The Birth of Design Thinking and Startup Culture

A Personal History of Mobile Telephony 1992 – 2002
A Publication from Holonomics Education
Simon Robinson
The Birth of Design Thinking
and Startup Culture

Page www.holonomics.co.uk2
What I would like to do in this book is to document one particular perspective on the history of mobile telephony in the UK, between
1992 and 2003. This timeframe corresponds to my time from being a Human Factors Engineer at BT Laboratories (now known as
Adastral Park) to my time at O2 (the UK mobile phone operator) and the mobile gaming company Digital Bridges, in which I had the
opportunity to be involved with many cutting edge projects, including the following:
!
BT Callminder (speech recognition answering service)
BT Onephone (GSM/ DECT)
BT Cellnet Barclaycard Phone (world’s first phone to accept electronic payments)
Genie Internet (world’s first mobile internet portal/ beta launch 1997/ 12million users worldwide/ BT Recognition Award)
World’s first WAP pre-paid phone
GMusic Live (text plus speech music service with EMI/ Vurgin Music)
Digitial Bridge’s UNITY - World’s first massively multiplayer mobile gaming platform
Nortel Orbitor (graphical touch screen/ Java OS/ client-server solution)
XY Music (WAP audio music and entertainment channel)
SKY interactive TV Java gaming solutionBT Cellnet Usability Protocols
WAP (BT Cellnet Business Development Manager for Smart Phones)
Over the Air SIM Programming
WAP Big Brother Game (UK’s most popular WAP application)
GenieStriker (Cross-platform Fantasy Football)
BT Cellnet Massive Multi-Player Gaming Platform
EA Sports Java Games
Tagtone

I felt that it is useful to document this history as I was involved in many
signiﬁcant developments throughout this career, some developments
now having been forgotten, and others which never made it to market,
such as Nortel’s Orbitor, a handset which had a touch sensitive screen,
a Java processor and a full client-server architecture. I thought it would
therefore be interesting to document this history from the inside, and
look at the decisions and motivations, trials, tribulations and successes
we had along the way. This is a very personal account, and others’
accounts will differ and be from different perspectives, such as from the
handset manufacturers.

In 1992 I graduated in Psychology from Nottingham University and my first job was in the Human Factors
department at BT Laboratories. BT was still developing it’s identify as a private company having been a
government organisation as part of the post office for many decades previously. The purpose of the
Human Factors department was to carry out research that challenged emerging technology to meet real
human needs and at that time it was the largest usability facility of its kind in Europe. A key concept was
the notion of designing the customer experience as opposed to designing new technology, and I can see
a lot of the thinking developed in the early 1990s now becoming much more visible in the form of design
thinking and business design.
!
To give you just one example of the types of trial we did. BT’s Marketing department did not think they had
problems with their answering machines, but people were calling customer helplines after purchasing
them. Our department set up some trials whereby we would wait for people to buy a machine in the BT
shop in Ipswich, and then ask if we could go home with them to watch them set them up. Customers were
filmed in their actual environments, i.e. at home with children distracting them, visitors coming and phones
ringing etc. It was only when they saw the video footage of people not setting the machines up in the
clinical and expert way in which Marketing did, that they realised they had to improve the user interfaces
and instructions etc.
!
In the first week or so I was taking a special course for new graduates BT It’s Systems and Networks. This
was easy for all the new engineering graduates, who made up the majority of employees at the
Laboratories. As a psychologist this was a bit of a mad course, but it was incredible to learn about just
how complex BT’s global network was, and for example how you could send more than one phone call
down a single line. Even back then BT was beginning to examine Video on Demand, of which Ipswich
were the Laboratories were was one big test bed. Video on Demand would allow customers to order
whole films down phone lines, and I remember many discussions about would the phone networks be able
to cope or not.

BT Group has had an interesting history in the UK. In 1912, the British General Post Office
was given the monopoly to build the UK’s telecoms infrastructure. British Telecom was
formed in 1980, and became independent from the Post office in 1981, and then was
privatised in 1984, with 50% of the shares being sold to investors. The second half of British
Telecom was sold in 1991 and 1993, which coincided with me joining the group in 1992 as
a psychologist in BT’s Human Factors Department, within it’s Research Department at BT
Laboratories, under then head Peter Cochrane.
!
BT is often much maligned by British people, but it was certainly responsible for much at
the cutting edge of telecoms development, including introducing a much more organic
design aesthetic into its consumer handsets starting from the early 1990s.
!
I began working on a number of what were called Network Services, such as Call Waiting,
Call Forwarding and my main product, BT Chargecard. With this service, people could
make a call from any phone, including a pay phone, but have the cost of the call charged
to the home phone bill. Customers would dial a short code, and then would have to go
through a number of voice prompts to enter their card number and PIN.
!
We had prototyping tools to create the dialogue flows, and we also had usability labs where
members of the public would come in to be participants in trials of our new services.
Actually, one of my highlights was meeting the woman who was employed by BT to record
many of their voice services. She came in to record the Chargecard prompts, and I had to
direct her. I know many people get frustrated with these types of system, but at BT we used
to test different styles of intonation to help people understand if they were listening to
prompts or a question.

