James spends much of his time working within mobile operators' marketing teams on projects such as portal launches and content strategy development. "Basically showing them how to make money from the infrastructure equipment they have bought from Ericsson," he explains.

Christoffer Andersson, the book's editor, originally contacted James to provide background information and advice for the book. When it became clear the book would need content focused on customer experience, James signed on as one of the authors. He welcomed the opportunity to take ideas he had accumulated over the past 20 years and write them in a structured form.

Although he had written many reports on product and marketing topics, which were published internally within Ericsson, this was James' first experience writing a book.  He enjoyed the challenge and learned a great deal. "Once you get into a flow, it's a fascinating exercise.  It's always interesting to see what comes out of your head that you didn't know was there."

The key motivation for James is championing the cause of customer understanding. "The telecom and IT industries are extremely inexperienced about what drives customers when it comes to services," he says. James feels this book "comes at a crucial time, when there is much talk and hype about convergence – the merging of the media, telecom and IT industries. We cannot assume there is an automatic demand for data services and that users will discover, understand and try services unprompted. Voice and SMS have led the industry to believe that mobile services sell themselves. This is not true for data. The user experience must be managed – from discovery all the way to the regular use of services," he says.

"The iPod, digital cameras and DVD players have become hugely successful because they are well designed, simple to use and satisfy clear customer needs. I believe that if a product or service stalls, it's because it's not designed well enough, not because of some mythical 'chasm' that prevents people from purchasing it. If a product or service is designed well to begin with, it should penetrate the mass market without trouble. iMode got it right as far as user experience goes – and when Vodafone followed iMode's lead with Vodafone Live, its data offering also started to become successful," he says.

Writing the book has led James to think about the impact of rapid change on people. "It's fascinating how things change so quickly, yet we adapt to them without thinking, or even noticing the change," he says. While working on a degree in 1994, James conducted all his research by going to a library, looking through the stacks and checking out books. Now, only 10 years later, using the internet for these things is taken for granted.

"It's difficult to predict how new technology and change will alter our behavior," he adds. "Mobility itself was a surprise to most people. Operators thought it was a niche product. In South Africa, one operator's original 10-year plan aimed for 200,000 subscribers – 10 years later it has 10 million," he says.

James points out that: "At this point, the technology that can be crammed into a handset can be used to access pretty much all types of media, so now it's about creating the right services for the right people and making it easy to use."

He believes the mobile media market will really take off when the media industry realizes that it can use the mobile channel for individual marketing. "The mobile phone is a highly personal device that can be used to target communities and individuals with customized information," he says. "We've been trying so hard to push information to customers, but operators will eventually realize that the mobile phone is the perfect market-research channel. I strongly believe that the real value of mobility is in the information that we can gather from individual people. Only then will we truly start to understand our customers."

Read more about the book

By John Maxwell Hobbs