The website of Alex Kinch, live from London
Features
Volunteers wanted, must be willing to lock up their old mobile
Jun 17th
Are you fed up with your old mobile? Willing to swap it for a shiny new handsets for a few weeks? We’ve three brand new 3 handsets, three cages, and are looking for three volunteers willing to lock up their old mobile and try 3 and Skype for a fortnight.
Here’s the deal. We’ve teamed up with the guys at 3mobilebuzz to promote free Skype calling on 3. The challenge? 3 want to lock up your mobile, and replace it with a model that’s a little more ’3′ (yes I know, terrible pun).
We’ve got an INQ1, Sony Ericsson C510, and a Nokia E63 – all with a 3 SIM card and free calls for you to try for a couple of weeks. There’s also a cute little ‘phone cell’ (again, another terrible pun) for you to lock up your old handset.
The catch? There isn’t one really – all we ask in return is you take care of the handset, don’t flush it down the toilet, and bring it back in a couple of weeks. Oh, and we want to know how you got on, so we’ll be asking to write a little piece about how you found your two weeks with your new handset, free Skype calling and 3 in general.
Interested? Drop a comment on this post telling us what your current mobile is, and which phone you’d like to try, and we’ll pick three lucky people and sort the rest.
Update: Just a small note to apologise to Lloyd at the Tuttle Club, where I was planning to give out the handsets. Lloyd has quite rightly pointed out that commercial organisations wishing to do promotional work at Tuttle need to agree it with him before hand, and pay a sponsorship fee. As I just happened to be there for something else on Friday morning, it sort of made sense. Neither myself or anyone associated with this blog have received any renumeration for this promotion from 3, 3mobilebuzz, or their associated companies – and we aren’t being paid for it. However I understand there are firm procedures in place, and apologise if anyone thought I was trying to circumvent them.
If you’re interested in a handset, add your comment and we’ll get in touch to get an address of where we can post it to.
Where is Payforit Today? Del Dias, MD, AEI Media
Jun 1st
Del Dias, AEI
In the last of a series of articles covering the ‘Where is Payforit Today?’ event (link to part one and part two) the final speaker of the evening was Del Dias, Managing Director at AEI Media – who amongst other things are a content provider customer of Dialogue.
Del gave us an introduction to the company – in a nutshell they have a background in music and entertainment, focussing on drum & bass, dubstep and dance genres. Established in Sheffield in 1996, and working with Dialogue since ’98, they’ve also produced the top-selling ‘Drum & Bass Arena’ compilation series, and have the number one music-based podcast on iTunes.
Back in the ‘good old days’ of ring tones, AEI looked after mobile content delivery, billing and marketing for some of the biggest names in the music industry, like Warner and Ministry of Sound. Del cited an example of Ministry of Sound – who were converting 30-40% of CD sales into single ring tone purchases – or to put it another way at least a third of people who’d bought one of their compilations for upwards of £13-14 had then gone off and spent a few quid on a single song as a ringtone for their phone.
Unfortunately, Jamster killed the market in 2005 with it’s now infamous ‘Crazy Frog’-driven subscription service – and some would say in turn killed consumer confidence in the mobile industry. Back to 2009 though.. AEI have a ‘dual-download’ (mobile and PC) music store, selling full tracks for 99p – at least that’s the price if you pay by credit or debit card. Del said they were having to charge a premium for customers wishing to charge the transaction to their mobile with Payforit or Web Payforit as the operator charges were such that the already razor-thin profit margin on a single track download was virtually wiped out at 99p.
Their approach was to reluctantly put the price up for Payforit transactions to £1.50 per track – a 50% increase over the cost to the user if they paid by card. The proof is in the stats – and with Payforit only accounting for 3-5% of total transactions in the past eight months, it’s quite possible the higher price is a factor in the apparent reluctance of consumers to pay with their mobiles.
So after all that, is Del a fan of Payforit? “Mobile billing is currently in flux”, he said. “I support Payforit but there are still issues to get over. There is not an immediate solution and time is needed to resolve these matters.