In the early 1990s our team was also working closely with the Speech Recognition team to develop a
new voice based answering service. Although one version of the service was created using ‘1’ for ‘yes’
and ‘2’ for ‘no’, another version allowed people to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ for the voice prompts such as “Do
you wish to hear that message again?” I was involved in a number of the usability trials, and it was
interesting to see how even though people had exactly the same set of options, if they spoke to the
service rather than typing ‘1’ or ‘2’ they attributed far more intelligence to it, with many people speaking
to it in long sentences.
!
“Would you like to hear that message again?” “Oh yes, thank you very much.”
!
This used to play havoc with the speech recognition, and so we had to word prompts along the lines of
“Answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would you like to hear that message again?”
!
Nowadays we almost take design thinking and business design for granted, even though these terms
have only been introduced quite recently. Although if you think of product design and telecoms you
tend to think of Apple, in fact much of the thinking came from this type of usability work in the 1990s.
Design thinking was not common. The BT Human Factors team was one of the largest in Europe, if not
the world, and unlike more academic teams based in universities, we worked extremely closely with our
marketing colleagues, who were our internal clients.

For this reason a number of us published various papers about how a Human Factors team can work best with
marketing. My colleague Mike Atyeo and myself published our paper Delivering Competitive Edge in Human-
Computer Interaction, Interact ’95, Chapman and Hall (1995). The following year the two of us and another
colleague, Charanjit Sidhu published Working with Marketing (Conference Companion on Human Factors in
Computing Systems). The theme of the conference on which the papers were based was “Common Ground”
and this introduction provides an interesting snapshot of the design thinking at that time:
!
Scientific and engineering fields evolve based on common goals, paradigms, conceptual frameworks, methods,
and theories. As they mature, they tend to increase their structure in terms of sub-fields, and the trend continues
toward sub-dividing not only the field but also jobs, communities, and events. Through this evolution, some
fields lose their identity, and thereby their common ground; in the end they often fall apart. Other, stronger fields
experience paradigm shifts, changes of views, the emergence of new frameworks and theories and keep
themselves alive by a constant effort to integrate new views into their own common ground.
!
Since its emergence, the field of “Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)” has evolved through such a dynamic, and
the CHI conference is a mirror of that evolution. Sub-fields emerging from HCI, like “Computer Supported
Cooperative Work (CSCW)”, Participatory Design and “User Interface Software Technology (UIST)” now have
their own platforms in addition to CHI. Some of these fields have voted for a radical paradigm shift in contrast to
old paradigms which have played a major role in the common understanding of the field of HCI. From the
technology corner, new sub-fields like Hypermedia, Multimedia and Virtual Reality are arising.
!
In the past, we have built bridges, we have showcased and celebrated interdependence, and we have worked
on the creation of a mosaic of creativity. It is time now to focus on defining our common ground.
!
The more our field matures, the more we need to understand its common ground. We need to understand that
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Technological progress alone can not determine the maturity of the
field.

In 1992 I didn’t have a mobile phone. The cost of calls was high, and the ﬁrst mobile
project I worked on was BT Chargecard, a payphone card which would allow
customers to add the cost of the calls to their home phone bills. I also worked on
Callminder, a revolutionary voicemail system which used voice recognition instead of
people having to use their keypads. It was fascinating to run trials with members of the
public and see how they would react differently to saying yes or no as opposed to
typing 1 for yes and 2 for no.
!
Also the business model for Callminder was compelling. There were millions of calls
which went unanswered due to people not owning an answering machine. If everyone
gave people a free answering machine, then they would be able to collect 5p for each
message which connected. However, there was a lot of anti-monopoly legislation and it
was no simple matter just to do this for free since BT would have to give this ability to
competitors.
!
Another area of complexity was the BT billing system. At the time, about one quarter of
BT’s costs went into its billing system. If it stopped billing per call and charged people
a monthly ﬂat rate, it would be able to save billions.

At this time, 1992 – 1994 the key buzzword was not the internet but
multimedia. Many of my colleagues were specialising in this, and I was told
that to move up through the company I would need to specialise. We had a
fantastic director, Peter Cochrane, who was the head of the research
department of which we were a part. He was fascinated by the recently
launched Nokia 2110, and for some reason was talking to me about it, asking
why was it that this phone was so compelling to use.
!
I am sure many of you will remember phones prior to the 2110. Phones had
function keys, and you had to remember combinations of buttons. They lacked
large screens, and were therefore hard to use. The Nokia 2110 changed all of
that, with a revolutionary soft key which changed depending on the context of
the screen. The screen itself was a work of art, being moulded with its futuristic
oval shape, designed to highlight the link between the screen functions and
the soft keys below.

