The Wireless Innovation Centre at Hillington, a key hub drawing together the disparate wireless scene in Scotland, hosted a mobile social networking event the Friday before last. The centre’s technology manager Alisdair Gunn kicked the day off by installing Andy Campbell (”Chief Networker” and CEO of Specialmove) as compere. Andy, well known in the games industry, is currently exploring Facebook as a recruitment tool. If you ever get blown out by a Facebook indiscretion, get in touch with Andy: He’s the kind of guy who will see the funny side. By way of diversion, prurient readers wishing to see the author caught in a moment of tendresse with a beautiful blonde look here.

Phil Taylor, Service Director at Strategy Analytics provided the business context - and numerous nuggets for business plan enhancement. He was followed by Richard Marshall, founder of Rapid Mobile, presenting work done with Betfair. Betfair made an interesting case study showing how the immediacy of mobile technology can tap into critical events: those where money changes hands. Mike Kinsella of Weeworld is an engaging speaker with a memorable turn of phrase. He described the company he founded prior to investment - with millions of users and five people employees - as “the world’s tallest dwarf” (which definitely demands a WeeMee ). Mike stressed the importance of understanding users and not building services that will attract “as many users as a Wigan B road”. His comment resonates with a remark made by Ian Hay at Barcamp Leeds: it’s possible to build a use case for anything - that doesn’t mean it will be useful. Frank Boyd offered a similar warning in his session on Persona development at the BBC Innovation Labs Edinburgh launch.

Emal Rumi of the Motorola European Innovation Team presented an overview of Moto’s enabling technologies for social networking. Motorola’s strong convergent technology portfolio, spanning emerging wireless technologies and the connected home, provides a natural platform for the next generation of seamless mobility applications. Hopefully this will not be under threat from the recent change of CTO and pressure for breakup into separate divisions.

So did the event live up to the promise and answer the key question: How can your company get its share of this growing market? Realistically, the best it was going to do was produce some interesting food for thought - which was duly served up. My particular problem is that, while accepting that advertising revenue will grow, I’m skeptical about the amount that can be rung out of mobile without totally trashing the user experience. It takes a shed load of cash to run the mobile network infrastructure and there is little scope for further operational efficiencies. Phil did touch on subscription services. But, although there is an argument that anything worth having is worth paying for, it may well be lost on a user base that is getting increasingly used to free. In my view, developers of mobile social networking applications will have to be a lot more subtle in their pursuit of a viable return. So, building on this, bring on the next event. How about Norman Lewis, Martin Geddes and Ian Hay?