Rudy De Waele

I wrote an article on Connecting cultures through music for edition #16 of the Vodafone Receiver magazine. The main topic was ‘A Night Out’, interesting challenge and braintwister to write. This issue is covered with some excellent articles by authors like Charlie Schick, Mark Curtis, Lee Humphreys, Tim Cole, Karenza Moore, Frank Lantz, and Antony Bruno (sorry Bruno could not find your link). Definately worth a read, check out the Receiver archives too!

“This receiver issue wants to spark off some ideas about social networking the mobile way: clubbing, seeing your favourite band, sharing memories of a night out or playfully exploring the city, getting to know and experiencing, even creating, music – can mobile add to all these? And how does it affect how we get our friends together for joint action? Does it trigger emergent behaviour? Or is it the ideal means to pull it all together? What do *you* think?”

There is room for discussion on the website, needless to say it would be great to get some of your comments, thoughts and ideas on the evolution of music culture from our mobile lifestyle perspective.

The Artwork for receiver #16 is done by Zaza+Crusher, illustrations by students from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Essen, Germany).

Last weeks have been really busy; besides initiating Mobile Monday Barcelona recently, I moved with Gotomedia to new offices in the famous Estació de França train station in Barcelona. Gotomedia, led by Kelly Goto, will be partnering with research partners Barcelona Media, which has ties to Pompeu Fabra University to engage in global mobile research. Check also the gotomobile blog to stay updated on results and mobile web issues.

I started helping Russell Buckley with business development for AdMob in Spain and other EU countries. It has been great working with him and learn more on mobile advertising and the mobile web in general. AdMob, launched in January this year by Omar Hamoui, passed last weekend a staggering 50 million ad views

The other exciting project I started working on recently is MyStrands (also known as MusicStrands). They just launched a new project that touches probably all sectors I worked in before and of which (to me) the combination has tons of opportunities for the future… Music, Mobile, Internet and … (the next part I will explain soon here). You can read part of the story how we got to eachother here, just know that this article was written completely independent before I got in touch with MyStrands people.

This month I received the very first $500 “Host of the Month” award of the Carnival of the Mobilists, sponsored by Khosla Ventures for my hosting of the Carnival of the Mobilist 33 at m-trends.org in June.

Check out the latest Carnival edition in Carnival of the Mobilists 38 hosted by Judy Breck at Smart Mobs.

I am pleased to announce, as a co-founder of the Spanish Mobile Monday Chapter, the first MobileMonday event of Spain to be launched in Barcelona on July 3. Thanks to partners like Barcelona Media and Alcatel we can kick-off with a very interesting speakers program.

The event is free of charge; you only need to subscribe to reserve your seat. Don’t wait last minute to subscribe here, there are 150 seats available for this event - more monthly events are scheduled after summer!

Topic is set to Mobile Marketing & Advertising. We invited some of the most experienced people in this area to present us an interesting cocktail of history, experience and future on this topic.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates Director of Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain and Yahoo! Research Latin America at Santiago, Chile will talk about “Search and advertising in the Web and their implicancies in the mobile world”.

Ana Caralt, CEO of McCann Interactive Spain will explain us about the experience of the agency with clients such as Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, Amstel… and how the brands are reaching their marketing objectives by intergating the mobile channel in their media mix.

Russell Buckley, from MobHappy and now recently also at AdMob will explain his view on “Mobile Advertising… The Story So Far”. Russell draws on the lessons of 6 years of Mobile advertising, he looks at successes and failures and draws some important lessons for the future.

José Luis Jorge Marrasé, Director of Alcatel’s Mobile Solutions Division in Spain will explain us about Mobile TV as a potential solution for Mobile TV advertising.

Vicente López, CEO of Barcelona Media and Jari Tammisto, CEO of MobileMonday Headquarters in Helsinki, Finland will do the introductions. The whole evening will be moderated by Hernán Rodriguez, CEO of Aecomo.org (Asociación Española de Comunicaciones Móviles) and followed by a networking cocktail.

The first MobileMonday Barcelona will be held at the Auditorium University of Pompeu Fabra in the famous Estación de Francia.

Full details at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com

During my years working in mobile, I have always found it difficult to find a good calendar of relevant mobile events in our sector. The most appropriate to me was the Wireless World Forum Calendar but though relevant, still not perfect, neither complete. Then there are the other consulting and event agencies that are only promoting their own events, so I thought it was time for the mobilists to come in

After some discussion with Carlo on the best tools, I started a little experiment at upcoming.org. I must say, this seems to be a very efficient tool to stay updated on events of my interest. I can add events, invite friends, see who’s attending events and start discussions about what’s happening and do a lot more…

I created a Mobile Events group and invited some mobilists friends to see how fast we can get some decent event calendar together… Check for yourself the result, in a day we got some 20 events together starting from the idea that all group members enter a couple of events he/she knows about. Anyone can subscribe to the calender feed or integrate it into his personal iCal/Google/Yahoo! calendar. To subscribe to the group and suggest events yourself, you just need to subscribe to the service and look for the Mobile Events group.

