- Presenter: “I’ve got a futurologist with me tonight. So that means you’re an expert on the future.”

- Futurologist: “Well, just technology in my case, not the whole future, that’d be rather a lot.”

And it got me thinking. Isn’t that the problem with futurologists (in our sector they’re often called analysts), you can’t just take technology in isolation and try and predict its future as everything else gets in the way?

If it was just down to the technology, we could all be driving around in hover cars like we were promised all those years ago – but we’re not. So surely before making these wild predictions about technology in the future, people should also consider the society that might, or most likely might not, use that technology.

What do you think?

The Company
ScreenReach talks about itself as a ‘Screen 2.0′ company, which means that it offers an interactive display system that can deliver personalised content to screens – both big plasma display screens as well as mobiles.

Primarily this personalised content can be external information configured however the screen owner chooses. That could be news, stock market updates or the local weather. In this respect it is a bit like iGoogle for plasmas. The really clever stuff however is the fact that the content can be personalised based on the people near the screen.

The founders of the company come from a signage background and were looking for a way to provide hi-tech, quality display systems for all.

The Technology
In my first piece I talked about ScreenReach bringing the film Minority Report to life. I was referring to the scene in which Tom Cruise walks into a shop and all the screens recognise him and display personal messages just for him. ScreenReach offers something similar, or as Paul puts it, they “utilise location-based data to deliver something useful” to the consumer.

That location based data can be recognising that you as an individual are near the screen, maybe by using Cell-ID, GPS, or if you are close enough Bluetooth. Or it could be data that predicts the make-up of the ‘group’ of people nearby e.g. by accessing the till systems of the retailer to understand who has recently purchased. This information is then used to personalise the content on the screen.

For example, if the system recognised Ewan it might display a notice that said that Irn Bru was on offer, whereas if it recognised me it might display the advert for Custard Creams.

The Business Model
The audience for this technology is as Paul sees it ‘anyone who wants to deliver a message’, but that is mainly retailers or possibly corporate receptions and other similar places.

What ScreenReach is looking to do is to offer this technology to as many people as possible and not keep it in the hands of an exclusive group that can afford to pay big money for traditional quality signage. For that reason the initial costs have been set low (£99 for the software, plus a monthly fee based on the content delivered). On top of that, ScreenReach hopes to generate additional advertising revenues – with a percentage going to the retailer.

The idea behind all of this is that both the consumer and the retailer can configure the system to deliver the ads / information that they want.

For retailers, this means not running ads that are competitive with their offering and obviously running ads that actively promote their products.

For consumers it will be about setting their own personal preferences. One of the ways that ScreenReach is hoping to entice consumers to do that is through the mobile vouchers scheme that it offers. Consumers can set their preferences and then receive discount vouchers to their phone. These vouchers can be based on both their preferences and the additional information gathered (e.g. location) to make them more relevant.

In many ways this is a location based version of what Shop, Scan, Save offers.

What ScreenReach is hoping is that following launch they will be able to grow rapidly and steal ‘first mover advantage’ becoming the de facto solution for retailers.

Next Steps
So far ScreenReach has been self-funded and is currently talking to VCs so that funding can be provided to launch to the market and grow the service. At present they are trialling the service in a few select places and are hoping that a full launch will see their presence grow.

When I spoke to Paul he was confident about achieving funding and thought that the launch would be in only about 2-3 months.

My View
There were a number of people commenting about this after my teaser. Many pointing out that consumers would not want to be recognised and have ads displayed based on their preferences.

Yet, people already have their preferences played back to them on websites they visit and through any decent example of direct mail. As I said at the time, it’s all about how it is deployed and I see no immeidate problem with this, if it is done well.

However, what this does highlight is that ScreenReach is at the mercy of other people getting it ‘right’ – whether it’s the people they sell the system too, or the people who advertise on the screens. As Mike42 said, it won’t take many mistakes for this to affect trade in the retail stores and therefore affect ScreenReach.

