It’s the first new year’s eve since the launch of iMessage. Will Apple’s servers hold up? Can they teach the MNOs a thing or two about scaling? History suggests not but I guess we’ll find out!

Jay responded:

That would be a no! It’s midnight here in Hong Kong, and trying to send *any text* with iMessage enabled results in “Message send failure” – turning off iMessage, and the mobile operator handles it just fine.

So I guess even just the lookup of “is this an iMessage person” was failing… ouch!

My son was due out of bed at about 530am (teething at the moment) so I didn’t bother doing the whole New Year thing. I was in bed by 10pm I think. Life as a father with a toddler, eh? So I didn’t get to see if iMessage performed nicely during the midnight rush. How did you find things? It raises interesting questions about Apple’s ability to truly scale to significant volume. One imagines that Hong Kong wasn’t doing THAT many iMessages, surely?

This time the universitys 30,000 students promptly received email and text message alerts warning them about the gunman. The university website and Twitter account swiftly alerted the outside world to developments onsite.

via Virginia Tech shooting leaves two dead – Telegraph.

I hope by now that most large institutions such as Universities have implemented some kind of emergency SMS update system to contact students in such circumstances.

I do however know a lot of people in the SMS marketplace who are rather concerned by the assumption by many (especially those in Silicon Valley) that SMS is all but dead. The received wisdom is that iMessage is the way ahead. This wisdom does have a way of spawning a self-fulfilling cycle — witness, for example, the Silicon Valley viewpoint a few years back that Nokia was dead. The Valley collectively helped make this true, by — in some cases — actually refusing to develop for the Nokia platform.

There’s quite a few problems with the ‘SMS is dead’ viewpoint, not least the fact that everyone you communicate with MUST have an iPhone in order for iMessage to be vaguely useful. There are legions of Android users in the Valley so I wonder just how well the viewpoint will stay alive across the next few months.

SMS still has a part to play in the marketing mix and, fundamentally, if you need to contact someone with a message (and you don’t know/care what device they’ve got), text messaging is the way ahead.

I wonder how much damage iMessage will do to the mobile operator business model? In the short term, not much, I don’t think. I’ll need to look closely at how the medium works. If, for example, you try to message someone on another iPhone, will Apple automatically route that message via their network rather than SMS? That would certainly be stimulating. Or do you need to actually decide to use the medium? This is a little unclear to me as I haven’t looked at it in-depth.

The challenge with SMS from an operator standpoint is that it will become increasingly difficult to justify the ’10p’ (or, in some cases, 12p+VAT) per message charge. I’m excited to see how consumers react: Will they, for example, decide to buy smaller text bundles in future.

What’s your view?

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A tale of how not to handle a corporate customer…

I travel. A lot. Three times to Asia in the last 3 months, and Europe too. The quintessential harried business-class passenger eager to get the hell off the plane, through border control with smile intact / genitals unsearched, and back onto email/spreadsheet/Keynote in the back of the airport car. Get stuff knocked out before the kids rugby-tackle you in the hall as the wife hands you the baby covered in beetroot soup and heads for the bubbly, locking the kitchen door behind her. If I had a penny for every time I’ve wanted to kill the person managing the shambles that is UK Border Control – in fact, just about every ‘service’ at LHR – I’d have about £1.35.

I consider a discreet, professional service to be a business tool. Not a luxury. I could care less about vehicle brand. Your bum gets from A-B just as well on cloth as it does leather, in a Vauxhall as well as an E-class. But the *service* must be immaculate. Don’t think I’m a Gordon Gecko shouty suited asshole. I consider myself polite and well-mannered. But I don’t suffer fools, or crap service – especially when paying a premium for it.

For the last year I’ve used a ‘corporate’ car firm to do my airport runs. I’ve been very happy with the service. Until the last two trips.

First, I found myself in the car at 5am with an Android phone that had decided not to charge overnight and was at 9%, with a whole day’s Euro-faffing ahead. I had USB leads but no 12V cigarette plug, and the driver only had Nokia chargers. So I ended up booting up the laptop and wasting precious battery life to charge the phone at 500mA, instead of in-car at >1000mA. spent the rest of the day playing catch-up with the 5V gods.

So I asked the firm to provide in-car micro-USB and iOS device chargers, or as a bare minimum USB sockets via dirt-cheap 12V adapters. Surely we consider USB in-car to be a basic human right, along with aircon and satnav?

