay. For a while it looked like they'd get away with it, since they had more knowledge and connections in the Turkish legal and political systems, but in the end their business empire collapsed and was taken over by the government.

The interesting thing about the Turkish mobile phone market, at least 4 years ago when I was living and working there, was that very few people used monthly contracts. Most customers use "pay as you go", where you have to prepay for the time you will use. This was mostly down to price, the Turkish companies just didn't offer the kinds of deals that UK operators do. Vodafone may change this, they may even introduce contracts whereby people can get good phones at cheap prices when they sign a contract.

Turkey is a great market for mobile phones, it's such a social culture. I remember being impressed when I first visited Istanbul in 2000 at how pervasive they were. Mobiles were already common in the UK at the time, but in the US they still had an embarassing "yuppie" stigma.

Workmate Ben (or "Bean", as he calls himself), provides us with this link to a kiwi christmas story. "They came in, said 'Merry Christmas' and then helped themselves."

Google alerts has just informed me of the existing of "Kief Princess", who is a champion breed mare in Ireland according to this article. Too bad Good thing she's not a racehorse, or I'd be betting on her in every race.

I would really like to build or buy a box that lets me easily watch files I download with bittorrent on my TV. There are a lot of interesting new media appliances for the TV these days, including:

• PVRs, which are hard drive-based TV recorders with nifty features for automatically scheduling shows to be recorded,
• XBox and XBox 360, which are game consoles that can buy and update games through an online service
• Windows Media Center, which is basically a PC running a special version of Windows XP designed for PVR and other functions

I don't have any of these things, but I'd quite like something that does at least the PVR stuff, but also lets me run bittorrent.

If you don't know what bittorrent is, it's basically a network protocol for downloading files that is well suited to transferring large, popular files. Without going into the technical details (which, as a geek, I find fascinating), bittorrent turns the usual dynamics of downloading files on their head - the more people that are downloading a file, the faster it will be for you to download.

This makes it an ideal and increasingly popular way to download software, television shows, movies, etc, which tend to be large files. Serving media files on the Internet requires a lot of bandwidth, which gets very expensive for popular files, but with bittorrent it's much more efficient, cheap, and faster, so better for everyone involved. Of course much of the content people download using bittorrent is of dubious legality.

Personally, I like to download TV shows that aren't available in the UK using bittorrent. The two big things I like are that I can watch it when I want, and without commercials. The big thing I don't like is that I mostly have to watch these on my PC instead of my TV. It's possible to hook my TV up to my PC, but not convenient, since they're in different rooms, and the PC doesn't have a remote control.

A PVR like Sky+ would probably give me the two things I like about bittorrent, and solve the thing I don't. But there is another advantage bittorrent has over a PVR, and that's the Internet. A PVR still only lets me watch whatever is made available by my cable company, satellite service, or local broadcasters. A torrent box connected to my broadband Internet connection and my TV would give me access to any content people put on the Net.

This would do for TV what VOIP is doing for phone service, and what IPTV doesn't even try to do) - wipe out geographical limitations. Producers and/or distributors of television content could make their stuff available on the net via bittorrent, either charging a fee or, for promotional or amateur content, for free, and reach viewers everywhere. My wife and I could watch TV shows from Turkey, local stations in the US, and independent producers, no matter where we live. That would rule.

The box is actually trival to make. It's a hardware device that can connect to a TV and a broadband connection (a plain ethernet jack or wifi would work for me), play media files (XviD), and run a bittorrent client (ideally Azureus), and a UI to make it easy to browse and select files to download. Adding 1 or 2 TV tuners would give you a PVR as well, and a DVD drive (preferably a writer) replaces your DVD player.

The quickest way to get a box that does this, and more, would be to get a Windows Media Center device. This is basically a PC shaped and designed like a home entertainment component, running a special version of Microsoft Windows. It would be a simple matter of installing Java and Azureus, and ideally writing a decent UI (or perhaps WMC plugins?) to browse and select torrent files to download. Alternately, the same hardware could run Linux and a free PVR software package like MythTV.

The drawback of this is expense. Most of these boxes seem to cost around £1,000. I'm sure a box could be sold for around £300-400 that could handle this, maybe not quite as full powered and full featured as the media center PC's, but enough for downloading and watching TV. The new XBox 360 games console actually looks to have the right hardware. I think the only thing keeping the 360 from being able to do this easily is that its Internet connection seems to be restricted to connecting to Microsoft's online service. I'm sure there are hacks for this or, at the worst, Linux will inevitably be ported to the 360 the way it has for the original Xbox.

In fact, I could probably get a workaround for what I want by installing Windows Media Center on my normal desktop PC, and buying the XBox 360 and connecting it to my TV. The 360 apparently works with Media Center as a "Media Extender", so it can play music and video on the Media Center PC's hard drive. I'm not sure how easy it would be to install a program on the XBox that let me browse and choose bittorrent files from the X-Box though, and it is overall an awkward solution.

In any case, the hardest part of all of this is the content. Most of the content out there right now is illegal, so nobody other than a hobbyist like me is going to make a bittorrent box. The key to making it popular will be on the content side, which is an interesting business challenge. I've got more on that subject for a later post.

If anyone knows of a box that costs around £300 and can run Linux (or Windows Media Center), has a hard drive, TV connectors, and ethernet or wifi, let me know. The closest I've found in price is the Topfield (also see the UK forum), which is a sweet-sounding PVR but has no network interface. Shuttle makes many different small form-factor PC's, but these are pretty powerful and more expensive than I'm looking for.