New iPods – and the second coming of Jesus first public appearance of Steve Jobs in months aside, the event also saw the official launch of iPhone OS 3.1. So what’s new, and is it worth an upgrade?

The main featured additions seem to involve Apple’s clever ‘Genius’ recommendation system. Already a feature in later versions of iTunes, Genius on iPhone OS 3.1 will recommend you apps based on your appstore purchase/download history and, in conjunction with iTunes 9, turn your music library into mixes.

Also on the list for 3.1 is ringtones – and lots of them – over 30,000 in fact. Priced at $1.29 a pop, you can browse, preview and download them on a new ‘Ringtones’ section of iTunes 9.

Meanwhile there’s a whole heap of bug fixes and little changes over OS 3.0. Apple claim 3.1 brings improved syncing for iTunes and iPhoto content, better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when you’ve got Bluetooth switched on, anti-phishing warnings in Safari, improved Exchange calendar syncing, Bluetooth headset voice control for the 3Gs, and a few other bits and bobs along the way.

OS 3.1 is available now, and more details are on the Apple site here.

l to r: Richard Moat, CEO T-Mobile UK; Gervais Pellissier, CFO of France Telecom; Timotheus Höttges, CFO of Deutsche Telekom; Tom Alexander, CEO Orange UK

It may have only been unveiled a matter of hours ago, but the PR teams at both T-Mobile and Orange have been busy assembling a veritable ream of information about the proposed merger of their two businesses. And some video too (at the end of this post).

First, some headline figures. As mentioned in the post earlier, the joint venture will create the UK’s biggest mobile operator – with an approximate 37% market share based on figures from the end of 2008. Orange have also revealed if you combined the 2008 figures from both operators you’d get revenue of approximately £7.7 billion, and EBITDA (profitability to you and me) of £1.7 billion.

People-wise, Richard Moat – T-Mobile UK’s current CEO, will take up the COO position, with the CEO hotseat being taken over by Tom Alexander, current CEO of Orange UK. Whilst it’s far too early to predict redundancies, there are already plans in place to reduce the number of retail outlets, and combine customer service, network and general/adminstration functions. These activities – along with the decommissioning of duplicate cell sites – is estimated to cost between £600m and £800m between 2010 and 2014.

Talking about cellsites and networks – most of that £600m-£800m cost will be taken up by decommissioning redundant duplicate radio network infrastructure. T-Mobile will contribute the 50% share of their joint radio network with Hutchinson 3G (3 to its friends and customers) to the pot, who incidentally already use Orange’s 2G network for fill-in coverage. Assuming T-Mobile and 3 put both their radio networks into the joint venture, you’ll end up with the interesting situation of 3 using a joint 3G network shared with Orange and T-Mobile, and a GSM network operated by Orange and T-Mobile.

Back to the subject of money, but still on the point of the shared 3G network currently (pre-merger) owned 50/50 by T-Mobile and 3, that’s clocked up gross tax losses so far of at least £1.5 billion. Looking at the bigger picture, France Telecom will be contributing, along with Orange UK, £1.25 billion of intra-group debt to the pot. Deutsche Telekom will then loan £625 million to the joint venture, which will be immediately paid back to France Telecom. After all is said and done, that leaves a joint debt of £1.25 billion, split 50/50 down the middle with £625 million of loans owed each to Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom.

So will the T-Mobile and Orange brands be disappearing from our High Street just yet? Not for a while, it seems. Both companies have committed to maintain separate brands for 18 months after the completion of the merger – so it could be at least a couple of years until we see a new (and as yet unnamed) ‘super brand’ hitting the mobile world.

The new combined unit would bring in around £8.2bn worth of sales, and hoover up 37% of the UK market – more than O2′s current lead at 27%. Costs associated with the merger could reach £800m though, but savings are expected to be £445m by 2014.

All of this is, of course, subject to regulatory approval. However, it does leave lots of unanswered questions – for instance what happens with existing joint ventures like T-Mobile’s MVNO with Virgin, and their 3G network sharing deal with 3? Plus there’s the big dark cloud over jobs – how many redundancies will such a merger cause?

Whilst neither party will comment on the report, sources close to both companies said an official announcement could happen as early as tomorrow (Tuesday).

Reports over the weekend in the UK Sunday newspapers claimed Vodafone and O2′s parent company Telefonica had already submitted bids of £3.5bn for Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK business unit.

A combination of O2 and T-Mobile would bring around a 42% market share in the UK, Vodafone and T-Mobile 40%, whilst a joint venture with Orange could grab 37% of the market.

I started using Wapedia the other day. Whilst it’s been around since 2004, I’ve never really stumbled across it. Run by Taptu.com it gives you a nice fast way to access Wikipedia on the go – and, in my humblest opinion, looks nicer than Wikipedia’s native mobile interface.

Anyway, when I clicked on my Wapedia bookmark on my E71 a day or so ago I got the following message:

Blocked? Eh? Maybe I’d bookmarked it wrong, so I typed in wapedia.mobi into the browser. Again, the same message. So I left it a day or so, and tried again. Still blocked.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of a reason 3 would block Wapedia. Is it an adult site? Not that I know of – besides, from what I’ve seen there’s a different message for that (if you’ve got a 3 phone try firing up something like www.thepiratebay.org on your browser). Is it dangerous? Well, if you believe everything you read on Wikipedia, maybe. But seriously though, it worked for a few days then BANG! – blocked for no apparent reason.

I’ll fire an email to 3′s PR team and Taptu (the people behind Wapedia) shortly – hopefully it’s a simple mistake and not something more sinister.

UPDATE: Less than 24 hours after I wrote the above, Wapedia mysteriously got unblocked. Chris over at Taptu says they’ve asked 3 to look into it – but doubts they’ll get to the bottom of this little mystery. Still – all’s well that ends well.

