London, December 7, 2009 / mlovesociety.org – MLOVE announced today a new event exploring inspiration and how mobile will change our future.

The first MLOVE ConFestival in April of 2010 will combine a new way of sharing inspiring stories, innovation, leadership and entrepreneurial success from around the globe. The invite-only event will take place at an undisclosed location that is a 100-room castle built in 1818 and once served as a gathering place of a secret society.

Requests for invites can be emailed to 2010@mlovesociety.org

MLOVE will be a ConFestival of ideas, surprises and value for those that are going beyond the ordinary, challenge the status quo and for those that want to learn and share with fellow passionistas. MLOVE’s goal is to enable people to be inspired and inspire others one story at a time.

“Never before has there been such an intoxicating mix of personal experiences and personal interaction, all centered around the most personal communication device of all time” said MLOVE advisor Jonathan MacDonald, Managing Director of JMA, the global agency that enables companies to execute projects in mobile and other new media.

“We are bringing together CXO’s, innovators and entrepreneurs from across multiple disciplines to share, learn and cross-pollinate ideas with an array of scientists, artists and other thought leaders,” said Peter Giblin, Director of the MLOVE ConFestival. The event exposes the mobile industry to the best minds outside of mobile to maximize the opportunity of creating life-changing services and applications that can impact us all for the better.

The MLOVE ConFestival is a two and a half day event designed to take you outside of every day thinking; an inspirational experience in a trusted environment. The backdrop is mobile, but the goal is to stimulate new ideas and thinking which you can apply to your life, your business and to inspire others.

“We believe mobile is nothing less than the future of our every day lives,” says Andrew J Scott, also an MLOVE advisor and the entrepreneur behind Rummble. “As radio, the telephone, jet engine, television and the Internet before it, wireless communication changes everything.”

How will mobile change your future?

About MLOVE:

The MLOVE tribe started grass roots by an international group of “mobile passionistas” in 2008. Through MLOVE “camps” in Barcelona, San Francisco, Munich, London, New York and Singapore the agenda for MLOVE evolved into more than mobile.

The advisory board to the MLOVE ConFestival 2010 includes: Andrew J. Scott (Rummble), Harald Neidhardt (Smaato & Founder MLOVE), Fee Beyer (T-Mobile), Jonathan MacDonald (JMA), René Bellack (Vodafone Media Solutions!) and Stefanie Hoffmann (aka-aki). The ConFestival is co-produced for MLOVE by Peter Giblin of Learn.Share.Play and in association with James Cameron of Camerjam (www.camerjam.com).

information and your request for an invite write to 2010@mlovesociety.org or go to www.mlovesociety.org — Follow MLOVE on Twitter: @mlovesociety and hashtag #mloveBecome a MLOVE fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MLOVE/202832245694

Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt famously said, “if you’ve got visions, you should go see a doctor” – we kindly disagree.

We are happy to announce our participation in the m.LOVE initiative, a movement aiming to make the mobile world a better place by gathering people passionate about mobile, to share their ideas and visions about the future.

For further details, please see the full press release below, and get involved via the m.LOVE website, the Facebook group and YouTube.

Mobile is personal and mobile advertising (actually all communications from all companies) will have to at least offer people a say in their experiences… Advertising – at its most basic level – is also about passion. It’s about making us want an object/service so badly, we will buy it over any other in its class. Why do we choose a particular brand over another? … Advertisers won’t get far if they treat mobile as just another screen, and insist on using it to deliver a one-to-many pitch rather than encourage a balanced exchange that respects our personal space and excites our individual passions.

Advertising needs to be about spreading passion.  Even more passion can be found in these great slides of Jonathan, Marc C. and Jan on hungymobile.

Now the call goes out to all Mobile Passionistas worldwide to share your passion with us. Do what ever you think is most illumitative to show us “What is your passion for Mobile” is and drop it on the m.LOVE-facebook-group. We look forward to see your share.

The paper got a lot of media (f.e. Daily Mail, NY Times, Guardian) attention because Dr. Sigman claims that the amount of real-life social interaction of some one, especially of kids, is correlated with his psychological and physical health. To stress how alarming his findings are, he indirectly refers to different studies which present that the amount of face-to-face interaction has dramatically decreased because of the use of new communication channels such as messaging, social networking or mobile phone. On average, people today only spend 2 hours on face-to-face-interaction daily, compared to 6 hours a day 20 years ago.

In the words of Dr. Sigman this trend is predicted to increase, especially with younger people who spend a lot of time in social networks.

The qualtity of Sigman`s findings have been widely discussed and criticied in the blogosphere f.e. by BadScience, Valleywag. There has also been an BBC interview with Dr.Ben Goldacre (BadScience.net) and Dr. Aric Sigman. The Bloggers accuse Dr. Sigman not to work scientifically, because the references he uses are selectively chosen and only in favor of his arguments.

