New steps in M-Payments

Total Telecom reports that the Italian Post Office's MVNO will have a number of Payment services available in an effort to distinguish itself from it carrier Vodafone.

Thus we finally have a Western European network looking to offer customers replacement of paper money and coins. The Italian Banking environment is still what underdeveloped compared to most with a number of regional banks rather than National banks when it comes to the retail sector and so the Post Office is still a major player when it comes to payments. This makes the target of 2M subscribers look somewhat conservative. Perhaps they need to take a leaf out of Tesco's book and look to grow more aggressively?

I hope that they are successful, and I hope that the GSMA take note and start to back M-Payments for the benefit of the Market rather than a get rich quick scheme as the seem to be with the present remittance based approach. Perhaps if they engaged with consultants that know the payments market rather than Blue Chip accountants they would be more flexible and finally manage to develop Mobile Payments. But that is unlikely and this has all the hallmarks of the dotmobi plan to "get rich quick" rather than aid the market!

Another organisation that could do with some Consulting help is Transport for London who are pushing ahead with a trial of NFC based handsets from Nokia on the O2 network. Whilst I support the movement of my Oyster Card onto my handset I do not think that the use of the UK network with the worst billing system will be an effective proof of concept. The Independent today writes about the trial; something the Guardian did on Monday. This is the second trial that I know of, a very small test took place in the summer with some 200 people using handsets I hope that this one will be bigger. I would also have hopes that they tested on the other networks to see how the billing systems function there both Pre and Post-Paid.

UPDATE: The press release has now been sent out and what 500 lucky O2 customers can now expect is the use of a Nokia handset for the next six months whilst they trial  the system.  Thus we have no great leap forward, rather we can expect another small step.  

I wonder if the move will force the  other networks to open up mobile payments or if we can 
expect to have to wait before we  have open access. The good news is that it's not expected to work on an iPhone!

Future of Mobile

Ian Hay from Orange has written the best review of last weeks Future of Mobile event.

Looks like Tony has got some new jokes. Others gave some interesting points, still not sure about the focus on data.

Perhaps Fog and I need to sit down with Ian and talk more about the Power of Voice in mobile.

The event itself looks like something I should try and attend when they next run it. Did want to go, if only to finally catch up with a few that I have not been able to since the Summer.

The Carnival hits 100

Abhishek Tiwari hosts the hundredth Carnival of the Mobilist.

I have been an occasional submitter of posts and hosted the carnival twice myself. The Guys at Mobhappy had a wonderful idea and others have taken it forward. Over the past two years I have made a number of new friends and read some great counterpoints on all things wireless.

Here is to the next 100

Economist says that 2008 might be the year for m-payments

I picked up the 2008 edition of the Economist's magazine The World in... and one of the features in the business sector was Buying and celling by Tom Standage which looked at how NFC will start to gain traction.

One of the data points that gained my attention was a graphic that shows that only in the US the population has more access to cash machines than mobile phone.

I still think that mobile payments face a challenge in the UK and US where we are too reliant on credit cards rather than bank cards. For M-Payments to work they have to be a replacement of paper and coin based payment rather than an alternative to electronic fund transfers. If mobile networks start to try and compete with Banks then the Banks are going to ask that they are regulated in the same manner. However if the networks can replace micropayments of a value of less than say $20 then we can look to a rosy future.

I think that the introduction of M-Payments will also reap benefits for customer retention, the Networks will seek to establish a stronger relationship with its customers which will see them move from PAYG to Contract. Once the mobile phone has more functionality than just talk and text consumers will be less price sensitive. The functionality will not in my view be the Internet it has to be something more than just a window.

Looks like I was not the only one that passed on the iPhone

Reading the reports on the launch of the iPhone over the last 24 hours and it does not look like good news for Apple.

In the Telegraph O2 says that they had a great weekend and sold more phones than Carphone Warehouse. The interesting snippet was the spokeman saying that once you get people in the shop they can sell them something.

Over at Dialaphone they have a number of photos of empty CPW shops showing just how the UK wanted an iPhone after a week of wall to wall coverage.

Spoke to a few who might have been iPhone customers and they said that they have gone for the iTouch because it was a smart iPod without a poor phone.

