Feel the MLOVE

DM: Harald, I’ve been looking at the agenda for MLOVE, and it doesn’t look much like most of the conferences I go to. What’s the idea?

HN: I must do around 40 conferences a year around the world, and there is always this notion that they are good for making business contacts and learning new ideas. But it is always a challenge to spend enough time with the more passionate innovative people.

So around the beginning of 2009, I asked some friends who share my passion for mobile to join me at a camp in Munich. There were 25 of us there, and all we had in common was that we worked in the mobile industry, and were very passionate about it.

And then since then, we have met in San Francisco, Barcelona, and most recently we had 40 people in Andorra, thinking about, how will mobile change our future. We had handset makers, operators, start-ups, creative people, artists and musicians, from Russia, the US, Europe, the UK, and we tested the ‘Future Cube’ concept, where we had two groups of 20 people thinking about how a certain topic is influenced by mobility, mobile devices and mobile services, and this was a big test run for MLOVE. 

DM: So it sounds like the key to it is that you give yourselves some quality thinking time; it’s not a  case of sitting in front of a procession of presenters?

HN: It’s about thinking and networking. So on the first night, we have over 200 people arriving, so we are setting up 10 tables where 20 people sit together and introduce themselves, so you’re not part of a big, anonymous group; it’s more like being a guest at a dinner party. The castle has 100 rooms, so there are a lot of places we can go.

The next day, we have some keynote speakers, but part of the day is an open space where people can interact with everyone, and we have taken guidance from people experienced in this area to discuss what topics are hot on their mind. People can dive in make comments and leave a mark, and we have a visual recorder putting it all down on paper.

Then as part of the conference, when we talk about how mobile is changing different aspects of life,  we have someone from the Grammys, we have the CEO of  Grameenphone in Bangladesh, we have advertising people from Omnicom, and the head of customer experience for the Puma phone from Sagem, so looking at how a sports company has entered the mobile business.

Then on the Thursday evening, everyone goes round to the back of the castle, which is 100m wide, and there we have a visual artist from Switzerland, who is projecting videos from Glastonbury and other festivals onto the castle. So the whole castle is animated, and everyone can join in by using their mobile phone to “paint” on the walls of the castle, so this is the symbol of the mobile as the remote control to our lives.

DM: How does that work exactly?

HN: It’s a clever piece of technology that converts your phone into a computer mouse effectively, a little hard to explain, but we think it’s going to be really special. So by now, we think everyone will have made friends, and then on the Friday, it’s the highlight of the collaboration session.

We have converted a huge barn on the back of the castle into a gallery space of 10 Future Cubes. In each of these, we will be discussing a different topic, so Advertising, Media, Music etc. We have musicians, performers, visual artists and also ideation experts from Deutsche Telekom, and they have a 6 x 6m white wall, so they have to start creating ideas based on their discussions, and then everyone can run round and see what the other Cubes did, so it becomes like a focus group. Then after the event, the Fashion Cube is travelling to different fashion shows in Berlin, Copenhagen, Florence and other places, so it’s going on the road.

DM: And other than the ideas people take away, are you going to document this in any way for future reference?

HN: Yes, all the speeches will be taped and there will be photos, and a video studio where we will be interviewing all the attendees, asking them for their thoughts about the future of mobile. So this will be like a time capsule of what happened in June 2010, and what people were thinking, and we hope this will inspire people in the future.

DM: Harald, it sounds unlike any conference I’ve ever taken part in, and one of those things you probably have to experience to fully appreciate what you’re doing. The very best of luck with it.

HN: Thank you.