Posts Tagged ‘uk’
ShoZu record 45% traffic uplift from UK snowfall
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009I dropped a note over to the ShoZu team to ask them if they’d seen much of an increase in traffic from their users as a result of the snowfall across the UK yesterday.
I was expecting perhaps 10% increase, maybe 20% — but a 45% increase in uploads? Heh. Brilliant!
If you took any photos of the snow and zapped them up to Twitpic or Flickr yesterday, can you send me a link? I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.
And if you haven’t downloaded ShoZu recently, check it out at www.shozu.com.
3 inches of snow brings UK to halt thanks to mobile networks
Monday, February 2nd, 2009That headline above is not a quote from The Onion.
I know most of the Americans and Canadians reading — and we do have a lot reading — simply don’t believe this happens. Here’s today’s headline from The London Telegraph
Well it does. Do you remember the video I showed you recently? (“How bad are Brits at handling 0.5 inches of snow?) Well we’ve had a few more.
2.5-3 inches in Billericay, Essex, about 30 miles east of London.
And that’s it. That’s IT. Life is over for a good few days. My wife had a doctor’s appointment. Cancelled. If it’s an emergency, phone the ambulance, she was told.
It wasn’t, so she didn’t.
She was due to get a beauty treatment after that. Cancelled.
Absolute rubbish, it really is.
This is the problem with the mobile networks. They’re obviously still ‘live’. It takes quite a bit of properly horrible weather before the actual hardware packs in. But a smidgen of snow and this country is screwed.
It’s screwed because we can be. If it was the year 1940, everyone would be at work. Everyone except the folk who’re living in the mountains in Scotland that got 10ft of snow. That’s fine. But everyone in the lowlands of the country would have put on their boots, wrapped up warm and made it happen.
Nowadays any old excuse like a bit of snow prevents the majority of the population from getting anywhere or doing anything.
But it’s the connected nature of our population that makes it easy. You can phone in ’stranded’. You can text your boss — so you don’t actually have to speak to him and let him hear your pathetic rubbish — and tell him the car won’t start. And what’s more, your boss will be delighted because the more folk who call in ’snowed’, means he doesn’t have to get out of bed. Or bother providing a service. And he can tell his boss that today is a write-off.
Even if you don’t have internet at home, you can check out the latest ‘advice’ from concerned organisations eager to get a bit of press, about just how dangerous it is.
Clever schools and colleges that have implemented text message update services for parents are able, at a moment’s notice, to take a personal day. Too cold. Can’t be arsed. And so on.
The fact we’re all mobilised means we can deliver excuse after excuse after excuse. And really easily.
Before texting, before the possibility of being able to text/call your boss on his mobile (you’d never call the boss at his home landline unless the office was on fire, right?) you simply had to lump it. You got out of bed, opened the curtains, swore a little bit and put on an extra layer of clothing and went to work. So did the bus driver, the train driver and everybody else required to make the country work as normal.
But now the bus driver doesn’t bother. Any sodding excuse. Neither does the train driver. Or the taxi driver. Or the Starbucks barista. So actually even if you DO want to get to work this morning in the UK, because of the collective ‘fck it’ attitude — and the ability to quickly confirm this via mobile — you probably can’t get to work anyway.
Thankfully every mobile operator base station is operated automatically. It doesn’t have to have a little R2D2-sized chap inside to make your mobile work. Which is a good thing from a connectivity point of view, but conversely, a bad thing from a business productivity point of view.
So to the Americans and Canadians out there — especially the hardly lot like my friend Keith regularly dealing with -15 temperatures on his daily commute — feel free to being your scoffing…. now.
PhonePayPlus: The dinner lady of the UK mobile industry
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009PhonePayPlus is the proverbial dinner lady in the mobile industry school playground.
Nominally known as the premium rate industry regulator, they typically hand out fines to companies that have made a huge, huge amount of money from spamming the mystified UK population — and who, have conveniently costed a fine into the profitability matrix.
I describe PhonePayPlus to anyone who enquires as one of runt dinner ladies. The dinner lady that, despite the huge sign saying KEEP OFF THE GRASS outside the Headmaster’s office, will strategically ignore the 14 or 15 ugly oversized teenagers sprawled across it. That’s because, earlier in the term, she once walked over and insisted they get off the grass — to which the teenagers just stared briefly at her and then carried on listening to their headphones.