“I also feel that the development process of Payforit has been quite painful and perhaps that is the problem created when competing operators work together on the same project. I am optimistic for the future and for a growth in revenues, but I don’t think these will come solely from mobile, but a convergence of mobile and traditional internet”
For the final word, Del’s tip from the music industry. When asked what the music industry think of Payforit, full track mobile downloads and everything else, he shrugged his shoulders and said “We get so many calls every day from people in the music industry asking ‘can you build an iPhone app? That’s where the money is right now’.
And with that, the presentations were over. My thanks to Dialogue and BCS PR for putting me on the guest list after my 11th hour request, and also a special mention to Andrew Darling of AIME for organising and moderating a sometimes rather noisy event!
Where is Payforit today? Rory Maguire, Head of Payment Services, 3
May 29th
Continuing the series of articles on Payforit, we turn the spotlight to Rory Maguire, Head of Payment Services for 3, and the presentation he gave at aime’s ‘Where is Payforit today?’ seminar.
It’s been said many a time the opening slide is the key to hooking an audience – and putting ‘Warning – my presentation is controversial’ in big letters pretty much did the job in this case.
After a brief overview of Payforit (see part one of this series if you missed Guillaume Peersman’s introduction to the service), Rory explained that 3 feel that the mobile services sector are stuck in a rut. There’s a decline in consumer interest due to the ‘same old’ products being put out there, poor return on investment (ROI) on advertising, low pay-outs to content providers, consumer suspicion over the mobile industry and payment after the whole run of premium SMS subscription, voting and competition ‘scams’ a few years back, regulatory pressure to stop the aforementioned ‘scams’, and to top it all off – we’re in the biggest recession since the 1930′s.
So what does the industry do? Not one to mince his words, Rory said they moan about pay-outs, mislead users by hiding the true nature of subscription services, and spend time complaining the regulator is heavy-handed. And the vicious circle continues.
How can this loop be broken? “What is required is the pricing clarity of Payforit, helping to rebuild the consumers trust by providing them with a safe buying environment. Payforit helps define the good from the bad, but growth is limited on pure handset content. I believe Web Payforit will change the game and open up new opportunities as well as protect consumers, it is a mountain of gold that no one has as yet tapped into”.
Last year Premium SMS payments for web-based content (which Web Payforit is hoping to take over from) were implicated in at least four PhonePayPlus adjudications – totalling many thousands of pounds worth of fines. Rory argued that the way Payforit is set-Payforit up – in terms of security, user authorisation, and control over what the content provider can bill – makes it safer for both on and off-handset payments. The latter – through Web Payforit – would really help online retailers reach 60-70% of the UK population that 3 reckon are ‘e-commerce disadvantaged’ – i.e. no credit or debit card. Rory cited research that in addition to this statistic, 64% of the UK population have both access to the web and a mobile.
So the technology is there, how do the industry get consumers to use – and more importantly – trust it – as a payment method?
Rory said whilst he accepted Payforit promotion was an issue for operators, they do not want to take out billboards and adverts shouting about the initiative and instead would rather let awareness grow through consumer usage, word of mouth and information provided on operator portals and websites. 3 plan to run a ‘Payforit is safe’ promotion on their web and mobile portals in the coming weeks to kick off this process.
Whilst Payforit is very much a UK operator initiative, Rory was asked for his views on rolling it out to 3′s sister companies outside the UK. Guillaume Peersman of Dialogue had earlier revealed that talks were already underway with the Irish operators and regulators to bring Payforit to the country – something that Rory echoed and said had been met with much enthusiasm by content providers, due to the large amount of mobile scams blighting their mobile industry, so much so that the regulatory bodies became unable to cope and unfortunately all content providers were tarred with the same brush in the eyes of the consumer. 3 have also spoken to their counterparts in Australia, who are pushing the concept for adoption by other operators in the market like Optus, Telstra and Vodafone.
The lack of operator willingness to spend money from Payforit – but still take large chunks of money from payments as a ‘transaction charge’ – was the straw that broke the camels back at this point, with the audience breaking out in what could only be described as a ‘minor shouting match’, with accusations of operators ‘ripping off content providers and consumers’ being shouted from the back of the room. After about 10-15 minutes of shouting – and rather heated debate – the moderator managed to calm the mood in the room and the audience settled down to hear the third speaker of the night – Del Dias from content provider AEI Mobile.