Secondly, on arrival into T3 at 7pm on a Friday night, along with the rest of the UK PLC’s Euro day-travellers and a few 744′s of Americans in khaki slacks to boot, the arrivals hall was *utter bedlam*. There were literally hundreds of grey-suited chauffeurs holding white placards with black writing on them. It took 15 minutes of degrading, demeaning trawling up and down the lines of suits, squinting expectantly, hopefully, looking at each poorly-written name until finding the right one.

So could the firm please SMS me on arrival, saying where they were standing. Which would a) help me find them and b) give me their number in case I couldn’t.

Two easy, do-able requests for a ‘corporate’ service, you’d think.

But no.

On the charger issue the reply came back that the company didn’t want to take responsibility for possibly damaging customer phones. After a long correspondence I managed to convince them that providing a USB port was both cheap and risk-free, and suggested they could add a small disclaimer sticker next to it if they really felt at risk. Yeesh.

Where things really came unstuck was the subsequent request to be sent an SMS on arrival, letting me know where the hell in the arrivals hall they were standing. “Bob your driver here, next to Costa” would do very nicely.

Their reply, and I quote: “Quite frankly there are probably many things we could do to enhance our service but everything costs in this world and the extra cost would have to be passed onto the passenger which is something our clientele would not be happy about, we deal with most of the major companies and they feel our service is second to none”

I should have got the hint, I really should. But I’m a sucker for trying to help people help themselves. So I replied: “Please advise how much extra you will charge me for a different colour sign and a single text message. I believe it will be about £1 for the A4 sign as a one off charge and 20p for the SMS at the most expensive network rate. I would very much appreciate that service, even if no other customers might.”

Was that clear? Reasonable? Was it hell. The final word from the ‘corporate’ firm:

“I have no intention of asking drivers to use their personal mobiles for company business as this is an unacceptable request in my estimation. The office phone is diverted to someone on call out of hours so that any emergency, change or problem can be dealt with. The procedures we use are widely accepted and have never come into question before so I see no reason to change them. In an ideal world we would all get the service we wanted unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world, therefore we all have to accept what the majority are happy with”

Got the message? Mr Big-Shot £2,000-worth-of-taxis-a-year? Like we need your business. Other people like mediocre, so that’s all we’re gonna serve. They like it. You should too.

So literally 24 seconds later Google gave me http://www.acornexecutivetravel.co.uk – The owner Ian answered the phone immediately. Why yes, of course we send SMS to our customers advising where we are located inside arrivals. Of course we have iOS, Blackberry, Nokia, and micro USB chargers in-car. Certainly you can avail yourself of the two 240V AC power points in the car to charge your laptop. Feel free to read the complimentary newspaper of your choice, just let us know your preference. Sip on the complimentary chilled bottled water. We won’t charge you for the airport parking or waiting time if delayed, and you can of course pile all your travel onto an account with 28 days to pay – handy for defeating the the accounting trolls come expense claim time.

Sold. SOLD. S-O-L-D. Two future hires cancelled with the ‘corporate’ firm, two new bookings with Acorn. E280 Avantgarde saloon. And – get this – cheaper than the other outfit.

All for the sake of not wanting to send an SMS, the ‘corporate’ firm lost £2k of business. And I look very much forward to reading the Guardian, sipping on my chilled water, while my mobile and laptop charge away.

SMS Sorted.

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Thank you for this, Mr Anonymous. Highly illustrative of the way to behave when faced with stupid, lazy British businesses. Love it!

UPDATE: Here’s a response from the author to the comments below:

I understand the desire for blood.

However, in writing this piece I was not setting out to exact revenge on the incumbent firm. The drivers are all good people, and don’t deserve to loose income just because some head office jobsworth has not the wit or ability to see beyond the status quo. Maybe they are so flush with cash and overbooked that they can afford to loose my £2k / year. Maybe.

To clarify, I am free to choose whoever I wish for this sort of service, there’s no procurement tie-in. So it was very easy to take my business elsewhere. Had this been a mandated vendor, I’d have been playing merry hell with our CFO to get either their policy or our preference changed.

