Here’s a bit of Matt’s story:

If you reside in the UK and you are one of the millions of subscribers to mobile operator O2, you may be alarmed to learn that the carrier is sending your mobile number to every website you visit on your mobile phone.

The issue was brought to our attention by Lewis Peckover, who created a simple webpage to check the information that a mobile browser would send to a website when it requested data.

The story is still developing, however it’s clear that o2 has been passing your phone number to every website you visit. It’s passed in the headers — which most sites will ignore. Indeed, if your server isn’t looking for the field, then it’ll simply ignore it.

This is clearly a mistake and certainly not normal practice. If anything, I suspect it’s a misconfiguration or a standard configuration on a particular server, gateway or system at o2.

o2 will be horrified.

It’s going to be fascinating to see how they handle this. People are still hugely attached to their perceived privacy and the knowledge that every website you’ve visited via your phone could have retrieved your phone number will be massively discomforting.

The real problem is if the mainstream media pick it up. It looks like a bit of a slow news day — and it’s a terribly sexy issue, this, especially in the context of phone hacking. The headlines boiled down will make highly frustrating reading. I wouldn’t be surprised to see headlines like, “o2 exposes your phone number to every website” or “o2 gives your phone number to spammers” appearing shortly in the mainstream press.

o2 need to respond very, very quickly. I think they’ve got until midday to deliver a formal response. It’s 11am now. After midday the story could potentially gravitate from a Twitter firestorm into mainstream consciousness.

Can you imagine the implications of an adult website claiming that [insert famous person here] has visited their site 100 times in the last 2 days — and they’ve got the logs to prove it? Ooof!

What should o2 do?

Well I think that depends on how the media treat the issue. If it’s picked up by the Daily Mail anywhere near their front page, then they’ll need a mega response. Definitely.

Normal mobile users on o2 reading the story will go nuts. Folk will want to do something in response to the perceived privacy invasion, even if it didn’t actually affect them. The first instinct will be to cancel the line and churn to another network. The next instinct will be some kind of recompense — a free credit, some extra text messages or something like that. Quite possibly legions of users will demand that their phone numbers be changed.

Goodness me. It’s a bit of a mess.

There’s not much o2 can do, I don’t think, that would appease me as a normal user. I’d probably react very, very negatively to a £5 credit offer (“Is that what my privacy is worth?”).

The underlying issue here is the break down of trust that many o2 consumers will feel when they read the news. I think o2 should act decisively, positively — and if anything, they should over-react. Do everything. Offer everything. And put the CEO or a C-Level executive on camera right-away to speak to the media.

Of course we’re going to want to know how long this flaw has been live on the o2 systems; how many users have been potentially compromised and so on. That could take days to determine. So an immediate response is required now and then hourly updates should be issued throughout today and, say, tomorrow, until all the information is in o2′s hands.

We shall see.

If anyone can handle this kind of challenge, it’s o2. The team there are seriously capable. If anything, I think they could possibly use this as an opportunity to engage brilliantly with their customers and boost loyalty even more.

Bring it on, o2!

Update: Matt is back with a related post – How O2 could unwittingly help spammers conduct a nasty phishing campaign that’s worth a read.

Update 2: o2 has posted a public announcement on the matter (thanks Adrian)

Kudos to o2 Enterprise. The team specialises in helping enterprise organisations embrace flexible working. Instead of simply knocking out a few whitepapers, the company has taken a different path. It’s embraced the flexible working ethos itself! Here’s a quote from their story [PDF]:

We’ve been on a journey. We’ve saved millions. We use hundreds fewer desks. We’ve changed our culture and the way our people collaborate. And it’s all through flexible working. Or as we call it, Joined Up People.

In the highly personal case study, the company outlines just how effective the Joined Up People programme has been. Here are their three key highlights:

• We’ve saved over £3 million by cutting 550 desks (it costs £7,000 a year to run a desk)
• 100% of our flexible workers reported a better work/life balance
• The annual savings for a team of eight through virtual monthly meetings is £30,400

It’s rather refreshing to see a big tech company actually do this kind of thing rather than just talk about it. It most certainly makes the conversation with other enterprises highly authentic, given that o2′s done it all itself.

It doesn’t just stop there though.

They’ve actually put each of their heads of department ON VIDEO talking about the benefits of the Joined Up People approach. Take for instance the company’s Human Resources head honcho, Nicky Brimmer: She’s positively glowing on camera, discussing how the programme has seriously benefitted o2 employees.