Coming on Monday: Del Dias from content provider AEI Mobile gives his view.
Where is Payforit today? Guillaume Peersman, UK MD, Dialogue
May 27th
Guillaume Peersman, Dialogue
A few years ago a handful of operators, aggregators and content providers got together and quietly launched a new payment method called Payforit. Two years on, how has it evolved?
That was the question on everyone’s lips at the aptly named ‘Where is Payforit today?’ seminar, organised by aime (Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment), which took place in London last Thursday. With speakers representing all three sections of the chain (operators, mobile services providers and content providers) – plus the promise of a no holds-barred questions and answers session, I sat poised with my pen and paper and settled in for an interesting evening.
First up was Guillaume Peersman, UK Managing Director of Dialogue Communications – a mobile solutions provider (SMS aggregator to those of us who’ve been around the industry long enough) and one of the leads on the Payforit initiative.
Guillaume first gave us an overview of Payforit. Launched in March 2006, with the first services going live in January 2007, Payforit enables content providers to charge up to £10 to a users post-pay or pre-pay account. Mandated by all the UK operators (apart from Orange, bizarrely) it can handle both one-off and repeat subscription-based charging, and can also be used on the ‘full-fat’ non-mobile web.
Other developments added to the original Payforit specification along the way include one-click charging, charging to broadband dongles, and the ability to charge not just for mobile content but other low value items like CD’s, DVD’s, tickets, etc.
There are issues though. Whilst one operator has opened up a £30 price point, the rest are still stuck at a maximum of £10. Incidentally these price points are fixed – eg 25p, £1, £5 – so you can’t charge for instance £4.99 or £6.34 or any other random figure. Consumer awareness is still quite low – Payforit accounts for around 8-10% of revenue for Dialogue’s customers compared to the traditional Premium SMS mobile charging method. And whilst Payforit is showing some growth, it’s still got a long way to go before it overtakes the established payment methods like credit/debit card and PayPal for low-value items.
So where do Dialogue see Payforit going in the future? Guillaume reckons it will replace premium SMS billing, be adopted outside the UK (Ireland have already shown an interest), see growth from non-mobile content and evolve into a more converged web and mobile purchasing experience.
“We need to get away from Payforit being seen solely as a mobile content buying solution”, he says. “The content market has levelled off and with the launch of web payforit new markets are being identified, such as e-vouchers, CD’s and books, thus widening it’s appeal and providing the consumer with another payment option using mobile billing, but more importantly reaching those buyers who don’t have bank accounts, credit or debit cards”. He pointed out that whilst premium SMS billing was launched back in 1998 it only really took off in 2002 as a charging method.
With Payforit only two years into it’s evolution, and with a positively cautious attitude towards making sure it isn’t tarnished with the same ‘scam and fraud’ brush as premium SMS was a few years back, Guillaume reckons the use of Payforit is set to grow in the coming years.
“At our last Payforit seminar in 2007, I predicted that Payforit would dominate m-payments for some time to come, but that it was by no means the finished product. This prediction has been realised with the introduction of Web Payforit and Single Click, however we still have a way to go in reaching our ultimate goal of making Payforit a consistent and recognisable brand for consumers across all WAP sites.”
Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll tell you what Rory Maguire, 3 UK’s Head of Payment Services, had to say.
Interview: Haim Yashar, President, TCM Mobile
May 26th
American company TCM Mobile claimed recently to have built the world’s first totally VoIP-based cellular network – a story which we covered here. I caught up for a quick chat with company president Haim Yashar to find out more.
First I asked him for a little bit of background on the company. Having spent quite a few years immersed in the mobile and VoIP space, I hadn’t heard of them before – and was curious of what differed their offering from existing mobile VoIP services, like Vopium, Nimbuzz and most recently Skype.
