One small step for a man…..

It would appear that I left this earthly realm after posting my Pre 2 review, while rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated…. I have been monumentally busy.

I left the education sector last month to join BlueVia, Telefonica’s new developer platform and I thought I would take five minutes to discuss the reasons why. To say I was spinning my wheels in my previous job would be an understatement, the company under delivered for both clients and myself personally and I am very glad to no longer be associated with them. I had signed up to drive the use of technology within education (and I still believe that it can be the difference maker to students lives), what I got was a well paying helpdesk job for an under utilised product.

My personal idea of hell.

So I poured my energy into Twitter, read a lot of websites, followed interesting people and Tweeted like a madman. 2010 turns into 2011 and I had decided that my musing about changing jobs had to become reality as that job was killing me. However I knew that if I wanted to get into mobile as a profession I would always be at a disadvantage, my then CV experience for mobile was slim at best. I also knew that if I could get talking face to face with anyone that my lack of on paper experience wouldn’t mean anything. Because I love to talk about technology and I know its a marketable skill.

The trouble was getting to that interview……

So There I was, ready to pull the cord and leave education but with nothing a fist full of nothing and a pocket full of dreams.

I noticed that BlueVia was looking for new people, I had followed James for a while but I knew the traditional approach would not work. So I took a chance and DM’d him on twitter and asked straight up who was good to talk to about what I thought I would be good at, namely product evangilsation.

Thankfully he didn’t tell me to piss off, but invited me down for a chat about life, the universe and mobile technology.

The rest they say was history, save a second interview with Jose Valles where, when asked to sell BlueVia to an imaginary company, came up with the most random whatthehellwasithinking idea of,

“People surf the internet a lot at work which you can monitor on workstations, but what about when they use their company phone away from their desk? Using our user context API you can find out if they are a high use user and separate whos working and who is having fun on the internet on company time”

I know, there isn’t a big enough facepalm.

However I must have done something right as he gave me the nod and a couple of months later I was joining the team as Marketing Manager.

I can safely say that I’ve learnt, seen and done more in the last month than in the last year.

I believe that BlueVia is the only way that operators can stay relevant in the next 5 years; Orange, Vodafone, 3UK need to follow our example of opening up API’s and providing the incentives for developers to use it, without interfering.

I’ve never been in mobile or in marketing, so I will make mistakes, but you can be damn sure that I’ll be enjoying myself all the same.