Ewan from Mobile Industry Review found me in a corner with a beer at Swedish Beers and got me to talk for about 15 minutes.. most of which was rather sensitive, but this bit got published..

MIR Show – Week 45 – Mobile Operators & Google from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Google isn’t that interested in providing every service itself, as long as it gets to sit between the remaining ones. They will happily let other people do the really hard parts, usually involving hardware. Android is a good example of this, Voice is another, Chrome OS is the next. Everyone else gets to compete, while Google sits in the middle.

It doesn’t even want to build it’s own social network. Why? because there’s the internet. So again it builds tools in-between the parts everyone else has made, tools such as OpenSocial.

Whether or not this turns out to be a good thing?.. Well the future isn’t that far away..

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This article was originally posted, by me, on the awesome Mobile Industry Review, Where Ewan adds some great background to the story.

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Having had a very quick turn around on a new iPhone order with O2 (I did it online on their store and it arrived roughly 16 hours later!) I called Orange to get my PAC number so I could cancel my contract with them, and move the number i’ve had forever, away from them and to O2. My first call consisted of me being on hold for almost an hour. Although it was at 5.50pm on a Friday, so I figured they’re probably running less staff at that time, and I’d give them a chance.

My next call, which was immediately after my hour-long top of the pops session, consisted of me pressing * and 0 repeatedly until I spoke to a human. She took my details and passed me on within a couple of minutes to a chirpy guy in the Customer Retention team. He was a bit too happy, that’s probably why he was given that job. Anyone who can be dealing with people who want to *leave* your service, at almost 7pm on a Friday, well… it’s not a job I’d want.

Somehow he knows I’m leaving to go to O2, is that because that’s what everyone’s doing, or (more likely?) that the mobile operators have access to something central that has a global record of what accounts I hold? A scary thought. Then again, that’s what credit report agencies such as Experian do. Yeah, that is a scary thought.

So he knows I’m leaving to O2, somehow he also knows it’s because I want an iPhone. I jokingly quip that if he/Orange could give me an iPhone, I’d stay with them. After-all, I’ve had that account for roughly 7 years IIRC, and that’s got to be worth something. (It’s then that I wonder that a Customer Retention team would be much more effective if it’s job was to make me happy *all the time*, not just when I’m trying to leave FFS). He then starts to attack the iPhone, and by proxy, my decision making. This is dangerous ground. He has no knowledge (or does he?) of what I know or what my motivations are. At this point I suggest to him the things that I think the iPhone lacks. I’m trying to play his game, I just want the PAC number, if I play nice then maybe he’ll be easy on me and just let me have it. He disses the camera, I tell him I carry a DSLR everywhere. But then I suggest that, yes, you can’t forward text messages, and that’s annoying. Actually I never do that anyway, and can type quick enough that it doesn’t matter. He seems to be playing along, I’m just hoping his typing I can hear is him retrieving the PAC. Then he mentions that you can’t send picture messages. Oh come on, I have email, and wifi, and 3G, so yeah, you can. But I don’t say that, I just agree. I’m still leaving you dude, gimme the PAC.

This is getting boring by now, he’s suggesting that they can give me a phone with more features. You don’t need me to tell you that this line of argument isn’t going to work. I tell him that I’ve already got an original iPhone, cracked and running on Orange. I don’t want whatever Samsung they have an excess stock of. I’ve chosen the iPhone for the ecosystem it’s part of, I use Mobile Me, a MacBook, loads of apps I love and couldn’t do without. This is the genius of Apple, this is why and how they changed the game. You my friend, working in a call centre on a friday night, for a faceless organisation that’s fighting, nay struggling, for relevance and market share, you my friend, can not help me. PAC number, now.

Orange’s inability to predict the future (like most large, oldschool incumbent companies) of it’s own industry, and it’s inability to put me, a valuable flagged customer, first.. This is what’s loosing it’s business, and my cash.

He knows I’m flagged as a valuable customer, this become obvious when he drops a bombshell. He says casually, sounding like he’s giving up now, that it’s a shame I’ve already made my decision, because they could have given me a loan to buy myself a PAYG iPhone from Apple/O2 and then crack it and use it with Orange.

Erm, huh?

So they would effectively give me money to stay with them. They would endorse me using a phone that they can’t support. They would encourage me to break my warranty on my shiny new iPhone. All kinds of wrong.

This is where I just get annoyed, I haven’t really taken in what he’s just said, I just want the code. Which eventually he agrees to send me. In the post. We’re in 2009, and they’re sending me a letter. I ask if he can give it to me on the phone, now, while I’m here, talking to him, a guy who can see the code on his screen. He can’t. He explains that if I had called several times previously, or if I was an annoyed customer, then he could. But I didn’t fit that profile. Yet.

I hang up. If O2 can get me an iPhone from an automated system overnight, then surely Orange can get a letter to me in at least the same amount of time, right?