‘We founded the company five years ago’, Haim explained. ‘Our goal was to create a new mobile technology without the entrance barriers of traditional cellular services – for instance the high cost of infrastructure, and the limited availability and relative expense of licensed GSM and 3G spectrum. We wanted to remove these restrictions by developing a platform that provided the quality, services and robustness of a traditional cellular service but with the flexibility of VoIP technology and using unlicensed frequency space, like 2.4GHz [traditionally used for low power Wi-Fi services]‘.
Whilst the theory was good, how would such a technology work in practice – especially with the limitations of using such frequency ranges – for instance interference, capacity, etc.?
‘Our R&D team, based in Israel, knew that this wouldn’t be a simple job. We’ve spent five years overcoming the hurdles involving capacity, hand-off, scalability, and quite importantly the fact we’re sharing spectrum with an increasing amount of Wi-Fi base stations and the like. The whole system has been built from scratch with these limitations in mind – and I believe we are now at the stage where we have a platform using our own patented technology which is comparable – if not better than – traditional GSM’.
So if it uses VoIP technology and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi spectrum, could services designed for the TCM platform work as VoIP Wi-Fi handsets, and more importantly, with an increasing amount of smartphones supporting these technologies, vice-versa? Plus could a TCM designed handset roam off to a traditional GSM network?
‘Good questions. Whilst TCM handsets can connect to regular VoIP services over Wi-Fi, it’s not as great the other way around. Our handsets feature special hardware and software components to overcome the issues we discussed earlier, for instance seamless handover, frequency management, and dealing with interference from other users on the same channels. As for GSM roaming, our first generation of handsets don’t have GSM radio at the moment, but it is something we’re expecting to offer within the coming months’.
Sticking with the whole compatibility theme, I put a theoretical question to Haim. If a company with a public Wi-Fi network, such as The Cloud or BT Openzone, wanted to deploy TCM’s technology and offer a cellular service, could they re-use their existing Wi-Fi access points? ‘Unfortunately not’, he replies. ‘Our platform is designed to be secure, robust, reliable and support all the features you’d expect on a regular GSM network – plus more. Existing Wi-Fi access points – whilst good for data – are not really designed for the service levels and features our users would come to expect, so whilst we would share the same frequency space as an existing Wi-Fi network it would require our own technology to provide voice services’.
So who are TCM Mobile’s prospective customers? ‘Something you should understand is this: we’re a technology company, not a vendor or a standard equipment supplier – and a very well funded one at that. Our aim was to develop the technology – and we’re now considering the next step to bring the product to market. We’ve had considerable interest from companies in parts of the world like India, where deploying traditional GSM technology in rural areas is very costly and takes many resources. The thing they like about our offering is they can roll out cellular services to these areas at a fraction of the cost and resource requirements normally associated with GSM. For instance our base stations are small enough – and have such low energy requirements – that a site can be run off a small generator’.
With an open invitation to visit their trial deployment in Syracuse, New York, and so many more questions to ask, I felt I’d gained a little more insight into TCM Mobile. However with our allotted interview time already close to running out and the joys of a conference call routed from London through New York and onwards to Israel meaning it wasn’t so easy to make each other heard, I had to leave it there for now. It’ll be interesting to watch this company and their future announcements – I’m sure we haven’t heard the last from them.
Farewell, T-Mobile UK?
May 1st
UPDATE: It doesn’t seem that long ago that we lost the one2one brand in favour of T-Mobile – and it might be about to happen again if Deutsche Telekom’s shareholders get their way, and force an exit of the UK market.
According to a report in the FT, T-Mob’s parent company are under pressure from the German government and private equity group Blackstone – it’s two main shareholders – to do something about it’s under-performing UK mobile operation.
Sources close to the supervisory board say the controlling investors are worried about the performance of T-Mobile UK, which is only the fourth-largest player in the UK market – with only Hutchinson’s 3 service having less market share.
The sources quoted by the FT continue: “the issue of getting out of one of Telekom’s largest markets was first aired about six months ago, but falling asset valuations soon made Berlin and Blackstone more cautious about pursuing a sale option alone.
