Posts tagged Press Release

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 a couple of other publications, and you can make up your own mind whether we – or the world of technology media at a whole – is on a witch hunt.

Financial Mail reported the following yesterday that:

• one of SpinVox’s ‘technology partners’ is about to pull the plug over an outstanding bill of £100,000.
• another supplier last week filed three county court claims against the company for over £200,000 of unpaid bills.
• other suppliers spoken to by the Financial Mail have said they haven’t been paid for months – if at all.
• some have been threatened with legal action by SpinVox if they spoke to the press.
• one of SpinVox’s call centre suppliers is filing a lawsuit in the High Court.

A quick crunch of the numbers involved in the article and it totals around £320,000.

Meanwhile The Guardian is reporting SpinVox have raised an undisclosed amount – rumoured to be at least £5.5m – of emergency funding from existing suppliers.

Financial Mail’s sources? I count three companies – at least – who aren’t SpinVox. The source of The Guardian’s story? SpinVox itself.

So what did SpinVox say when asked to comment by the Financial Mail? “We’re naturally having discussions with our customers and suppliers as we all adapt to the conditions of the credit crunch” said the unnamed person – who added they “could not comment on matters of litigation.”Random Posts

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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 – but it turned out they were merely changing direction towards an operator partnership model.

And here we are, a mere two days or so later, and they’re leaving the UK. Here’s a little excerpt from their blog post by co-founder Antti Öhrling:

For now, stick with us for the last month – you’ll continue to receive your free credit until midnight on 26th August and we’ll be bombarding you with great offers, brand messages, competitions and music exclusives.

Though Blyk will no longer be an active network operator in the UK, together we have re-shaped the future of communication and we hope you’ve enjoyed the journey. We certainly have. Blyk will continue to operate in other markets, providing the unique experience to members there in the same way we have in the UK. Thank you for your support over the last couple of years.

So that’s it then folks – move along, nothing to see. If you’re a Blyk customer you’ve got a month to get your PAC code and shift elsewhere. Alternatively, Reuters is reporting Orange (Blyk’s O in the MVNO acronym) have bagged the rights to the customer base – and will be launching a range of tariffs which’ll give you discounts for receiving ads and other marketing blurb.

If you’re tearful farewells, or this is the first you’ve heard of the soon-to-be-dead ad-funded mobile operator, you can re-live Blyk’s greatest moments on MIR here.Random Posts

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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 been able to do this for ages, right? Even back in the dark ages of BT’s ’star services’ on the then rather shiny and new System X exchanges, there was a call divert feature. Tap in *21*(your mobile number)# and anyone calling your landline would be automatically diverted to your mobile. They pay the call cost to your landline, and you pick up the tab for the divert to your mobile.

Here comes the interesting bit. There’s no divert charges. Not a penny. Admittedly there’s a £10/month service charge (£15/month for the freephone 0808 service), but no per minute costs – about 12p or so according to BT.

O2 – and most other mobile operators – have always claimed it costs them a lot of money to route a voice call over their mobile infrastructure. That’s why they’re quite happy taking an average of 6p a minute from the callers telco to terminate a call to your mobile. UK geographic number termination rates are quite a bit less than a penny a minute. So why the change of heart?

While you ponder that, I’ll tell you a bit more about Fixed Number Anywhere. As mentioned before, its aimed at O2 business customers. You can port your existing BT number or choose a new one, and up to five geo numbers can be linked to the same mobile phone. There’s also a hunt group feature, which allows calls to ring up to ten different O2 mobile numbers simultaneously or on a priority basis.

Simon Devonshire, Head of SME Marketing, O2, comments: “Desk phones were great when business was done from a desk but for the vast majority of small businesses the fixed nature of a landline is at odds with how they operate day to day. By converging a fixed landline number with a mobile service, small businesses can continue to maintain an image of being a local business, which is valued by customers, whilst maintaining the flexibility and mobility that has enabled them to adapt to and thrive in the current climate.”Random Posts

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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 wasn’t as smart as the company claimed it was. As their website says:

“So D2’s pretty smart. It’s bound to be, as D2’s a combination of artificial intelligence, voice recognition and natural linguistics. But it also knows what it doesn’t know and is able to call on human experts for assistance”

But how often are these ‘human experts’ called? And who are they?

Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s Technology Correspondent, has done a little digging – and come up with some shocking facts (link).

Claims have been made to the BBC that the majority of messages are manually transcribed by low paid staff in battery farmed call centres in South Africa and the Philippines.

And former call centre worker Mohammed Mustafa told the BBC “The machine doesn’t understand anything. You have to start typing when you hear the message.”

SpinVox have declined to tell the BBC how many messages are manually transcribed, claiming that information is ‘highly confidential and sensitive data’.

