Sweden cures the mobile Internet’s syncing feeling

VENTURE CAPITALISTS ARE a bit like Hollywood studio executives. They only greenlight a project if its sounds like something that's already successful.

Today's box office smash is social networking for mobiles. If you invent an application, the best way to get funding is to say it's for social networking purposes. But often, the applications are far wider.

Swedish outfit Mashmobile (formerly Conveneer) is a case in point. It has invented a way to make mobile data networks deliver the sort of performance that operators have been over-promising for years.

Today's phones struggle to upload anything other than a pin code or contacts, so the mobile Internet is pretty much one way traffic. The network address translator you get from your operator only gives you a temporary IP number that lets you surf out from your handset, and nobody can access content stored on your phone from outside the device.

Marc Klefter and Rickard Lindberg, engineers at Conveneer, had an idea to fix this by finding a way to assign URLs to mobile devices. If a mobile devices could somehow be given a socket, it could be assigned a URL. By creating a connectivity platform - a sort of bolt on to the mobile network - they could create a socket connection for each mobile device to its own URL.

The bottom line would be that any mobile device could be seen, and would be as visible on the web, as one of the BBC's servers. As this might create privacy issues, access can be controlled by passwords.

The technology speeds up access since your device has a constant connection, so there are no dropouts while data is being transferred. Moreover, the Mash mobile network uses cache memory to store photos, so their delivery is quicker than if the data was transferred from the device across the network.

The inventors' boss at Conveneer/Mash, Christer Bjork, realised this could be a significant breakthrough for the mobile Internet, so he paid off the engineers and brought in a more experienced development team. Last week the team celebrated the completion of the connectivity platform, Mikz. This is being slowly rolled out to the carriers now.

The upshot is that any data on your mobile device can be seen by anyone on the Net. Any pictures you store on your Iphone can be seen by any server. From a social networking perspective, that means your contacts group can see pictures as soon as you take them. From a business perspective that might mean pictures you take of, say, the scene of a suspected arson for an insurance claim can be immediately accessed by forensic experts back at the office.

You could even use it to broadcast moving images. As soon as Mashmobile starts offering its connectivity service to speed up 3G networks the possibilities are endless, argues Bjork.

"This is important because two-way discovery is do-able," said Rob Bamforth, mobile services analyst at Quocirca, adding that domain name server lookups are too clunky. "This is significant, but slightly destabilising for existing companies involved in reporting and media creation," he said, because now anyone can become a TV station. All you need to broadcast live pictures is an Iphone and a 3G connection. And of course, access to Mashmobile's connectivity service.

Which is why mobile operators are already placing orders for the service. When The INQ visited Bjork, he had just come from talks with Qualcomm about running a managed service for the mobile carrier. "Once social networks and broadcast work better on your mobile, it will give the mobile operators something better to offer their customers," he said.

Of course, it's already popular to broadcast live video over mobile - if you are happy for the content to be viewed through Bambuser's web site. Bambuser is the invention of Mans Adler, and it's already been used by a variety of celebrities.

Blogger Robert Scoble, for example, used it to broadcast a number of live programmes over his mobile connection during Davos. When members of Pirate Bay held a press conference after their trial, it was broadcast live using Bambuser's service. When the Swedish premier league was drawing to a close, footballer Victor Elm gave a series of live video blogs while teammate Henrik Rydberg used his Iphone as cameraman.

Bambuser runs this service for the mobile operators, which share the revenue they get from customers. "We're democratising broadcast media. Anyone can become a broadcaster now," says founder Mans Adler.

It sounds tempting but so far people haven't rushed to adopt the technology. When another Swedish service provider, Tactel, ran a similar managed service for CNN, so that viewers could compile their own reports, there was no resulting explosion of citizen journalists on the streets.

Talking of exposés, service provider MM3 has a great mobile service, Lundstignsratt, for the legal industry. It's a mobile court service that texts prompts to jurors, witnesses and, of course, the parties themselves, to turn up to court. This saves parties a huge amount of money by preventing delayed trials, given the expensive hourly rate of a barrister. Could be great for Britain, where delays cost us millions and cause the collapse of many civil and criminal trials.

"If the system prevents just one no show, then it will have paid for itself," says Ulf Richeberg, MM3's CEO. µ