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.

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.

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.

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.

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 prÄ“ 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 prÄ“, 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*

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.

It makes interesting reading:

- – - – -

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

- – - – -

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.

Do any of the UK  networks (including MVNO’s)  class reciveing a call or incoming sms as activity, and therefore will not cut you off?

Can anyone recommend a company that can provide a few UK virtual mobile numbers with voice terminated over SIP and SMS over SMPP or some other API?

Preferably not numbers that are stupidly expensive to call and excluded from other MNO’s minutes buckets.

Let me know in the comments or via e-mail: dan.lane@mobileindustryreview.com

I popped into my local T-Mobile shop and asking what was showing up on my account for renewing, and basically I was told I could take a £10 discount for the next six months or untill I decided to upgrade which ever was sooner. Not all customers are eligable for the £10 discount some will get £5, I am unsure of how it is calculated.

I was cautious at this point, I thought I would be agreeing to another 18 month contract and also I did not want to loose my extra add ons (unlimited weekend calls and £5 loyalty discount), but I was assured by the salesman that this would not happen.

The £10 discount is a tactic to stall its customers on upgrading until after Christmas, however you have to ask for it. So if you are due to upgrade in the next month or have an upgrade pending I definitely recommend you to pop into store.

On another related note for those of you who are paying £7.50 for web and walk as an add on, ring up customer care and ask to move onto a wnw tariff. This drops the price of web and walk to £5.

I love it when staff in stores and on the phone are 100% honest with you, and are nice to you. I want to personally thank the member of staff who served me in the Manchester City Centre Branch.

The best thing is I am now paying £20 a month for Flext 30 with unlimited weekend calls and web and walk.

T-Mobile UK you officially rock!

I suspect that the battery on the G1 will make it unusable for me as a primary handset. The continual synching must really kill it. When I have been carrying it, I make a point of *switching it off* in the morning and putting it in my bag. That way, when I want to use it, it has full battery.

It is obviously not a primary phone at this point. But in order to use it as such, I needed to unlock it.

What to do?

Well, I visited www.unlock-tmobileg1.com. $44.99 was the unlock fee and they claimed to be able to unlock the G1.

Hmm.

I wasn’t so sure, you never know about some sites you find on the internet — and many times before, I’ve taken it upon myself as a Mobile Industry Review chap — or SMS Text News before then — to stump up the cash and test these things out for you.

Well, I ordered. Paid the $44.99 by PayPal.

And I waited.

At least 12 hours was the warning — it could take that long. I sat back and did some work.

I watched a few minutes of Strictly Come Dancing.

1 hour, 57 minutes later, my unlock code arrived by email.

So I ordered at 7pm, got the code at 9pm UK time.

Instructions on the email were straight forward.

I ignored them and did what I reckoned was correct: My job to play around, I thought. I took out my T-Mobile sim, put in the Vodafone SIM, and restarted the phone.

The phone started fine, finishing with this ‘SIM network unlock PIN’ screen:

‘Am I about to screw it up?’ I wondered.

I typed in the unlock code supplied and pressed UNLOCK:

I got a brief message saying ’success’. Brief enough for me to miss it and not take a photo of it.

I then saw No Service on the screen:

Uh oh.

Then the screen’s network ID went blank:

Right then. Maybe it’s worked? Has it worked? Maybe it hasn’t been hard-coded with the Vodafone network ID, I thought — so it won’t actually show up as ‘Vodafone’.

I was asked to re-type my Google Account password. I suspect that’s because I changed networks.

I ticked ‘allow international roaming’ and switched on data services in the phone’s menu, just in case that was needed.

I typed in the various Vodafone settings — the APN and so on from Filesaveas.com — and took a deep breath.

Perhaps I have to set it as default? Or so some other jiggery pokery? Maybe.

First off, let’s connect to the internet and see if it worked:

Yup.

Fast. Quick. Done.

Got a moment?

I’ve got a Youtube video for you. Here’s the first screen:

If you’ve got a moment, watch the full vid…

Does anyone know someone with Avid sat on their machine who could import this Avid video, then export it in a format that I can work with?

I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com if you do.