So do SpinVox treat your voice messages as ‘highly confidential and sensitive?’ Apparently not. The BBC took a look through SpinVox’s registration information under the Data Protection Act, and found the company claims it doesn’t transfer any data outside the European Economic Area. Which is fine, because obviously South Africa and the Philippines had a meeting overnight when I wasn’t looking and suddenly became part of Europe.. didn’t they?

Meanwhile, there’s the whole question over money. Where precisely has all that investment – the BBC claims over £120m – gone? Apparently not on voice recognition technology. That leads on to another question – if its mostly gone on paying for transcriptions at call centres, then surely the business model just doesn’t add up? If the cost of an agent transcribing a message in a call centre is more expensive than the cost SpinVox charges to the customer, then what’s the point?

And whilst we’re on the subject of money, The Register reported last week that SpinVox had asked employees to take share options instead of wages. The BBC has a quote from ISP ANLX – who host some of SpinVox’s servers – saying that they’ve removed SpinVox’s access as they haven’t paid the bills. Plus there’s also rumours floating around that ex MIR contributor James Whatley – who heads up “Digital & Social Media” and is seen by many as the ‘voice’ of SpinVox on various social media sites – is no longer employed by the company on a full time basis.

Now to balance things up a bit. I quite like SpinVox – I’ve used it on and off for a number of years. It sort of does what it says on the tin – the accuracy is sometimes horrendous (Guinness came out as ‘Gurmish’ once) and I’ve had to dial in occasionally to actually listen to the message. Did it save me time listening to voicemails? Yes. Was I aware that they used humans? Yup. Did I mind? No, but I assumed – probably like everyone else – that it wasn’t one big battery farming dictation operation with apparently not a single bit of technology involved.

I’m going to cancel my subscription to SpinVox today – and I’m sure other people will be. Something just doesn’t feel right here. I feel like we – as the mobile industry – have been misled about just how wonderful and technologically advanced the service really was. And if I was an investor specialising in funding hi-tech ventures, right now I’d be on the phone to my lawyers clarifying what I’d really invested in.Random Posts

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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 is the mobile industry – a sector not exactly renowned for its competitive cooperation and commercial innovation (compared to the world of the web/Internet). How groundbreaking would the conference really be? Would anything really come out of it, or would it just be a collection of industry leaders nodding their heads, agreeing they needed to do something useful with messaging, then after the beers had been drunk and the corporate hospitality exhausted, all go home and revert back to the paranoid blinkered attitude we have come to know and love from operators?

With limited time available, I figured a better way to gauge what was new, hot and exciting in messaging would be to hang around the exhibition and talk to some of the companies attending.

So what did I find? Representaives of some companies were quite welcoming, and more than happy to talk about what they were up to. Others were, how can I put it, more intent on hiding in the corner of their stands and being as welcoming and inviting as a shop with the shutters down and the open sign firmly turned to ‘closed’.

Armed with a notepad, a pen and my press pass, I wandered up to each stand (the ones with people there who looked like they wanted to talk and weren’t busy hiding or having customer meetings) and asked the simple question: ‘What’s new in your world?’

Comsys

First stop, Comsys. ‘So what do you do?’, I asked. ‘IVR’, said the gentlemen. Hmm, ok – that’s a strange start. This is a conference on mobile messaging – and you do voice response platforms for call centres? Fair enough – I let him carry on to see if there was anything I’d missed.

The company originally provided big beefy (read: expensive) IVR platforms to the likes of Christies, and Ikea. Their focus had now turned to the SME market, and they were showcasing a ‘drag and drop’ IVR service aimed at, as the guy put it, ‘non geeks’. Give it to an office manager and they could setup a simple switchboard or platform to route calls in a call centre. It’s all hosted by Comsys, so instead of spending large sums of cash on ominous grey boxes you just paid for what you needed. Plus with the simple user-friendly ‘normob-proof’ interface, it didn’t take a team of experts to set up and maintain.

‘When’s it available?’, I asked. ‘Autumn’, was the response. Hmm. Not exactly now, and not exactly innovative, I thought – casting my mind back to an IVR I’d built about 3-4 years ago with UK-based service provider Callagenix. That was sort of drag and drop – ok it didn’t have the worlds prettiest GUI but it was point click and go with a relatively simple web interface. So how far has IVR come in 3-4 years? Not too far, it seems.

After a brief chat about life, universe and the general state of the industry, I shuffled off to find something a little more innovative – and mobile-related.

MX Telecom

Next stop, MX Telecom. They’ve been around for donkeys years, originally as a simple SMS aggregator and over the years have moved into MMS, video shortcodes and voice. So what’s rocking their world?