I still have my 2110 and it is still working. The phone had SMS which was
launched as a new GSM feature in 1992. Another phone I loved was the
Ericsson 337. This was a very tactile phone with lovely buttons which remind
me of a children’s game from the 1970s the name of which I forget. It also had
Bang and Olufsen audio technology inside with great clarity of sound.
!
Having spoken to Peter Cochrane I set up a project to study the ease of use of
the popular phones on the market, and contacted manufacturers who then
sent me samples of their phones. I did not just want this to be an academic
exercise, and began to look for potential in-company “customers” at BT
Cellnet. At the time BT Cellnet had batteries of tests for new phones regarding
their technical qualities, but they did no testing for ease of use, and this work
became a new set of indicators for them.
!
In parallel I began working with BT Mobile, the commercial arm of BT who
sold mobile solutions to corporate clients. They were developing a new
concept of phone in partnership with Ericsson, the Onephone. This was to be
a phone which was both GSM and DECT. DECT is the technology used in
cordless home phones, and it made sense to offer customers this new dual
phone since they could have mobile when out and about but save money
when they were at home. This was a hugely challenging project, since the
phone had to be able to tell customers what network it was on, and it would
not be until 1999 that Onephone was launched. By this time mobile phone
calls were falling rapidly, reducing the need for such a handset.

In the case of OnePhone, there were three different customers. There was the person using OnePhone, either
a corporate user or a residential customer, there was the Corporation who would be buying this as an overall
solution (including all the networking and routing equipment and services) and then also you have the
person calling a OnePhone. So here was the crux of the issue. Not only would the person using OnePhone
need to know when the phone had switched from the cordless mode to the mobile network, the person
calling the phone would need to know what the cost of the call would be. The regulation was such as the
customer would know this via the type of number they were dialling (e.g. 0181, 0800, 07801, and premium
lines etc), so a single number which changed rates would not be possible.
!
In the end, BT launched a corporate OnePhone solution in 1997, and a residential version in 1998, but there
was still no true OnePhone which worked both in companies and at home. A new personal numbering
service was also launched, the idea that people would have one number for life, one which would follow
them around, but this concept never really took off. One year later, in 1999, the ability to send a text from a
mobile phone on one network to a phone on another network was ﬁnally implemented, and text messaging
then really began to take off, as the cost of calls also began to fall. With many younger people opting not to
have a residential phone at all, OnePhone would never become a mass-market success.
!
What I think is interesting today is how many companies are now taking a much wider view of their purpose
in life, and as well as just considering customers, they are considering their place in society, and their impact
on the environment, something that was just not on the radar in the telecoms industry in the 90s. Whereas
Design Thinking may be suffering through being seen as a bit of a fad, perhaps we just need to go back and
look at how the less bombastic community of customer experience designers have been developing some
excellent methods for wading through the complexities of product and service design, complexities which
are only increasing in our now interconnected world.

For a bit of a nerd like me, working at BT Labs was geek heaven,
especially having futurologist Peter Cochrane, Head of Research
as my Director. As well as our day jobs as design thinkers,
developing products and services based around human needs
and not just technical capabilities, we had skunk time, free time
each week to be creative and dream new dreams.
!
All sorts of prototypes were built in our part of the labs, and we
played a lot with virtual reality machines and wearable computers
and mobile concepts. As you can see from this screen shot from a
documentary made in 1996, the wearable technology was bulky
to say the least. In reality, these “mobile” concepts had hidden
cables running up our clothes, connecting the screens to hidden
Macs running the software.
!
These were great times and a great working environment. So of
course it has been interesting to follow the launch of Google
Glass. What we envisioned in the early 90s has now become a
viable commercial reality.

One of the great things at BT Laboratories was that we could get
involved in a few skunk works, a few below the radar projects in
order to develop our curiosity, creativity and inspiration. I still
remember a colleague showing me how to load up Mosaic, a
browser which most other employees were not allowed to install.
“Look at this – graphics!” BT overall was still focussed on
multimedia rather than really putting energy into internet services in
the very early 1990s.
!
Having spent much time with BT Mobile and having had meetings at
BT Cellnet, I met Tony Eales who was the head of the very small
business development team, consisting of himself and two other
team members. BT Cellnet overall was a small company in terms of
numbers of employees, with Vodafone being far bigger. Tom
Alexander (who would later be CEO of Orange) was Head of Value
Added Services, and so the Business Development team were
focussing on hardware (such as in-car and data cards) and the
Value Added Services team on services such as voicemail, text
messaging and content services. In their adverts from 1996, the
emphasis was still very much on voice calls being more affordable
than before, and on the fact that mobile phones were no longer
business tools.

I am really grateful to the opportunity Tony gave me. He recognised that BT
Cellnet lacked usability and design thinking, and he saw an opportunity to
add me to his team, as head of smart phones. At that time phones still only
had SMS and data, but BT Cellnet was beginning to talk to manufacturers
about handsets in development and they would need someone to design
the customer experience of these. I therefore decided to leave BT
Laboratories and move internally to BT Cellnet in Slough.
!
Tony was a hard negotiator, commercially extremely astute and very
different to me as a person. But he spent a lot of time mentoring me,
allowing me to develop commercial skills to complement my academic and
analytic skills. For this reason I always look to see how well an organisation
implements its own mentoring programmes, as these are incredibly
powerful.