If you don’t know what yammer is; it is simply twitter for your organization, however only people who have a work email address can join.

The lack of UK SMS was one of the reasons why the reasons why uptake was low with the team. We are now going to have a look again at the service and I will be doing a full write up on it the next week or so.

The study, which was carried out by the Mobile Data Association suggests that the amount of text messages sent in a month could be around 6.5 billion. Along with the text messages, users also send 1.5 million picture messages and video-based text messages every day.

Could this be credited to the fall in tariffs? Or could this because of the evolution of the mobile market as a whole? I sent a total of 433 text messages last month, according to my service provider.

 

 

And it’s a good job they are.

For a long time, T-Mobile have been the proverbial arse-in-the-corner, ignoring the blogosphere because it’s, well, unknown.. and filled with.. er… the great unwashed…

For any organisation accustomed to broadcasting to customers and potential customers, the utter shock at being held accountable and having to — one way or another — respond to questions from the great unwashed, well, it’s understandable.

Most marketing and public relations folk in big companies such as T-Mobile are doing correct thing and reading a lot about it, attending conferences to get good case studies and constantly doing their best to put off the meeting with the Communications Strategy meeting with the Chief Executive. Most CEOs these days love the concept of communicating directly.

It scares the hell out of most public relations people who’re used to rules. And proper ways of doing things.

The key point with the blogosphere is that it’s populated by people. Real people who, in the case of T-Mobile UK particularly — are actual customers. Or wannabe customers. Or potentially interested.

And when you come across big lumbering giants like T-Mobile, of course, you know it’s going to take them fooking years to understand and get comfortable with the new medium.

There’s no excuse for it. There’s no need. They should be hot footing it right into the blogosphere hot tub rather than standing at the back wrapped in a towel shivering.

T-Mobile’s Marketing and PR chaps have dipped a toe. And that’s a good thing. But they’ve done it with a plausible deniability safety-net.

If Will or Anna screw up, the Marketing Director can hang them out to dry.

I’d like to see some bollocks on the line. Not for any particular reason other than I — and most of you reading — are actually interested and — if pushed — rather passionate about T-Mobile. I’d like to know what’s going on. I’d like to ask questions. I’d like to hear from their directors. I’d like to tell them how to take more cash off me.

So I say right-on to T-Mobile UK for taking tentative steps. Well done for hiring NixonMcInnes — one of the best agencies to handle this sort of thing — but I’d like to see more, soon.

If you’d like to follow T-Mobile UK on Twitter — you can — SHOCK HORROR. The username you want is TMobileSharing.

As for how good it is… well I’ll give it a go shortly and see…

(In fact I almost bought one of their handsets today when I was passing a Carphone Warehouse on the way to Earls Court).

There was a predictable riot of good looking young things queuing round the building when we poured out our cab and made our way to the crowded door.

Dizzy Rascal was, reportedly, inside already.

“Who?” asked Dan.

Ben wasn’t quite clear either.

Despite being in our collective early 30s, we, er… we’re old already. I had to look the chap up on Wikipedia. And then I found his name is spelt ‘Dizzee Rascal’. And his real name is Dylan. Think rapper, think DJ, think actor.

Lots of other ‘celebs’ were in attendance although, again, we — er — failed dismally in our attempts to identify them (“Is he from Holby City?” Is that the one off X-Factor?”).

Either way, Nokia pulled out the stops and presented a brilliant evening.

We did the sensible thing and filmed in the event reception. Initially we were hoping to chat to some PR and marketing chaps from Nokia about their Comes With Music strategy, but they did us one better.

Simon Ainslie was briefly available and popped up to have a chat on camera.

Dan and James couldn’t quite believe it. Ben was agog.

Why?

Because he knew his stuff.

We started off with some innocuous ‘what’s this all about then’ questions and Simon knocked out the answers without blinking.

As I held the camera I could see Dan and James thinking, “This isn’t one of those normal know-nothing executives that we normally chat to.”

Indeed we often spend a lot of our time trying to lead-the-witness on camera (‘this looks like a GOOD phone?’) because a lot of executives in this industry are 100% hopeless.

Not Simon.