Now I expect to see a new iPhone after Christmas that will improve on the launch handset. Will Steve say sorry to the mugs that bought one before the relaunch with another iTunes voucher? I am not too sure we are a long way from his main market.

What might the new handset have? It needs a better camera, faster radio and a full Bluetooth radio. It also needs a different business model for Europe, I am not the only one saying that the price is too high. Apple needs to realise that the consumer will not pay over £100/€150 for a handset and if they are to "tax" the networks for its iPhone customers it needs to drop the entry price.

The iPhone is coming

This week O2 stepped up the marketing push for the iPhone. The FT ran a story that they expected to sell 200,000 handsets before Christmas. Peter Erskine was on the BBC radio spreading the word prior to launch on Friday.

Now in the run up to Christmas the UK will buy some 3Million handsets and so 200,000 does not look that great. The concern that I have is whilst the Apple store is always busy I just do not see the consumer demand once you have managed to use the phone. I think that a large number of those handsets sold by Carphone Warehouse could be returned by disappointed customers looking to get something that works.

Whilst I agree that O2 is a Consumer Network I do not think that many on the network are happy to pay over £45 per month. I can only see that the iPhone will not drive the business forward, rather it will expose the limited capability of the O2 network. I also do not think that the O2 and Apple brands are aligned. O2 claims that a third of all text messages are sent on its network, the latest figures show that over 1 billion were sent in the UK. As I and others have said the iPhone does not do text very well this is another reason why I say that it will not be the happy event that some are saying.

Watching TV last night and I saw my first iPhone advert and I have to say that I was not overly impressed. This was an advert that showed some of how the handset works.

Just hope that the Google Phone is something that breaks the game open when the covers come off this week.

Step back and ask who asked for this service

Yesterday we saw 3 carry on with its disruptive approach to the mobile market with the launch of the Skypephone. Others have written how this is just the thing needed to break the walled garden and the arrival of free phone calls.


Last night the Gadget Show on Channel 5 here in the UK had a comparison of the iPhone against the Nokia N95. Time and again the two presenters showed how the American designed phone lacked the power Europeans demand in its camera, texting and connection speeds. However everyone want to look at the Apple phone because it was attractive.


Both these features meant that I was grumpy by the time I went to sleep as once again they demonstrated just what is wrong with Mobile at the moment. We are too focused on the latest technology than making sure what we have works.


What we need to look at is just who is going to buy a new service, and when they do are they going to be happy with the quality and price.


Taking the use of Skype, if I use it it is not because it is free it is because I know that I get to talk with someone rather than voicemail. Email no longer works with many of my contacts as they have a vast backlog of unread messages that means that too often the response comes too late. I use texts to set up a call with a few people because they are not on Skype. With Skype I check availability and then call on my mobile or landline because my monthly fee has a large call allowance which most months I do not fully use.

The free calls that 3 are promoting are on net Skype to Skype calls. This means that they in fact a closed community, if you want to call an real number then you are charge for it. Thus waht you have is a service that 3 hope will stimulate more calls terminating on its network in the same way that they were paying those onPAYG to receive calls. I do not think that the service is mass market and I do not think that its disruptive. I can see a few early adopters carrying a second or third handset to play with the service.

If rumours are to be believed this month Google will finally lift its skirts and show us what it has got in the way of a mobile phone service. Once again a few will say that they have seen the light and that the Internet has once again showed the dumb operators that open is best. What they might need to look at is the architecture models currently running in the networks that seeCAPEX cycles triggered when capacity hits 70% this is far lower than in the fixed world. This fact means that we have owners of the assets looking to manage traffic far more than those in the fixed world.

I know that this post is not well argued but then I am angry that once again hype has trumped logic. Use the comment box to ask a question or point out why I am wrong and I will respond in a more structured manner.

Evolution at work

Yesterday I went to a railway arch in South London to here now Orange see the future of work.

It was interesting to see that mobile data is on the up turn. Last year the event was compared by an Orange Business SVP and this year we had a BBC journalist.

After five years the guys at Orange Business Services are getting good at staging such events that aim to show businesses now to use technology to manage the work force. This year we were not force feed that the solution requires Orange Broadband for home workers.