Just as I was joining Tony, he was finalising a deal with Trafficmaster, a company who had
won a government bid to cover the UK’s road network with sensors which could detect
the quantity of flow of traffic. The service launched in 1996 offering traffic information to
Vauxhall Motors’ website, and in 1997 Tony launched the first GSM service using cell
information. Mobile phones which detect three or more cell sites are able to tell the mobile
network the geographical location of that handset. The service created allowed a
customer to dial 1200 and listen to traffic information for that geographical region.
!
This was a phenomenal achievement not only for BT Cellnet but personally for Tony. He
had mentored me from the start, and I was given a front row seat watching Tony literally
steamroll through obstacles in the company to get this service launched. Tony was totally
driven and believed 100% in the service. He would never take no for an answer, even
from the technologists who claimed things could not be done, but in fact, with
monumental application and ingenuity could be. It seemed sometimes like every day
Tony would come back to our part of the office where he would tell me who was putting
up obstacles, and I learnt a huge amount, in terms of business development, negotiation,
and working in a highly multi-disciplined and multi-company project at this time.
!
In 1998 Trafficmaster and the RAC added RAC traffic incident information, and having
launched this, Tony left BT Cellnet to join Trafficmaster, becoming their CEO in 2005, as
well as becoming the CEO of Teletrac in 2001 (a software company now owned by
Trafficmaster).

I also became responsible for SIM cards from a business
development perspective. BT Cellnet had launched a revolutionary
mobile handset with Barclaycard, the ﬁrst ever mobile phone to
accept payments, and as SIM cards were becoming more powerful
and with more memory, more functionality could be added. BT
Cellnet rebranded an Alcatel handset with a big blue button to allow
customers a direct connection Barclaycard services and the
handset was sold to customers via promotions in the monthly phone
bills. This proved successful and so we started to look at what the
future mobile e-commerce solutions would look like.
!
In addition, I was asked to join the team to look at over-the-air SIM
programming. This would allow the mobile operators to do things
remotely without the customer having to go to a shop, and I began
to work on commercial proposals with server vendors. The BT
Cellnet Barclays Alcatel partnership ﬂourished, resulting in the
second generation Barclaycard phone.

A recent graduate Sam Di Lieto was assigned to this project to help me examine the
technical aspects of the server solutions. Sam was intelligent, vigilant, extremely hard
working, offering interesting insights and ideas and a fantastic new member of BT
Cellnet. I wanted to mention Sam here since just a couple of years later, in 1999
tragedy struck when a huge train crash occurred at Paddington. A great number of BT
Cellnet employees lived in London and would take the train from Paddington to
Slough each day. That day 31 people lost their lives, including Sam and another
engineer from BT Cellnet. I just wanted to remember Sam as I feel that these things
are important and obviously as well as the huge loss to his family, he was a great loss
to the company having such obvious great potential which was cut short.

Back to 1996 and it is probably worth remembering what technology we
were using. Psion dominated the electronic organiser market and I had one
too of course. It was quite incredible to connect it to a Nokia 2110 and hey
presto, text messaging without the need to use the numeric keypad of the
phone. I think in 1997 a representative from a very small and unknown
company called Tegic came to visit me and showed me a new way to type in
text messages. Many companies would visit me and I was hard to impress. I
remember being incredulous and I tried to think up some really obscure
words. But amazingly the system worked and this would go on to be
implemented by Nokia and many other manufacturers.
!
I should also note that in 1996 the UK market still was structured using
airtime service providers. In order to develop competition, these two mobile
networks were not allowed to sell direct to consumers. Airtime Service
Providers were the companies who customers had their contracts with, and
BT Cellnet did actually have it’s own one, but this had to buy airtime
wholesale from the network division, just like all other airtime providers.
Working for BT Cellnet was therefore a little schizophrenic at times. However,
with the launch of OnetoOne in 1993 and Orange in 1994 the regulatory
climate was less necessary, and eventually Bt Cellnet and Vodafone would
buy-up the airtime providers and have direct relationships with their
customers.

Two notable phones which stand out for me at this time were the Nokia 8110 and the 8810.
The 8110 was sometimes known as the banana phone and sometimes known as the Matrix
Phone. In fact the actual phone in the Matrix was an 8110 with a spring loaded cover which
would only be launched with the up and coming 7110 of which I will write about in a moment.
The 8800 was gorgeous, being tiny and looking like a Zippo lighter. At this time, I remember
that only the MD Peter Erskine, someone else and I received samples from Nokia. I don’t
know why I did, as I was not a director, and there was huge envy. The smaller the better at
this time but how things have changed.
!
Amazingly enough, in 1995 customers were only sending an average of 0.4 text messages
per month. This was partly due to poorly implemented billing options, and also in the UK
customers on one network could not send a message to customers on another UK network. A
BT Cellnet customer could only send a text message to another BT Cellnet handset. In 1999
this restriction was lifted, and by 2000 the average text messages per month went up to 35,
and on Christmas Day 2006 205 million messages were sent in the UK (source Wikipedia).
!
I still remember being shocked at just how small the capacity of mobile operators was. I think
a single mobile cell (i.e. a cell mast) could only cope with seven, yes seven, text messages
per second. (Thanks to Kevin Bradshaw for reminding me of this ﬁgure). This capacity is
unthinkable nowadays, although even in 2000 I remember messages taking a long time to be
received at midnight at New Year.
!
It is worth remembering that neither the mobile phone networks nor the handset
manufacturers foresaw txtspk (Text speak). This was a compact language developed by
teenagers to help them cram as much information into a single text message and therefore
save money. Txtspk can not be attributed to a single person, unlike the Twitter hashtag which
is said to have been created by Chris Messina from Google.