What I wanted to highlight was how easy it is for firms to do the right thing and win business – or the wrong thing and loose it. Acorn Executive Travel were just the first firm I discovered with a more evolved idea of ‘service’ and what modern business travellers value. I like to see companies like that win. Would love to hear via comments if anyone else makes a change to Acorn (or anyone else) based on the above. I’d like to think that such service becomes the UK norm, not the exception. Travel in places like Southeast Asia is mostly a joy because good service is such a priority. The UK still seems to have a world-beating grip on mediocre-to-rubbish. But it’s not all gloom – just like how the general availability of good coffee in the UK has improved out of sight the last 5 years, I have hope for service from Brit PLC.

Have you been bombarded with unwanted SMS? Has it forced you to complain to your operator — or even change your phone number? Did it end up costing you a lot of money?

They’re looking for someone to participate in an interview in London this coming Tuesday. If that’s you, drop me an email and I’ll connect you to the researcher!

I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.

The series has been terrifically well received — thank you once more to all the executives from around the industry who’ve complemented us. And hello to the chaps from o2 Innovation who, almost every week, point out that they’re working on something very similar. I do hope this is the case — o2 is historically well regarded for innovation. Do you remember Genie Mobile? Utterly fantastic. In recent years, the company’s BlueVia development team has been leading the charge for developer access to operator APIs. So I’m expecting good things from the o2 Innovation team.

Before we get started, I need to deliver a tip-of-the-hat to the team at Orange who pulled the Film To Go service out of the bag this week. Very good indeed. (Find out why I think it’s rather smart.)

Right, let’s get started.

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Last week I wrote about wanting one number for all my calls both incoming and outgoing. Right now I have five smartphones on my desk, all ‘live’ and active. Managing their various identities is quite a challenge.

When it comes to SMS, though, it’s even more of a minefield.

I can redirect my calls to one voicemail system, or one follow-me number. There are plenty of shit-but-good possibilities with voice.

But SMS?

It’s a total fracking nightmare.

SMS is still the king — and I do mean king. Even in today’s app economy, SMS still has a priority. It’s still the medium that we all fall-back to, isn’t it? You can arse around with Facebook Chat, Google+ Huddles and even email, but when it comes to needing to get a message to someone, beyond making a voice call, you have to use SMS.

This is because SMS breaks through.

It interrupts.

It’s real-time.

We all have confidence in it’s delivery (despite the fact the operators still cannot assure delivery to anywhere near a decent service level).

It’s built directly into the operating system of every single device.

It works the same on every phone. There is ALWAYS an inbox. There is always some kind of alerting function built in.

It’s international. There is universal compatibility whether you’re in Timbuktu, the Maldives or London.

As Apple are fond of saying, it just works.

And the 160 character limit is not a problem. Again, most devices support multiple-message length transmissions.

(BBM, because of it’s lack of cross platform support, simply doesn’t cut it unless you KNOW the other person has a BlackBerry).

So what’s the problem?

Well, first of all, if you have two or more devices, managing your SMS messages is a flipping-fracking-flucking nightmare. It’s simply impossible. I have come across one or two ‘forwarding’ apps that you can install — they’ll then forward any messages received to you. But this completely screws the return path functionality. You can GET the message, but you can’t easily reply to it. And even if I have forwarded all SMS from my BlackBerry to my iPhone, when I reply, I’m going to get tons of ‘Who is this?’ messages in return, because of the different phone number.

Rubbish.

It’s not just about the users with multiple devices though.

Even if you just have one phone, the ability to be able to archive, review, reply and create text messages from your desktop, iPad, iPod Touch, laptop or browser, would be really, really smart. Sometimes I just don’t want to write stuff on my actual phone.

Archive my SMS in Google?
Why can’t you copy every SMS that I receive into Google and attach an ‘SMS’ tag to it? This is precisely what Hullomail does. They send you a copy of every voicemail you’ve ever received. Your voicemail is actually stored IN your Gmail. It’s fantastically useful. It certainly doesn’t have to be Google, but I’d go so far as to suggest that if you’re a multi-geography operator, it’s highly likely that Google would do the development for you as long as you assign them one bod to help with the integration. Likewise I suspect Yahoo would be delighted to offer true SMS integration into their email client as a bonus.

07769658104@vodafone.net
And whatever happened to the ability to send a text via an email? I know some operators still offer this. But why was this facility switched off for so many? I loved this. It was a quick way of getting 160 characters to someone’s phone via the medium of email. Some bright spark decided that it might cannibalise revenues, eh? Idiots. Utter idiots. Don’t worry. They’ve probably either left the company or been promoted to CEO. So it’s worth a look again. I do know that lots of operators have moved to offering the facility via MMS. But.. eww, it’s just so badly implemented.