For ten points, can you guess what this is (apart from a mobile phone that wouldn’t look out of place in Del Boy’s possession in Only Fools & Horses)?

It’s a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, launched on an unsuspecting American public in 1983 (with the UK version coming a few years later in 1985). And apparently it could be worth up to £1000 – at least that’s what mobile phone collector Ian Reynolds, co-owner of vintagemobilephones.com, reckons.

The article in the Daily Mail goes on to say that Ian, 42, of County Kerry, says that a mint UK-version 8000X in the original box with all the accessories could fetch £3000. But don’t be confused by the similar looking 8500X – favoured by the aforementioned David Jason in Only Fools & Horses – which is sadly only worth £50-£100.

Another Motorola handset – the 3300 GSM, introduced in a fanfare in 1994 and, according to the Daily Mail, the first one with the ability to receive text messages, could get you up to £300 depending on condition. Ian says “You signed up to a server who sent texts as scroll messages that passed over the phone screen. These mobiles can sell for £130 to £300 if still boxed.”

Feeling a bit left out as you’ve only got a drawer full of old Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones from the last few years? Mobile phone recycling companies like Envirofone will give you an average of £40 for a working second-hand mobile – and Boots are now apparently now offering up to 5,000 Advantage Card points for your old handset. And there’s always the trusty standby of your local Computer Exchange (CEX) store. However, if you want to make the world a better place and start on the long road to beat Bill Gates’s philanthropy skills, the Daily Mail suggests donating your old unwanted mobile to a charity shop – and says Oxfam, Guide Dogs For The Blind, Action Aid and Hearing Dogs For Deaf People will happily take it off your hands.

Now if you don’t mind I’m off to find my old Mercury One2One-branded Motorola M400 (the ‘flip without a flip’). It cost me £300 (with a contract!) back in 1994 and, at the time, caused my father to exclaim: ‘What does an 18 year old want with a mobile? Only posers and drug dealers have mobiles – which one are you then, son?’

If my M400 is worth anything, I might need to remind him of the story when I next see him and suggest that, in hindsight, there was a third option: a savvy investor.

Now before you start panicking, let’s clear a few things up. This is a theoretical possibility – it doesn’t mean your calls are unsecure. Yet. However, whereas before it’d take quite a large chunk of processing power and many, many days of solid number crunching, according to a presentation (PDF) at the recent Hacking at Random (HAR) conference there’s already a plan in place.

The author, Karstan Nohl, needs help though. He’s calling for assistance in computing the rainbow tables required to decrypt the A5/1 ciphered data – all you need apparently is access to BitTorrent, and a certain kind of Nvidia video card (one with a CUDA-enabled GPU, apparently). Karstan reckons with 80 CUDA processors at his disposal he’ll have it cracked by Christmas.

Stan Schatt, Vice President and Practice Director, Healthcare and Security at ABI Research reckons GSM eavesdropping will be a real threat within the next 6-12 months. “Hackers have been quick to break into wireless LANs within the US, so there is no reason to think they won’t move to cell phones once they have the tools in place, particularly because so much valuable information is transmitted over cell phones.

“Potentially this news could have as profound an impact on the cell phone industry as the breaking of WEP encryption had on the wireless LAN industry. When people discovered that their wireless LANs were vulnerable, it slowed the sale of equipment until an industry group—the Wi-Fi Alliance –stepped in and came up with interim security standards. If people do nothing, we are likely to start to hear stories of sensitive information being compromised, acquisition information being leaked, personal financial security information being compromised, etc. We could see tales of blackmail and extortion on the rise.”

Meanwhile, over at risk management specialist Henderson Risk, spokesman Stuart Quick says he’s not suprised A5/1 is being cracked. “It remains a Holy Grail amongst the hacking community and is intriguing because of the associated conspiracy theories. It is believed that the cipher has had weaknesses engineered in to it in order to make it easier for the security services to snoop on calls and that mobile communications providers are therefore misleading or incorrectly advertising their product’s level of security.”

So what can you do to make your mobile calls more secure? A while ago I wrote an article on this very subject, citing some useful tips from Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of British tech company Cellcrypt. No article about the security of mobile calls would be complete without a word from Simon: “Everybody has known for quite some time that a theoretical hack of GSM existed. This news means that the theoretical risk will become a very real one within the next six months. Governments have taken steps to manage the threat for years and now this is a very worrying prospect for anyone that discusses valuable or confidential information over their mobile phone.”

In research soon to be published by Cellcrypt, they found in a survey of corporate mobile users in the USA that 79% regularly discuss confidential issues over the phone every few days, with 64% making such calls daily.

So is this all doom and gloom? Will the Sun and sister paper The News of the World be going shopping for this kit to make it a hatrick of sensational eavesdropping stories?* Only time will tell.

* Apart from News of the World and their recent stories apparently involving voicemail ‘hacking’, The Sun caused an uproar in the early 90′s by publishing transcripts of taped conversations between the late Diana Princess of Wales and ‘close friend’ (and apparent Lotus dealer) James Gilbey – under the rather amusing title of ‘Squidgygate‘.

Financial Mail reported the following yesterday that:

• one of SpinVox’s ‘technology partners’ is about to pull the plug over an outstanding bill of £100,000.
• another supplier last week filed three county court claims against the company for over £200,000 of unpaid bills.
• other suppliers spoken to by the Financial Mail have said they haven’t been paid for months – if at all.
• some have been threatened with legal action by SpinVox if they spoke to the press.
• one of SpinVox’s call centre suppliers is filing a lawsuit in the High Court.

A quick crunch of the numbers involved in the article and it totals around £320,000.

Meanwhile The Guardian is reporting SpinVox have raised an undisclosed amount – rumoured to be at least £5.5m – of emergency funding from existing suppliers.