My other potential problem with this is the ad-funded model. Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of ad-funded, but it’s just that the world and his dog is now using this as a method to launch new services and advertisers still only have a finite budget. I’m not sure how much Coke (or whoever) would value advertising to the people who sit in a small coffee shop in Warrington (or insert your own provincial town here).

Overall though, I hope it does work. It sounds really interesting, although I’ve not seen it in practice (I’d love to though sometime, if you’re listening Paul!!); it’s good that people from outside the mobile industry are choosing to innovate in this sector; and Paul was really enthusiastic and excited about it all. Now I know that they aren’t necessarily good enough reasons for a company to survive, but they’re good enough for me to want it to.

I guess we’ll all have to watch this space …

So to correct this and offer praise when praise is due I’m going to let you lovely readers know about the excellent experience I had with Vodafone this morning.

I set off with the intention of snapping up 3′s E71 white and laptop deals. But to be honest when I got there the E71′s looked a bit cheap and tacky in white (and they had none in stock at the shop I tried), while the laptops were aimed more at the home user market. So, I left the 3 shop disappointedly as I was looking forward to having some new toys to play with. But across the road was a Voda shop … might as well I thought.

At first things weren’t much better, I asked about a couple of handsets and was told, “No, sorry mate.” No attempt to see why I wanted those specific handsets, no attempt to sell me an alternative. But then it turns out they did have what I was looking for and Alex was sent over to serve me.

To put it simply Alex was brilliant.

He guided me through the multitude of price plans – finding the right deal for me. Helped me out with more information about international calls. Sorted out a usb dongle for me. Helped to port my existing mobile number over to Vodafone. Backed up my sim contacts. Was patient and friendly as my two-year son ran around the shop. And at one stage even got me a bottle of water from the staff room.

The whole process took about an hour, but at all times he was patient and explanied what was going on. We had a few glitches (his computer system, my PAC), but it didn’t matter – he just dealt with them and got the job done.

I left feeling like I was a valued customer for Vodafone and that is exactly how I should feel as I had just signed up to give them over £900.

Why can’t the other operators do this? Actually I don’t even know if this is common place for Vodafone. But what I do know is that without Alex I would have either left in the middle of the sign-up process or resented the time, effort and money I was spending with Vodafone and would have started my relationship with the big V feeling very negative. Instead I’m prepared to spend more as I feel ‘loved’.

So, if you are in the Nottingham area and want a pleasant mobile phone buying experience, go to the Vodafone store on Clumber street.

And if you’re listening Vodafone, give Alex a raise, a bonus, or at least some healthy commission from today’s sale.

This time Lauren from Sonus PR – who’s promise of a new iPhone couriered to her didn’t materialise – got on the phone to try and sort out the problem. As you can see from her story below it wasn’t a smooth process, but eventually she got the right outcome – a shiny new iPhone 3G.

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So, when we last left off I had been charged for my iPhone, £99, but was told by customer services that there was no order on record under my current contract. The lady at customer services, frantic from all her previous callers, searched and searched to see what glitch had occurred … O2 hold music proceeds … ‘Right, I’ve found your order’ she says ‘but unfortunately for some reason it has gone through as a new contract not an upgrade’. Ah! So I asked if I would be able to transfer my number over and cancel my previous contract, ‘I’m not sure’??? So, apparently I have an iPhone being delivered to me with a new number and new contract and I may not be able to transfer my number … worse still if I want to keep my number and it can’t be transferred then I will have to send back the iPhone! Disaster! So, now a waiting game for it to arrive and see what happens when I plug it in …

It arrives!!! Very exciting! I open it up and plug it in and get straight onto the phone to O2 customer services (to ensure no more mistakes) to explain the situation before I do a thing. I’m told that I need to speak to Apple to transfer my number, Apple tell me I have to speak to O2 :-S … Anyway, I use some initiative and while I have the Apple chap on the phone I get him to tell me a few things to make sure that I transfer all my old iPhone info onto my new iPhone.

