Phil Goldstein of Fierce Wireless has posted a rather fair article about Verizon and AT&T’s text message costs.
Charging 20 cents per text message, out of bundle, is still ridiculous, whatever way you look at it. And the defence that ‘most people buy in bundles so it’s ok’ doesn’t quite work.
With less than a week remaining before the 2009 Global Messaging Congress, time is running out for you to register your attendance. Want a 15% discount? read on..
The event – to be held on on June 23rd and 24th at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London – features an operator-led speaker line-up including:
- Mike Short, Vice-President – Research and Development, O2 and President, Mobile Data Association
- John Eccleston, Head of Communication Services, 3 UK
- Hans Paulsen. CCO, Uganda Telecom, Uganda
- Burak Ertas, Head, Consumer Services Division, Turkcell, Turkey
- Alessio Derme, Senior Product Manager, Marketing Consumer, Telecom Italia Mobile, Italy
- Olivier Laury, Director of i-mode and Content, Bouygues Telecom, France
- Karl-Johan Nybell, Director, Product Management and New Markets, Tele2, Sweden
- Axel Diehl, Head of Community Messaging, T-Mobile International
With the focus on how to increase messaging ARPUs the operator case studies will provide critical facts and figures on successful revenue-generating strategies. Sound interesting? The full brochure is here: http://roaming.msgfocus.com/c/1bjPZGl74uhXlxzw
I’ll* be there on the Tuesday and bringing you coverage from the conference. If you’d like to join me, it’s not too late – and to make it even more worthwhile we’ve negotiated a last minute discount deal with the organisers. To register just visit www.globalmessagingcongress.com, email mubenah.khan@informa.com, or simply call +44 (0) 207 017 5506 remembering to quote CU1179/MIR for an exclusive 15% discount off the registration fee!
* That’s me, Alex – not Ewan. Just in case you get confused..
I’ve had an email in from a long time reader who’s on the hunt for a better aggregator to use in Canada. I’ve not identified him because he’s looking to take his Canadian SMS traffic requirements elsewhere.
Here’s his enquiry:
Two of our customers are in need of a short code in Canada. Our aggregator is killing us with high rates to connect there and messaging fees. All we need is an XML connection. Anyone local in Canada you know of?
There’s a few people I know — I’ll drop a note over to them. But if you’re reading this and you’ve got some good suggestions for Canadian aggregators (preferably tier 2/3 — who’ll work with smaller companies) that we should highlight, drop me a note?
Either reply here or email me.
The reader also asks:
Is your writer in Canada still? You know, the girl that is terribly stuck using Rogers and their incredible price plans?
Why yes indeed, Krystal is the writer you’re referring to. I have yet to enquire as to whether she’s considering upgrading to one of the Rogers Android handsets. We normally try and keep Krystal locked up away from the wider mobile industry news. Reading about all the new toys and ridiculously cheap unlimited data plans in Europe and the United States was proving just too much for the poor girl…
Update: The first suggestion I got via JCDunn on Twitter: http://www.vortexmobile.ca/
Update 2: Here’s some more recommendations I received by email from reader JK. “Magnet, Atlas, or Vocomo. Sybase 365, Mythum and Impact Mobile will be the more expensive.”
Are you a quick texter?
I am, if it’s a Blackberry QWERTY keyboard. But on any other device, I’m just a bit better than an 86 year old grandmother who’s never ever touched a mobile phone before.
So I didn’t enter the LG texting championships.
The prize is a whopping $50k for the winner. LG have been sponsoring this for three years now and if you’re wondering what’s involved in today’s final, here are the details:
During the competition, players will compete in various challenges while typing in phrases on their LG handsets exactly as they appear on nearby LG plasma screens with no typos or abbreviations, trying to be quicker than their opponents. The competition starts off with 22 contestants who will go through a “Text Attack” round, resulting in 6 contestants that will endure the various challenges to try survive each ensuing round of texting play. The three top contestants will compete in a final qualifying round, resulting in two contestants who will fight to be crowned the LG U.S. National Texting Champion in the traditional style of the competition, a speed tournament.
Riiight.
The 2007 winner, 13-year-old Morgan Pozgar, won by typing this sentence:
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocios! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious,”
That would kill your fingers on a T9 device.
And last year’s winner, 20-year-old Nathan Schwartz, took home the title after knocking this one out in the quickest time:
“Does everybody here know the alphabet? Let’s text. Here it goes… AbcDeFghiJKlmNoPQrStuvWXy & Z! Now I know my A-B-C’s, next time won’t you text with me?”
All the details are at http://www.lgtexter.com/…
PS, LG — it ain’t cool to keep producing really swish handsets with bollocks proprietary bollocks operating systems that offer zero augmentation or enhancement whatsoever.
Mobile messaging service provider, WIN, has woken up and smelt the coffee.
