I couldn’t resist asking Andrew Bud, top chap at international mobile services company, mBlox, ‘What was your first handset?’
His answer was one of the most interesting we’ve ever had on Mobile Industry Review…
This is just a small vid — 1 minute 23 seconds. Have a watch — here it is:
At Mobile World Congress, we made a b-line for the mBlox stand to find out more about their Sender-Pays Data offering. It’s highly, highly innovative, still a trial — and only for the UK networks at the moment (with the exception of T-Mobile UK!). Andrew explains the concept in the video, but briefly, here’s the issue:
If you’re a content provider selling, say, a video or a music track via mobile at a cost of £3 — that’s not usually the final cost paid by the user. Data isn’t typically included. So you might end up having to pay £3 to the content provider — and then something stupid like £10 or more — to download the actual content.
Ridiculous and hugely, hugely problematic when you’re trying to encourage the market and prevent user bill shock. Well, mBlox have worked out a model whereby you, as a content provider, can pay for the data downloads of your customers (at, one imagines, a decently advantageous rate) so that the price you advertise your content for is the price the user pays. Rather smart.
Anyway. Over to Andrew to explain.
Find our more about Sender Pays here.
We caught up with Andrew Bud, Executive Chairman of mobile services provider, mBlox. We talked with Andrew for a good 25 minutes at the mBlox stand at Mobile World Congress. In this video, Andrew gives an overview of the mBlox service — very useful if you’ve seen them around but always wondered what they do.
Standby for more from mBlox shortly.
Seen a crime and want to report it anonymously? If you’re in the US or Canada, you can now dob people in using SMS, thanks to a new application from mBlox and Anderson Software called TipSoft.
It’s already being used by community action group Crime Stoppers and is already up and running in 16 Canadian cities. Another 32 cities in the US will be deploying the system soon, and after that, the application could be on its way to the UK.
Rather handily, the anonymity is two-way: the tips go from users’ phones and are delivered anonymously and the police can reply back without having access to the phone number of the user who sent in the tip. I wonder how it sits with privacy legislation: if cops really needed to get hold of the tipster, is there any privacy legislation that would block them?