Now, I get back onto O2 and the poor girl at customer services was going nowhere and it was looking unlikely for me to be able to transfer my number over (which I need to do as it’s on all my business cards). So I ask to speak to a manager to see if we can resolve this quickly, and possibly like Dan have to cancel the contract and send back the new iPhone The manager is much more upbeat about the situation and tells me that they will be able to complete the transfer, just simply take my sim from my old iPhone and put it in the new iPhone … Really? So simple and yet I have been on the phone all morning with various O2 and Apple customer service staff … I try it and it works!! He said to me ‘we will cancel your new iPhone contract and add the new iPhone to your existing contract’ … exactly what I had tried to do during my initial upgrade order online … hooray! My number was transferred within the hour and I still had my original £45 refund for my bill due to all the stress.

So, I am one happy iPhone 3G user, finally. It was a long road to get here but I think that it was all worth it

- – -

Well done Lauren. But seriously, come on guys, it should take that much effort from a customer to spend money with you.

This is from Ben:

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It was strangely reassuring to read someone else having a similar degree of pain! After O2′s site crashed and burned after 10 minutes of people trying to use it, I placed an order on CPW on Monday. That order never got past stage 1. In fact it’s still there. Then I ordered again on Thursday on CPW and surprisingly they delivered the phone on Friday. Still no activation though. I’ve been through the CPW blaming O2 and O2 blaming CPW. Done the, “we’re going to call you back” thing. Now waiting on the “there was an error in your data this will take 24-48 hours, we’ll call you back”. 48 hours to update an entry in an authentication database? Really?

Funny how they never have that much trouble to update their databases to take your money

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Ben, thanks for that. Unfortunately I’m sure you’re not the only one. We’d love to hear from anyone else out there with tales of woe – get it off your chest, share with an SMS Text News counsellor …

Unfortunately Screenreach doesn’t work with pre-cogs to detect crimes before they have happened. I don’t mean that bit of Minority Report. I mean the scene where Tom Cruise walks into a shop and all the screens recognise him and display personal messages just for him. That is what Screenreach can offer … or something similar.

I’m going to be doing a fuller piece on Screenreach soon, but basically the company offers information and content that can be sent to screens – primarily plasma screens in retail environments, but also mobiles. The content they provide can be personalised either by recognising you as an individual – for example the screen can ‘see’ you via bluetooth – or by amalgamating group information from sources such as recent till transactions.

It all sounds interesting and I’ll be doing more soon.

An older gentleman (possibly 65 ish) got an old Nokia out of his jacket pocket (unfortunately I didn’t see the exact model); took it out of its protective wallet and then got ready to make a call. However, instead of accessing the phone’s address book, he opened up a piece of paper that was in the wallet and typed the number into his phone.

Having a written list of the most used numbers was something that my grandparents used to keep by their old landline phone. If they were alive, I could imagine them using a mobile in exactly the same way as this guy sat near me did. This guy didn’t want to use all the clever applications that you and I might … he just wanted to make voice calls while he was mobile.

While I agree that the industry needs to keep innovating, part of the issue is that normobs like this are still a big part of the market for the operators et al.

Of course, as I was on an East Midlands train, the poor guy had no reception … so even his most basic requirement wasn’t met!

You can find out all the details here, but all you really need to know is that it is being held in the Magic Glasses Bar, The O’Callaghan Stephen’s Green Hotel, Dublin (map) from 6pm onwards.

We’re expecting a really good night. It will probably be a little more intimate than the recent London events, but that’s good because it will give everyone more time to chat and network. Even if you’re based in Dublin it might be worth a trip over.

Don’t forget – send Ewan an email (ewan@smstextnews.com) with UNLIMITED DRINKS = YES in the subject line and we’ll see you there.

The research was conducted by independent research firm Amplitude Research and other features that scored highly were having a camera (67%), having email capabilities (63%) and accessing the Internet (61%); while only 0.5% of respondents said that battery life was important – not like our own James Whately during Glastonbury.

For the geeks amongst us, it is interesting to read that 39% of respondents have added new applications, while 21% have added six or more new applications.