“An alternative to a sale could be a merger or acquisition deal with a UK rival to gain market share, but they want a decision yesterday. Berlin and Blackstone want a quick decision [from executives] about fixing the UK”.
Any proposed merger or sale would have to meet with the approval of the German government, which controls 32% of Deutsche Telekom, and Blackstone, who account for a 4.5% stake – and then overcome any regulatory hurdles. However, according to industry analysts quoted in a recent FT article regulators would be unlikely to veto such a move. One option muted is a merger with 3 – who have already signed a radio access network sharing agreement with T-Mobile. Then again, we’ve been here before back in 2007 – although last time analysts predicted T-Mobile would purchase 3.
The deal would be a good fit – 3 themselves don’t have a 2G network, and would save money by not having to pay Orange for roaming access. The combined group would account for up to 30% of the market – quite possibly ahead of the current leader O2, who had 28.3% of subscribers at the end of 2008.
Another possibility is a merger with France Telecom’s Orange subsidary – analysts from JP Morgan say this is a possibility – which would give the combined group over 40% of the UK mobile subscriber base.
United Mobile – is the end nigh for travel SIMs?
Apr 21st
It’s been an interesting few weeks in the world of travel SIM providers. If rumours are to be believed, United Mobile – one of the biggest (and longest established) providers of travel SIMs is in the throws of death – and already some of it’s competitors are trying to pick at the bones.
On Tuesday 7th April, Truphone-owned Sim4Travel registered unlted-mobile.com – a typo suspiciously close to the official United Mobile website of united-mobile.com. At the time of writing this entry, it was offering customers of ‘other’ travel SIM providers a free Sim4Travel SIM card: “Having problems with your travel SIM provider? You can’t make calls? You’re experiencing a poor service? Or simply, you just want peace of mind that you won’t be let down when you travel.”
Even more damning was a page found at www.sim4travel.com/um/ – which has since been taken down (but still available in Google’s cache) that went as far as to name United Mobile, by saying “Having problems with your Umited Mobile SIM? You can’t make calls? You’re experiencing a poor service? Or simply, you just want peace of mind that you won’t be let down when you travel.”
Meanwhile on Thursday 10th April Truphone issued a press release – which appears to have been swiftly withdrawn – trumpeting the same offer. A quick search of Google reveals that the largest German telecoms magazine Teltarif picked up on the story – which is translated into English via Google here.
Do Truphone know something we don’t? Perhaps. But their actions didn’t go unnoticed by United Mobile. An article in today’s print edition of Mobile News says that UM are to sue Truphone and Sim4travel for fraud. Both sides are quoted in the article. Firstly Sim4Travel’s Matt Rowntree:
“We have recently heard that global SIM provider United Mobile is having trouble supporting its customers. SIM4Travel would like to reassure all United Mobile customers that we can provide them with a continuation of service and would be happy to send them a replacement SIM card for free by first class post. Their remaining credit will be valid on our network.
“If the situation with United Mobile becomes more serious we will be more proactive in contacting their customers although we don’t want to be seen as vultures stealing their customers.”
United Mobile CEO Sven Donhuysen said: “It seems that SIM4Travel is really desperate. Otherwise I cannot explain their actions. What they are doing is fraud. We have our lawyers involved now.”
Meanwhile, United Mobile customers at various Internet forums are complaining that their SIM cards are no longer working. One poster at Flyertalk said: “I’m trying to use my United Mobile SIM card in Singapore and it isn’t working. I’ve used it in many other countries with no problems. This is the first time in several weeks though. I also notice big chunks of the United Mobile website are also down. You can’t access your account for a example. It’s a worrisome coincidence.” whilst another in a thread on Crunchbase posted: Just heard that United Mobile has gone out of business. Their assets have been frozen awaiting liquidation, there is no way the service will restart.”.
Meanwhile German-based Sunsim announced yesterday an offer for UM subscribers who can no longer use their SIM cards. The starter pack gives customers a new SIM card plus €15 of call credit for €14.95.
Both United Mobile and Sim4Travel rely on platforms hosted by and network connectivity provided by Channel Islands-based mobile operator Jersey Telecom.
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