I mentioned that handset manufacturers were developing smart phones, and smart phones would
require server solutions to allow them to connect to the wider internet. At the time Motorola, Nokia
and Ericsson were all developing server solutions which were only compatible with their handsets.
Another company Unwired Planet was also developing micro browser which was proprietary, and
Nokia was also developing a text messaging service which would allow text messages of 160
characters to be concatenated, i.e. joined up to form one single longer text message.
!
The business case just did not make sense. BT Cellnet knew this, and so did all the other mobile
operators. A totally new business model would be needed and that was when the WAP standard
was proposed. A WAP forum was created in 1997 bringing together handset manufacturers, mobile
operators and also Unwired Planet, to develop open standards for the industry. This was a huge
lesson for me attending the forum sessions around Europe, seeing such huge organisations, with
many competitors of course in the different parts of the value chain coming together to develop a
solution together.
!
However, behind the scenes BT Cellnet was working in secret with Nortel, the vast Canadian
telecommunications group to develop and launch the world’s ﬁrst Java phone. This was way ahead
of its time, and would have a touch sensitive and graphical user interface, running Java. It was not
just the handset but an entire client-server solution and Java applications would be able to be
downloaded from the internet. BT Cellnet were Nortel’s strategic partner and I was responsible for
the project, along with Tony Eales who was responsible for the commercial negotiations.

Working with me on the project were Phil Terrett and Ken Blakeslee from Nortel’s UK
head ofﬁce just down the road in Maidenhead. The design team headed up by Don
Lindsay were based in Ottawa, Canada, and I went over to visit them to help develop the
user interface, around 1997 I think. As well as a touch sensitive screen running real-time
Java applications, the handset would have voice-recognition for commands. Nortel
showcased the handset at the GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, and BT Cellnet
were all set to trial 80 of the handsets then launch that summer.
!
The handset would be sold as a complete package, fully integrated into Genie Internet’s
suit of mobile applications and services. Tony and myself made sure we visited a number
of retailers, including a meeting with Charles Dunstone of The Carphone Warehouse to
validate the customer proposition.
!
This was the Apple iPhone almost a decade before Apple launched its own killer
handset. Don Lindsay left Nortel for Apple in 2004 which is when Apple began forming
the design team for the iPhone. However, the most senior directors in Nortel got cold feet
and the project was abandoned. They had many reasons, such as mobile manufacturing
not being a core skill, and the need to develop new handsets at a much faster pace than
compared to their core business.

I do remember on receiving the ﬁrst handset that it was large, and we
wondered if this would be accepted by the market. However, a Nokia
9000 communicator cost £1,000 at the time, and the Orbitor was set to
be much less. Also, although I would never use one, people are
nowadays using huge Samsung Galaxys, so maybe uptake would have
been more than we were projecting at the time.
!
In the end it was Apple who would come to dominate the market, and
eventually Nortel would collapse. Maybe the Orbitor could have saved
the company, given what we now know about Apple’s performance.

I can not remember exactly when, but around this time I had made the move from the
Business Development team into Genie Internet, which at this time was still just a
concept. The Genie team was headed up by Brian Greasley, along with two or three
others from the Information Services team within Value Added Services, including
Malcolm Appleby who was looking after the architecture and Rick Stock who was in
charge of design. Consult Hyperion were used as the main contractors to help build the
infrastructure and integrate back into BT Cellnet’s core network.
!
Genie Internet is barely written about nowadays but I feel it warrants a key place in the
development of mobile as it was truly groundbreaking. At this time, the dominant
internet portals were AOL and Yahoo, but neither had any mobile functionality. Genie
would aim to break into this space by being the world’s ﬁrst internet portal. A deal was
brokered with the Press Association to supply news, weather, sport and travel
information, and users would be able to sign up for mobile alerts. I moved from a focus
on hardware to being responsible for music, games and entertainment. There would
also be the ability for the ﬁrst time to go to a web page and send a message to a mobile
phone. One critical point of difference would be that Genie would be for all users on all
UK networks.
!
In the proof of concept stage we managed to connect the website to BT Cellnet’s short
messaging service. The ability to sign up to alerts was not functioning, and we needed a
substantial amount of more funding to get it to beta stage were it could be launched to
customers. Brian hatched a cunning plan and I helped out. The top 200 managers in BT
Group were meeting in Spain for a weekend workshop. Brian would go there to secure
funding, and he knew that if the directors could experience Genie, it would be a sure
thing. He sent me the mobile numbers of all the directors, and that weekend every so
often I manually sent out messages, mainly sport, news and little information about BT.
The directors were hooked and Genie could steam ahead.

