I wanted to write a post about Moblog, our beginnings and where we’re going. It’s a bit long, but I hope you find it interesting. It is at the very least frank and sincere.

We started Moblog a long time ago, back in 2003 and one of the major issues that we’ve always had is that sign-up was pretty difficult. That was because we had a method in place which ensured security, but was quite difficult for your average user. So obviously that’s one of the major things we’ve addressed in the new platform. Although we were extremely early to the party in bringing mobile blogging forward and in fact have been at the forefront of so many of the critical junctures of what it means to publish content from a handheld device - I mean you know, we published the first images from 7/7, I started werenotafraid.com at first as a moblogging site, we recorded the first images from the Buncefield fires, the first images ever published of the 2012 brand logo etc. So, we’ve been there since pretty much the beginning and helped define what ‘Citizen Journalism’ is (Gawd I hate that term.)

We never went for funding back in the day, as a startup, because somehow we never really considered ourselves as such, we never… we didnt think like that, we were just two guys. The start of Moblog is actually a pretty funny story in itself.

I was using a site which one day decided to delete my moblog there, all my content. Deleted my account. At the time Id broken my knee and moblogged that, which was the only thing I could imagine they’d have deleted my account for. So anyway, I was extremely pissed off as you can imagine and I went to a forum I spent a lot of time at (4rthur.com where all the old school b3tards hung out) and I asked friends there if anyone wanted to work with me on building a Moblog site. And thats how I met Mat brown, and Mat you know, his reasons for wanting to build this as he so humorously states is because “I didn’t want to spend £30 on a data cable to get my pictures off my phone and onto my computer”.

SO, that’s the genesis of Moblog and still sort of who we are you know? So we *found* this odd business model we have, it was totally organic, and not many people have it. Through trying to figure out, “where is this technology applicable, where is it useful” we came upon it, and it turns out it’’s useful for a lot of people, consumers yes, but brands, bands, NGO’s, you name it.

So we’ve been doing that on the old platform for a *long* time, our first campaign for a client was in early 2004 for Sony Ericsson. The new Moblog platform has built on what we understand our clients to need when running mobile blogging campaigns.

Now, this blog post is certainly inspired by Mikes article on Moblog over on Techcrunch, and I almost just want to sort of think through it myself, as there were some criticisms in there for sure. In fact I think Mikes write up of Moblog was actually a snapshot of not only how big players are converging their web and mobile offerings but also of what it’s like for a start up to operate in this converged space right now, the fact that we all have quite enormous challenges in front of us. It’s certainly not the wild west of 2000, the web has inertia and it’s that which is bleeding into and informing the mobile web so we definitely have a challenge on our hands.

But Mike’s piece doesnt give any real detail onwhat we do, what the platform can do. Its main criticism is as above, the extension of large web players extending their services to mobile means we have massive competitors, and that our “…interface, which is stuck in 2002, … needs re-doing, pronto.” Now I take that to reference our design as opposed to our interface. The reason I say that is because we have never taken a particularly graphical approach to the site, so we might appear “behind the times”. Mat summed up our approach very well in an email discussion we were having:

“Design can be thought of as applied usability.  Form follows function, function is use, maximising function means maximising usability.  Increase usability, increase “designedness”, in a sense.  Le Corbusier probably wouldn’t have know the word “usability”, but if he did, he would have known it makes sense.  A website should be a machine for interacting in.”

Moblog’s interface is highly intuitive and uses web 2.0 technologies like AJAX when it needs to, not just because everyone else does. We might be a bit more Shiny at some point, so we do appreciate the criticism.

Let’s also just put into perspective what our main challenge is: Our challenge is in facing the behemoths of the world, outperforming them in function and accessibility, UX and innovation. That’s what Startups Do, and we intend to continue to do it. The web is littered with examples of small companies that innovated and trumped their larger rivals, take a little company called Google for example.

Moblog is a very different creature I think to many other startups in a number of ways. Firstly there is our genesis and how we built the site; we’re part agency, part technology licensing firm and at our core we’re a community of mobile bloggers. But if you look at that, that’s actually quite scary to investors, they look at you and go you know, ‘what are you? Are you an agency?Are you a platform licensing company like Yospace or Newbay? Are you a social networking site?”. Doug Richards described us as a ‘Many headed hydra’ of a business at the Techcrunch pitch last week, and suggested we focus on one or two core elements of our business. Great advice I think you’ll agree, and advice we’ve had before.

But this is a difficult thing for us to consider right now because licensing the tech whether thats at a lower level as we do with many clients, or at a higher level on a platform basis with people like Channel 4; that’s where most of our current revenues come from. So the advice we are getting is to scupper our main revenue generating approach and hope for the best in growing a community which is “scalable”. Scalable? How does our licensing of Moblogs *within Moblog itself* make that something that’s not possible. It actually helps; especially now in terms of how our clients moblogs now work, take a look at this graphic:

So our clients, which apparently won’t “scale” actually drive Moblog uptake itself. We want to grow the community (duh), and in fact are totally open to dropping any kind of a paid technology licensing approach to our clients once we’re funded. In fact it is at the point of funding that it makes sense. We’ve educated our clients, we’ve taken them along the road in creating mobile blogging campaigns, we’d *love* to do that for free, and we already have the client base to take it to a new level.

We believe that the platform we’ve created, in terms of ease of use, offering a unified mobile/web service and feature levels is world class. That’s not a conceit, we’ve worked on this platform for over a year, with fine minds collaborating on how it should work and why.

So, all I’d like to say is; wait and see. Moblog has a lot of tricks up it’s sleeve. Those tricks are obfuscated, they’re right there if you look, but they are potentialities waiting to be triggered right below the surface. The release of our API will be a good first look at how powerful the platform is; perhaps you might even be building your next start-up on it.