Vodafone 360 – Power to you

Today marks a big day in Vodafone’s history, the company just announced it’s new suite of internet services, goes by the name of Vodafone 360 and combines a unique seamless experience between mobile and the web.

Vodafone 360 aims at the core of our social life online: our friends, our communities, and all the artifacts that came from interacting with those, wether chat or mere content like photos, comments and music, all shared in one single place, providing a unified experience across different mediums.

Mobile phones have long been a central piece in our lives, it helps us define who we are, putting us in contact with the rest of the world. It’s also in many cases the first gateway to interact and perceive the world, in many senses they’ve enhanced our lives beyond expected, but at the same time they have been somehow out of the loop of our online lives, well it seems that until now! By combining contacts with the bits and bytes that they drop into the world, and combining all those tiny pieces of information in one single place I dare to say that Vodafone just took a deep jump into the future!

The 360 platform is open to anyone, meaning that you can join independently of your mobile operator, it’s also doesn’t compromise devices as it works across a multitude of different devices including the new and exclusive Vodafone 350 phones by Samsung.

In the words of Pieter Knook, Director of Internet Services at Vodafone Group:

“Vodafone 360 is the first service of its kind to offer customers the benefits of a truly integrated mobile internet experience that gathers all their contacts and content, all around them, in one place,”

“The beauty of Vodafone 360 is that all the services work together and they are easy to use. Vodafone 360 enables customers’ digital lives. Customers can stay in touch and share experiences through social networks, instant messaging, email, apps, maps, music and buying digital content on their mobile bill, with the personalized address book at its heart.”

Vodafone 360 is a substantiator of Vodafone’s new brand expression – ‘power to you’ – which is focused on putting the customer in control and enabling simple and easy to manage communications, both mobile and fixed.

Disclaimer: Although I’m extremely happy to see this announcement from Vodafone, my current employee, this post still represents a personal view on this subject and shouldn’t therefor be considered an official statement from the company in any ways. I’m truly happy to be able to write about it as this has been part of my life for the past months and the reason why I’ve moved to Germany.

Online Communities Clinic Workshop Materials

As promised, here are the materials from the workshop I gave out yesterday at LIFT 08 about Online Communities Design Patterns. The presentation as I’ve said before is still a work in progress since I’ve started it for Web2Expo Berlin last November, so they share quite a lot in common.

If you’re interested, you can get the FULL VERSION of the presentation in PDF or you can simply watch the Design Patterns part on SlideShare (sorry, but the 30Mb limit on SlideShare wouldn’t let me post it in it’s full extent):

I’ve also prepared a Patterns Matrix that basically categorizes the patterns in four different classes that you can use to test or plan your own community according to the patterns use or misuse:

1. Community Support Patterns: Registration, Login, Welcome Area , User Profile, Users Lists, Buddy’s List, Exit / Suspend;
2. Group Support Patterns: Invitations, Shared Artifacts, Reputation, Voting;
3. Communication Support Patterns: Messaging, Comments, Chat, Forums;
4. Awareness Support Patterns: Neighbors, Activity Logs, Interactive User Info, TimeLine, Periodic Reports, Aliveness Indicator.

Mark Kuznicki took some pretty extensive notes from the workshop, so you might as well gave them a loon if you’re interested.

One special work to the crowd that actually stood up for the 3 hours the workshop took: Thanks