This kind of direct, personal approach is really refreshing to see.

I do throughly recommend having a browse through the Joined Up People website — but most importantly, definitely have a browse of this PDF case study. It’s nicely written, not too heavy and it should get thinking good things about o2.

I think the Telefonica Digital team are winning when it comes to office locations. You’ve got most of Vodafone and Everything Everywhere camped out at Paddington whilst — as far as I know — 3 still dominates the Maidenhead skyline.

Yeah: Telefonica guys, you’ve won out. Being based at the bottom of Regent Street right next to Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Oxford Street and — of course, Mayfair’s finest restaurants — that will be rather useful. Plus the shopping is pretty good nearby.

400 Telefonica Digital employees are due to move into the 4th and 5th floors of The Crown Estate’s AirW1 scheme. You can find out more at the swanky AirW1 website.

I dare say that quite a few folk thinking about joining Telefonica Digital will be persuaded to do so thanks to this new office location — I would!

At Vodafone’s Paddington place, there’s — what — a Pret, a Soup place and a few bars?

What’s your view? Will you now shortly be joining Telefonica Digital?

They’ve created an international calling card application that you can download for your app. It’s a really nice idea — and something that I think most o2 customers who call abroad now-and-again should have on their phone.

If you’re a regular caller abroad then obviously, you should buy a special price plan or add-on to help mitigate the costs. However I think most users won’t call abroad enough to warrant an extra £5 or £10 a month on top of their standard price plan.

And when you want to phone the States, that’s when things get tricky as you’re likely going to have to pay lots of cash for the privilege.

Going to the local store to pick up a calling card is an option. But it’s a hassle.

An infinitely better experience is to download the all new o2 International Calling Card app. It’s a genius concept and a beautiful implementation.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1 – Download the app for free
Step 2 – Buy your calling card through the app, using your iTunes account
Step 3 – “scratch” off the panel to reveal your pin
Step 4 – click on make a call and either dial the number or select from your contact list.

That’s right, you scratch off the panel to reveal your PIN! Heh! A very cool addition, that.

I am particularly impressed that you can bill the cost of the card to your iTunes account. Seamless.

I’m going to give this one a go.

The app is free from iTunes and available now.

Let’s have some screenshots then…

The app frontpage:

Buying calling credit with your iTunes account:

Unwrapping and scratch off your PIN! Note — I particularly like the way you can send the card by email/text. Very useful.

To make a call from the app with your credit, just dial the international number and press call…

And once you press ‘call’, the app sticks on the access number for you and places the call.

Nice work o2!

It was THAT bad.

And it was unthinkable because of the battery overhead. It was absolutely ridiculous — it still is. Try using GPS for any length of time on your handset and watch the battery drain in near-real time.

It was worse, of course, with the first generation handsets featuring GPS. It was functionally rubbish too. I remember being able to get a GPS fix on my N95 by leaving it on a wall for more than 10 minutes.

It’s still bad today. But one of the major reasons we have GPS chips in our phones is because the mobile operator couldn’t get it’s act together.

I use the phrase ‘mobile operator’ in a global sense. Way back in… oh, I dunno, say 2005 (from my rough memory), one of the leading aggregators of the day called me up to explain that ‘location’ was now possible.

“Just like SMS,” the guy said, “You just give us the phone number and we connect to the operator’s systems and boom, you’ll get the lat/lon coordinates back. Or a post code if you like.”

It sounded fantastic.

“Yeah, the networks just do a triangulation on the cell towers,” he explained, “It’s pretty smart.”

“When can I use it?” I asked, wondering if we could somehow integrate the technology into our nightclub text-to-screen systems. It would have been flipping genius.

“Well, they’re being strict about look-ups,” the chap continued, “So you’ll need to get explicit authorisation first from any users.”

That’s doable, I thought.

“Oh, and it’s 12 pence per lookup.”

You what?

He wasn’t kidding. There was some model that if we paid a stupidly expensive fixed sum, we could have ‘unlimited’ look-ups. But the dicks at the operator — and I do mean TOTAL NUMBSKULLS — decided that since SMS messages were flying off the shelves at 12p-a-pop, they might as well use precisely the same billing mechanism for the developers looking to access the facility.

I spoke to lots of companies who’d have used look-ups. I’d have used them day-in-day-out at our nightclub text service. It would have been invaluable. Geez, the applications, the possibilities.

But the revenue model wouldn’t work.