Besides the question how scientific Dr. Sigmans paper is, it is interesting to ask yourself how your communication behaviour has changed over the last decade. We came to the conclusion, that a lot of information we are confronted with is not important for us and some kind of noise which consumes our time. Therefore we need information filtering (be it devices, services or a 1:1 meetings) to cancel the noise and help us to have the time for social interaction and understanding.
The effort of m.LOVE is to build an environment of trust and understanding even if just for weekend during to focus on people and social interaction of a passionate group sharing a similar vision like in our case the future of mobile.

Johannes

m.LOVE started grass roots from a small group of “mobile passionistas” and is planning a summer camp event to meet and elaborate on the future of mobile.

“We call out to passionate people worldwide – that are pushing the envelope of the mobile economy – to meet at m.LOVE and share ideas, visions and make new friends,” says Harald Neidhardt, initiator of m.LOVE and CMO at Smaato Inc. “We want to see how mobile advertising, mobile social communities and the society find solutions to be more engaging in the mobile media of the future.”

m.LOVE originated from a first brain storm weekend in the German Alps January 2009 where a group of passionate people started the m.LOVE idea. The group came from mobile operators, advertising agencies, service providers, game developers and mobile entrepreneurs from the USA, UK, France, Germany and Japan. Now the call goes out to passionate people globally to participate in the conversation.

“We are at the cusp of positive change and every single one of us can do their part. Mobile is the new medium of choice to foster global understanding and m.LOVE is a catalyst for this change to happen,” comments Jonathan MacDonald, a London based mobile futurist.

“m.LOVE was the most inspiring weekend ever”, adds Michael Schade, CEO of mobile game developer Fishlabs.

“Japan provides a glimpse of how mobile will be used in the future, and how this shapes society. By being a part of m.LOVE, we are aiming to help drive mobile innovation globally”, says Christopher Billich, SVP Research & Strategy at Tokyo-based Infinita, Inc.

Passionistas seek relevant and timely information, including ads that look and feel like content […] and customized suggestions […] according to the research.
They hold their brands to a high standard – and expect intelligent advertising, new approaches and authenticity. These consumers are more likely than average to remix content as a way to play with a brand, using online tools that make it increasingly easy for them to create movies, songs or slideshows to share with their friends.
“Being passionate today means digital content sharing and influencing others’ brand perceptions and purchase behaviors,” said Mark McLaughlin, Vice President of Audience Strategies at Yahoo!, “Marketers who build their campaigns from the start with the goal of tapping into passions are inviting consumers to get engaged and create an authentic dialogue.”

While this was published in 2007 for the online world, the m.LOVE group is convinced the digital passionistas of today are using mobile as their medium of choice when it comes to sharing and communicating with their friends and peers.

Mobile passionistas live around the world. She might be an avid “pro-sumer” that is talking back to her operator and is active within her local community to drive for better service. Or she is an entrepreneur starting or running a company that is pushing the envelope with a mobile application, service or social community site. And by all means there might be passionistas still in hiding in larger corporations such as mobile operators that use the larger set up to drive the agenda for mobile innovation from within.

While this was a very open start of discussion, the different work groups came almost to a similar conclusion: we as individuals and collectively in the mobile industry are shaping the future of communication and media – and we need to use it wisely.

Throughout the many travels to conferences as speaker or attendee, Harald met some great people in the mobile industry – from start-ups, operators, media or service companies. But like most of us, there are sometimes those special people that become almost friends right away, because you feel a connection.

For Harald, people with a passion for mobile and those who are in the drivers seat pushing the envelope are the most interesting to stay connected with. But, as everybody goes back to their busy lives, the idea was born to build a forum for some of those passionistas to meet and extend the time together and discuss about leading edge ideas and innovation.

Toffler’s imagination 40 years ago became part of our daily lives. Frequency and number of sources of information increase every day as well as the quantity of communication channels. Besides news supplied by  traditional media  like TV, newspapers and email, people provide their thoughts, ideas and impressions on blogs, twitter and to anyone they are connected with on social networks. Due to the fact that mobile internet has grown, all these stories, opinions and states of minds are accessible or even forwarded to your mobile where ever you are, every time – all the time. Evaluation of this increasing amount of information absorbs a major part of our attention. The volume of information transforms into noise and induces an information overload which handicaps any kind of decision-making or progress.

We, as communication enthusiasts, believe that it is our responsibility to reduce the noise surrounding us and create an environment for the richest and most valuable experience: social interaction. In order to achieve this target we need help – help to create noise cancelling devices, services, communities or plain “filters”. In quoting Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon: “The task is not to design information-distribution systems but intelligent information-filtering systems.”

We do think future begins when we start to imagine it; therefore M.LOVE is introducing a first theme:

L.E.A.R.N. – LIFE EXPERIENCE AND REDUCED NOISE. This may become a framework for filtering information based on emotions, explicit preferences, implicit activities and external factors in order to give us time for understanding and accessing truth. Join the discussion how to reduce noise.

In order to start to learn about the future we launched m.LOVE, an environment for authentic communication and trust, where communication technologies are discussed in a holistic and sustainable way – an environment where future begins.