Alex Kinch

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh no, not another SpinVox-bashing post”. So rather than continue Ewan’s previous run of what some people have accused of being a personal rant when it’s just merely reporting facts with a few points of personal opinion attached, I’m going to do something different here. I’ll state some “facts” from [...]

I had lunch today with a contact in the TV industry who is working on producing some rather good daily video content. It’s entertainment, movie and games news – and from what I’ve seen of the pilots very professional. It wouldn’t look out of place on a regular TV channel.
His plan is to get it [...]

Are ‘yoof’ targetted MVNO Blyk shutting down in the UK? Yes they are. But then they weren’t. But now they are. We think.
Just before the weekend I wrote that they’d inked a deal with Vodafone in Holland.
Remember Blyk, the ‘yoof’ ad-funded mobile service? Last thing we heard they were rumoured to be shutting up shop [...]

It’s been a bit of a bad week for O2 and their UK network.
On Monday a fire at an unnamed substation took out a whole load of cell sites across London.
On Tuesday it managed to break the whole data network for the majority of customers. Not just 3G but GPRS too. In fact the only [...]

Here’s a curious one. O2 have just announced the launch of something called ‘Fixed Number Anywhere’ – a service which gives O2 business customers a regular UK geographic (i.e. 01xxx 02xxx) or freephone (0808) number attached to their mobile. The caller dials the number, it rings your mobile, and voila.
But hang on a second, we’ve [...]

Remember Blyk, the ‘yoof’ ad-funded mobile service? Last thing we heard they were rumoured to be shutting up shop – but it turned out they were merely changing direction towards an operator partnership model.
With the course set towards that destination, Blyk announced yesterday they’ve inked their first operator deal – an exclusive with Vodafone in [...]

I’m sure you’ve heard of SpinVox – the UK-based firm that turns your voicemails into texts. And I’m pretty certain you’ve probably used them at some point – or know someone who has.
There’s been rumours flying around since SpinVox first surfaced that the clever technology that recognises speech and turns it into a pretty text [...]

I had a note from the guys over at InfoBip the other day about their new SMS offering. Called ‘Vanguard’, it provides a direct connection to UK mobile networks with just one SMSC between the sender and the recipient.
‘So what’, I hear you ask. ‘Surely all SMS providers are the same?’ No, they’re not – [...]

I spent an afternoon at the Global Messaging 2009 conference in London a little while back. Promising to ‘reverse the decline of messaging ARPUs’ and discussions on ’strategies to grow messaging traffic and revenue’, the conference itself featured some big names from the likes of O2, IDC, MTN and Vodafone.
But hang on a second, this [...]

Hello, Alex here. You may remember me from such recent articles as ‘Are mobile calls as secure as you think‘ and ‘Datawind launch three new mobile Internet devices‘.
To say I’ve been a bit busy with other projects lately would be an understatement. However, it hasn’t stopped me putting in the hours for this esteemed publication [...]