Robert Ainger presented the latest findings from Orange Future Enterprise on emerging work culture. I now know that I might be a Replicant or I could be working in a Mutual World whilst last year I was living in a data cloud with selective integration. It would have been good it the facilitators were better educated when talking about the future of work.

Over the last few weeks I have been listening to presentations about how IBM and Shell have been working on the future of work. We were also treated to some figures from Microsoft on how mobile and remote working is developing and how they themselves live using just such solutions. The next few weeks I am going to spend time looking more into the generational as well as the geographic differences of technology adoption. Can see myself investing time with a few of those that have made me think over the last few months about how things are coming together.

Why the photo, well I think it shows Orange addressing 52% of the population with something more than a Pink handset. The sad thing was that over the two hours it was working I did not see one person indulge. Perhaps those that were manning the stands enjoyed it once we all left.

A road map for the future

Over the last few weeks I have been consulting more and more about what Mobile might look like in 2012.

An interesting element is that the mobile networks are remember that first and foremost they are telephone companies and thus voice needs to be at the core of what they do. I hope that Voice2.0 will see the network look at what they can do before, during and after a call. I hope that in the near term what we will see is the introduction of better call quality alongside something that gives presence information before I make a call.

I am less positive on what happens with mobile data with a fixation on taking what happens on the fixed web and making it viewable on a small screen. If you think people making phone calls whilst driving is bad, just sit behind a driver send a text message to see that motion and mobility is dangerous. However the ability to use voice to navigate a website is exciting, it is one of the things I love about my Opera browser. Imaging if the Mobile Network could let me find driving directions (using handsfree) on the basis that I am charged on a premium rate call for the few times that I am lost in a new town without a satnav. Orange once had a service called Wildfire that provided a voice driven PA, then they were bought by the French and it was closed. What it did have when it was running was a loyal user base who spent over twice what the ARPU numbers were.

Whilst I am happy to read a few RSS feeds from my favourite websites, very few of the headlines result in me loading the page in full. This blog was written on a laptop waiting to fly home after a business trip, it would not be done if I were using just a phone, that is done with twitter should I want to.

At present Mobile Data is still about SMS. The major money spiller is not one-to-one texts which are predominately part of a bundle, it is rather premium SMS services linked to TV promotions. In the UK this is something that we are going to see decline thanks to the current stream of fraud and scandal. So with fewer and fewer people texting to lose the writing on the wall is that the users are not demanding data services in big enough volumes.

I do not think that Orange will be the only network that changes the guard at the top of the business. With new management teams to be bedded in, we are not going to see large amounts of innovation. My fellow Consultants are looking a windfalls as new mandidates are given to undertake benchmarking projects. The only hope if you are a consumer is that 3 and T-Mobile continue to be disruptive. I do not expect the iPhone to be a major impact in the UK because they are not that great for those that send text messages.

The Futures Bright?

The FT reports that Bernard Ghillebaert has been shown the door at Orange UK and that his replacement will be English and not a current FT employee.

Over the last few months I have become ever more frustrated at how far Orange had fallen from its heights. My day-to-day dealings with them have become a case book on how not to manage customers.

However a change of management will not change the business I am afraid that the move towards being more than a very good mobile phone company means that it has shifted to point that it cannot go backwards. I have never believed that convergence and multiple service offers work in telecoms. If you are Tesco's then you can cross sell to your customer base cheap what ever because they are in the market for cheap. However if you are offering an ever declining service what makes you think that someone will take more alternative services from you?

Would I accept the opportunity to once again consult to Orange?

I do not think that I would as the business is now an administration and stuck with meeting the demands of a distribution platform. Looking at the UK, Orange needs to say that the current infrastructure does not allow it to follow what happens in France and so something else is needed. I would advise them to look at the voice element of the business and at what can be done before, during and after a call takes place. Better voice quality will mean increased revenues, we are after all paying $1.3Trillion to use mobiles as a telephone and very little to watch TV, surf or shop!

UPDATE

The Independent had a short feature on Tom Alexander the man that Orange have turned to for leadership. Now a number of people that I have talked to this week have all said why? Tom you see does not need the money he was rich before NTL bought Virgin Mobile. He is also not very good at working in big companies, as anyone who knew him from is time at BT will tell you.

