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Current whipping boy Google is coming under attack from three giants in the European communications market. Telefonica, France Telecom (Orange) and Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) are complaining because Google isn’t giving them a share of the advertising revenue raised by consumers accessing Google’s products over their networks.
They have announced Yet Another App Store Beater and called it the Wholesale Applications Community in response to the (three-year-old) global wake-up call from Apple which converted a spec hungry market into one that is all about the app.
Cesar Alierta, Telefinica’s chairman, called on regulators to force Google to share some of the revenue raised from online advertising with the carriers who are providing access to the advertising in the first place. FT’s Stephane Richard agreed recognising that Google were the winners and the network operators were the losers.
DT’s CEO really demonstrated his grasp on the market by announcing that “There is not a single Google service that is not reliant on network service. We cannot offer our networks for free”.
Last time I looked I was being charged for network access whether it be from my phone, my home or my business. And if you ask me, if OpCos have been dumb enough to undersell their bandwidth in a land-grab led by marketeers then they deserve everything they get. I still won’t forgive them until I see the back of all the ‘unlimited’ deals that still feature so strongly in their shop fronts.
Meanwhile, I’m off to suggest a new profit model to BT where they take a share of my bill at Pizza Hut because I used one of their phones to place the order.
I’d quite like an iPhone but don’t want to be tied to a two-year contract. When looking at the TCO of most plans, you’re looking at something starting at £900 even for the most basic plans (75 minutes, 250 SMS and 1GB data).
Consider that O2 offer the iPhone on Pay as you Go from £449 (£440 on Orange) and you start to wonder what the extra £550 gives you. When averaged out on a two-year plan that gives you nearly £23 a month to play with. O2 offer a 1 month rolling Simplicity deal specifically for the iPhone giving you 300 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data & WiFi for £20 a month with a 1 month commitment.
Even with interest taken into account, getting a PAYG iPhone on your credit card and partnering it with a SIM-only deal from the same network is the cheapest way to buy giving you the benefit of a generous allowance and tieing you in for the shortest time.
If you want to be truly independent, you can get a SIM-free (unlocked) iPhone for around £800. You can get them cheaper, but they are usually hacked versions where you cannot update the software or you will relock the device to the original network.
Vodafone do not offer the iPhone on PAYG at the time of writing.
I have tried many touchscreen devices and always go back to numerical keys. Here’s why.
- I can touch type on a keyed device. A touch screen has no tactile feedback making it useless for non-sighted use.
- With a keyed device, the numeric keypad is by far the most gracious design. It constrains the input area sufficiently that I can operate the device using one hand and I need very limited movement in my thumb to operate it. Held in either hand, the side-keys on my Nokia E51 are in easy reach of my fingers and the main keypad sits nicely under my thumb. With a touchscreen, you need two hands if you are to avoid very awkward stretching and balancing.
- After a little time, T9 input is faster than QWERTY. Because I only have to move among 12 keys, I don’t have to look and optically digest an entire keyboard. Tengo provide a QWERTY version of T9 for Windows Mobile devices (I think they may have gone under).
- Constraining input to fewer keys removes the awkwardness of a multi-faceted input UI. There is no doubt that the back key on my device will always perform back functions. Even on the iPhone, this is performed by an on-screen button which isn’t always in exactly the same place. This is more true of the ’send’ or ‘green’ button. For touchscreen devices this is often anywhere on the screen which means you have to hunt for it.
- Keys offer me precise control. I know when I have pressed the key and I get immediate feedback. For a touchscreen I have often experienced a ‘dead touch’ where the screen hasn’t registered my finger.
UK regulator shows complaints stable at virtually zero
Some extremely heartening news for me that I wanted to share with you. A large part of my career has been spent dealing with, and training others to deal with complaint escalations. A very satisfying role, but there have been few situations over the years when I’ve thought the industry was making a rod for its own back. The phrase ‘cashback deal’ is definitely one that led me to thinking, ‘here we go again’.
Cashback deals are promotions often used by third-party dealers and retailers. Independent of the mobile network chosen, an arrangement is made between the customer and retailer agreeing that after a certain time period, if the bills have been paid correctly, the customer can claim back a large portion of their line rental charges as ‘cashback’.
This type of offer often appeared at the top of internet value league tables, because the total cost of the package seemed to be much lower than other deals. And if the cashback deals were administered fairly, all would have been well.
The problems often, and I do mean often, arose when customers tried to claim the money back. You can see from the table at the start of 2008 Ofcom were dealing with 500 complaints about this a month, the tip of the iceberg because most complaints would be made directly to the mobile networks, or more correctly to the retailers involved. To qualify, customer would have to prove they’d paid bills, but documents would mysteriously disappear in the post, even if sent by recorded delivery. Customers could find out they missed previously unexplained qualifying dates, bizarre vouchers might need to be exchanged, or retailers could even cease trading. Let’s just summarise by saying there were a number of unusual barriers involved in getting a claim approved.
It’s fantastic for me to see this problem seems to be virtually extinguished. Ofcom has no formal powers to regulate high-street retailers or off-shore cold calling, but the combination of a crack-down by the mobile networks on the behaviour of their retailers, action by consumer groups and increased customers awareness seems to have eliminated the cowboys. Cashback deals still exist, but consumers can buy with a much higher degree of confidence, as the table shows.