Regardless of whether or not they could give me a loan to buy the iPhone, there are several reasons why that wouldn’t work out. O2 have the data plan, the free wifi access, the warranty, the OS updates (much easier on a non-cracked iPhone), etc etc.. did I miss something? Oh yeah, I WOULD OWE ORANGE MONEY ON A LOAN.

This screams of panic, of desperation. They are screwed, and maybe it’s finally hitting home. The game is changing, maybe quicker than we thought. Operators need to give us more reasons to choose one over the other. Currently there is no customer loyalty whatsoever. Competing on price alone, is not how business is done in the 3rd millennium.

I’ll leave the advice on that for a future article, but I’m sure you, the MIR faithful, can fill them in :)

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Originally posted on Mobile Industry Review.

Mobile Industry Review Video 17 from Ewan MacLeod on Vimeo.

It was great fun, we spent a few hours in Covent Garden putting it together, and generally being geeks in public. Which in this case was great fun :)

I got to talk about the start of the upcoming Brighton Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe), and a little about the future of tracking offline to mobile conversions and location specific behavioral patterns. Something that I’m really interested in at the moment, and will happily talk about, come find me at the weekly Tuttle!

Seriously, WTF?

What you see above you on the left is a feature listing for the “Dolphin” set of tariffs from Orange. On the right is the “detail” of those tariffs. Do you see the problem?

I want:

• unlimited mobile internet
• unlimited anytime, any network texts
• 600 anytime, any network minutes

Is that £30 or £35?

Not to mention that the tagline at the top reads “..weekend..” texts. Gah!? (Oh, and the typo on the left-hand £25 too, “unlimited anytime text”, not “texts”, oh no). And why do they repeat themselves directly under the same copy?

I lack any confidence in these people. And I haven’t even touched on bloody “fair use” clauses.

Now I suspect that the confusion may be because I’m an existing customer, I’m logged in, and it’s showing me the relevant content. That’s no excuse for contradictions. I also suspect that these prices may reflect different contract lengths. However, there is no mention of that. Plus I already have a contract, and do not need to extend it to change my tariff.

Send them (and all the others (and all the banks)) to the School of WTF, and get them to make sense. This reinforces my theory that most businesses make their money by confusing the customer or taking advantage of ignorance or stupidity. This is why we don’t like you. Are you listening?

QRFlickr demo from Josh Russell on Vimeo.

Some time last year Dave and I got really into QR Codes.

(install the QRFlickr greasemonkey script I talk about in this post and demo in the above movie. Read on to find out what QR Codes are and how it works)

For those that don’t know, a QR Code is essentially a 2 dimensional barcode, in that it stores it’s data in two directions on a grid instead of in one direction as lines. (see the example at the bottom of this post)

Using various tools to create these codes (on a RESTful URL) it’s possible to embed or encode many types of information, such as plain alphanumeric text, phone numbers or whole vcards, or urls. You can also denote a protocol for the information to help the device reading the code to know what to do with it, i.e. http://, smsto:, tel: etc..

For example, encoding “tel:+44207000000″ will produce a QR Code that when scanned by a mobile will ask the user if they would like to call that phone number. Lots of possibilities! Yes, the things you’re thinking right now are possible ;)

(Brian and I went further with this and have started to create a wiki that documents all the different scenarios and protocols and tests them to understand how best to use QR Codes in the everyday application. More on that at a later date!)

So I then decided to see what else could be done. Others have done lots of examples, and I’m in no way suggesting that this is groundbreaking, but this is an example that interests me greatly, and also shows very simply the power of this technology.

Not being a coder I spent some time trawling the internet for some javascript help, I was about to write my first Greasemonkey script, so needed some basic help. I wanted to be able to find a particular element in an html page, in this case an image, and identify it’s URL. This URL is then turned into a QR Code and displayed conveniently on the page. So that while a user (with the Greasemonkey script installed) was viewing a Flickr photo page they could easily then visit the image URL on their mobile phone, and possibly choose to save it.

So here’s what it looks like:
– Original photo by cgandolfo, thanks!

Interesting? Yes. This is *the* simplest and quickest way I’ve ever seen to transfer data from one device to another, without and sort of direct connection between the two (Bluetooth, USB) or without any network or contact details (email address, fileserver). The user doesn’t even need to know the URL, type it in, or send it to themselves. Within seconds the photo just appears on the phone.

So if you want to do this, go install Greasemonkey for FireFox and then click on the QRFlickr script from the link below to install:

Install QRFlickr

Enjoy :)

Flash might be coming to the iPhone, Silverlight is coming to the mobile (and Java’s already here).

Shantanu Narayen:

We have a version [of Flash] that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.

read the article..

Well, Flash so far in emulation only. Implications?

(note that there is nothing in that quote that implies it will be Flash or Flash Lite)

I don’t know about you, but i’m loving the iPhone, as soon as ActiveSync is on there that’s me done, no more phones.