I have to say that the fact that the man he replaces has not been fired also speaks volumes. Just hope that the arrival of a new Chairman at FT will make things interesting.

Western Union's new mobile service

Yesterday the GSM Association and Western Union announced that they had struck a deal to bring the Money Transfer Service to mobile.

An agreement to use the GSMA platform does not mean that the service will be available on all if any of the 35 operators networks that are taking part in the scheme.

This is something that I see as a backward step in Mobile Commerce. The introduction of Western Union has to be a backward step. With G Cash in the Far East it is a service that works because it's cheaper to use than Western Union. The same is true in South Africa. Thus in an effort to get traction for a product the GSMA have allowed the fox into the chicken house.

The whole platform in general is something that I see as likely to fail as others GSMA projects have because this is not something that is driven by Operator demand. This like .mobi is something that the GSMA sees as a way to raise income for itself. They have not been able to demonstrate that the consumer or the networks want any form of mobile remittance or mobile commerce product.

In working with the Operators on M-Payment solutions the first thing that they look at is the risk of being seen as a bank. If you start to undertake remittance based payments then you are competing with the Banks on a transaction that has a good profit margin, thus they will ask that you are regulated in the same way as they are. This is something that no mobile operator can accept because of liquidity requirements. However if you were to build a platform that replaced low value transactions and thus reduce the banks cost base then you can work in partnership providing that you have something that is available across all of the mobiles in a particular country. Getting everyone to join a micro payments based service is however very difficult, so far every attempt in the UK has ended in failure.

Now if the GSMA was a trade association rather than a commercial organisation it might be able to do something in the world of payments. This action show that they are about income for themselves even if it does evil.

Latest toys

Since returning from my holiday I have replaced my handset with a new Sony Ericsson P1i and have a Jawbone as my headset.

The process has not been an easy one in terms of moving settings over from my old handset and setting up connectivity for data services from Orange. It has made me think that what's needed is some form of Vault which I can use to replicate what I have on one phone over to another. I did try to use a number of third party solutions but they did not cover all the basis. Orange were of little help because the handset is not yet available on their network and so they have no settings for it.

This got me thinking that the SIM free route for handset guys will require a huge investment in technical support which at present they don't have in place. If I pay someone over £200 pounds for a handset when my network give it for free they better have more than basic technical support available at the end of a 0870 number.

Over the last three weeks I have started to use it more and more as my only device. It does not take long to effectively use the Qwerty based keypad. The only draw back is when calling an IVR based Customer Services number that ask for two letters from you password and you have to quickly remember how to translate back to a numeric key pad. The keylock at times is a little to quick and for a handset this new I would have hoped for HSDPA data. Otherwise with a few mobile apps added to the standard set its very good. Having spoken ata number of events in the last two weeks the card scanner is excellent.

With Jawbone I have to date been very happy with the headset, its light, does not get in the way of my glasses and the audio quality is first rate. Battery life is great. The downside is that the dust cover keeps falling off and its only a question of time before I lose it.


Wonder if I will keep this handset until Christmas or am I going to be tempted by something more shinny?

Thoughts from Carriers World

Last week I spent a day listening and talking to the wholesale telecoms world. A few interesting points came out of the conversations.

1. The Carriers are only just now tarting to understand and plan for the demands of Mobile Networks. Looking at the backhaul network for one major mobile network who are running HSDPA they are using 2M lines, so I guess that explains why the service is slow even thought very few of your customers have signed up for it! It also places a massive question market over any data services because of the potential for a bottleneck that stops everything working.
2. Customers still want voice, and lots of it! The rise of Voice thanks to VoIP offerings has been something that the Carriers have not been forecasting. One presentation by Lycatel showed that rather than cannibalise revenues the introduction of MVNO services in mainland Europe has seen revenue growth on the calling card side of the business.

A few of those present went on to talk about development in voice services, such as the Cisco Conferencing Suites that use enhanced voice solutions to improve the call quality. Having had some experience of the early video conferencing solutions move to the desktop I have to say that all is well until the CEO decides to try the service whilst skiing and cannot understand why the difference between his experience on ADSL and the fibre solution at the office.