Have a read of this press release I just received:
Charities could be set to benefit from a campaign to erase commission charges on mobile text message donations. Currently, any mobile user who donates to charity via text message can see up to 30 per cent of their donation lost in network and third party delivery charges.
WIN plc, a leading provider of interactive mobile entertainment and information services, is looking to lead the campaign by announcing today that it will take no commission from any charity shortcode transaction that it handles via its distribution platform.
Graham Rivers, CEO of WIN plc, said: “Charities need to get the full amount without the middlemen – and we are one of them – taking a cut. WIN would like industry players, aggregators, and mobile operators to join us and help this become a reality.
“The UK Government has been known to waive the VAT on text donations to charity. A concerted move by all players to ensure charities get the full gift will also create more confidence in consumers and hopefully lead to a greater number of donations being made via text message. We need to create a win-win situation for the public and the charities.”
If you’re a charity, this is brilliant news.
If you’re a mobile messaging provider, should you be matching this move?
What, though, happens with the percentage of revenue eaten up by the mobile operator? I’m not clear if the operator is going to waive their portion — that’s the largest part of the 30% that’s lost.
I think it’s a good move for the charity sector.
But I think it’s rather late.
It’s ridiculously late, actually.
Now and again, outcry from the national press in the UK has caused the mobile operators (and sometimes the messaging providers) to waive their revenue shares in special cases — for example, the Tsunami appeal.
But right now if you’re a ‘bog standard charity’ (and, it’s a shame to use that description) but, frankly, if you’re not sexy and you’re not hot, then at least 30% of any text donations are gobbled up.
For no good reason.
It certainly doesn’t ‘cost’ 30% to manage and process.
Donating to charity by text could have been a real, real go-er. But it’s yet another total unmitigated fluck-up by the just-don’t-get-it or just-don’t-care industry.
Perhaps Win’s move might change this.
In the meantime, when is someone going to create a Charity application for the iPhone that uses micropayments to enable folk to donate to the charity of their choice by just flipping up the app on their device and hitting ‘donate’?
I got the PhonePayPlus (the British Premium Rate regulator) newsletter in this morning.
More dire reading.
Another 141,000 pounds worth of fines.
Here is just one sample of the ‘breaches upheld’ (or the areas of issue) for one company:
Adequate Technical Quality, Fairness (Misleading), Inappropriate Promotion, Subscription Reminders
Is this still where everyone’s making real cash? Misleading and unfair trickery?
The morning-after emergency contraceptive pill is to be made available to schoolgirls at six schools in Oxfordshire here in the UK. And the medium of request is text messaging.
If you’ve been having a bit of jiggery-pokery and you think the contraception might have failed; or if you didn’t bother and you’re in a blind panic, you can now text the nurse and ask for one.
Whatever your perspective on teenagers, sex and the easy availability of contraception, this is super news in the context of the SMS medium — it’s absolutely perfect for this type of communication.
You can read more here.
I got a reminder yesterday from my dental practice.
By text message.
Here’s how it read:
Ewan, this is just a reminder that you have an appointment tomorrow at 10am. [insert name of practice]
Good service, no?
Aye.
I was very impressed. They’d obviously taken my phone number and decided to follow up with a text. We’re all sold on the concept of text reminders, I hope.
We’re all, I hope, feeling a bit of private satisfaction on behalf of the mobile industry as a result. Isn’t it good to see the local dentist adopting the medium? It’s finally MAINSTREAM!
Well, no.
Here’s the problem.
The surgery’s secretary types each message out by hand. On a rubbish 5 year old Pay-As-You-Go handset that must have belonged to the dentist originally.
This is their business critical infrastructure.
I’ve seen the poor lady typing out the messages. Every single one is custom typed! The phone numbers are stored in a paper-based diary.
Goodness me.
The moment I discovered this I felt a huge stab of mental pain.
What’s the problem here? Why haven’t they got some-kind-of-system to do this for them?
Well, for one thing, they’re still stuck on a paper-based calendar for the booking and management of appointments. So there’s no easy way to automate.
And there’s no desktop on their desktop. No web browser to use the array of desktop text alert services that I could list out. There’s quite a lot of barriers. You need a desktop machine, you need the practice to be computerised, you need a plugin text service, you need the secretaries to be trained…
How depressing.
Still, it’s good to see the medium getting a bit of use.
One final point. A lot of these text systems that you see nowadays — for example if you’re getting your haircut, some of those systems have automated text messages — a lot of them have no reply function. They’re simply broadcast messages with no return-ID set. So you can’t reply at all.
I do actually quite like the fact that this poor secretary has had to hand-type the message to me… because if I need to change my appointment, I know I can reply and that she will see it.
Now and again if I’ve had time, I’ve actually written back and said thank you whenever I’ve had a reminder.
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