‘We’ve got a large product, it’s really innovative, but I can’t tell you about it’. Oh. ‘But ask any of our competitiors and they’ll tell you what it is’. Oh. Again. So what is it? ‘I can’t tell you too much, but it launches in August, it’s something to do with FMCG [Google says that's 'Fast Moving Consumer Goods'], and we’ll be giving it a big push’.

OK, I’m still none the wiser. So is there anything I can write about? ‘Well we’ve just enhanced our 3G video calling service’. Zzz. Does anyone make video calls to an automated platform, let alone to each other? But then it twigged. Porn. Maybe that’s where the money is. And on that delightful (and slightly smutty) note, I moved on..

mBlox

Another stand, another SMS aggregator that’s been around since the year dot. So what was rocking mBlox’s world? Of course the question I really wanted to ask was ‘how are you getting on with all those PhonePayPlus adjudications and fines?’, but it didn’t seem the right time and place (if you click here and select mBlox as the service provider, you’ll see what I mean).

“We’re busy moving into new industry sectors, including travel alerts, anti-fraud services, and healthcare’. Well, I guess that’s better than reverse-billed SMS and subscription services. ‘We’ve also got a new reverse charge service for mobile data, which allows the content provider to pay the users data charge for downloading content’. Now this is quite interesting. Sometimes we forget a large chunk of the market doesn’t have unlimited data plans like us ‘mobile savvy’ lot do, and are still paying by the megabyte. What this service basically does is ‘reverse charges’ the data cost for downloading a bit of content back to the service provider – so if I pay lets say £3 for a ringtone (I know, I wouldn’t either, but bear with me) I don’t have to pay my data charges for downloading it. Neat. Is it available now? ‘We’re doing a trial at the moment in the UK, hopefully it’ll be rolled out soon’.

Finally, something interesting and vaguely innovative. With a renewed sense of vigor I wandered off to the next stand that looked welcoming.

I-New

‘Hello’, I piped up, ‘I’m writing for Mobile Industry Review. What are you showcasing today?’, I said to the rather tired looking gentlemen on the stand. He seemed quite delighted that someone was showing interest in their offerings – to be honest it was a bit of a quiet exhibition – and he started talking. I couldn’t keep up. My plan to use pen and paper was clearly failing, and I began to wonder whether I should have just bought an old fashioned dictaphone with me.

Reading my notes, and a pile of brochures I picked up, here’s a rough overview. I-New provide content and services platforms for mobile operators and MVNOs – think a big box you can lock up in a rack and offer a new service. They do messaging platforms, marketing software, IVR, instant messaging, colour ringback tones (known as ‘caller tunes’ on some operators in the UK), Intelligent Network services, and other operator-focuseed platforms. There’s also something interesting called ‘Mamba’ – which stands for ‘Mobile Assisted Micro Broker Application’ – which allows operators to provide money transfer services to mobile customers. With the UK operators and regulators seemingly failing to embrace the whole concept of mobile money transfer and flexible micropayments compared to somewhere like Africa, I wondered how many people attending today would be interested in such a solution. Still, with a worldwide audience, I’m sure there’d be an innovative operator somewhere in the room.

Lleida.net

Glancing around Lleida’s stand, and eyeing up their product literature, it looked like I’d found ‘yet another’ SMS and MMS aggregator – and I wasn’t wrong. The company, based in Spain, offer international SMS and MMS transit for MNOs, along with ENUM services, and something called ‘Virtual Handset’ – which at closer inspection is a regular virtual mobile service for receiving and sending SMS on your PC. So what was cooking in their world?

‘We’re showcasing Certified SMS today’, the representative told me. So what’s that? ‘It allows you to prove an SMS has been delivered to a particular destination’, he said. Right, so delivery reports? ‘Yes, but we provide a signed and digitally stamped delivery receipt via email to prove that the message has been delivered’. So who’s the intended audience? The brochure I have in front of me says legal documents. But surely a legal document is more than 160 characters? It seems more likely to be used for something like ‘Dear Alex, your bank account is about to self destruct as it’s overdrawn’, or the like. They reckon you could do a will or power of attorney over text. I’m not too sure..

And that was that. ‘Hang on’, I’m sure you’re saying, ‘you only talked to five people? What about the rest?’ Well, as I said before, sometimes exhibitors can be as welcoming as a shop with the shutters down and the sign turned to ‘closed’. I did want to talk to a couple of other people, like SMS router bods Telsis but to be honest they seemed to be having a picnic the first time I wandered past, and a customer meeting the next. I’m sure there were some other people there worth talking to, but stands were empty, some of them had one bloke cowered over a laptop scowling in the corner, and to be honest I doubt there was anything earth-shattering there anyway. However, I did get a chance to catch up with Jote Bassi, VP Global Sales & Marketing at messaging experts Anam for a chat – I’ll be covering that on another post in the coming days.Random Posts

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