Apart from what I mentioned above, upcoming.org groups allow you to find and collect events by interest or location. You can create your own calendar and send an interesting event to a group, add and search your favourite tags, look for maps of venues, etc.

So, what are you waiting for? If anyone joining can add some events, we’ll get soon the best mobile event calendar around and we can all share it!

Creative Commons weblog and Crammed Discs anounced the Crammed Discs Remix Contest. The Creative Commons remix contest is organised in conjunction with Crammed Discs over at the Creative Commons community remix site, ccMixter. Crammed artists Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove — some of Brazil’s most innovative contemporary musicians — are offering new sounds online under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, so people throughout the world can legally use them in remixes, mash-ups, and new compositions.

Nine winning remixes will appear on a Crammed/ccMixter EP project to be sold online through digital music stores. Participating is easy: read the official rules of the contest. (Also available for download as a PDF), download the audio sources, make your remix and upload your mix to ccMixter under a CC BY-NC license between April 26, 2006 and May 24, 2006.

Go to the Crammed Discs Remix Contest pages for all details and separated audio elements downloads of Cibelle’s “Noite de Carnaval,” DJ Dolores’s “Sanidade,” and Apollo Nove’s “Yage Cameras”.

Check the artists view on remixing content on the Crammed Discs Remix Contest pages:

“The whole process of making music has changed. The very concept of composition now extends to the creation of sounds and textures. I’m very curious to see how other people will use and manipulate my sounds and how they will use them as tools to create new music.” — Cibelle

“I like the idea of giving people the opportunity to hear what I hear when I’m producing — a separate candomblé percussion track or some painstakingly constructed soundscape. If mixing is part of the compositional process, it’s only natural that I try sharing the compositional responsibilities with anyone interested in taking them on.” — Apollo Nove

“This is what every intelligent musician should do. The idea is to share and allow one’s work to be cut up, reinvented and — who knows — transformed into something even better than the original. This isn’t about generosity; it’s about inventing new ways of creating musical products that go well beyond the world of physical carriers like vinyl and CDs.” — DJ Dolores

The nine winning remixes will appear on a Crammed/ccMixter remix compilation, to be sold online through digital music stores. Your chance to engage in a creative dialogue with Crammed Discs artists Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove and get your mix of their work on the Crammed/ccMixter remix EP!

Interviews currently published at m-trends.org in the Women in Mobile interview series:

# 16 Yasmine Abbas 

# 15 Katrin Verclas

# 14 Stephanie Rieger

# 13 Sarah Blow

# 12 Julia Dimambro

# 11 Trixie Concepcion

# 10 Xen Mendelsohn

# 9 Amy Jo Kim

# 8 Judy Breck

# 7 Keren Flavell

# 6 Emily Turrettini

# 5 Anina

# 4 Helen Keegan

# 3 Debi Jones

# 2 Julia Palatovska

# 1 Darla Mack

# Kick-Off with Sabine Allaeys from Minifizz.com

More in-depth interviews with interesting women working in mobile are on their way, stay tuned!

Welcome to my personal webspace, I decided to create this blog to keep track of the projects I work on and provide additional information on them.

I am Rudy De Waele, I am Belgian living and working since 2002 in Barcelona, Spain. I am married with Zohra and have three lovely teenage daughters. I speak and write fluently Dutch, English, French and basic Spanish.

I am working in the mobile and wireless sector for a couple of years now and I still have the feeling that everything has to happen yet, it is a very exciting time now with a lot of challenges and opportunities out there. I think the best is yet to come in mobile!

I use my experience and network within the mobile value chain to assist companies entering the mobile market space. I work with companies in the wireless, new media and IT areas where I assist them with identifying business models, strategic alliances, funding opportunities and competitive intelligence to help these companies commercialize their technologies in the global market.

In my more than 10 years experience in digital media, I worked in many different team environments throughout the European continent. I always worked in management positions: as executive or producer, as project or event manager, or as communicator or mediator. Still, I always kept an eye on the broader marketing perspective, with special attention to public relations, business development, and promotion; direct, event, online and mobile marketing; and partnerships and sponsorships.

The blog I post regularely is m-trends.org - about mobile media lifestyle. Currently I work with Kelly Goto on a new mobile research and consulting project for San Francisco-based Gotomedia Inc, which currently results in gotomobile.com. I am also one of the initiaters/organisers of the Mobile Monday in Spain. Soon more on this event here.

With RandomOne, I just finalised a partner research project, funded by the European Commission, as part of the IST programme, called MuLiMob, about Multilingualism and Mobility. My role in the project was to investigate and consult on multilingual technical barriers and mobile music opportunities within the mobile value chain.

My specialities and interests include:

Strategic planning, business development, market research, branding, enabling mobile services ecosystem, user generated content, mobile web, mobile marketing, mobilizing music, usability, user-experience, think-tank, events, digital music distribution, location-based services (lbs), mobile social media, blogs, moblogs, blogging, moblogging, mososo, collaborative systems, mobile communities, mobilists, MobileMonday

Feel free to contact me at my regular email adress: rudy AT m–trends DOT org