But it wasn’t all geeks they talked to. They also surveyed some people just like my mum – as 4.83% said that the only reason they have a cell phone is in case of emergency!

You can read more on FierceWireless here.

Shaq took the feud to new levels by recently getting up in a New York nightclub and rapping about Kobe missing out on the NBA Championship Finals, asking “Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes.” The YouTube clip of the rap has had nearly 600,000 views already.

Well, now you can have the rap as your mobile ringtone thanks to FunMobility. If you want to download it, you can get from FunMobility.

I suppose that in the UK it would be the equivalent of JohnTerry and Wayne Rooney squaring up to each other … then again that will happen almost every week once the Premiership starts again!

Critical Info
The date: July 10th (Thursday)
The venue: Magic Glasses Bar, The O’Callaghan Stephen’s Green Hotel, Dublin (map)
The time: 6pm onwards
Get on the guestlist: Email Ewan at ewan@smstextnews.com with the subject UNLIMITED DRINKS = YES as soon as you can.

The background
The Dublin Unlimited Drinks is a chance to meet Ireland’s mobile community. Some of you we know already, many of you we don’t. So we’re really looking forward to meeting you; finding out more about you, your company, your products; then watching you grow. Also, it’s a chance for you to meet other likeminded individuals. We think it will be valuable and interesting for us all.

Who’s supporting it?
This is where thanks are due to Anam, Arantech and ChangingWorlds who are supporting the night. More will be posted about each one of them shortly, but if you see anyone from these three companies on the night don’t forget to say ‘thanks’ and also maybe have a listen to what they do.

What’s happening on the night?
We’ve got an area of the Magic Glasses Bar set aside especially for us. Once you arrive you’ll be met by Ewan – and he’ll insist on taking a card from you and that’s the formalities over. The rest is up to you, it’s all about networking and drinking. No presentations, no announcements, no speeches, no hassle. Just remember to bring your business cards.

The Venue
They say it “is a very trendy spot decorated in warm terra cotta tiles and soft copper lighting. The contrast of the Georgian architecture of the bar with a contemporary setting, brings a unique ambience to the Magic Glasses Bar.” We say it’s all about providing a welcoming and relaxing atmosphere that will allow you to chat, mingle and enjoy yourself.

Here are some photos:

The Drinks
I named the evening ‘Unlimited Drinks’ because, genuinely, We’d like to offer unlimited drinks to everyone. It’s posssssssible that could overload Ewan’s capacity to fund it. All things being equal though, you will not pay for beer, wine or soft drinks. Spirits, however, will be chargeable at the bar. Therefore, like many of our big mobile networks with their data plans, there is a fair use policy at Unlimited Drinks.

There will also be a little bit of finger food provided to help the drinks go down.

The other attendees
Expect to meet people with opinions! Expect to meet mobile entrepreneurs, industry executives, analysts, public relations supremeos and those who work in and around the mobile, wireless and web 2.0 industries.

Come on along!
By default, you’re invited. But please email Ewan so we can control the numbers. If you want to come please email right-away with your name (and other guest names and job titles). Mail Ewan, ewan@smstextnews.com with the subject ‘UNLIMITED DRINKS = YES’ and he will reply to confirm.

After the event
You must be sure to give Ewan your business card on the evening as, soon after the event, he will write up a one-liner on every attendee and link to their respective websites. This is one of the highest trafficked elements of the site so do remember this.

We hope to meet you on the night!

To be honest if you are going to Beijing for the Olympics then I’ve got very little sympathy for you. I’m sure you’ll have an amazing experience and a lack of 3G will hardly register.

On a non-technology note, I wonder if Dwain Chambers will need to buy a new Chinese handset. Dwain is the UK’s highest profile drugs ‘cheat’ and he is trying to get his lifetime ban from the Olympics overturned. You can read more about it here.