We were moved out of the head ofﬁce at Slough and into a rented ofﬁce in
Richmond-upon-Thames in order to be out of all the red tape and politics. Kevin
Bradshaw from Hyperion began to work with me on the development of a
massively multi-player gaming platform, and I learnt a huge amount from him on
systems architecture and Java technology. He focussed on the technology and I
focussed on the business requirements.
!
In the late 90s Nokia had an almost natural monopoly on ringtones. Nokia
dominated the teenage and youth markets, and ringtones began to really take
off. I wanted to buy their platform, which also included the ability to charge for
ringtones using premium rate text messages, but I remember being overruled
due to Nokia’s system only being compatible with Nokia handsets. This I think
was a strategic error and BT Cellnet lost a great deal of ground to third party
ringtone suppliers.
!
We launched Genie as a beta service and followed the Hotmail viral marketing
model. Text messages were free, but there was a little advert telling recipients to
sign up too. The idea rapidly took off, and Genie in the UK soon hit half a million
registrations. At this time all internet start-ups were focussed on users, and
Genie would soon reach a market capitalisation of £1 billion. There was nothing
else like Genie in the market, and although we thought Vodafone and Orange
would copy us, they didn’t, leaving Genie alone in this space.

I had to do some research for this article, and the official launch of Genie is 1997. At this time, we
had very basic branding, and only a minimal set of services. But we did allow used to connect to
their POP3 email service providers which was a huge benefit, as well as offering our own POP3
email which rapidly took off. This article is somewhat European in bias. Although the US always
liked to think of itself as ahead in all areas of technology, when it came to mobile technology it was
slow compared to the US. However, in 1999 LG Telecom in South Korea launched it’s ez-i internet
service, which by 2001 had reached 2million users with a rich volume of content including games.
!
In 2000 I led a small delegation to South Korea to spend a week looking at how we could develop
a strategic relationship which BT had been developing. In 2001 BT announced the strategic
partnership, with LG Telecom integrating Genie’s now UMS (Unified Messaging Service) and
Genie integrating a suite of LG Java games. LG Telecom deserve a mention in this history since
they were the first in the world to launch a mobile service using ez-Java. I believe NTT DoCoMo in
Japan can probably lay claim to launching the first java handset in February of 1999 with their i-
mode service which Vodafone would invest heavily in to catch up with Genie and BT Cellnet.
!
Music and youth-orientated content providers were taking a very close look at Genie. In the late
90s, Danny van Emden returned to work for Virgin Records with a remit to explore internet
developments. She set up the UKs first New Media department at a record label, and quickly
ensured that all artists had an internet presence, as well as setting up The Raft website for the
label. EMI followed quickly (Virgin Records were a part of EMI at this time), with a New Media
department headed up by Fergal Gara with Eric Winbolt. The record labels and artists were
already seeing that for young mobile users their primary access to the web would not be via
computers (iPads were never envisaged at this time) but via mobile, and they would need to
partner with Genie to help reach music fans.

Music and youth-orientated content providers were taking a very close look at Genie. In the
late 90s, Danny van Emden returned to work for Virgin Records with a remit to explore
internet developments. She set up the UKs ﬁrst New Media department at a record label, and
quickly ensured that all artists had an internet presence, as well as setting up The Raft
website for the label. EMI followed quickly (Virgin Records were a part of EMI at this time),
with a New Media department headed up by Fergal Gara with Eric Winbolt. The record labels
and artists were already seeing that for young mobile users their primary access to the web
would not be via computers (iPads were never envisaged at this time) but via mobile, and
they would need to partner with Genie to help reach music fans.
!
BT Retail were already talking to EMI Group and asked me along to see what I could make of
their suggested technology. BT Retail were developing voice services, and Genie of course
was dominating the text market. Combined, the idea would be to develop GLive Music,
whereby EMI Group could send out alerts to music fans, and not only would they receive a
headline in the text, but a phone number to call back on to listen to further information. I
created four channels Stars, Guitars, Heartbeats and Breakbeats based around Rock, Indie,
Pop and Dance music, and Virgin hired the BBC Radio 1 DJ Jo Wiley to be the voice of the
service.
!
The most compelling part of the service is that the record labels (Virgin, EMI, Chrysalis and
Parlophone) would also ensure that the bands themselves would record personal messages.
This would give them unprecedented and personalised access to their fans in a way in which
only Twitter would be able to the following decade. GLive Music launched with great fanfare
at the top of the BT Tower, with us managing to project the www.genie.co.uk right up the side
of the tower for all of London to see.

BT Cellnet had also launched a new sub-brand called U for the youth market. Although
it did not last, it was well received and we also were able to co-promote with some of the
new pop groups at the time including Atomic Kitten, Jamelia, Precious and Scootch.
Many of my colleagues mocked me for having relatively unknown bands and for not
acquiring the services of say Robbie Williams or Kylie Minogue, but at least Atomic
Kitten and Jamelia would make it big. Scootch were created as a rival to the hugely
popular Steps, but never made it big, and neither did Precious, with some members
leaving to join other established acts.
!
Anyway, I know this will sound crazy, but in fact Atomic Kitten can lay claim to being
pioneers in developing new ways of connecting with their fans way before either Twitter
or blogging or any social networks were launched. Not long after this party, they
released their single Whole Again which would become the forth largest selling single
by a Girl Band of all time.