Will flash *work* on the iPhone conceptually is the real question, flash (as it is) works on the web, but similar ui/ux/interface paradigms have to exist/be created as have to be for other iPhone/mobile apps and sites. Just having flash on the iPhone (presumably in-browser) is not enough. Even though that will enable users to see the flash, does that mean that the flash will be usable on this platform in the same way it is in a desktop browser. I think that the very fact that there are iPhone specific web sites proves that it won’t just *work* in terms of ui/ux in the way that current flash sites do in a desktop browser. This will require developers and designers to do similar interface rethinks and detection as they’re already doing for html sites.

Not to mention touch, multitouch, scaling, frame rates (timeline based actions and animation), performance, player version, webcam/microphone access, uploads/downloads, video codecs available.

So if we can assume that (mobile) bandwidth will increase, handsets will get more powerful, have more storage and screen real-estate, does this mean we can expect better experiences as a result?

Website owners (or designers/developers, whatever..) are very quick to consume a users bandwidth. By that i mean the thinking that if there is more bandwidth then it can be used. Surely if there is more bandwidth then it means current things can be quicker! Downloaded faster! Download sizes of sites and their elements should still be efficient, video streamed should be realistic. Why not enhance the experience through performance rather than what is effectively just more data transfer in the form of more graphics, higher quality video, or even just more code. The best mobile apps and sites are the ones that let you use them quickly for the function that you need right there and then. And are designed with the end medium (essentially the small screen form-factor) in mind. And not forgetting, right now, also at a good data cost. For most users there is still a cost per kb, let’s not use data size as a barrier to use at all.

Brian sums a lot of this up very well for the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit blog.

Luckily the iPhone has inspired people do make websites that take advantage of the form factor, and so far to not just push the limits of every aspect of it, making it unusable. The experiences are mostly good, because they are fast, low-fat, and have familiar interfaces instantly taking cues from the basic native apps.

Let’s go about this in the right way, help the users to take the leap to the mobile web by creating things that are genuinely useful and that work. Let’s not go back to the frustrating early days of pretty much every new step forward of the web, mobile or otherwise. Don’t make me compare this to WAP, please! We were young, ignorant, but excited and creative, and we learned a lot.

[This article has been reposted on the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit blog]

• They have deals with the record labels already
• They have a mechanism to transfer to a phone (iTunes)
• They have a very large userbase
• Profit on ringtones is higher than singles (and you could probably sell them for more)

The iTunes transfer may be the key to this working. It’s certainly a lot cheaper to operate as it bypasses the mobile phone operators.

So what’s missing? Well the Apple phone of course!

Just a prediction…

But what if you’re selling Smart cars?

PingBase is a more efficient, modern and affordable car. A car designed for not only the driver but it’s environment and the cohabitants of that environment.

All these monitoring services certainly do their job, although I’ve not used them all, so what’s wrong with them?

1. The Price
   They are prohibitively expensive. usually charging around $10/month per domain or URL you want to monitor.
2. The Free Trial
   You might get a month for free or maybe longer but for a much lower level of service.
3. Access to data
   Few provide an API or even RSS, although around half offer multiple person notification lists of some sort.
4. They’re not designed for everyone
   Most are designed for web developers or large corporations, they ignore the needs of the majority of websites and their owners.

I think that last point may be the most important. Everybody and their fathers brothers have a website and they all need to know the uptime, or downtime of their sites. A persons blog is a very important thing. Some livelihoods are made from blogs as well as reputations built from them.

If your blog is down, you need to know! But you shouldn’t have to pay more than it costs you to have the website for that knowledge.

Enter PingBase, a modern website monitor built for you, your friends, your company or your rabbit.

If you want to monitor your blog, PingBase will do that, for free, forever. If you want more, then you can upgrade to the first level which will allow you to monitor 10 URLs for $15/month with the added bonus of receiving SMS (text messages) as well as email when your site goes down.

There is an FAQ that should answer more of your questions, and you can sign up to know when it’s launched from any page on the site.

I’m really excited to get this up and running, I’ve been looking forward to announcing it.. I know it’ll be a useful addition to many peoples online lives.

A normal headphone jack so i can use my own headphones. And one that will also handle a mic input if a handsfree is used.

Easy, standards-based, phone-to-phone syncing of data/contacts/sms/pictures/etc..

The same memory cards as everything else. SD preferably. Normal size, high speed a bonus.

The ability to use my 3G data connection with my laptop over Bluetooth.

An actual USB port, yeah alright the mini version. USB 2.0 too please!

A joystick that you can press inward to make selections without accidentily moving the cursor up or down.

Oh, and of course, Symbian (Series 60) and come with Flash Player as standard, for free.

I don’t think these are unreasonable requests.

Like most industries, the mobile phone manufacturing industry could learn a lot from the current state of the web. Tools that let you have easy access to your data, that let you use already standard third party devices or services, in this case USB, SD, SyncML, 3.5mm audio jacks. And that let you share your data with others or even remove all your data completely.

Flickr found that even though they provide an API that allows you to take all your data and leave, nobody has actually done it. Just knowing that they can if they need to instils trust in the provider and therefore people stay.

They will get more brand loyalty and longevity out of their products by making these very simple changes. Hell, even if BenQ made a phone that did that stuff i’d buy it! Even BenQ!