The deal with Boingo means that you can sign in and pay for usage without having to have a contract with Alltel. The rates are $19.99 for a month and $3.99 for one day’s usage. Or if you are an Alltel customer you can subscribe to the Internet Anywhere Bundle for $69.98 per month which gives you Mobile Internet and access to the Wi-Fi hotspots.

Angela Rittgers, director of product marketing at Alltel described the Internet Anywhere Bundle as “a common-sense approach to network connectivity.”

There are now 1.2 million venues in the database with 10% of those being added by users themselves. The top cities being New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and London in the UK and not surprisingly the most popular days for usage are Friday, followed by Saturday and then Thursday.

If you’re going out this weekend why don’t you give it a try and let us know how you get on.

So if you’re confused about your mobile strategy, unsure of whether to use VoIP or just feel like you might be able to get a better deal from your provider then you can use this report to guide you through the difficulties and pitfalls.

You can get the report by emailing guide@utilitywatch.co.uk or by calling 0800 652 5100.

The service will be launching in August and it will involve texting a unique PIN and ID to your local authority. For the 150 local authorities that work with DSI the text service will complement the existing ways to register which are calling a hotline number or filling in an on-line form.

After a numbers of years in the early nineties where the numbers on the electoral roll ‘mysteriously’ fell after the introduction on the Poll Tax, this now means that no-one has an excuse to not vote.

The exact details haven’t been announced and the company says that it will make more country-specific announcements in the “near future.”

Avid readers of SMS Text News will have been well-prepared for this news however, as when Ewan bumped into Leif Fagelstedt, Blyk Chief Operating Officer at the Blyk one-year party, he hinted at European expansion. This is what he told Ewan:

“We’ve got a very clear vision,” he shoots, “We’re the fastest growing youth media in the UK at the moment. By the end of the year, we want to be the biggest. Then we want to do it in Europe.”

So well done to Blyk, they’ve done as they promised. If they can take the advertisers over to these markets with them then they are onto a winner. I presume that’s what the choice of territories is partly based on: advertisers who are getting an average of a 29% response rate in the UK have looked at other markets and asked Blyk to get out there. Apparently all three countries have big advertising markets, so it looks like there is room for Blyk to be successful out there.

Blyk’s CEO and Co-founder, Pekka Ala-Pietilä said of the move:

“There is a great opportunity for Blyk in these markets. Our research shows that young people in Germany, Spain and Belgium are interested in the Blyk proposition because they want to interact with brands they like in exchange for free communication.”

If you’re between 16-24 and you live in Germany, Spain or Belgium then look out for more and let us know if you sign up and what your experiences are like.

Obviously Ricky will still be updating us with his BlykWatch articles on a regular basis about what Blyk is up to in the UK. In the announcement Blyk says that it still expanding in the UK and expects to have upto 200 brands on board by the end of the year.

“The management board are all white males. Our top 600 managers are predominantly white German males. We are too one-dimensional,” he said in an interview with the FT. Although 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from outside Germany, only 4 of 15 divisional heads are not German.

This highlights a wider issue in German companies according to the article, with not enough international managers and therefore not enough global culture being recognised. I can’t promise much ‘culture’, but if they want a non-German hand they know where I am …

You can read the full article here.

Anyone who upgrades from the 2G iPhone to the new 3G one can simply pass the old one to family or friends. It seems if the recipient is an O2 customer they can transfer onto the iPhone tarriff, or if not O2 will be offering iPhone Pay and Go SIMs.

If you don’t want to pass it on to anyone (or you’ve got no friends) then you can use O2′s handset recycling service.

It will be interesting to see how the Pay and Go SIMs work – will it still mean unlimited data or will they cap that? Maybe it will be along the lines of Vodafone’s £7.50 per month unlimited data, as long as you top up that much per month – away you go. Let’s see.

NatWest has announced its new student deals and they include a £50 voucher off 3′s Mobile Broadband. They also include £100 off an ASUS laptop.

Fear not though, they are still offering a student railcard.

The deal is obviously trying to attract the more tech-savvy students who consider these sorts of things a necessity for student life. For me the necessities were cheap cider and cubicles in the library where you could fall asleep while pretending to work. How times have changed.