The wake up call for me was that even after 20 plus years of having a mobile arm the wholesale demands are not fully understood by the Carriers. Just how can you to run data services as a mobile firm if your standards are different from the provider of Backbone connectivity? Even the understanding of IP standards does not seem to be the same? Security provides interesting headaches because on a carrier network they don't have SIMS that carry the ID management and so require protection across the whole network. Does this mean that my next generation handset will be getting bigger rather than smaller?

More Truephone "good news"

Truephone has demoed its software running on an iPhone just as Apple lock down handsets that have been hacked.

Will we see Truephone take Apple to court when they get locked out? They say that they have every right to run on the Apple platform using the browser and wifi to make calls.

Guess they have not read that one of the key elements in any iPhone deal is that Mr Jobs not only gets the tribe to pay top dollar for his equipment he also gets a share of the revenues. Hope that the Truephone guys can make the app work on a Touch because they wont get it to work on an iPhone for long.

Wonder if they can demo it on the T-Mobile network next month when it goes live in Germany?

We don't need no TV on our Phone

Today's Guardian reports that we are not a nation of Television addicts when it comes to watching on your mobile.

Now I have long said that Mobile TV is this years MMS, Gaming ...... in that this is an application that the user has not asked for but rather the Marketing Department thinks we will pay for. When you look at the Far East mobile TV works because the population density is such that choice is limited when you live in a tiny apartment and the nature of work means that watching TV when you are having lunch works. The content you have to remember is not broadcast but side loaded on the whole.

Now the Networks are not interested in side loaded content because it does away with the network and stops the user from using the phone to send texts etc.

Perhaps a few more reports that show Mobile TV is a dead donkey and the networks will drop the idea and focus on improving the voice quality. I have to report that too many calls have been dropped or of poor quality on my 3G handset this wonderful English summer. At the height of the flood watch I had to revert back to my land line because I needed to make a call and could not relied on Orange to maintain the call.

We don't need no y

Independent asks are we being ripped off by the mobile companies?

Today's Independent has a two page spread in the hardcopy version of the Paper that talks about the UK mobile industry being the best functioning cartel in Britain.

Among the various data points that it uses to back up just how the consumer is ripped off are the gems:-

• £1.8Bn worth of mobile calls and texts included in monthly contracts go unused each year.
• It's 10 times cheaper for Vodafone to connect a call to China Mobile than to connect the same call to the 3 network in the UK.
• You pay 12 times more to send a text than NASA does to get data from the Hubble space telescope
• Mobiles with Wi-Fi are a big headache for the networks as users can call for free.

I guess that the technology editor at the Independent is not as good as the old one. Because when you start to read the ten points what you see are a number of plugs for the likes of Vyke; Opera Mini,Uswitch, Rebtel, Fring, Skype, and Truephone. The other issues are that Termination Rates need to be taken into consideration when you start talking about on net and off net calls. When you talk about the cost of a text message please remember that a significant number are bundled into those that are post paid. O2 are ending the i-mode service and so the data price is a mute point.

The reason that I felt the need to blog after a month of not doing so is that what was not talked about is that we are making more calls from our mobiles than ever before. The reason that more and more are going mobile only is that the networks are including too many minutes for the average user to consume, they are working on the principle that a significant number of calls end in telephone tag. As such any money the lose by giving the customer buckets of minutes is more than recovered by people terminating calls on their network. With the reduction of termination rates forced by OFCOM we could see bundles srink, another unintended consequence like the EU cap on roaming rates.

As someone who makes a good living from the mobile industry I do have a vested interest. However I also think that in the last 15 years a significant number of people have benefited from the mobile boom. For example, last year I was talking to a building who said "getting a mobile made a real difference to my life not only did it increase the amount of work I could do it also meant that my wife got a job because I no longer had her staying home just to take messages. I would say that my money tripled because people could call me direct regardless of where I am."

I guess you only feel that your mobile is a rip off if it is not helping make life better, if you are making more money because you have a mobile then its a cost worth paying. As forcartel I think the terms is best left to the Airlines on the basis of the fines handed down today to BA.

IPhone, just around the corner.....

...but is happiness?

The Financial Times has been running a number of articles in the run up to the launch of the iPhone. Yesterday John Gapper wrote about how the iPhone might force the Mobile Networks might just have to fix the network as owners of demand data rates closer to DSL. Side loading of content shows that Apple do not trust the networks at present, I have to agree the last few weeks of rain has once again demonstrated that the Orange 3G network is far from built here in London.