Financial Mail’s sources? I count three companies – at least – who aren’t SpinVox. The source of The Guardian’s story? SpinVox itself.

So what did SpinVox say when asked to comment by the Financial Mail? “We’re naturally having discussions with our customers and suppliers as we all adapt to the conditions of the credit crunch” said the unnamed person – who added they “could not comment on matters of litigation.”

His plan is to get it on the mobile operator portals, but the operators themselves aren’t exactly being super-helpful. They probably get independent content producers like him calling them every day asking to be on the portal or part of a subscriber video package in return for a few pence per user per month. However someone did point him in the right direction, and suggest he talks to one of the mobile content aggregators who have the deals in place with the operators to provide them with content for their portals.

He’s also looking at a way of getting his content onto the iPhone. I suggested iTunes and video podcasts wouldn’t be a bad start, but he’s looking at developing a free to download app to get his content out there – and therefore more potential for sponsorship/advertising.

So over to you.. can you help? If your thoughts are a little bit hush hush you can ping me an email at alex (at) alexkinch (dot) com

Just before the weekend I wrote that they’d inked a deal with Vodafone in Holland.

Remember Blyk, the ‘yoof’ ad-funded mobile service? Last thing we heard they were rumoured to be shutting up shop – but it turned out they were merely changing direction towards an operator partnership model.

And here we are, a mere two days or so later, and they’re leaving the UK. Here’s a little excerpt from their blog post by co-founder Antti Öhrling:

For now, stick with us for the last month – you’ll continue to receive your free credit until midnight on 26th August and we’ll be bombarding you with great offers, brand messages, competitions and music exclusives.

Though Blyk will no longer be an active network operator in the UK, together we have re-shaped the future of communication and we hope you’ve enjoyed the journey. We certainly have. Blyk will continue to operate in other markets, providing the unique experience to members there in the same way we have in the UK. Thank you for your support over the last couple of years.

So that’s it then folks – move along, nothing to see. If you’re a Blyk customer you’ve got a month to get your PAC code and shift elsewhere. Alternatively, Reuters is reporting Orange (Blyk’s O in the MVNO acronym) have bagged the rights to the customer base – and will be launching a range of tariffs which’ll give you discounts for receiving ads and other marketing blurb.

If you’re tearful farewells, or this is the first you’ve heard of the soon-to-be-dead ad-funded mobile operator, you can re-live Blyk’s greatest moments on MIR here.

On Monday a fire at an unnamed substation took out a whole load of cell sites across London.

On Tuesday it managed to break the whole data network for the majority of customers. Not just 3G but GPRS too. In fact the only thing they didn’t apparently break to do with data was iPhone public Wi-Fi access – but that’s thankfully a completely different kettle of fish.

The Register initially reported the problem was only affecting users in the London area, but as the day went on the problem crept across the rest of the UK, leaving owners of iPhones fretting and hunting a working Cloud Wi-Fi access point. The next day, O2 admitted it was a ‘misconfigured DHCP server’. Just the one? That’s a little careless, having a single point of failure and all. Or did they make a change to all of them simultaneously and break the whole damn lot?

So it’s now Friday. Data on O2 is apparently fixed – but now they’ve totally gone and broken roaming. Since about 10pm last night (Thursday), customers roaming in certain countries have experienced issues registering on foreign networks, making calls, using data, sending and receiving texts – in fact pretty much everything seems to have stopped working (with the exception of using your mobile as the world’s most expensive torch).

About an hour ago, O2 slid out this rather vague statement:

We are aware of an issue currently affecting customers who are roaming in certain countries.

We have identified the cause of the problem and are applying a fix which we hope will restore service for these affected customers as soon as possible.

We are very sorry for this loss of service. We will post further updates as soon as we have them.

Which is nice, but not exactly helpful. What’s the time to fix? If the claims that this problem started at 10pm last night, how come it took until gone 4pm this afternoon to make a statement? In a bizarre case of deja-vu from yesterday – when SpinVox took the best part of a day to comment on the whole ‘call centre sweat shop’ debacle – again we have a rather late terse statement. Admittedly this one says ‘we’re sorry’, but it’s still not much use to anyone who is reliant on their mobile whilst travelling and can’t get a peek out of it.

UPDATE: A little glance through Twitter reveals more problems today. Zeetha in Brighton can’t make or receive calls, ats2040 can’t make or receive calls nor send texts in Glasgow, and woolnough has had ‘no service’ on his iPhone for most of the day in Newbury. That’s three quite geographical diverse locations, and three rather large failures.

Are you having problems on O2? Pop a comment below – it probably won’t get it fixed any faster but it’s always good to whinge

UPDATE FRIDAY 9.10PM:

Some more from O2:

There continue to be network issues affecting some customers roaming internationally and a small proportion of UK-based customers.

The issue relates to how call traffic is being routed and we are working as quickly as we can with our network technology suppliers to re-route traffic and restore services.

We will post further updates as soon as we have them and can only apologise again for the inconvenience this is causing to customers.

But hang on a second, we’ve been able to do this for ages, right? Even back in the dark ages of BT’s ‘star services’ on the then rather shiny and new System X exchanges, there was a call divert feature. Tap in *21*(your mobile number)# and anyone calling your landline would be automatically diverted to your mobile. They pay the call cost to your landline, and you pick up the tab for the divert to your mobile.

Here comes the interesting bit. There’s no divert charges. Not a penny. Admittedly there’s a £10/month service charge (£15/month for the freephone 0808 service), but no per minute costs – about 12p or so according to BT.

O2 – and most other mobile operators – have always claimed it costs them a lot of money to route a voice call over their mobile infrastructure. That’s why they’re quite happy taking an average of 6p a minute from the callers telco to terminate a call to your mobile. UK geographic number termination rates are quite a bit less than a penny a minute. So why the change of heart?