So the PhonePayPlus dinner lady continues to patrol the school playground and conveniently ignores all the bollocks going on until whilst, now and again, putting some of the teeny kids — the ones who haven’t learnt that disobeying has next to no effect — in detention.
The mobile industry in the UK is completely screwed in the context of premium billing. How is it possible for me to get an unsolicited text like this one…
… INSTRUCTING ME to reply STOP if I’m not interested?
Where’s the register that allows me to unsubscribe from all unsolicited bollocks like this? And I mean a register that works and is adhered to by anyone sending marketing messages?
Why isn’t there a differentiation made between folk who send you marketing texts and service text messages?
If I’m a hairdresser and I want to text you with an appointment update — that’s entirely non-premium, right? So when I sign up with a mobile aggregator, I should choose the NON PREMIUM option.
If I want to make money from a premium marketing service, shouldn’t I have to sign-up for a different account — that, when I send messages out — runs them through a country-wide ‘unsubscribe and don’t market me’ list of numbers before the promotional messages are even transmitted?
It’ll never happen.
So I’ll just keep getting woken up by stupid texts like that one.
And until the country moves away from the money making CASH COW that is the premium text messaging scam.
And by the way here’s the latest ineffectual news from PhonePayPlus:
- Prior permission: providers offering mobile subscription services charging over £4.50 in any given week or applying pay-per-page charges on the mobile internet must first apply for permission from PhonepayPlus;
- Active confirmation: as part of the prior permission undertaking, any consumer joining a subscription service must first receive a free confirmation text message detailing the cost and conditions of the service. The consumer cannot be charged until they have confirmed their subscription by replying to that text.
Will this change anything? Yeah. The ‘nice’ providers will observe it. But everybody else? Nah.
Watch as the naughty kids on on the grass don’t even bother looking this way.
Those new rules, by the way, are off the back of this:
PhonepayPlus’ review of the premium mobile sector was prompted by a worrying 108% increase in mobile-related complaints received from 2006/7 to 2007/8. This was accompanied by anecdotal evidence of consumers, including young people, being charged several thousand pounds in some cases as a result of bad practice by content and service providers.
Next.
Hyundai hits the UK mobile handset market with 15 handsets en route
Monday, January 19th, 2009The global behemoth, Hyundai, has entered the UK mobile handset market.
Big time.
There’s no toe-in-the-water nonsense from Hyundai. Nope. They’re hitting the market with 2, followed by 10 to 15 new handsets this year.
That’s THE FIRST HALF of this year.
Come on!
A little bit of competition, eh? Plus you might get a discount on your next Yaris. Or Taris. Or… Hyundai [something]. I can’t, alas, name a Hyundai car model without resorting to Google. And that would be cheating.
I’m going to do more on this shortly. For now, here are two images to whet your appetite.
This one, unsurprisingly (from the description on the screen), has — as I infer — a touchscreen:
No word on actual operating system specifics. I tell you what, if Hyundai simply HINTED at the SLIGHT POSSIBILITY of manufacturing 200m Android handsets this year, I’m willing to bet half the industry would wet their pants. Some with delight, others not so much.
Anyway, more soon.
RumourMill: Palm prē to be on Vodafone in the UK
Monday, January 19th, 2009
In what appears to be another leak, Vodafone could be getting the latest handset from Palm with their very latest OS later on this year. Trumping all the other networks vying for the ultimate iPhone killer to be with them, bar O2 of course.
The website MobileTopSoft ran a piece indicating news from ‘Vodafone officials’ the prē is set to be with them, this is much welcomed news and just adds to their catalogue of media rich phones such as the BlackBerry Storm.
To some, this could even be seen as competition to the Storm, or at the very least a possible competitor to BlackBerry and RIM as a whole. As the phone sits on the fence between a business handset and a personal one. Although it lacks in our humble opinion out of the box business tools with the likes of Office Suite access and corporate email support to a high level.
Reading between the lines of the copy, as not every site can afford to spell out exactly who the source is and how accurate the news is, it does appear they most certainly know Vodafone will be carrying the mobile.
The piece also goes on to state this could be a case of one up man ship for the network, with O2 exclusively getting the iPhone and the fortunes of Vodafone could be definitely endorsed by this new deal.
MobileTopSoft added the negotiations are in the early stages still, and they doubt anyone will hear any official news of this sort until the ink is nearly dry. This just goes someway to stamp even more credibility on the fact they have received this leak from an internal source.
