Ian Atkinson, a participant from the British company, Criterion said: "Ericsson should engage developers at an early stage and this kind of event is a good way to do this." When asked about MMS, Atkinson said that person-to-person MMS and interoperability must be improved. "We need to make sure the simple applications work first before moving on to more complicated applications."

The day kicked off with Jörgen Odgaard of Ericsson, describing what Ericsson Mobility World is about, following with a presentation from Ericsson Marketing Manager, Karin Björk, who discussed trends within MMS. Björk explained that a successful MMS launch is dependent on starting in the right place – with the end users' needs. Other key areas that must be addressed include handsets, pricing, interoperability, content and applications and ease of use.

Björk mentioned two operators that have had successful launches, Vodafone Live and Verizon Wireless.

Magnus Ahlberg, Head of Business Sales at Swedish operator 3, spoke next about the challenges they have faced in entering the Swedish market and introducing MMS. 3 launched its services in June 2003 and is currently competing in the Swedish market based on its competitive voice call pricing.

Ahlberg challenged the developers in the audience by telling them not to come to him with a product to sell, but to tell him how many new customers 3 will gain through their applications. Read the full article.

Following Ahlberg's presentation was a technical look at Ericsson's MMS SDK. Lori Ann Robertson said that the SDK would be available to developers in January. Some of the enhancements and changes that are planned for the future include content-to-person and optimized push services.

Gulamabbas Sumar from Sony Ericsson gave a technical overview of MMS features in phones today, coming features, and discussed how Java and video streaming will affect MMS application design.

Using the go-to-market model, Fredrik Ruben presented the Internet Payment eXchange (IPX). IPX is a unique payment service provider acting as a transparent, white-label content acquirer and transaction router between operators and content providers. IPX enables the mobile subscriber to purchase published digital content, regardless wherever in the world he or she resides, using the mobile identity for authentication and pay via the existing operator charging relationship, pre paid or post paid.

IPX is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Singapore and Finland.

In a final wrap up, Robert Arcon of Ericsson explained how Ericsson Mobility World can assist developers through the developer program, IPX, business partnering and testing services.

Aimée Ravacon