Mobile working back from Cannes - another coverage on trains rant

Following on form my post Mobile working to Cannes, I'm not going to report on the whole trip but I have one observation from the return leg.

For a number of reasons I ended up flying back to Heathrow then getting a cab back to Nottingham. Complete carbon disaster compared to the outbound leg.

Sitting in the back of the cab I fired up the laptop, plugged in the Vodafone USB modem and was greated with very good coverage for a good proportion of the journey up the M1. Given that most cars contain only one person and thus cannot take advantage of this data coverage, this makes the lack of a decent mobile service on the nation's inter-city rail routes even more criminal.

Is the M1 is benefiting from intersecting more urban coverage? It seems wholly wrong that where it is safe to use mobile coverage you can't (the train) and where it isn't (when you're single handedly piloting a tonne of metal and plastic) you have more than you can shake a stick at.

One of the people I met last week, who worked for a UK operator was explaining to me that much of the issue rests with Network Rail and their desire to cream as much out of the network operators as possible for putting rail-cells on their property.

He was actually advocating nationalising the cell infrastructure and let the network operators provide services on top. Not sure of the merits of this given his complaint about a monoplistic player preventing the establishment of the infrastructure.

If this is the issue, I do think there is a case for the government to step in and require Network Rail to facilitate the establishment of a network of cells to give full and reliable coverage to at least the intercity routes. I'm sure the train operating companies would be prepared to get involved if it meant providing better facilities to their customers.

This would also serve to increase the attractiveness of the train as a viable transport option to businesses. Thanks to this nation's obsession with personal transport, trains have to try much harder to attract passengers. Providing customers with the facilities to support proper mobile working would tip the balance for many people.

And who knows, we might just get a few more cars off the roads in the process.

Beware the Normob, for they are many and they are right

Normobs, normal mobile users, are everywhere. They make calls, they text, that's it. They're not interested in mobile browsing, watching TV on the go or anything else the product managers at the network operators believe is the next big thing.

Ewan at SMSTextNews posted about the standard of handsets he was seeing people using while he was in LA : Welcome to LA, home of the crap handset.

While I to have concerns over the sartorial crimes committed in the name of mobile phone protection I also think this observation is an important one for the mobile industry.

I am not a Normob. I have 2 phones, an N95 and a Blackberry. I change them when I want. I am technically savvy. I don’t pay my own phone bill. I should be a product manager’s dream. However, I’m not a big mobile Internet user, I’m not interested watching TV on my phone and I find mobile applications irritating.

It’s easy to get carried away with sexy new services but these services are generally used by early adopters who actually enjoy that they are difficult to use or that the experience is sub-standard. The problems provide a barrier which in turn makes these services exclusive.

Only if you can surmount the hurdles, understand the technology and have the patience of a saint can you be part of the select group who can experience this latest new thing. These are not the attributes of the Normob.

What the Normob wants are services that are useful and that fit in with their daily lives.

I don’t have a problem with early adopters. They are a key group in the development of any technology. Without them testing, trialling and reporting, new services would never get off the ground.

The problem I have is with the crazy valuations and exponential business plans that accompany them. As if somehow getting adopted by the majority is the easy bit, a given if you’ve tapped into this geeky niche.

I’m sure some of these applications are excellent and that they fulfil a need, however temporary, in their target audience. But until the Normob is using them, they remain interesting rather than ground-breaking.

TiddlyWiki - mobile synchronisation problems

Hmmmm seems that I'm having issues with the automatic synchronisation. Versions being overwritten, notes getting lost, etc.

Back to the drawing board

TiddlyWiki - browser shortcut

Created a bookmark in my phone browser to the file. It's save on my phone memory, waiting for a big Micro SD card (somehow sounds oxymoronic!) to come. The path I'm using is:

c:\data\briefcase\mytiddlywiki.htm

c: - for the phone and the rest is the path.

TiddlyWiki - backup

I'm having a few issues backing up my TiddlyWiki to a different location to the main file. The reason I want to do this is that every save results in a new complete copy of the file being created which is quickly filling up my phone.

In the interim I found this Alternate Backup Method which saves everything to one file.

TiddlyWiki goes mobile too

Jonathon at work found this little gem: TiddlyWiki.

It's a Wiki site encapsulated into one HTML file. You view and edit it like a Wiki but save it locally. It's your very own web notebook.

Here at Esendex, we're big fans of Wikis having an internal one which contains a wealth of knowledge on how our company operates. This includes, system documentation, sales and finance processes, system performance records and a whole host more.

What's really neat about Tiddlywiki for me is that I can push this HTML file to my Nokia N95 and it works a treat. I've got access to everything I want to make notes about, wherever I am. All I've done is saved the file to a synchronisation folder on my PC so it's always in sync.

