Back in 2012, I was taking the fledgling "QRpedia" project to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We had a cool little invention - stick a QR code on a museum exhibit and when a visitor scans it, they're automatically taken to the Wikipedia page in their native language. Nifty, huh?

The project was still in beta, but was gaining traction with museums and galleries around the world. We were also getting good press!

More importantly, our project worked. Not only had we demonstrated that the technology was viable, but we had proof of it succeeding.

So I entered QRpedia into a UKTI backed competition to find the best UK mobile technology. We went through a couple of rounds of judging and ended up as one of four finalists!

Look how excited (and young!) I was!

We were up against a nanotech firm, an augmented reality app, and a company bringing low-cost Android tablets to the developing world. All impressive competitors!

We all did our presentations, then had TV cameras pointed at us while we waited for the announcement. QRpedia didn't win.

I think I managed to hide my disappointment on screen. The winner - DataWind - had done a great presentation about how they were going to bring "Aakash" a $50 Android tablet to India. But I thought there was something "off" about it.

What happened to DataWind?

Back in 2011 - well before the competition - DataWind made headlines by offering a $35 tablet to India. At the time, lots of sensible people questioned whether a laptop with suitable functionality could be made that cheaply. Spoiler alert - it couldn't!

Contemporary reports branded the Aakash device "a dud".

Despite wining a $4 million contract from the Indian Government, DataWind couldn't deliver what it promised. Reportedly, a third of the laptops wouldn't boot at all.

There was, I thought, ample evidence that the company wasn't able to deliver on its promises. But, wow, they did give a great presentation.

Over the next few years, it all came crashing down.

• Today, the Aakash tablet is no less than a subject of mockery (2012)
• The disastrous Aakash project has expunged India's dream of developing the world's cheapest computing device (2012)
• Datawind $35 Aakash 2 – A Cautionary Tale (2012)
• It has become increasingly evident that DataWind are unable to deliver on most of their ambitious promises (2012)
• Aakash tablet project comes a cropper (2013)

DataWind and the Aakash tablet were also the subject of an academic look into the failures of the project - "The Aakash tablet and technological imaginaries of mass education in contemporary India".

Their success wasn't a part in my failure

I know a few things about my personality. I love starting new projects, but I'm hopeless at pushing them out to market. Like the mathematician putting out a fire, I'm content to go "Aha! A solution exists."

A few years after the competition, the QRpedia project was given over to Wikimedia UK. Without a dedicated "sales" team to promote it, the project languished. Partly it was QR codes not being quite mainstream enough, and partly it was my failure to recognise that museums and galleries wanted to point to their own content - not Wikipedia.

Would winning the award have changed anything?

I can't remember what the prize money was - not a life changing amount, I suspect - but the legitimacy that it conferred on the project may have been useful in helping us get more uptake.

I'm happy to say our other competitors from that day are doing well. P2i are still selling waterproof nanocoating. And Blippar had a bit of a tumultuous time, but are still doing great AR work.

QRpedia codes still work - and I occasionally get sent photos of them in the wild.

Perhaps the resurgence of QR codes means that QRpedia will finally take the world by storm.

The lessons that I took from all of this? Winning prizes doesn't matter. The prize wasn't enough to stop DataWind from failing.

Judges aren't omniscient. At the time, I saw the loss as a direct rejection of our vision, and I couldn't understand how the judges had picked such an "obviously" flawed winner.

The power of story telling. Looking back, it's easy to see how DataWind had a much more compelling story and roadmap for real world impact.

Finally, holding on to bitterness isn't helpful. We lost, so fucking what? I should have used that emotion to spur me on rather than knock me back.

You see, being a heterosexual male, I'm biologically predisposed to be sexually stimulated by images and videos of women in various states of undress. When I'm sexually stimulated my penis has this tendency to experience a rush of blood, which makes the spongy tissues expand until the whole organ is fairly rigid. I have to say, it's awfully nice. Yes, it's nice to have an erection.