We did two interviews. Once we established he could take the heat of a full Dan Lane examination, we got stuck in for a good few minutes, with Dan finally asking, ‘So, do you come with music?’

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they choose to handle that question. I think that’s why Dan posed the question. We wanted to see if he was real. Suffice to say he’s a top chap. You can see Simon’s interview most probably in the upcoming MIR Show on Monday. (I say most probably as we’ve got a heck of a lot of footage so we might need to stretch across two weeks for everything from today).

Thanks for taking the time Simon and every success with the Comes With Music launch.

You can, by the way, read about Simon in a recent Times of London profile piece. We’ll obviously need to get him on to the Mobile Industry Review Who’s Who in short order.

Good news.

Who’s getting one?

I am strongly considering it…

Well, this evening I was greeted with:

Uh oh.

Bad news, right? BAD news! Suspended? AGAIN! I’ve been battling against the T-Mobile rubbish system for weeks to try and keep everything above board. I’ve never encountered a company that simply cannot take money off you without some kind of frustration, prevention, policy problem or technical fault.

Screw this, then, I thought.

It’s only £20 a month I pay on that account. Goodness me. I’ll pay 150 pounds to it so that I’m in credit, right?

I headed over to the Make-A-Payment screen that is totally flocked. There’s no PAY button. I kid ye not.

Have a look at this:

You select your card number and then enter your security code… then… go nowhere. Because the PAY button doesn’t exist on this page, tonight, for some INANE reason.

You have to click on to one of the Direct Debit tabs, then Top-Up tabs, then click BACK on to the Make Payment section. THEN the sodding button appears:

Shit. Shit. Shite.

Flakey.

My current balance on this page read £-46.00.

What’s that? Surely that… that’s negative? That means I’m in credit?

Or…

But the front-screen message is telling me I’m WAYYY behind with payments. My account has been SUSPENDED, it tells me.

Yet I’m 46 in credit.

I don’t know what to believe.

And since it’s 11:30pm on a Sunday, there’s no one from T-Mobile UK available for me to call and ask them to state their reasons for existing. It is a VERY safe bet that T-Mobile are not within 100 miles of winning the Mobile Industry Review Most Innovative Operator category (actual winner announced tomorrow).

So I chucked £150 on to the T-Mobile account, just in case.

My account is now £-196.00 which, presumably, means I’m ok.

I still have the annoying message on the My T-Mobile page:

Warning your account has been suspended, you will not be able to use your mobile until you have made a payment

Why can’t they build something that works?

Appalling.

Appalling.

And THRICE appalling.

Here’s another vid for you to feast your eyes on:

Posted by email from MIR Live (posterous)

She’s just finished 18 months of contractual service with Orange and the company that sold her the deal has phoned her up again, wanting to flog another contract. They’re offering her 600 minutes (I imagine cross-network) along with unlimited text messaging for £30 a month. And, I suspect, a new handset although that wasn’t mentioned in the email.

Is this a good deal?

No. Or so I thought. Vodafone will, for example, offer you the exact same for 20 quid/month on a month-to-month rolling contract:

Ergo there has to be a much, much better deal available for contract customers? Right?

Well, let’s use the N95 8GB as an example.

What does your average Nokia N95 8GB retail for?

Vodafone will give you one for free along with 600 minutes and unlimited texts — AND unlimited mobile data — for £35 a month (18 months).

Hmm. 600 minutes sounds a bit… low.

I thought there’d be a better deal around.

Let’s check T-Mobile. They’ll give you the same handset on Flext 35 which gives you 1000 minutes, 2,000 texts or any combination. 18 months. £30 a month. But your new N95 8GB which, let’s face it, is getting a bit old now, will cost you a whopping £149.99. Stump up another fiver to take your price plan over 40 pounds and the phone is free.

Let’s have a look at Three. The challenger brand. They’ll have a good deal, right?

£35 per month, unlimited texts, 750 cross network minutes and a free N95 8GB. 18 month contract. Result. That’s a bit better, eh?

I have to confess I thought there would be better deals to be had.

How boring.

Any suggestions?

http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-phones/t-mobileg1-whats-hot/