Complaints still happen, but I’m genuinely delighted to see the level around cashback so low. There’s still work to be done on mis-selling and slamming, but the trend is also down. Mis-selling is a broad category, usually occurring where a consumer alleges they’ve been told a service is free or inclusive at the point of sale, only to find out it carries a charge or just isn’t available. Slamming is the illegal switching of a subscriber’s phone (or other utility) service to another provider without their consent.
Friend me
 Facebook certainly has come a long way from its 2004 origins as a yearbook for Harvard University students. Easily the most popular social networking site with more than 400 million users worldwide, it may be about to provide more features, if rumours can be believed.
‘Project Titan’ is expected to be Facebook’s unveiling of greatly expanded messaging capabilities, adding full email functionality to its pages. Currently, Facebook messaging is only available by logging directly into the site, but users will be granted their chosen-name@facebook.com, accessible while browsing, or through POP3 and IMAP clients.
Microsoft have the biggest webmail share at present, with around 260 million users. A move into email could scoop the top slot for Facebook very quickly. But beyond our own pages, why does it matter?
Customers want information on the move, and they want it all the time. Newly launched reporting tool, Mobile Media Metrics (MMM), from the GSM Association demonstrates the importance of social networking sites to the mobile industry. The data for December 2009 shows that five million people spent in total, more than 2 billion minutes on Facebook from mobiles. That’s more than seven hours of checking status updates each, and accounts for more than 50% of all data use shown in the survey. Perhaps explaining why every phone is now advertised dripping with social networking widgets and brand names.
The provisional data from MMM only includes Orange, Vodafone and O2. T-Mobile and 3 are taking part as well, and their data may push the figure even higher.
Verizon continue to gender market its portfolio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLh0gfMvJ7g
Someone in the advertising team at American operator, Verizon Wireless, wants to stick to the philosophy of gender selling. Last year, the Motorola Droid launch was very much aimed at boys, with the racehorse duct-taped to a scud-missile line. But is it wise this time to aim the Palm Pre+ at Girls?
Isn’t it dangerous to put the idea in my head that a phone I’d thought was pretty neat, with one of the very best implementations of multitasking, is now a girls phone? What do you think?
3+D=£2
 The success of Avatar, the second highest grossing movie of all time has virtually every industry salivating and attempting to jump on the 3D bandwagon. 3D TVs and monitors are ultra cool but will have a price-tag to scare away all but the most fat-wallet laden innovators for a year or two yet. And we haven’t even gone through the pain of competing platforms, you know it will happen.
In the meantime, developers and manufactures will look to smaller screen devices to pilot technology and increase user acceptance of 3D applications, and of using goggles or glasses. I hope message alert and simple icons forming the beginnings of a head-up display will be combined to increase utility and future-factor.
Roughly a quarter chargeable sales
 Market researcher Gartner publishes its latest report, revealing an incredible two and a half billion bits of software were downloaded across ‘i’ phones and pods last year. The number downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008 has been catapulted above the three billion milestone.
Opinions differ on the quantity that were actual sales, but with only 16 million apps downloaded across *all* rival platforms, Apple are dominating the market with a percentage cut in the very high nineties, however you cut the cake.
Gartner forecast app sales and revenue to grow and grow. Other pundits suggest the smartphone segment of mobile sales is expected to grow by 10% in 2010. But with the early majority more hesitant about paying for downloads and instead focused on their social contacts, more revenue share will be drawn from advertising. Unsurprisingly Apple has just acquired its own mobile ad firm, Quattro Wireless.
Dozens of new tablet devices premiered at the CES show last week (more on these in another post), and the secret to driving consumer demand for them will be finding something worthwhile to use them for, that isn’t just as easy on a smartphone or laptop. What the killer app will be, or even if it exists is still up in the air, but expect thousands of attempts to claim the prize.
Access Gateway becomes Sure Signal
 First to the UK with a femtocell last July, Vodafone this week rebranded their Access Gateway with the more customer-friendly name Sure Signal. Their web page details several customer accolades for the product, examples where poor or no previous coverage was available due to living or working in basement flats, or in the wilds of Northumberland.
The box is similar to a router and must be plugged into an existing 1Mb or better fixed-line broadband connection. It allows up to four 3G Voda mobiles to operate at a time, and 32 can be registered in total. The cost for Sure Signal is £50 up front if your monthly plan is at least £25, or £120 for all other customers.
Access Gateway wasn’t very popular, but the industry are watching closely and willing femtocells to succeed, not least because pesky data traffic is instantly transferred to another providers bandwidth. Consumer concerns will remain due to essentially paying a second time to use their own connection when their mobile network can’t provide a signal in the first place.
It would be cool to be able to take your femtocell anywhere in the world, plug it into a local connection, and have a mini network to avoid roaming charges. Regrettably, they only work from your registered home landline number, and all kinds of licensing laws might get in the way.
Blond ambition?
As the physical and digital words become ever more closely meshed together, here’s an interesting concept video from Nokia’s mixed reality experience team. It demonstrates the potential use of near-eye display glasses, gaze tracking and a haptic wristband for gesture control (a bit like a Wii controller).
On the other hand, mixed reality might have a shadowy undertone. Do you think the actress starts to look a bit uncomfortable by the time she gets her third message? I can imagine her regretting the sign up to unlimited partner tracking.
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