The only thing I can't do currently is save changes made on the phone which I'll investigate further. In the meantime I'm definitely moving from a random collection of notes in Outlook to this far more useful contextual notebook.

PayForIt web site found

Thanks to an anonymous comment on one my previous posts about PayForIt, PayPal Mobile Checkout opens, PayForIt watch out, I can now reveal the location of the PayForIt web site

http://www.payforituk.com

Had a quick check again and it still doesn't come up on the first 4 pages of a Google search. Although a service called PayForIt, http://www.payforit.net that allows you to pay for school dinners does.

When choosing a name for this service, given that is was to service the mobile internet, you'd think they'd pick something that at least had the domain name available.

Open Source Components

I ended up on the Truphone web site today after a bit of browsing. I do like their approach and positioning, I reckon they've got it bang-on for their target market.

Another shrewd partof their approach has been to concentrate on one mobile phone platform, Nokia. So many mobile application vendors try and work across multiple devices and end up underwhelming everyone. I've no doubt they have plans for other platforms, almost certainly Sony Ericsson after their stellar rise to prominence in the last year or so, but they've given themselves the best chance of success by carefully choosing the battleground.

While there, I discovered their How Truphone Works page. They eulogise about the wonders of using open source software components plugged together to make their service work.

We do make use of open source software at Esendex but more in a supporting role than in our core system. This isn't through any fundamental opposition to using open source software, more a indication of the maturity of the open source industry in our chosen development environment.

Our systems are 100% Microsoft.Net, coded in C#, hosted on Windows servers. The open source systems with the most active development and mature feature sets are predominantly designed for Linux systems, coded in C.

So we've had to develop everything ourselves. Good news is that the system works just the way we want it to without any unnecessary functionality. Bad news is that it's taken us a longer to get there.

We have found a place for open source software, we use NUnit for unit testing; NAnt for build automation; Log4Net for application logging; Ethereal for network communication diagnosis; along with a variety of supporting libraries in our SMS SDKs for the open source environments.

The open source movement has been phenomenally successful and has provided a fast track for many companies. For us it's helped us make better systems.

PayForIt is a success

According to this article in Cellular News: Can Global Telcos Replicate the UK's Success with PayForIt? it is.

Not sure how a merchant service consumers haven't heard of can be construed a success.

Tell me I'm wrong, what am I missing?

PayPal Mobile Checkout opens, PayForIt watch out

Picked up a story on Cellular News: PayPal Mobile Checkout Opens for Business. PayPal have launched their Mobile Checkout service to enable mobile commerce for it's merchants.

The solution that the UK mobile industry is touting for merchants wanting to get involved in m-commerce is PayForIt. This relies on mobile service providers like us to provide merchant processes that the operators accredit and therefore the consumer is supposed to trust.

I've searched for PayForIt again, as I have done frequently, and still nothing comes up. No one outside of the mobile industry has heard of it. How can consumers trust something they've never heard of?

Enter PayPal, most people have heard of them, especially the demographic who are purchasing using their mobile phone, immediately it's a trusted service.

They also enforce far, far lower processing charges for the merchants, and I really mean far, far lower.

PayPal is international, if your customer can access the mobile internet and has a PayPal account they can buy in whichever country they want. PayForIt is just UK.

You can probably see where this post is going and why we haven't bothered with PayForIt.

This is another example of the mobile operators just not getting the Internet. They want the sexiness and rapid evolution but have forgotten that the Internet model has been so successful because there are no controls. Without controls there is no opportunity to charge for access and other, more specialised and agile players can pick off the good bits, like merchant services.

I don't know what the answer is, people still want to talk and traditional voice calls are still the best way to do that. Though if the current trend to provide mobile broadband continues, services like Truphone might take that away from them as well.

Mobile Phone Applications, when will they ever take off?

Mobile phone apps are not successful. I have no doubt that there are exceptions to this assertion but I would suggest they're only in a niche context. Successful among a set of tech-savvy early adopters but not in the subscriber base as a whole. Is it that mobile phone apps are not providing a compelling user experience or are the barriers to using the applications too great?

A lot has been written and talked about the issues of downloading applications to the phone. Once I've managed to get over the hurdles of downloading and installing the application, I've then got to start it up.

First I have to remember where the app is installed. probably somwhere deep in the phone's menu system in obscurely named folders. Secondly if this application is going to be monitoring or waiting for an event before alerting me, I've got to remember to start it up when I switch on my phone.

I realised writing this that it's been ages since I've downloaded a phone app and things could have moved on, I thought I should probably try again. So I downloaded one of the IP-based mobile messaging applications, it was the first application I could think of I would want it starting up when I started the phone.

It was a nightmare, it didn't work. I think I selected the wrong GPRS settings on my Sony Ericsson K800i. But really who knows and if I was interested in the application before, I certainly wasn't now.

As for launching the application, it's hidden in an Applications folder under the Organiser menu option. The shortcut facility should have been my saviour but it would appear that you can't save links to individual applications.

PC operating systems provide all sorts of hooks and facilities to make it easier for me to use my applications and get them ready for me. Startup menu, system tray, quick launch bar are all in place to support me and get the PC ready for me to use. Is it too much to ask that my phone does the same?

So why has it come to this? I think it's down to the operating systems.

For a start their are lot's of them, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson all ship their devices with proprietary operating systems. In the PC world for better or worse we've got Windows, well for the most part. Windows provides an essentially standard platform that developers can leverage to provide applications.

In the mobile phone world the only standard is really Java and that sits on top of the OS with variable support of base functions because of the variety of devices. It certainly doesn't provide facilities to change menus or automatic startup facilities.

The device manufacturers could make their OSs more flexible but I suspect their biggest customers, the network operators, may be less keen. Their desire to control the experience for their subscribers will probably constrain the experience for a while to come.

Enter Apple, soon to enter the market with a typically disruptive device. The support for Widgets in the iPhone looks especially interesting. Applications able to interact with web services that are available as part of the OS. Further, Apple is providing a developer program to enable 3rd party developers to build innovative new services for the phone.

As I commented in Innovation at the speed of Telecoms they face a real choice as they face up to the demand for the mobile Internet: innovation or control.

Apple may not get it right first time with the iPhone but if it is in any way successful, I hope it drives the other manufacturers to open up their devices so we can see some real innovation.

State of the UK Mobile Content Market

Went to the MDA Member Forum this week. The subject was the state of the UK Mobile Content Market.

Saw some interesting presentations by analysts from Informa as M:Metrics as well as Graham Brown of both Wireless World Forum and Mobile Youth.

In short the ring tone and wallpaper market is dead, too many subscribers have fancy phones that allow them to share content, take great photos and play MP3s whenever someone calls.

Mobile Youth focus on researching the the mobile habits and views of children and their recent research came up with some interesting findings for the network operators. When asked what network they were on, many said 'Nokia' or equivalent. This could be terrible news for the mobile networks. If there is no association with them providing the services then where is the loyalty?

The mobile networks are desparately trying not to become a bit-pipe. If they let that happen they will essentially become mobile ISPs and there is no value in that for them. Unfortunately off-portal is where the growth in consumer spend is going to come, according to Informa.

In response to this demand for off-portal access they are placing a Google search box at the head of their portals, allowing people to leave their controlled, revenue generating environments and out into the frontier land of the Internet. The problem is how do the generate any money?

The Payforit scheme (sorry couldn't find a link) or Trusted Mobile Payment Framework is an attempt by the operators to provide a payment mechanism for this off-portal world. This was officially launched this week. Given the operator's propensity for significant margins on their payment solutions, see premium SMS outpayments, I think they're going to face stiff competition from services like PayPal Mobile.

An alternative is to keep the subscribers on-portal by providing compelling and exclusive content. This can be subsidised through advertising or sponsorship, repeating a business model that has operated for decades in TV, radio and printed media.

Mobile TV is the highest profile example of this new generation of services, although notably the subcriber is currently paying for the privilege in Vodafone's case. Check out my previous post Is Mobile TV the new WAP? for my views on the current offerings.

So the industry that has got fat on ring tones and wallpapers is trying to establish itself as a necessary part of the mobile internet. The problem is they could end up just providing the plumbing.

Mobile web is rubbish

Seems there is some work to do if I'm right and the time has finally come for the mobile internet.

Mobile web is rubbish, say students

Mobile Internet, finally it's time has come

The mobile internet has been talked about for a while now but I feel that it's time has finally come. The tipping point for me are the announcements by Vodafone and Orange that they're following T-Mobile and 3 by offering flat rate data tariffs.

This is so important.

We've been working with a number of clients who are keen to develop their existing online services into the mobile arena. The problem was low adoption of mobile internet because people were terrified of racking up enormous data charges on their pay per use tariff. Flat rates change all that.

Broadband at home is seen as a standard requirement for many and mobile broadband, whether it be 3G or HDPSA, will be seen similarly by many people. Now that the charging is on a similar flat rate basis, I have no doubt we will see an explosion in the number of sites and services delivered where-ever you are.

For those of you who can remember the damp squib that was WAP when it was launched, this is what we were promised way back then. Oh well, what's 8 years amongst friends!