While you ponder that, I’ll tell you a bit more about Fixed Number Anywhere. As mentioned before, its aimed at O2 business customers. You can port your existing BT number or choose a new one, and up to five geo numbers can be linked to the same mobile phone.  There’s also a hunt group feature, which allows calls to ring up to ten different O2 mobile numbers simultaneously or on a priority basis.

Simon Devonshire, Head of SME Marketing, O2, comments: “Desk phones were great when business was done from a desk but for the vast majority of small businesses the fixed nature of a landline is at odds with how they operate day to day. By converging a fixed landline number with a mobile service, small businesses can continue to maintain an image of being a local business, which is valued by customers, whilst maintaining the flexibility and mobility that has enabled them to adapt to and thrive in the current climate.”

With the course set towards that destination, Blyk announced yesterday they’ve inked their first operator deal – an exclusive with Vodafone in the Netherlands. The two companies will work together to, amongst other things, co-develop the consumer proposition and manage the audience. At least that’s what it says on the press release. Here’s a couple of soundbites:

“We’re extremely pleased to be extending our relationship with Vodafone. For Blyk, the partnership is part of a global strategy to bring scale and speed to our operations, while continuing to provide an innovative and valuable proposition for both consumers and advertisers. Together with Vodafone, we intend to build a game changing engagement media in the Dutch market.” says Blyk co-founder and CEO, Pekka Ala-Pietilä. “Our relationship will include a co-development of the consumer proposition for the Netherlands and audience management.  Blyk will have responsibility for the advertising sales and technology.”

Eric Kip, Managing Director Blyk Netherlands, says: “The Netherlands has the third highest advertising spend per capita in Europe and is a hub for many global companies and ad agencies, so it is an obvious territory for Blyk’s expansion. The advertising market, whilst both creative and dynamic, is also cluttered and we believe youth brands will welcome a highly engaging communication channel like Blyk. We are confident that both Dutch advertisers and global advertisers will make use of Blyk’s unique ability to connect them with an important consumer segment.”

Strangely there’s nothing there from Vodafone. Not a peep. So is it ‘just’ another MVNO deal, like their arrangement with Orange in the UK – or something a bit more substantial? There’s been no announcement of a launch date as yet, or even exactly what they’re planning to launch. Whether this is the start of something bigger – a possible purchase of Blyk by Vodafone and/or roll-out across other Voda countries – is also unknown.

There’s been rumours flying around since SpinVox first surfaced that the clever technology that recognises speech and turns it into a pretty text wasn’t as smart as the company claimed it was. As their website says:

“So D2′s pretty smart. It’s bound to be, as D2′s a combination of artificial intelligence, voice recognition and natural linguistics. But it also knows what it doesn’t know and is able to call on human experts for assistance”

But how often are these ‘human experts’ called? And who are they?

Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s Technology Correspondent, has done a little digging – and come up with some shocking facts (link).

Claims have been made to the BBC that the majority of messages are manually transcribed by low paid staff in battery farmed call centres in South Africa and the Philippines.

And former call centre worker Mohammed Mustafa told the BBC “The machine doesn’t understand anything. You have to start typing when you hear the message.”

SpinVox have declined to tell the BBC how many messages are manually transcribed, claiming that information is ‘highly confidential and sensitive data’.

So do SpinVox treat your voice messages as ‘highly confidential and sensitive?’ Apparently not. The BBC took a look through SpinVox’s registration information under the Data Protection Act, and found the company claims it doesn’t transfer any data outside the European Economic Area. Which is fine, because obviously South Africa and the Philippines had a meeting overnight when I wasn’t looking and suddenly became part of Europe.. didn’t they?

Meanwhile, there’s the whole question over money. Where precisely has all that investment – the BBC claims over £120m – gone? Apparently not on voice recognition technology. That leads on to another question – if its mostly gone on paying for transcriptions at call centres, then surely the business model just doesn’t add up? If the cost of an agent transcribing a message in a call centre is more expensive than the cost SpinVox charges to the customer, then what’s the point?

And whilst we’re on the subject of money, The Register reported last week that SpinVox had asked employees to take share options instead of wages. The BBC has a quote from ISP ANLX – who host some of SpinVox’s servers – saying that they’ve removed SpinVox’s access as they haven’t paid the bills. Plus there’s also rumours floating around that ex MIR contributor James Whatley – who heads up “Digital & Social Media” and is seen by many as the ‘voice’ of SpinVox on various social media sites – is no longer employed by the company on a full time basis.

Now to balance things up a bit. I quite like SpinVox – I’ve used it on and off for a number of years. It sort of does what it says on the tin – the accuracy is sometimes horrendous (Guinness came out as ‘Gurmish’ once) and I’ve had to dial in occasionally to actually listen to the message. Did it save me time listening to voicemails? Yes. Was I aware that they used humans? Yup. Did I mind? No, but I assumed – probably like everyone else – that it wasn’t one big battery farming dictation operation with apparently not a single bit of technology involved.

I’m going to cancel my subscription to SpinVox today – and I’m sure other people will be. Something just doesn’t feel right here. I feel like we – as the mobile industry – have been misled about just how wonderful and technologically advanced the service really was. And if I was an investor specialising in funding hi-tech ventures, right now I’d be on the phone to my lawyers clarifying what I’d really invested in.

‘So what’, I hear you ask. ‘Surely all SMS providers are the same?’ No, they’re not – ask anyone who’s ever been involved in SMS and mention ‘grey routes’ and they’ll usually break out into a cold sweat. Whilst many companies claim to have super-reliable high-speed SS7 connections direct into the heart of the mobile operators networks, that’s often not the case. Your traffic might end up going via India, Russia or the Far East, get clogged up on a overloaded connection somewhere, or might never get there at all. Even worse – you might find your text messages go via a stack of old Nokia’s hotwired into a PC. As the old adage goes, ‘you get what you pay for’.

