The website of Alex Kinch, live from London
Archive for July, 2007
Tony Blair learns how to text
Jul 13th
Link: BBC NEWS | Politics | Blair gets to grips with mobiles
Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has taken one of the biggest steps in his new career since leaving office last month – by learning how to use text messaging.
Speaking to a Labour Party fundraising events, he admitted he’s only just got the hang of texting, having only bought his first mobile phone last October - and his first message got a reply back asking: “Who are you?”
(Thanks to Krystal for spotting this one!)
Can you blend an iPhone?
Jul 12th
Link: Will It Blend? | Presented By Blendtec
OK so I promised not to write anything more about the iPhone unless it was groundbreaking, exciting, and worth reading. Surely putting one through a blender is all of the above?
In a rather interesting PR stunt, American blender manufacturer Blendtec have been asking ‘Will It Blend?‘ for a while now, putting all sorts of weird and wonderful things through their range of blenders. We’ve had glowsticks, Barbie dolls, diamonds, and now – the iPhone.
Want to see what an iPhone does when you put it in a blender? Here’s the video:
As always, the standard disclaimer applies: DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME (or at work, for that matter)!
Sprint hang up on 1,000 annoying customers
Jul 12th
Link: Nevada County National News – TheUnion.com
US mobile carrier Sprint-Nextel has chopped 1,000 of their customers – for calling them too much.
The customers, who’ve been averaging 40-50 calls per month to the companys customer services team, got sent letters on June 29, giving them a month to find an alternative mobile supplier.
“While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs,” the letters said.
Sprint spokesperson Roni Singleton said: “We feel strongly that the decisions we made, we stand by them. These decisions weren’t made lightly. If the average person is calling less than once per month and these people are calling 40 or 50 times more, that takes away from customer service. Our priority is to improve the customer experience.”
Masabi launch secure mobile card payments
Jul 12th
Masabi, the secure mobile applications company, today announced that BT has completed validation of the cryptographic
algorithms used in EncryptME, the world’s first mobile Java security application that provides web commerce level security on the vast majority of existing handsets. EncryptME is to be used by train ticketing technology specialists YourRail to enable tickets to be securely bought and used from almost all mobile phones using credit and debit cards.
In a single SMS message, or a few bytes of GPRS data, EncryptME can set up a secure session and sign up a new user, a new credit card and make a transaction thereby bringing fast, secure and convenient m-commerce to mobile users across virtually all handsets in current use.
“The main reason internet commerce has not been extended into the mobile world has been that most handsets cannot support the security available on PCs which is necessary to safely authenticate users and perform transactions. EncryptME symbolises the turning of the tide,” said Ben Whitaker, Co-Founder and head of Security Development at Masabi. “For the first time EncryptME brings internet security to mobile phones thereby enabling the likes of Amazon, eBay and any other internet retailer to extend their offerings to users on the move”
Beware nutty cakes at the Co-Op
Jul 11th
Link: Food Standards Agency – Gadsby’s withdraws five bakery products
I don’t make a habit of posting blog entries about food, but this one caught my eye – so I thought I’d share it.
Gadsby’s of Southwell Ltd has withdrawn five different bakery products from certain Co-op stores due to incorrect allergen labelling information. Almond is not declared on the labels which may make the products unsuitable for people with a nut allergy. The Agency has issued an Allergy Alert.
The company has withdrawn the affected products from Co-op stores in the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire area. Customers with a nut allergy are advised not to eat the products as they contain almond which is not declared on the labels.
With me so far? Good. So what’s this got to do with SMS and mobile? Tucked away at the bottom of the press release, I found this useful bit of information:
You can get details of all the latest allergy alerts as soon as they’re issued by getting the details sent as a SMS text message direct to your mobile phone.
To sign up to this free service, simply send the text message ‘START ALLERGY’ to the number 62372. To unsubscribe, just text ‘STOP ALLERGY’ to the same number.
Having never had a nut allergy, and not really being allergic to anything (except Marmite, and that’s more of a ‘eww it’s disgusting’ thing than a proper allergy), I didn’t realise there was an Allergy Alert service – and it was available by SMS. How neat is that? If you do know someone that has a nut allergy, or you’re just curious to know when this sort of information is released, you can get it delivered straight to your phone courtesy of the UK’s Food Standards Agency.
Another great example of the public sector finally getting on the mobile bandwagon.
Realeyes3D celebrate 30 million milestone
Jul 11th
Paris-based Realeyes3D, a leading provider of mobile imaging applications, today announced their handwritten messaging applications for camera phone users had been shipped to more than 30 million camera phones worldwide.
The applications, which has also been licensed via an OEM agreement with Samsung and Sanyo, allow camera phone users to send messages that they create in their own handwriting, using a standard pen and any type of paper. The user simply jots down a message, takes a picture and RealEyes3D’s Digitizer application extracts the message and transmits it to the recipient. Their other offering, W-Postcard, provides the facility to add comments, notes, doodles or drawings to pictures users have already taken with their camera phone, and again transmit it to the recipient using standard MMS technology.