With the carrier Sprint in the US of A being a full partner in the launch of the prē, we’re assuming a UK network will have the same level of involvement too. Who knows, all this could be made public at Mobile World Congress next month *cough*
Record Vodafone UK usage across the Festive period
Friday, January 9th, 2009Just got this in from Ally at Vodafone:
Nearly 170m text messages were sent over the Vodafone UK network during the 24hrs of New Years Eve and Day. At its peak, just after midnight, over 6,000 text messages a second were processed. The same period saw Vodafone customers make nearly 90 million calls. The festive season also saw a record numbers of people sending picture messages, with 1 million sent on Christmas Day alone. Data usage also rose dramatically with over four times higher figures than in the same period last year.
6,000 texts a second eh?
Somehow, actually, I reckoned it would have been a lot more.
However, if you sit and work it out, that does begin to add up rather quickly. If you assumed a throughput of 5,000 messages a second for a whole minute, that would add up to 300,000 texts a minute.
UK Rail Agrees Mobile Ticketing Standard
Friday, December 19th, 2008Nick Dillon, on behalf of the chaps at secure mobile specialist, Masabi, dropped me a briefing note on the state of mobile ticketing on UK railways.
It makes interesting reading:
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Hi Ewan,
I thought you might be interested to hear that the Association of Train Operating Companies, (which represents all UK rail operators) has introduced an industry-wide mobile ticketing standard based on 2D barcodes. This standard means that rail operators are now able to sell mobile tickets which can be used on other rail operator’s networks, thus removing a major hurdle to mobile ticketing.
I’ve put a bit of information and background on the standard below – please let me know if you need any further info or would like to speak to Masabi, the company which developed the standard. You can see what the barcode looks like here: http://www.masabi.com/solutions_ticketing.html.
[ Ewan: Here's some screenshots ]
State of the Market
* As it stands today some of the more pioneering rail operators have started offering mobile ticketing across some of their routes. These include National Express (who bought GNER), as well as Virgin, Heathrow Express and Chiltern Railways.
* This typically allows commuters to buy a ticket on a web site which is then delivered by an encrypted SMS or MMS to their handset and comes in the form of a 2D barcode. When they travel the ticket inspector simply uses a barcode scanner to read the ticket on their phone.
* As you’re undoubtedly aware mobile tickets have not yet become a widespread phenomenon. This is due to a few important reasons:-
o First off, it is fundamentally difficult to develop a secure ticket that cannot be fraudulently recreated which would obviously enable people to make their own free tickets
o Secondly, existing rail operator mobile ticket services require a PC to buy the ticket but for the service to be much more successful commuters need to be able to buy and display tickets on their handset wherever they are thereby creating the killer convenience factor. 88% of tickets are bought at the station You can imagine how useful it would be to buy a ticket once you’ve got on the train or on your way to the station or even when you’re at the station and there is a queue for the ticket machines
o Thirdly, it is crucial that the tickets work on mass market handsets not just smart phones. For example there’s been a lot of excitement around NFC, the communications technology used in Oyster cards, but to date NFC has only found its way into a couple of phones. Any system needs to work on all phones.
o Finally, the few mobile ticketing solutions on the market all use different systems so commuters can’t buy a ticket that goes across multiple rail operators.
The New Standard
* With these issues in mind ATOC (the Association of Train Operating Companies), which is owned by and represents all UK rail operators, decided to introduce an industry-wide mobile ticketing standard and brought on us at Masabi to put it together.
* The result is we now have a finalised 2d bar code standard that overcomes all of the aforementioned mobile ticketing difficulties.
* All the rail operators now have a system at their disposal with the highest level of security to ensure that mobile ticketing fraud can’t take place.
* The 2d bar code contains all information about the ticket so there is no need to for the ticket inspector’s machines to check any database. This enables commuters to buy mobile tickets at any point, including on the phone, so they don’t need to be bought on the web before-hand.
* The 2d bar code works on 90% of mobile handsets i.e. Any mobile phone with a colour screen or that has been introduced in the last five years. This means almost everyone can use the service.
* Finally, the standard means that a mobile ticket can be used on a journey spanning lots of rail operators.
* Over the next few months, we expect the existing rail operators with mobile ticketing services to migrate to the new system.
* The barriers for other rail operators have now been removed so hopefully we can now start seeing wider mobile ticketing offerings
Regards,
Nick
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Nick, thanks for emailing that over. I reckon that will be very useful for a lot of people considering or actually already doing business in this space.