What sets Vanguard apart from the usual offerings in my mind is this: InfoBip will only charge you for messages that have been successfully delivered – you don’t pay for those that for whatever reason – e.g. an old number that’s no longer in service – fail.

Surely that should always have been the case? When people ask me about this sort of thing I usually compare it to the Royal Mail: you pay for the stamp on your letter assuming it’ll get there. If it comes back ‘return to sender’ for whatever reason, they don’t give you a refund.

Anyway, back to SMS and Vanguard. InfoBip’s CEO Silvio Kutic says: “This connection introduces certain elements which set it apart from other routes in our portfolio, but it also stands out on a bigger scale, hence a name that stands out as well. Not only does this route have superior technical features, its major benefits also include the charging of only delivered messages, which allows significant cost-cutting for our clients, and no monthly commitment, allowing for more flexibility”.

So who are InfoBip? I can vouch that they exist, having met three of their guys in a pub for a quick pint after Global Messaging 2009. Headquartered in Croatia, they’ve got offices in the Isle of Man and Germany too. A quick flick through their website reveals they’ve been around since 2002, so they’re by no means new to this game. Other than that, you’re on your own. However if you do decide to let them pitch for your business, make sure you mention Mobile Industry Review – and perhaps they’ll get the beers in for us next time they visit London.

But hang on a second, this is the mobile industry – a sector not exactly renowned for its competitive cooperation and commercial innovation (compared to the world of the web/Internet). How groundbreaking would the conference really be? Would anything really come out of it, or would it just be a collection of industry leaders nodding their heads, agreeing they needed to do something useful with messaging, then after the beers had been drunk and the corporate hospitality exhausted, all go home and revert back to the paranoid blinkered attitude we have come to know and love from operators?

With limited time available, I figured a better way to gauge what was new, hot and exciting in messaging would be to hang around the exhibition and talk to some of the companies attending.

So what did I find? Representaives of some companies were quite welcoming, and more than happy to talk about what they were up to. Others were, how can I put it, more intent on hiding in the corner of their stands and being as welcoming and inviting as a shop with the shutters down and the open sign firmly turned to ‘closed’.

Armed with a notepad, a pen and my press pass, I wandered up to each stand (the ones with people there who looked like they wanted to talk and weren’t busy hiding or having customer meetings) and asked the simple question: ‘What’s new in your world?’

Comsys

First stop, Comsys. ‘So what do you do?’, I asked. ‘IVR’, said the gentlemen. Hmm, ok – that’s a strange start. This is a conference on mobile messaging – and you do voice response platforms for call centres? Fair enough – I let him carry on to see if there was anything I’d missed.

The company originally provided big beefy (read: expensive) IVR platforms to the likes of Christies, and Ikea. Their focus had now turned to the SME market, and they were showcasing a ‘drag and drop’ IVR service aimed at, as the guy put it, ‘non geeks’. Give it to an office manager and they could setup a simple switchboard or platform to route calls in a call centre. It’s all hosted by Comsys, so instead of spending large sums of cash on ominous grey boxes you just paid for what you needed. Plus with the simple user-friendly ‘normob-proof’ interface, it didn’t take a team of experts to set up and maintain.

‘When’s it available?’, I asked. ‘Autumn’, was the response. Hmm. Not exactly now, and not exactly innovative, I thought – casting my mind back to an IVR I’d built about 3-4 years ago with UK-based service provider Callagenix. That was sort of drag and drop – ok it didn’t have the worlds prettiest GUI but it was point click and go with a relatively simple web interface. So how far has IVR come in 3-4 years? Not too far, it seems.

After a brief chat about life, universe and the general state of the industry, I shuffled off to find something a little more innovative – and mobile-related.

MX Telecom

Next stop, MX Telecom. They’ve been around for donkeys years, originally as a simple SMS aggregator and over the years have moved into MMS, video shortcodes and voice. So what’s rocking their world?

‘We’ve got a large product, it’s really innovative, but I can’t tell you about it’. Oh. ‘But ask any of our competitiors and they’ll tell you what it is’. Oh. Again. So what is it? ‘I can’t tell you too much, but it launches in August, it’s something to do with FMCG [Google says that's 'Fast Moving Consumer Goods'], and we’ll be giving it a big push’.

OK, I’m still none the wiser. So is there anything I can write about? ‘Well we’ve just enhanced our 3G video calling service’. Zzz. Does anyone make video calls to an automated platform, let alone to each other? But then it twigged. Porn. Maybe that’s where the money is. And on that delightful (and slightly smutty) note, I moved on..

mBlox

Another stand, another SMS aggregator that’s been around since the year dot. So what was rocking mBlox’s world? Of course the question I really wanted to ask was ‘how are you getting on with all those PhonePayPlus adjudications and fines?’, but it didn’t seem the right time and place (if you click here and select mBlox as the service provider, you’ll see what I mean).

“We’re busy moving into new industry sectors, including travel alerts, anti-fraud services, and healthcare’. Well, I guess that’s better than reverse-billed SMS and subscription services. ‘We’ve also got a new reverse charge service for mobile data, which allows the content provider to pay the users data charge for downloading content’. Now this is quite interesting. Sometimes we forget a large chunk of the market doesn’t have unlimited data plans like us ‘mobile savvy’ lot do, and are still paying by the megabyte. What this service basically does is ‘reverse charges’ the data cost for downloading a bit of content back to the service provider – so if I pay lets say £3 for a ringtone (I know, I wouldn’t either, but bear with me) I don’t have to pay my data charges for downloading it. Neat. Is it available now? ‘We’re doing a trial at the moment in the UK, hopefully it’ll be rolled out soon’.

Finally, something interesting and vaguely innovative. With a renewed sense of vigor I wandered off to the next stand that looked welcoming.