A second near revolutionary service would be developed, and I still remember receiving Paul Bennun from
London-based production company Somethin’ Else coming to meet me for the first time. We quickly
established a rapport, since Somethin’ Else produced many different radio and television programmes,
including Giles Peterson’s show for Radio 1, the flagship show for the UK’s latin, jazz, funk and rare group
scene of which I was a part. The idea would be to develop a wap-based service allowing users to listen to
short shows produced by Somethin’ Else, and I really thought that this would be the showcase Genie
needed to establish credibility and core production skills for future services.
!
The service was called XY Network and launched in the first half of 2000. However, around this time Genie
was becoming so successful that senior directors in BT were starting to take notice and wanting to become
involved. It was around this time that I feel Genie began to lose some of its focus, especially as it was being
readied for international expansion with some of BT’s partners in Europe, Asia and the US. I remember at
the time that BT Openworld, the broadband unit of BT spent £1 million on rights to an Elton John concert. I
felt that they had really failed to exploit these rights, and that I was looking for this sum of money to be able
to take a stake in XY network. In the end the senior team of Genie were not interested in having a
production and media component, and it would be Radio company Forever Broadcasting, owner of
Liverpool radio station Juice 107.6 FM, would would invest this sum and be given a 15 per cent stake in XY
Network.
!
The one key asset BT Group did feel it had was the Genie/ BT Cellnet wap home page which all users
started at when going into their wap browser. This was valuable real estate, and so the commercial team
began to sell menu items on the various sub headings such as news, sport, entertainment etc. Volume of
WAP minutes was a source of revenue, but it was thought that selling this space would also be a key
source of revenue. However, this business model killed off any applications from smaller providers due to
the inhibitive costs involved. Smaller providers wanted a share of call revenue from their applications, but
this was a complex area to say the least and it never took off.

UK's leading mobile internet company with
over 3 million registered users of the Genie
Internet portal.
Independently valued with a market cap of £1
billion
First UK mobile company to launch a
commercial GSM WAP
World’s first prepay WAP phone
World’s first audio on demand music service
GenieMobile was the world's first exclusively
online mobile service.
Genie Internet in Numbers
!
Services:
!
SMS Alerts - Information direct to mobile, as it happens.
Email on WAP - Access your email anywhere at no extra charge.
Personalised WAP menu - select your favourites from the Genie website and your personalised list will
appear on your phone.
GenieOne - Manage all your emails, faxes and voice messages all from one place via your mobile or
PC.
GenieMobile - World’s first virtual mobile network operator

In March of 2000 BT Cellnet and Genie undertook a massive press campaign to
launch a whole suite of services, including the UK’s first pre-paid WAP handsets
targeted at the youth market. Faster data was now available in the form of
GPRS. It launched a new advertising campaign based around “surfing the BT
Cellnet” but this campaign was roundly criticised for developing expectations
that you could have what you had on your PC on your phone. In the advert
above, you will see Dotmusic featured a lot. Dotmusic was the internet part of
the music industry paper Music Week, and they were starting to develop wap
applications including news and the music charts. It seems quite ridiculous
nowadays to make an entire advert from this one little wap application, but I had
no role in the making of it and I was as surprised as anyone when I saw it!
!
Genie was expanding rapidly, and had moved out of the Richmond offices and
into much larger offices in Hammersmith. There was now a huge pressure to
monetise services after having grown the customer base, but it the only billing
mechanism it had was via credit cards. This was the proposed mechanism for
charging users for GLive Music and other information services, and it was never
going to work. I helped out on the customer requirements for a new premium
rate messaging service, but for me Genie was losing a lot of the fun.

I know I am going backwards and forwards a little in this history, but it would be too
hard to try and put everything in strict chronological order. Kevin and I had worked on
the gaming strategy as far back as 1997 I think and there was a decision to be made.
Should BT Cellnet and Genie invest in the development of its own platform. This would
mean it would have to cover costs of equipment, hosting and maintenance, but costs
would be saved by not having to lease it. The decision was made not to proceed with
the development of the platform, but having faith in his own work, Kevin left Hyperion
to set up Digital Bridges in 1998 and he and the small team he put together would
build the platform themselves. Digital Bridges gained the seed funding required, and
BT Cellnet would become its ﬁrst client.
!
I was now the global head of music, games and entertainment but Genie had also
developed country-speciﬁc teams. The UK team was created quickly by a team who
had come from Worldcom, and so they too had people doing music, games and
entertainment. It was not often clear what the strategy was in terms of roles and
responsibilities. I was never great at politics, nor empire building and found this period
very pressurised. There was a massive pressure from above to begin to bring in
sizable revenues, something I felt Genie not quite ready for, but the networks were
building incredible business cases in the build up to the government auctions for 3G
network spectrums, hence the strains and stresses.