Real-time device SMS Synchronisation, anyone?
Indeed, if you’ve got a moment and a few million quid of development money, I’d like my SMS messages to be synched across all my devices. Why isn’t this possible? Why hasn’t it been done? Come on!

SMS from the desktop
I want to be able to SMS from my desktop. One bright spark has actually made this work for you if you’re an o2 customer. You can text from your phone’s number using Text Deck Pro on the Mac. But you can’t receive. There’s no inbox. I want to be able to browse all my SMS messages. I want to see what I’ve sent and received since the start of my relationship with the operator. Don’t even consider telling me that this is ‘logistically difficult’, Mr Operator. Just stick them all in Google if your 1TB SATA hard disk solution isn’t good enough.

SMS: The ticket to relevance for operators
Just like the phone number I depend on for my voice calls, SMS is also your ticket to continued relevance. Lose this at your peril.

And you know what, that’s precisely what every single over-the-top player is trying to do. They’re all iterating fast to try and remove our reliance upon SMS. You just need to look at what Apple’s doing with iMessage and Google’s G+ Huddles. Once you make the username (Facebook, iCloud/Apple, Gmail) the unique identifier — properly — the operator is literally moved to a place of irrelevance. Just the bandwidth, thank you very much.

I’d very much like to see operators working on methods to solidify the position of SMS by extending the technology all over the place. First of all, I need to be able to see the back archive. Second, I need to be able to access and write messages from some browser/app. Wouldn’t it be neat to see the Vodafone logo on my Apple desktop? Third, you need to let me do smart things like sync and archive into Google. And I expect to be billed for the privilege. Maybe it’s a quid a month. Maybe it’s a ‘come on’ to get me to swap to a higher range of price plans. Can you imagine going out to market and asking people if they’d like to archive all their SMS messages for £0.50 a month? Folk would love it.

The SMS Mobile Application
I’d LOVE to be able to download the Vodafone SMS application on to my Three iPhone. I’d just have to verify my account and boom, I would be able to get ALL the SMS I normally receive on my BlackBerry via my iPhone too. And I’d be able to write messages from the iPhone via the app that get sent out using my primary Vodafone number, not my iPhone number. This would rock. Voda could send me a push notification of SMS to my iPhone. The integration on an Android phone would be even better.

Ah dear.

Back to reality, eh? The fact that I’m actually getting excited over something so mundane, so easy, so SIMPLE to implement, geez it’s depressing.

Thus ends the fifth Operator Innovation post.

[Note: o2's Bluebook is due a mention. Just a brief mention. You sort-of got this working, folks. Sort-of. But to my utter annoyance, you really didn't go anywhere near as far enough. Come on. What about a proper refresh, eh?]

- – - – -

Check out the other posts in the Operator Innovation series:

- One number for all my voice calls
- Fancy a MacBook Air, iPhone, iPad for £100/month?
- Why can’t my operator talk to my bank when my card declines abroad
- Taxis, baby, Taxis!

A number of complainants reported to having received unsolicited chargeable text messages after downloading an Android application on their handset to extend the life of their phone battery. Users were signed up to a subscription service after downloading the application and the complainants reported to having had difficult in cancelling the service. The Tribunal found that users were misled into entering the subscription service, pricing information and contact information was not given and users were unable to leave the service by sending the ‘STOP’ command. The Tribunal also found that the promotion did not make it clear that the service was a subscription service, nor state the terms and conditions or advertise the ‘STOP’ command.mBlox Limited was given a formal reprimand, ordered to refund all affected consumers and fined £135,000

Posted via email from MIR Live

The title of this post — 10% of British teenagers think it’s ok to text whilst having sex — was just one small research statistic that Tomi threw out to the audience. That really got a lot of people thinking.

Knowing that most of the people in the audience were content producers from Hollywood and around the globe, Tomi’s message was clear: Look to the revenue streams that you can access right now, today — SMS and MMS. It’s easy to ignore these mediums. It really is, especially in the context of the App explosion.

However Tomi pointed out that last year, entertainment companies grossed half a billion dollars from SMS text voting revenues in America alone. He also gave an interesting MMS-usage example, citing one newspaper in China that’s converted 39% of it’s readers to a daily MMS news service that’s generating pots of money.

In true shakey-cam glory, I managed to get 8 minutes of Tomi’s presentation on the iPhone — have a watch and see how the audience reacts to his points: