Archive for May, 2007
by Ewan Spence
May 31, 2007 at 8:35 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS
Russell seems to be picking up on every interesting story just as I get an idea, and he’s done the same with his post on SMS voting in the media. He’s right to point out that the guidelines are coming out of the UK market, but what’s interesting to me is the effect this is already having on program makers in the UK.
It’s no secret that SMS and Premium Phone Lines are a large part of the profit of these shows. The biggest of these in the UK is the Endemol produced reality tv show Big Brother. But this year things aren’t so clear cut in terms of profits. First of all, Channel 4 (the broadcaster) placed its own regulations on verifying the number of votes cast by SMS. The companies could not reach that standard.
As a result, there is to be no premium SMS voting for the show this year. That’s a huge loss of income, given that as recently as 2004, the UK record for SMS voting was broken by the Big Brother Show (471 votes per second). Even at 20% profit from a 50p SMS, multiplied over the course of ten weeks, that’s a large financial slice to give up.
The phone voting is under similar constraints, dropped from 45p a call to 25p a call, and a lot of publicity shouting out that its 15p admin costs and 10p to charity per call and we won’t make a profit (I wonder if it’ll still count in their turnover though…).
What’s interesting to me is the sheer amount of effort being put in place to reassure the UK public that the voting is safe, their thoughts will be counted, and that they really should keep on doing it. It might not be a financial success, but this years Big Brother UK could be the make or break the premium voting system so desperately needs.
by Imran Ali
May 30, 2007 at 7:52 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Events + Conferences
Following from Hylton’s post on Global Messaging 2007, there are a bunch of side events shaping up, including the launch of a Monte-Carlo edition of Mobile Monday, joining the global community of Mobile Monday chapters. See if you can guess which day it takes place…
Head on over to www.mobilemondaymc.com to register…unfortunately, I can’t make it as I’ll be somewhere between Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur and Monte-Carlo in either a cab (boo!) or a helicopter (yay!), probably the cab…
by Russell Shaw
May 30, 2007 at 12:25 pm · Filed under SMS, Privacy + Security, News
Yesterday on my BlackBerry Beat blog over at ZDNet, I posted an entry about a utility that can silently and stealthily record all your SMS messages.
First, let me relate the relevant parts of this post. After that, I will ask you a couple of questions.
Here’s the germane section of my post:
Vervata Co. Ltd. has just released new BlackBerry versions of its FlexiSPY mobile phone spy software.
The FlexiSPY software, runs invisibly in the background on the device, can only be accessed using a secret code, is available in two versions, PRO (around $199 U.S. for a year’s subscription) and LIGHT (around $132 U.S. per year).
Here’s the secret sauce:
FlexiSPY LIGHT silently records all SMS messages, call logs, emails and the device location. It then uploads this information via GPRS to a secure server for viewing and analysis. Curious- or probably more often- suspicious- minds log on to their secure web accounts to access a log of all phone activity as recorded by FlexiSPY.
FlexiSPY PRO enables all that and more- plus the ability to secretly switch the BlackBerry’s microphone on from any other phone. That way you can listen to your target’s surroundings in real time as well.
I should point out there are versions of FlexiSPY for most other cellphones as well.
Now, readers, I’d love to start some discussion on whether FlexiSPY is a useful recording tool, a facilitator for intrusive, privacy-violating practices, a potentially productive monitoring actualizer to check up on SMS messages sent by children, teenagers, spouses oremployees who may be engaging in susceptible behavior.
My take- some or all of the above, depending on the situation.
by Russell Shaw
May 30, 2007 at 12:11 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Privacy + Security
Al;though specific statistics are elusive, it is a given that SMS is used by numerous television and radio stations and networks for voting purposes.
There’s even a term for some of this activity. It’s called “Participation TV.” Thinhk “American Idol” voting here in North America, and lots of quizzes and contests in Europe.
Yesterday, the Mobile Entertainment Forum introduced guidelines for SMS voting that it hopes will minimize what it seems to be acknowledging as the potential for fraud and inefficiency.
For now, these guidelines will be a type of voluntary code that will make the votng processes auditable.
According to Telephony Online’s Kevin Fitchard, most of the shortcomings in Participation TV so far have occurred in the U.K.
“Over the last year there have been several examples of premium SMS abuse,” writes Fitchard. “U.K. television shows–overcharging for premium SMS messages, texts or automated phone votes not being counted, and other instances where customers phone or text entries simply disappeared into the ether despite being charged.”
He then cites an instance on the U.K.’s Channel 4, where on a a popular daytime talk show viewers were encouraged “to send in contest entries via SMS, giving them a chance to participate in the show’s You Say We Pay quiz. But even as the hosts were encouraging viewers to call in their entries for $2 a call, the contestants had already been selected, resulted in an estimated 35,000 people being cheated out of their money.”
If you think that resulted in an outcry, you’re right.
“MEF general manager for the Americas Karen Allen said the controversy resulted in an enormous loss of confidence in the U.K. for participation TV, one study finding that 35% of people surveyed would not participate in voting or contest campaigns again,” Fitchard writes. “While such a controversy has yet to hit the U.S., Allen said that the MEF is trying to be pro-active by anticipating any sort of problems before they occur.”
Good for them.
by Hylton Jolliffe
May 29, 2007 at 11:40 am · Filed under Events + Conferences
About half of the team behind MobileMessaging2.com will be at next week’s Global Messaging 2007 in Monte Carlo. Please be sure to tune in to the blog June 5-6 for intense reporting from the conference and, if you’re there, please come by our special section and introduce yourselves.
The event, for which Airwide Solutions, the sponsor of this blog, is the exclusive blog sponsor, brings together operators and leading and emerging companies in the messaging space for two days of talks, panels, networking events, and more. Among those who’ll be attending - five of the contributors to this blog: Imran Ali, Debi Jones, Helen Keegan, Oliver Starr, and Ewan Spence. Also helping out behind the scenes: Francois Gossieaux, the president of Corante.
To find out more visit the event’s website and again, stay tuned next week and if you’re at the event please seek us out and introduce yourselves - we’re eager to meet you and extend the conversations that have kicked off on the blog over the past month.
by Oliver Starr
May 28, 2007 at 10:42 am · Filed under Software
I liked the idea of SpinVox when I first heard about it. The company takes your inbound voice messages and converts them simultaneously to text messages sent instantly to your phone and email sent immediately to your computer. It also archives a copy of the actual recorded message that you can listen to by calling your voicemail just like in the days when that was what you HAD to do to get your messages.
Like I said, I liked the idea of SpinVox when I heard about it but now, having used the service for about 3 weeks, I’m not sure I could live without it. Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but truthfully, this system is so far superior to traditional “call to hear ‘em” messages that it is an improvement roughly comparable to the difference between a corded and cordless phone in your home. Bigger, even.
The problem with conventional voicemail is that you have no real idea what the call you missed was about until you do that which you hadn’t wanted to do when the phone was ringing - interrupt what you were doing and pick up the receiver. Granted, calling voicemail isn’t the same as actually making yourself available to the person on the other end of the line but you might as well have. If the message is important, you’re going to have to call them back anyway, and if it’s not - well - it still resulted in you doing something other than what you had been doing when the phone rang.
From my perspective what SpinVox is really about is putting the control back in the hands of the person receiving the call. Instead of being at the beck and call (literally) of anyone with your number you can let the calls you don’t want (or can’t answer for whatever reason) ring through to the SpinVox service confident in the knowledge that if what the caller has to say is sufficiently important that they choose to leave a message, you’ll be getting that message as a text within moments - preventing you from having to do anything more than steal a quick glance at your phone to view the message and determine what course of action you wish to take.
Having every message archived as an email is another nice touch, saving you from having to listen to a dozen saved messages on your phone just to get someone’s number. Another nice touch is that each message is given a unique message ID number. Entering this number at the prompt when listening to your messages over the phone (the old-busted way) allows you to skip directly to the message you are interested in without having to listen to all the other stacked up detritus that tends to clog conventional voice mail boxes as we use them as a substitute for a good secretary, good note taking skills, a good memory or a combination of all three.
This second innovation is one of those “a-ha why didn’t I think of that?” ideas that is completely logical once you hear it but which took more than a decade and a certain kind of genius to make a reality. In my humble opinion this elegant solution is far superior to Steve Jobs new “Visual Voicemail” if only for the reason that it doesn’t require that you have access to a dedicated interface to take advantage of the feature. So long as you know your voicemail number (or can remember to hit the asterisk at the beginning of the outbound message after dialing your own phone number) you can access this indexed voice mail from any phone at any time. Not bad, huh?
When I tell people about SpinVox the first thing that they ask me about is how reliably it translates what people say to text messages. My answer is that it does a job that by all accounts is surprisingly good. Far better than what you’ve experienced if you’ve tried to use voice recognition software on your computer at home. In fact, so far I’ve only had two messages that weren’t perfectly translated and the mistakes were as follows: I have a friend from the Netherlands named Wibe. (Pronounced something like: veehbeh) Spinvox interpreted this as Weaver. Not bad. B”Oliver, it’s Arkady” became Oliver ___ in North City… of course if you heard this fellow speak you’d probably find it nearly impossible to understand him yourself. So again, I don’t think this is too bad.
In comparison, I met with some folks the other day that were using a competitive product that I won’t name since I haven’t reviewed it myself. One of them showed me a message he had just received that said:
“Tim. I get this, get this, this ??? it ??? get that.” Now, maybe this was a joke. Maybe his dog was calling him? Maybe someone with Wernicke’s Aphasia? Or maybe the system isn’t so good. I do know that he asked if I could hook him up with a SpinVox account so it is safe to assume that from what he saw SpinVox is superior to the competitor in his opinion. While I can’t say that I know this first hand, I tend to believe it is true. What I can say for certain is that they can have my SpinVox service back when they pry the handset from my cold, dead hand. (yes. it’s that good.)
DISCLOSURE: I liked SpinVox so much that I approached the company and am now helping them with some product strategy and evangelism in Silicon Valley.
EXTRA: As a result of this evangelistic role I can dole out the occasional freebie SpinVox account so here’s what I am going to do. If you’d like to try SpinVox for free, let me know why you’re deserving of the service in a comment on this post. I’ll hand out up to five free accounts to the comments that I determine in my sole opinion are those that seem most deserving of an account. (Mind you this is done at my discretion and my discretion alone so no whining, my decisions are final)
by Imran Ali
May 28, 2007 at 8:36 am · Filed under Devices, Studies + Research, Platforms
Like ITP, MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab is doing some interesting and research into mobility.
The Electronic Lens, or eLens, project is particularly intriguing, taking ‘civic ubiquitous networking’ as a starting point to explore the use of geo-tagged mobile messages to tag locations, places and buildings - essentially annotating the physical environment.
Conceptually, eLens isn’t so novel, but the ubiquitous computing environment necessary to enable such experiences is only just beginning to emerge. Unfortunately, the real barriers are more corporate than technological…
- In hoarding geo-data and restricting access to locative APIs, mobile operators have lost control over the value of their locative data to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s superior open mapping APIs.
- Twittervision’s location commands provides a mechanism for geo-tagging text messages, dis-intermediating the mobile operator’s locative platform entirely.
- Nokia’s integration of GPS in the N95 and other upcoming handsets bypasses cellcos altogether; though it’d be cuter if the N95 could automagically geotag photos and outgoing messages…
Three years ago, Nokia’s Chris Heathcote spoke about 35 Ways to Find Your Location, utilising everything from low-end hacks to high-end solutions. Since that time, while mobile operator’s concentrated on a short-sighted strategy of locking away valuable and useful data, handset builders and the internet industry have done and end run around operators using open philosophies and technologies.
Lesson: Be Open.
( Maybe I shouldn’t mention the success of open spectrum wifi - vs auctioned spectrum 3G 
)
by Imran Ali
May 27, 2007 at 10:31 pm · Filed under Devices, Studies + Research, User Interface, Usage + Usability, News
NYU’s fabulously inventive Interactive Telecommunications Program closed out its Spring Show a couple weeks ago. A handful of playful and provocative projects illustrated some novel directions for mobile adnd wireless messaging…
- 888- iPLATEu - register your mobile so you can text a car’s driver, simply be entering their registration plate.
- Clock-Talk - an alarm clock which messages ‘wake up’ calls to various lighting, heating, music and cooking appliances each morning.
- LettrWritr - an email to snailmail service that could be readily adapted to text messaging.
- imPulse - ‘feeling, seeing and sharing heartbeats over a distance’ an appliance that indicates some potential applications for social signalling.
- MobileVoices - a mobile media and messaging platform to encourage the growth of grassroots citizen media within developing African nations, whilst anonymising the citizen’s contribution to protect their identity.
- Trigr - a service which ‘nudges’ users at random times via SMS with prompts to “take a picture” that then acts as an artefact to bind users in time and space.
by Imran Ali
May 27, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under SMS
A few weeks ago, I introduced my extended family to Twitter and they’re *hooked*. Unfortunately, I’m now regularly caught in the crossfire of familial ribbing; worst of all, a second cousin has accused my tweets of being more boring her husband’s!
Of course, I attempted to demonstrate empirically that I was indeed more interesting. Could ‘interestingness’ be a function of Twitter’s friends and followers? How about subtracting the former from the latter - a large number of less intimate relationships could indicate that more ’strangers’ are interested in your tweets and you’re therefore more interesting?
Employing this watertight (yes, watertight!) algorithm, here’s how we fared in a random leaderboard of interestingess…
So Darth Vader is more interesting than a pair of US presidential contenders and a British candidate for Deputy PM. More importantly, I’m more interesting than Irfan - his negative score only adds to my gloatiness! Though, I’m sure both of us appear equally uninteresting to our family…
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by Ewan Spence
May 26, 2007 at 9:07 am · Filed under Devices, SMS, Studies + Research, User Interface, Mobile Tech, Platforms
Russell has presented the Strategy Analytics consumer report on the Apple iPhone, and I’m not at all surprised that the iPhone has come out as a better phone, even though nobody in the survey will have actually tried out any of the features on the iPhone. So straight away the survey is flawed in showing the iPhone is better.
What it has quantified is just how much of a reality distortion filed (ie hype) surrounds anything coming out of Cupertino. From 7% of people thinking it will make better phone calls, right up to 35% better at doing music (although I think that one is fair, given this is a video iPod with a phone circuit, not a phone with a a/v circuit). I’m also raising an eyebrow at the 35% better at web browsing – considering the Nokia S60 devices use the same web core fundamentals as Safari does that’s a rather arrogant number.
Of course Apple are packing in a lot of new technology into the iPhone (such as the multi-tap screen), but the area where it was not perceived to be ahead is in texting – one of the key markets in Europe and Asia – areas where the iPhone initially isn’t available.
But what it does tell us is that Apple’s presence is already having an effect on the marketplace. What will be more interesting is who is going to get the most value – the marketplace or Apple themselves
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