I-New

‘Hello’, I piped up, ‘I’m writing for Mobile Industry Review. What are you showcasing today?’, I said to the rather tired looking gentlemen on the stand. He seemed quite delighted that someone was showing interest in their offerings – to be honest it was a bit of a quiet exhibition – and he started talking. I couldn’t keep up. My plan to use pen and paper was clearly failing, and I began to wonder whether I should have just bought an old fashioned dictaphone with me.

Reading my notes, and a pile of brochures I picked up, here’s a rough overview. I-New provide content and services platforms for mobile operators and MVNOs – think a big box you can lock up in a rack and offer a new service. They do messaging platforms, marketing software, IVR, instant messaging, colour ringback tones (known as ‘caller tunes’ on some operators in the UK), Intelligent Network services, and other operator-focuseed platforms. There’s also something interesting called ‘Mamba’ – which stands for ‘Mobile Assisted Micro Broker Application’ – which allows operators to provide money transfer services to mobile customers. With the UK operators and regulators seemingly failing to embrace the whole concept of mobile money transfer and flexible micropayments compared to somewhere like Africa, I wondered how many people attending today would be interested in such a solution. Still, with a worldwide audience, I’m sure there’d be an innovative operator somewhere in the room.

Lleida.net

Glancing around Lleida’s stand, and eyeing up their product literature, it looked like I’d found ‘yet another’ SMS and MMS aggregator – and I wasn’t wrong. The company, based in Spain, offer international SMS and MMS transit for MNOs, along with ENUM services, and something called ‘Virtual Handset’ – which at closer inspection is a regular virtual mobile service for receiving and sending SMS on your PC. So what was cooking in their world?

‘We’re showcasing Certified SMS today’, the representative told me. So what’s that? ‘It allows you to prove an SMS has been delivered to a particular destination’, he said. Right, so delivery reports? ‘Yes, but we provide a signed and digitally stamped delivery receipt via email to prove that the message has been delivered’. So who’s the intended audience? The brochure I have in front of me says legal documents. But surely a legal document is more than 160 characters? It seems more likely to be used for something like ‘Dear Alex, your bank account is about to self destruct as it’s overdrawn’, or the like. They reckon you could do a will or power of attorney over text. I’m not too sure..

And that was that. ‘Hang on’, I’m sure you’re saying, ‘you only talked to five people? What about the rest?’ Well, as I said before, sometimes exhibitors can be as welcoming as a shop with the shutters down and the sign turned to ‘closed’. I did want to talk to a couple of other people, like SMS router bods Telsis but to be honest they seemed to be having a picnic the first time I wandered past, and a customer meeting the next. I’m sure there were some other people there worth talking to, but stands were empty, some of them had one bloke cowered over a laptop scowling in the corner, and to be honest I doubt there was anything earth-shattering there anyway. However, I did get a chance to catch up with Jote Bassi, VP Global Sales & Marketing at messaging experts Anam for a chat – I’ll be covering that on another post in the coming days.

To say I’ve been a bit busy with other projects lately would be an understatement. However, it hasn’t stopped me putting in the hours for this esteemed publication and catching up with some of the movers and shakers in the mobile industry over the past few weeks.

Here’s a taster of what’s coming your way in the next week or so:

- Interview with Jote Bassi, VP Global Sales & Marketing at messaging experts Anam.

- A feature on brand new MVNO Uni-Tel and their MVNA partner x-Mobility, including interviews with x-Mobility CEO Wayne Myers and Uni-Tel Mobile Operations Director Mike Hall.

- A chat over breakfast with Tim Haysom from operator-sponsored mobile platform forum OMTP.

and last but not least – and slightly overdue:

- A brief round-up and who’s who of exhibitors at the Global Messaging 2009 event last month.

Would you like your company on this list? Drop an email to alex (at) alexkinch (dot) com and let me know, and we’ll try and work out a plan for a feature and interview.

So is calling over GSM really secure? Yes and no. Yes as in your call is encrypted between the handset and the network, so its not just a case of someone with a scanner ‘tuning in’ like the old days with analogue cordless phones – but no as there’s so many other places it can be tapped. Plus the encryption standard used by GSM was cracked in theory about 10 years ago, so anyone with a suitably large amount of technology could in theory break the code. Last year two researchers – Steve Muller and David Hulton – claimed they’d come up with a method of doing it quite quickly without the need for silly amounts of computing power you’d normally only associate with a government.

Then there’s the theoretical possibility of a physical ‘wiretap’ within the mobile network or public telephone system. Let’s take a call between a 3 mobile user in the UK and someone in Germany on T-Mobile. It’s quite possible that call will go from 3 to BT, across BT’s international network to Deutsche Telekom in Germany, off Deutsche Telekom’s transit network to the actual T-Mobile network, and then onwards to the other end. Across that path it’s more than likely that call has passed through not only four different networks but quite a few exchanges – as an unencrypted digital stream. Pick an exchange that call happens to pass through, find a disgruntled and persuadable (with a nice brown envelope of cash) switch engineer and voila – one wiretap.

Of course this is all theoretical, and I’m not suggesting it happens all the time. However with increasing concerns about the security of phone calls, many companies are beginning to use encryption technology you’d only see spooks and the military using five years ago.

One company to offer such technology is British-based CellCrypt. Their software-based offering can be installed on Nokia, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphone. With just a few clicks you can make a secured call over the 3G/2G or Wi-Fi data network to another CellCrypt-enabled device (or office PBX if you’ve got the relevent hardware installed) and not only completely bypass the voice network but also secure your conversation with something called Encrypted Mobile Content Protocol (EMCP). Here’s a little diagram of how it works:

So how secure is secure? Not wishing to get too techy about it, but CellCrypt uses RSA 2048 bit and AES 256 bit encryption, DH and RSA algorithms for key exchange, SHA512 and MD5 for hashing and DSA and RSA to authenticate data.