Games proved to be the killer app for WAP. BT Cellnet became the lead sponsor of the first
few series of Big Brother, and they wanted to do more than just add their name. The marketing
team asked me for a game, but I had literally just a few weeks time to develop something. I
had been looking at a SIM City style game which was based on houses, and so I decided to
develop this game, doing a simple rebrand to become the Big Brother wap game. It really
took off, and BT Cellnet saw its WAP data traffic increase by 20% within the first six days of
Big Brother airing. We also used the GLive infrastructure to launch a Big Brother gossip
service, something Endomol, the producers really wanted and Genie, being cross network
and not tied to BT Cellnet really fitted the bill.
!
I think Genie was becoming a lot less fun for Brian, and he left in 2001 to join Apax Partners.
Digital Bridges was taking off, and Ari Honka joined as their commercial manager to develop
deals with the UK networks. Apax Partners decided to inject further funding into Digital
Bridges, along with their other major investor, and Brian would be placed into Digital Bridges
as their CEO.
!
In 2002 BT Cellnet undertook a major rebrand, with BT Cellnet seeming far too nerdy
especially when compared to Orange. It rebranded to O2, a huge risk I felt at the time but time
has shown it to have succeeded I feel. The new brand saw the end of Genie, with its services
being brought back in house, and so too did the vision for what it could have become. Brian
asked me to join Digital Bridges as the Business Development Manager, and work became
fun again, being back in a small and focussed team.

Digital Bridges continued to be at the cutting edge, developing major partnerships
with the likes of Electronic Arts, Taito, Disney and Steve Jackson amongst others. I
was responsible for developing a project with Sky, and against stiff competition we
won the bid to become their mobile gaming partner. Sky integrated the Digital
Bridges platform into its digital television platform, and users could download games
onto the phones via their television handsets, with the cost of the game going on to
their Sky bill.
!
Digital Bridges were the ﬁrst to offer ﬁrst WAP games in colour, and then the biggest
selling Java games such as FIFA football for mobile. In 2003 I left Digital Bridges to
begin a very different career trajectory, having started to develop an interest in
sustainability and a nascent and gently spiritual connection with nature. I sold my
house and took a year off, something that for many personal reasons too I really felt I
needed at that time.

This history is by no means complete of course, and is my own personal recollection of
events. There were many crazy moments as you can imagine, but it was amazing to have
been a part of the mobile industry when it was absolutely buzzing, and also a part of
Genie Internet which was even crazier. At the start we had huge funding from BT Group,
and often we made it up as we went along. There were no precedents, and while certain
things did not work, I feel our team should be recognised for the achievements we did
manage, and we did win a number of industry awards for design.
!
Many of my friends and colleagues have gone on to many more exciting and innovative
projects, but my own path would eventually lead me back into design, developing the
concept of customer experiences with soul, an approach to design based on the
philosophy of my book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter.
!
I hope you have enjoyed this trip down memory lane. Some of the developments you will
have known about, others maybe not. But I hope it has been informative and of some use
as well as being interesting.

Simon Robinson is the co-author of Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter. He helps
organisations to think and innovate beyond business-as-usual, to help companies align their purpose and
value proposition with today’s most critical challenges. He works holistically, integrating programmes
across strategy, change management, innovation, sustainability and customer experience. He is currently
working with Fritjof Capra on the development, implementation, launch and marketing of Capra Course,
Fritjof Capra’s new on-line course based on his latest book The Systems View of Life.
!
In the 1990s Simon was a co-founder of Genie Internet, the award-winning first mobile phone portal for
the internet, where as Head of Music and Games he developed partnerships with global entertainment
companies including MTV, EMI, Endemol and Big Brother. He began his career at BT Laboratories (British
Telecom) in ergonomics and human factors, responsible for the user interfaces and the customer
experience of fixed and mobile consumer products. In 1996 he became the Business Development
Manager of BT Cellnet (now O2) responsible for smart phones, working on the first mobile phone with
java technology, along with Nortel, and helping to develop global standards for internet and mobile
phones.
!
He has spoken and chaired panel sessions at many international conferences on mobile and internet
technologies, new media, gaming and sustainability including Sustainable Brands (London, San Diego,
Rio de Janeiro), TEDx Florianopolis, Green Spa Network 8th Annual Congress (California), Harvard
Business Review Masterclass (São Paulo), Sustainable Foods Summit (São Paulo), Strategy Execution
Summit (São Paulo), GSM World Congress (Cannes), Net Sounds (New York), Nokia World Congress
(San Francisco, Hannover) and Mobile Internet (Paris, London, Lisbon).
!
Simon graduated in Psychology from Nottingham University, and has a masters degree in Holistic
Science from Schumacher College. He is a Harvard Business Review author, a member of Biomimicry for
Creative Innovation and editor of the blog www.transitionconsciousness.org.
!

Simon Robinson
Holonomics Education
!
!
Contact Information!
!
!
www.holonomics.co.uk (English)
!
www.holonomics.com.br (Portuguese)
!
www.transitionconsiousness.org (blog)
!
@srerobinson (Twitter)
!
https://br.linkedin.com/in/srerobinson (LinkedIn)
!

The Birth of Design Thinking and Startup Culture

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