So we — that is, the market — went OTT. Over-the-top. Apple cracked it with their mix of “A-GPS” and Skyhook Wireless integration that made the whole thing work like magic.

And nobody used the mobile operator’s location look-up technology.

So it is with no small amount of delight that I report to you today that BlueVia, Telefonica’s developer arm, has now launched an all new location API to the existing wealth of capabilities. First — and most important — it’s entirely free. Second, it allows you to query a customer’s longitude, latitude, altitude, location accuracy and timestamp.

What are the implications of this? Well, it means that any application you’re currently considering for deployment on BlueVia can now make use of location (in the United Kingdom — I’m sure BlueVia will be aiming to extend this feature out to the other 6 supported countries soon).

However, I’d like developers to consider going one-step further. For example, if your application requires the use of GPS just to establish a ‘general’ location (e.g. High Street, Marlow), you can now opt to check if the user is an o2 customer using the BlueVia API. Just one API call. And if they are, store that information so that whenever you need to access their location, AVOID killing their battery and place a network lookup API call instead. Just for o2 customers. They’ll love you for it.

Now. There’s another application I’m thinking of — right away — that I want to see.

I use Google Latitude. I quite enjoy it. Sometimes it’s rather useful. But, unfortunately, there’s a stupid battery overhead. Thousands of well meaning mobile phone luvvies will claim it’s minimal. It’s not. It’s at least 5-8% I reckon. Of the day’s use. I can’t use it on my BlackBerry — I literally have to exit Google Maps manually every time I’m not using it so that my BlackBerry doesn’t leak battery through Google Maps.

On the iPhone, the battery impact is less pronounced but it’s STILL there. Maybe 5%. And 5%, when the handset can’t blow it’s nose without dropping 10% battery, is very important to me.

But I like Latitude. I like my friends and contacts knowing where I am.

So here’s my idea for the BlueVia API: A system that pings my location via the BlueVia API once per hour and feeds this information into Google Apps. Or even every 30 minutes. Who cares? It’s free! It’s a resource sitting there. o2 *ALREADY* knows where my phone is. There is NO battery impact. At all.

FINALLY!

There are tons of possible uses for BlueVia’s new location API. It’s a shame it’s only available for o2 UK at the moment, but that’s still tens of millions of accessible users. And of course, it doesn’t matter what phone they use.

And just how easy is it to integrate into your code?

Watch this.

Or, read this, rather:

(You’ve already added the BlueVia library into your PHP/whatever script, right)

Done.

LOVE it. LOVE it!

Get stuck in at bluevia.com.

There’s some more news about location, however I’m going to write about that in a separate post.

For now I’d like to leave you with this table of feature availability and a reminder that I filmed a whole series of introductory videos on BlueVia (find them here) that are well worth a watch.

Here’s the feature availability:

BlueVia feature availability

For more information, head over to bluevia.com and get stuck into the API.

It’s time for the third episode of our BlueVia Introduction series (kindly supported by BlueVia). This time we hear from BlueVia’s top man, José Valles. I was initially planning on doing a 5-6 minute interview with him just to make sure we had his perspective. We spoke together on camera for 20 minutes at Mobile World Congress — and goodness me, it was fascinating. I think perhaps the most exciting element of the interview was the refreshingly direct and hugely enthusiastic manner in which José presented BlueVia.

In this episode, José describes how mobile operators (including Telefonica) have a pretty poor track record when it comes to working with mobile developers. He then sets the scene for BlueVia and describes why Telefonica has introduced the programme.

We’ll have more from José on Monday.

For more information on BlueVia, Telefonica’s developer programme, please visit www.bluevia.com.

In the first of our new video series, we meet James Parton, Head of Marketing for Telefonica’s developer programme, BlueVia.

I asked James to introduce BlueVia to us and to highlight it’s key offerings for developers.

If you are working in mobile development, you should be intimately aware of what you can do with BlueVia. The team there have basically put an API in front of the Telefonica global network — which offers some phenomenal opportunities, in terms of user experience, market access and developer revenue potential. Their services are live and usable for 80 million Telefonica subscribers right now.

I will be going into a lot more detail with BlueVia, particularly on the revenue side, in the coming posts — but in the meantime, please do get a cup of coffee and watch this introduction from James.

For more information on BlueVia, Telefonica’s developer programme, please visit www.bluevia.com. Everything you need to get started with BlueVia is right there on the site including all the API documentation — however if you’d like an introduction to James and the team there, just drop me a note. I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.