‘Realeyes3D’s handwritten messaging applications represent an evolution in person-to-person communication beyond text messaging,” said Benoît Bergeret, co-founder and CEO of Realeyes3D. ‘In the fiercely competitive wireless marketplace, operators and handset manufacturers are actively looking for applications that add compelling value to their devices as camera phone adoptions skyrocket.”
Monstermob search for locksmith in Philippines
Jul 11th
Link: Monstermob Locked out of its Philippines Offices
It hasn’t been a good time lately for UK mobile content provider Monstermob. Their share price recently collapsed after plans were announced to de-list from the stockmarket, they’ve recently been denied access to financial information from their Chinese subsidary, and now.. well this.
In a court hearing last week, Monstermob staff were barred from entering the offices of Information Gateway (who they acquired as part of Upper Mobile in 2005) and they’ve been blocked from making any changes to the staff or directors of the company.
Under the purchase agreement, the accountants of both Monstermob and Information Gateway were to produce a joint report stating the profit before tax for the earn-out period by no later than 30 June 2007. Monstermob has for this purpose appointed a ‘Big Four’ accountancy firm and DIAL has appointed a local firm of accountants. These two firms have produced an independent report each, which draw significantly different conclusions.
Monstermob has now received notification from DIAL claiming that it is in breach of its agreement to buy the company. On 2 July 2007 the Company received a notice of breach from DIAL, alleging that the Company was in breach of the terms of the SPA, an allegation the Company refutes, and demanding recision of the SPA.
As a few people have pointed out in the industry, perhaps they should have sold out instead of floating – and taken a slightly more cautious approach to their dealings in Asia.
ROK and Nokia in D2C Mobile TV initiative
Jul 11th
ROK TV today announced a deal with Nokia, which will see the mobile TV company offering a direct to consumer business-orientated mobile TV service to Nokia Eseries device users.
The service, available in the UK now and due for launch into mainland Europe from August onwards, will headline with channels from Bloomberg, CNBC, EuroNews and ITN.
Commenting on the plans, David King, business development manager, Enterprise Solutions, Nokia said “Nokia Eseries customers tend to be professional people who seek instant information and entertainment, on-demand, so it is a logical and practicle step to offer our customers a business-orientated mobile TV service.”
“We’re absolutely delighted to be working with Nokia on this exciting deployment of mobile TV” said Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman of ROK. “As we know there is a huge and as-yet untapped market for live and instantly-available business and financial news amongst mobile TV customers.”
ROK TV is available via the Downloads! Service on such devices as Nokia E61i and Nokia E65, initially, which the owner simply needs to activate to begin watching the services. Two channel packages will be offered – a 5 channel ‘Strictly Business’ package, to be charged in the UK at £5.00 a month, with a heavy emphasis on business news and information channels such as Bloomberg, CNBC Europe, EuroNews in 9 languages and regional news channels, and a 10 channel ‘ROK All’ TV package, to be charged at £10.00 a month containing all the live business news channels as well as additional sports news, music videos and comedy channels. As a trial, both TV packages will be free to view for the first 2 weeks.
PayPal launch Mobile Checkout service
Jul 11th
Link: PayPal Mobile Checkout Opens for Business
Popular Internet payment provider PayPal has announced the launch of their new mobile payment service.
The company, owned by auction giant eBay, says Mobile Checkout will allow consumers in the USA, UK and Canada to purchase items securely by simply clicking on a PayPal button on the merchants mobile internet site.
Kevinj Dulsky, senior director of PayPal Mobile commented: “As the mobile commerce market grows as an extension of ecommerce, it will be critical for online merchants to adopt a secure mobile payment platform to reach new consumers and to remain competitive in the market.”
This is not the first move by PayPal to capture the fast growing mobile commerce sector. In April 2006 they began to offer a mobile payment service using SMS, which allows consumers to buy, donate or send money from their existing PayPal account via text.
News of the service comes in the week that Juniper Research predicted mobile payments will generate transactions worth $22bn by 2011.
Blyk to offer classified ads
Jul 11th
According to Mobile Entertainment, ad-funded mobile service Blyk is planning to offer classified ads to its users.
The service, originally due to launch in the UK in July but recently put back to October, has said subscribers will be able to market their goods and services in the same way as major consumer brands. Blyk says the service will besimilar to eBay, but totally mobile – and possibly lacking an auction facility.
Jonathan MacDonald, sales director of Blyk, said: ‘There’s so much talk about mobile advertising, but it’s easy to overlook the potential of user-generated ads. Our system makes it easy for individuals to define and send ads to other users. I think they will – in big numbers.”
Recent Comments