When I was chatting to Ewan about this he said, “when I was a lad, all you got from the bank was a smile, 10 quid’s worth of book tokens and a young person’s railcard when you signed up as a student.” But then again, Ewan thinks that policemen are getting younger and he remembers when “all this was fields”.

If you are a student, you can find out more here.

It says that this will be the start of a new mobile phone service called UK01. According to Magnus Kelly, the CEO of Mapesbury, the agreement is, “an important milestone as it accelerates our ability to launch the UK’s 6th mobile phone network.”

Can this really be the 6th mobile operator? Does having the ability to send out a signal from ‘hundreds’ of phone boxes really mean we can start talking about a national operator?

If you sign up with UK01 they will send you a new SIM card, which once inserted into your phone, and once you are close to a UK01 location, allows you to make calls. There’s not a lot of information on the website, but the advantages of signing up with UK01, are described as:

“When you begin using the UK01 service not only will you be able to make fantastic savings on the calls you make, you will also receive your very own UK01 phone number.”

However, I did notice one very big disadvantage too – “When you leave the UK01 location simply change SIM cards.”

This means no roaming between networks as yet and, from what we can see, a very small network to use. Anyone else want to join me hanging around phone boxes to get cheaper calls?

T-Mobile USA is hoping to release a handset in the fourth quarter, while in Europe talk is of “Christmas time”. The world’s largest operator, China Mobile, is also taking about delaying until the fourth quarter or even next year. A Director of Google, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, said of dealing with the handset manufacturers and mobile operators, “This is where the pain happens.”

I suppose that it’s hearterning to learn that even Google can have problems with this and that the pain is not just confined to the mobile application developers that our own Mr Operator meets.

You can read more from The Times here.

The service, run by iPLATO, is being used to ask patients what there current smoking ‘status’ is. The idea is that those who have been identified as wanting to quit can be referred to the right channels to receive advice and support. The response rates for these text messages has been 46% so far.

To send out the texts the GP just links up iPLATO’s service with their own patient records to choose the right people to target and the numbers to send the messages to. Not only has this been used to target smokers, they can also send out informtaion about ‘flu, immunisations and obesity.

Location based services would be good to tie into this, imagine if your doctor could send you a text when you entered a cake shop, “Put the cake down, your cholesterol is already too high.” But at the moment it’s all about getting to people to give up smoking … I don’t know, they’ll be paying people next.

This all sounds pretty impressive given the stories we hear of bombs, terrorism and destruction every night on our news programmes. It just shows that underneath all that violence there is still a country and a population getting on with the job of living their lives the best they can.

Afghan Wireless Communications (which calls itself: “An Afghan Company, By Afghans, For Afghans”) has also been nominated for the GSMA’s Best Network Quality Initiative Award for 2008.

As an aside, if you want to get an insight into Afghan life over the last few decades (Soviet occupation, Mujahideen, Taliban) then you could do worse than read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner. Both are beautifully written stories about lives that are vastly different from the ones we enjoy in the West.

I’m just about to leave my current phone contract and I need some advice about what I should do next. I’ve currently got an E61 on Nokia and it’s being paid for by work, I’ll be paying for the new contract myself, so I need to make sure I get the best deal. That said, the best deal doesn’t mean the cheapest – it means the best.

What do I want? Well, I’m a big mobile email user, so a qwerty keyboard would help; a camera would be nice but not essential; I need reliability for my calls; a good data plan (maybe Orange if the rumour is true); I’m in the UK, but I’ll be making a few international calls so a good international plan would be good (but I could also use Maxroam or someone similar); and obviously I’ll be using nearly all of the cool apps that we discuss here.

So, what do you think?

Let me know and if you’ve got a hot tip you don’t want to share with everyone else you can email me on patrick@smstextnews.com.

By the way, if anyone’s got any ‘spare’ devices you’d be willing to let me try out I’d be more than happy to do that . I’m sure it might even get a write-up here.