Does it work? Is it simple to use? Yes, in a word. I had the opportunity to have a play with the CellCrypt technology a few weeks ago, and it seems quite straight forward. Select a contact from your CellCrypt phone book, hit the button, and within 10 seconds its placed the call, secured it, and you’re ready to rock and roll. As the call does go over your operators 2G or 3G service it can be a little delayed, but to be honest its not really noticeable – and not that much worse than a normal mobile to mobile call.

Even if you don’t think CellCrypt – or similar technology – is for you, here’s CellCrypt’s CEO Simon Bransfield-Garth with some top tips for mobile safety. Obviously he’ll want you to place an order for his service, but quite a lot of this is common sense and simple to do.

• Never assume that voice calls are secure – like fax or email, never discuss confidential or sensitive issues on the phone, or use phones with voice encryption
• Never leave confidential voice messages or send confidential texts
• Make sure you use your mobile phone PIN and protect it in the same way as your Bank Card PIN –  voicemails can be accessed from any phone with the PIN
• Be vigilant to prevent malicious use of your phone – be wary of texts, system messages or events on your phone that you did not ask initiate or expect; turn off Bluetooth if you are not using it and don’t leave your phone lying around
• Think about the value of the conversation and then choose the right communication means for the call – if you are discussing something very valuable, such as a business deal, don’t leave information lying around or use communications means that can be intercepted

You can find out more about CellCrypt at http://www.cellcrypt.com – and watch out for an interview in the coming weeks.

The PocketSurfer3

Here’s the deal. The PocketSurfer3 and PocketSurfer3 Lite, like their older siblings, have a Vodafone SIM superglued into the device. When you buy the device you get 30 hours per month of GPRS Internet browsing included for a year (it was 20 hours per month with the PocketSurfer 2). After a year you pony up £29.99 and get another years worth of 30 hours per month. Or at anytime you can pay £5.99 a month for unlimited access and £59.99 for ‘lifetime of the product’ unlimited access.

Now comes the interesting bit – roaming. Instead of paying per megabyte, Datawind charge European access at 5p per minute. There’s even a little timer on the screen so you can work out how many minutes you’ve been online.

Anyway, some brief specs on the device. At 152 x 75 x 15 mm and weighing in at 174 grams, both the PocketSurfer3 and its ‘Lite’ version have a 640×240 TFT colour screen, quad band GSM/GPRS radio, backlit QWERTY keyboard, and about four hours of usage with a standby time of four days. It runs Linux and apart from a web browser has email and IM applications built in. The PocketSurfer3 also has GPS and a funky touch pad, which the Lite doesn’t have.

Price-wise? The PocketSurfer3 is £199, and PocketSurfer Lite is £159. It’s available now from Maplin and, rather curiously, the Ideal World TV shopping channel.

Ubisurfer

Datawind also unveiled the Ubisurfer – a new netbook. Similar in concept to the PocketSurer, it’s got a 7″ TFT screen running at 800×480, 128MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash, onboard Wi-Fi, an Ethernet port, sound, an SD card socket, 3 USB ports, and a few more applications – like media player, XIP Office (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation), PDF Viewer, Paint, and a handful of games. Again it runs Linux, and as with the PocketSurfer it comes with 30 hours a month of Vodafone GPRS surfing, and 5p/minute roaming access in Europe.

Pricing for the UbiSurfer is a rather reasonable £159, and again its available now from Maplin and the Ideal World TV shopping channel.

Review units should be hitting the streets in the next few weeks, so as soon as they wing their way here we’ll bring you a full in depth road test. In the meantime you can find out more about the UbiSurfer here and the PocketSurfer3 here.

The paper reports that the operation, launched in mid-2007, has just filed accounts at the Companies’ Registration Office (CRO) – Ireland’s equivalent to the UK’s Companies House – which show the deficit on the balance sheet as of December 31st last year, compared with a €3.1m deficit at the end of 2007.

So can we call that figure a loss? Not exactly. Whilst the accounts do say the operation made a loss in 2008, as it’s classed as a small company it only has to file a balance sheet and not a full profit and loss account. The Irish Times did ask the same question, and a spokesman for the venture said they ‘would not elaborate on its performance last year, and did not provide any details on the number of subscribers that it has recruited.’

According to the accounts, the shareholders (Tesco and O2) stumped up €11m in July 2007 to finance launch and development. The venture spent €2.5 million of this in 2007, and €6 million last year, a total of €8.5 million. This leaves €2.5m in the kitty. Not a great deal in the grand scheme of things.

So is Tesco Mobile Ireland in trouble? Maybe not quite yet. Tesco and O2 have agreed to provide ‘last resort’ funding to the company until at least 30 June 2010. But that still leaves the issue of the €8.5m it has spent so far – and whether it can repay O2 and Tesco. The accounts show the €8.5m was provided in the form of interest-free unsecured loans, of which €1.5m must be paid by December 31st 2010 and the remaining €7m by December 31st 2011.

The Telefonica O2 group operates mobile networks in the UK, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Isle of Man – so you’d expect the launch to encompass all of these countries? Nope, think again.

Spain, the UK, Ireland and Germany will get the Palm Pre in time for Christmas. Where does that leave the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Isle of Man? Nowhere, apparently. And the rest of Europe? Nothing concrete yet – although it wouldn’t be a surprise if a handful of the other operators scoop up the rest of Europe.

Still no word on pricing, the exact launch date, and how many months worth of contract you’ll have to sign in blood. However there is a set of ‘pre-notification’ pages on Palm’s website:

• UK and Ireland: http://www.palm.com/uk-pre-notify
• Germany: http://www.palm.com/de-pre-notify
• Spain: http://www.palm.com/es-pre-notify

It’ll be available on pay as you go, and comes with a bluetooth headset, built-in speaker, 3G and video calling. And that’s all we appear to know right now.

