I’ve given Mr Operator a Twitter account, a domain name and a Disqus account.

Don’t expect to be overflowing with informed Mr Operator opinion every time you turn a corner. He’s a busy chap.

You will, however, see him around the site now and again. I wanted to be clear that if you see the ‘Mr Operator’ user — it’s genuine. I could give Mr Operator the username and password for the Disqus account — however we’re playing it ultra safe. His identity is, as you might imagine, a rather critical secret, given the informed opinion and facts that he often dispenses. There’s an ever-so-slight chance that a over zealous network manager at Vodafone, 3, Verizon, o2, Sprint, China Mobile, T-Mobile or [insert operator network here], might do some lookups and find out the identity.

Therefore Mr Operator sends me his replies by personal email. And I post’em. Likewise with the Twitter account.

If you’d like to follow Mr Operator on Twitter, it’s here: @MROperator.

Check out Mr Operator’s back catalogue here.

I’m looking at every single handset that’s released and thinking ‘oh, that’d be good with Android’. Now that you can configure your own mobile experience — albeit in limited form with the T-Mobile G1 — the other handsets are shortly going to look hugely, hugely tame from the viewpoint of an increasingly mobile savvy buying public.

I did a second take the other day when I was watching live television (a rare thing nowadays) and found an advert from Apple, showing off the iPhone — but focusing on the fact you can augment your iPhone experience buy purchasing applications. Fantastic.

But the fact you can now get Visa on your Android handset… that’s going to get a lot of alarm bells ringing across the planet. Visa’s moving. You want to get your arse in gear.

There’s a heck of a lot of interested parties who’ve all been doing the business equivalent of sticking their heads in the sand and waiting for ‘something’ to happen with mobile and transactions.

Kudos to Visa for taking a leap.

So reports the American Banker. (Thanks to the industry heavyweight who forwarded me the article)

The Visa for Android application is, at the moment, simply just a view into your Visa account:

Visa Mobile for Android provides three services to the handset, she said: alerts and notifications sent by Visa, marketing offers from its merchant partners, and an integrated locator function that links a phone’s GPS system with the Google Maps service.

Right now the service is exclusive to those banking with US institution, JP Morgan Chase. So if you’ve got an Android device AND you bank with JPMorgan, check it out and tell me what you think?

A tiny step, perhaps. But:

Visa expects consumers to eventually use their phones to store information about multiple card accounts and to initiate transactions at the point of sale or online.

Definitely. Most definitely. It’s fooking annoying having to phone up to check your balance. Entirely 100% inefficient. It’s even worse having to wait to get a sodding paper statement.

I really like the idea of buying a television and .. woosh.. during the transaction, getting a little pop-up on my phone thus:

The alerts are sent to users’ phones after a transaction almost immediately, Ms. Zuercher said. “Because this runs off our authorization system, these notifications can appear on your handset in near real time, practically before you walk away from the point of sale.”

What’s next? Swiping your handset at the point of sale perhaps?