That's why, I assume, your demo videos are filled with nubile young women, your booth-babes are busty, and your hackathons come with beer dispensing wenches as a "perk".

An honest question - next time I'm confronted with one of your sexist selling attempts, do you want me to fling down my tousers and start beating one off?

No? But, you keep trying to give me an erection - I thought my priapic member was what you wanted. Why else treat women as mere sex objects?

If you're one of the tech companies who are trying to co-opt my schlong, I want you to take a long hard look at what you're trying to do.

When I'm at a technology show like MWC, or researching which API to use, I'm in "work mode". Having an erection is an unnecessary distraction. It doesn't make me feel professional. If nothing else, it's hard to think with eight-times the normal amount of blood swilling round my phallus.

I want to work - I don't want to be arroused. And - let's face it - if I did want to be aroused, they have porn on the Internet now! I can go off to Alta Vista, type in "boobies" and get me some high-quality, women demeaning, surround sound erotica. I don't need to glimpse half a centimetre of your model's left buttock - I can see all of a lady's naked behind without your glowing logo superimposed over it.

And stop demeaning me! Just because I'm a geek- it doesn't mean I'm a long haired, spotty nerd, who spends every hour coding and is thus unlikely to meet a girl - let alone woo her.

As it happens, I am that long haired, spotty nerd and I've been happily married for nearly five years.

I know... I know... It's "ironic". You just love women! It's all just "banter". We're all friends. It's just, you know, a bit of a laugh.

Guess what? It's really difficult to tell the difference between an ironic erection and the real deal.

Oh, and while we're at it, stop being so hetero-normative. There are plenty of gay geeks. Now, I may not know an awful lot about what turns on homosexual men - but I've got a sneaking suspicious it isn't silicone enhanced breasts, high heels, and a bikini. I suppose what I'm saying is - if you have to resort to sex to sell your stuff - throw some beefcake in there for the guys and girls who like that sort of thing too. In fact, if you're a male CEO - how about we see you strut your stuff covered with baby-oil and dressed simply in a diamanté thong? After all, it's not demeaning, is it?

That's not really the corporate image you want, I suppose.

If your product can't stand proud independently - don't get my cock to do the heavy lifting for you.

The 25 Biggest Companies in Mobile. The inimitable Tommi Ahonen pores over the statistics and shows the size of companies according to the money they make in mobile - and only mobile. I may query the use of USD rather than € in the calculations, but the data are still highly interesting.  This is my post of the week!

Mob4Hire launches. There are thousands of handsets on hundreds of networks, how can you be sure your site or app will work on them? If you don't want to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds building a library of devices and SIM cards, it's worth looking at a service like this to get a wide range of test cases.

Mobile Wins Gold at Winter Olympics. With more people accessing the mobile web than ever before, MobiThinking takes a look at the explosion in mobile data use around the Olympics. Let's hope that London's networks are up to scratch for 2012!

What now for .mobi? With the slightly shocking news that .mobi has been sold to Affilias, what does this mean for the .mobi brand. I've a vested interest in this one, as I run a .mobi domain. Will mobile sites migrate to m. a la facebook and twitter? Can .mobi regain the initiative. Important questions.

Free White Paper on Mobile VoIP. This is a detailed look into the prospects of mobile VoIP in 2010. My thoughts? As we move the LTE - an all IP network - is there a long term future for alternate VoIP providers?

App Wars. Native apps vs Web apps vs Widgets vs JIL vs Device App Stores vs Operator App stores. It's a bloodbath out there - but John Puterbaugh performs some excellent analysis on the main players and issues.

In a similar vein, Apps vs Browsers - Peggy Salz is looking for your opinion.  Will the mobile web splinter between touch devices, normal phones, apps?

Finally, bored with Google and Yahoo? Why not try Gune, a new meta-search engine for mobile.

You can find all my latest mobile focused blog posts at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/category/mobile/

Thanks for reading!