“Pay as you go only”, you may gasp, “why?”

Well here’s my thinking. What perfect way to sell you a gizmo you’ll probably get bored of using within a few weeks, and notch up another SIM ‘subscriber’. Imagine being tied in to a 36 month contract on a watch? I couldn’t either really. It’ll also go down well with the kids – who, unless they have crazy parents with deep pockets, are usually on pay as you go these days.

The device will be available, according to Orange, ‘for a limited time period’ (there’s a pun in there somewhere), and is the first of at least three new ‘market leading’ devices they’re planning to announce before the end of the year.

Over to Tom Alexander, CEO of Orange UK, for the obligatory soundbite: “The Watch Phone is the must-have gadget of 2009. It’s handcrafted, exclusively limited, and will turn heads on the high street. Our ambition is to become the best loved communications brand in the UK, and the destination brand of choice for high-end mobile users in the market. To help us achieve this, we have secured some of the most original and innovative devices available.

“The Watch Phone is the first of these devices, all focused on bringing a 21st-century experience to our 21st century customers. Over time we also intend to match the power of these devices with bespoke multimedia packages, driving even more inspirational conversations and deeper connections for our customers.”

The last time we spoke on this very blog about mobile phones meeting watches was back in 2007 when Sony Ericsson and Fossil launched a Bluetooth watch. Seen many on the street? No nor have I – and to be honest you’d get some very funny looks talking into your wrist.

So how will the Orange/LG watch phone fair? Only time will tell. And on that note, I’ll leave you to watch the lovely demo video courtesy of Orange.

First, Vodafone. They announced a cut in roaming charges across the EU to £4.99 a day for up to 25MB. That works out, as the press release helpfully says, at the equivalent of 20p per MB. But wait, in true operator fashion there’s a little bit of a complicated twist.

That £4.99 a day deal is just for mobile data. Under 1MB Vodafone will charge you a per KB rate, with 100KB costing 50p. Go above a meg and you’ll instantly be charged £4.99 for the remaining 24MB. What happens after 25MB? You get charged another £4.99, and get another 25MB. And so on and so forth.

If you’re planning to use your mobile broadband dongle, that price doubles – but so does the inclusive data bundle. Whether the per KB charging for dongle usage remains is a little unclear, but you’ll be charged £9.99 for 50MB chunks of data. Again, this is all on a daily basis – so if you use 2MB of data every day for a week on your laptop it’ll end up costing a rather hefty £69.93.

If you venture outside of the Europe (Vodafone have defined all of Europe – whether it’s in the EU or not – as ‘zone 1′), it’s £14.99 per day per 25MB on your phone, or £29.99 per day per 50MB on your dongle.

At this point, I’d imagine even the more maths-savvy consumer is a bit lost in figures. Why can’t things just be simple – one price for data per megabyte whether it be on your laptop or mobile?

Cue 3 and their new charges. £1.25 per MB – no minimums, no bundles, no 24 hour windows and no differentiation between your phone or a dongle. A pricing model so simple that it takes one sentence to explain, versus four paragraphs. OK so it may be more expensive per megabyte if you’re a heavy user, but at least you don’t need a calculator and a calendar to work it all out.

Is he worried about being left out of the bidding war for Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK business unit? Quite probably, but he plays it quite cool. “We are watching developments closely, but if you’re asking me whether it’s consuming my time day and night, the answer is no,” he says. I’m entirely relaxed about the situation – no one is running around here like headless chickens.”

Meanwhile the Sunday Times reports Vodafone is talking to Deutsche Telekom about swapping it’s Turkish operation (formerly Telsim) for T-Mobile UK. To put that possibility into figures, Vodafone paid £2.6bn for the Telsim operation in 2006, but has since written it down due to competition from Turkcell – the dominate player in the market. It could raise £1.5bn of the projected £3m worth of T-Mobile UK by disposing of the Turkish unit.

Finally, the Daily Mail adds its usual dose of doom, gloom and ‘they’re all out to get us’ sensationalism with a report that says ‘Telecoms regulator Ofcom is warning potential bidders for T-Mobile that any takeover deal will face the toughest scrutiny, amid fears that it would lead to a sharp increase in prices for consumers.’

Happy days indeed, with sources close to Deutsche Telekom still claiming there’s ‘no rush’ to offload T-Mobile UK. With new MD Richard Moat (formerly of Orange) less than two months in the job there still may be time to avoid being swallowed up by a rival player. Speaking of Orange, they’re still in the frame for a deal with T-Mobile. Or not, if you believe the claims a possible deal was rejected a few weeks ago.

So here’s the deal. x-Mobility have an agreement with 3, all the backend (BSS/OSS) systems, a customer care service, plus SIM and handset fulfilment. In theory you don’t have to do anything – apart from give them some cash and a copy of your brands logo. 120 days later and voila – have your very own MVNO. No months of negotiations with the mobile operator over radio access contracts, and no large outlay on equipment.

That’s what Uni-Tel Mobile did, and they’re now about to launch a new UK student-targetted service. Details on exactly what their offer is – when it’ll be available, etc – is a little sketchy, but their Operations Director, Mike Hall, is quoted as saying ‘We think that we have a very compelling offering to the student market and we’re extremely excited about the possibilities.’

Anyway, back to x-Mobility. The company claims they’re working with a number of brands to launch some more MVNO’s soon. But is there room in the market? Many MVNO’s have come, failed and gone. Differentiation against the traditional operators is the key – it’s not just a case of slapping on your brands logo and hoping for the best; a fact that was a little lost on Marks & Spencer a while back.

I’m currently arranging some time with both Uni-Tel and x-Mobility for a chat – if you’ve got any questions you want putting to them please drop a comment on this post.