This is excellent news.

It means that shortly, if you’re an App World user, you’ll be able to pay for your downloads via one-click carrier billing, rather than having to type in your PayPal details.

Although PayPal is highly useful, it’s a total arse for me because the service insisted I use a crazily complicated password to prevent hacking. Which means that actually using PayPal is a Cecil B DeMille production involving copious copying and pasting. Just bill me. Hit me. Just get it done. This is what I want from App World. I just want to get the app or the content. Ergo, I think RIM will shortly find a heck of a lot more downloads completing when it introduces the service across these new operators.

I’m also looking forward to hearing from application developers who should really, really benefit from this news.

It’s not just payments for downloads — you’ll also be able to charge in-app payments to your bill as well. Absolutely fantastic. Whenever I’ve looked at any conversion statistics in the context of carrier billing, the numbers are always off the charts compared to credit card, PayPal and so on.

If you’re a Vodafone customer, expect App World carrier billing to be available for the following countries: United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece and Ireland. More countries to follow suit.

No word yet on which Telefonica and Deutsche countries will get carrier billing on App World but I think it’s a fair bet to assume the UK and Germany will be enabled as a priority.

Good news, RIM.

I’ll be popping by their stand later today to have a wander around. More shortly!

Telefonica is well known for being serious about working with developers — and I’m pleased to see continual innovations and iterations in their approach as the market evolves.

Here’s the overview from James:

Hi Ewan,

I’m writing to you and the good people at Mobile Industry review as we wanted to be the first to let you know about the launch of Telefonica’s new global developer platform – BlueVia.

We’ve made mistakes when reaching out to developers before (see Simon Maddox’s Mobile Industry Review post from earlier this year about one of the O2 Litmus developer competitions we ran) but we’ve been listening to and working closely with our developer community to learn from those mistakes, improve upon the features our community liked, and evolve the platform to something closely aligned with what developers are really looking for from a telco.

BlueVia is the new global developer programme from Telefonica that helps developers take apps, web services, and ideas to market. The platform lets developers monetise their apps by plugging in powerful, risk free API’s offering revenue share business models. Altogether, BlueVia represents now the possibility to access more than 80 million customers. And it will be more in the near future.

We’re all about more revenues for developers, clear routes to market and an addressable audience – all in a risk free environment.

The platform is currently in closed beta, so you have to register as a developer to receive an invite (or just give me a nudge on Twitter @jamesparton), but most of the site is public for you and all Mobile industry Review readers to take a look around.

Feel free to get in touch with me for more information, but I hope you like what you see with BlueVia and we look forward to sharing more news with you as the platform develops.

Best,

James

Brilliant, thank you very much James. Every success to you and the team.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about how things go.

And, well, it seems there is. Telefonica — otherwise known to you and I as ‘o2′ here in the United Kingdom (or more accurately, o2′s parent company) have signed a whopping €350m 5-year deal to manage Deutsche Post’s telecoms infrastructure.

We’re talking:

• 100,000 LAN ports
• 60,000 fixed voice devices (‘telephones’)
• 80,000 mobile connections — comprising 24,000 mobile handsets/smartphones

That’s 125,000 Deutsche Post staff across 2,400 office sites in 28 European countries.

Nice.

Just as you and I like the concept getting one unified bill from one single provider (who can take responsibility and bash heads together when needed), this looks like a rather sensible deal for Deutsche Post.  And a boom for Telefonica.

Good news. You can read more about the announcement here.

There are always plusses and minuses about these types of deals.  Sometimes it can work well — and it will certainly help to count that 350m Euro as direct revenue for Telefonica.  It’s all about the people, the policies and the procedures though.  Every success to both parties.

Like previous announcements of European iPhone launches, there’s no further details on when the iPhone will be launched or pricing, or whether Movistar will get to carry the device in its markets outside Spain.

There’s apparently a sign up page on Movistar’s website that promises to inform would be iPhone buyers when the device is available. Hands up if you’re betting that it’ll be next week?

Gizmodo says the 3G iPhone will hit Spain on June 18 at the opening of the Telefonica megastore, with all the other iPhone-carrying countries in Europe getting the handsets around about the same time.

And there’s more good news: the 3G phone will no longer be flogged for a fixed price, with operators likely allowed to subsidise the device as they see fit for the first time. Phew. It looks like some good sense has finally prevailed over at Apple. The question is now: will O2 keep the exclusive rights? Answers on a postcard…