Today Kevin Allison's analysis is about the risk Apple has taken in entering the Mobile phone sector. The Industry Insiders who have commented have all taken the opportunity to have a dig at the fact that technically the iPhone is not up to the technical standards of 3G handsets in terms of form and the only benefit is that it has a full operating system.

Whilst I agree that in terms of Form the iPhone is not a natural evolution of mobile phones the issue is that 3G may have passed. You only have to look at the fact that many consumers are just not interested, if they were then Motorola would not have managed to ship 100M V3 handsets over the last three years.

Whilst I await the launch of test devices in Europe I am prepared to hold fire on the iPhone, but I expect that the PR machine at Apple to continue to drive interest. Talking with others it seems that the strategy for Europe will differ rumour has it that Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone and T-Mobile will be the launch partners rather than an exclusive deal with a single network.

Some interesting data points

Technology Guardian has an opinion piece by Victor Keegan that highlights some interesting data about the Mobile Internet. He outlines that the reason that the mobile web is more important than the fixed one is that it comes with its own built in payment mechanism. It is this fact that means that the Crazy Frog made more money than all of iTunes in 2006.

The problem is that the cost of transit is a key element of the $31Bn revenues and just like the net did not take off until broadband and unlimited the lack of unlimited net access is holding back development. Whilst I agree that this may be true, I also contend just how many Mobile Users ask for a data package; if you get to see the internal numbers for some of the networks the fact that they have added millions of new accounts in the last year is not reflected in how many of those have taken a data account to go with it. I still contend that most people want a phone just to send texts and make calls. If it was a price issue then those in the mobile networks could fix it by opening the mobile web, know that unlikely the fixed operators they would still make money thanks to their control of the payments platform.

Today's Economist has a feature about the rise of the ebook on your mobile in Japan, the print edition shows a row of women reading the screens of their mobile phones. The market has sprung up over the last five years to the point that it is now worth $82m a year and is still growing fast. Whilst the use of Mobile Data in the Far East is important I have learnt that the fact that using your mobile to make a call on in public is not something that is seen as polite, a large number of the public commute for over three hours a day and that the housing situation means that denisity levels are close to a battery farm all mean that shaping a business on what happens in Japen or Korea is a very high risk.

Keith has what I consider to be the best comment on the populist nature of the EU war on Roaming Rip Offs. I guess as a Business User on a Contract the fact that most of my calls last over 2 minutes and that I travel alot mean that the EU think that I am using a service such as Awayphone!

Rememberance of things past

So following my lunch this week I set about trying to find the 2001 Keynote by Douglas Adams. I start off by using Google to seek out the GSMNewsReel video I remember watching on my return from Cannes six years ago - and get no joy. However I do get the opportunity to read a number of posts that talk about what the Mobile world will look like once we go 3G; also I get to see that Douglas Adams not only invented Babblefish but he could also have claimed to be a key driver in the development of User Generated Content and Wiki's thanks to H2G2.

The I use Ask and it does better than Google in that it locates a transcript of Douglas Adams address and a review from the GSMNewsReel of all those that spoke in 2001. Still no joy finding the video, have asked if a contact at the GSMA can find the footage in their archieve and send me a copy, if get lucky I will post it up so that you can all see what he is said at the time.

Looking back at the past I got a number of snipets which with hindsight can be seen with a different light. Branson spoke before Adams at Cannes and he "put forward a convincing argument in favour of MVNOs, explaining that they can enhance revenue streams, they're cheap to establish and that they offer solid risk diversification. In the never-ending search for the winning data strategy, an extra operator on your satisfactory discovery, he said. He called forth examples from the motor industry and the music industry where the virtual model has proven success. His words of advice in this area were clear. Shareholder buy-in from the host, decent distribution, a general rather than niche approach to the market and access to the meaningful content are all pivotal elements of success, he said."

I wonder if Virgin Media are following the same Strategy today as part of the Quad Play we see today, heck I wonder if they have a strategy that allows them to compete with Tesco Mobile. As an MVNO we see in Tesco an excellent example of Consumer choice, some 1.8M subscribers have opted to get their mobile with their milk. Not for them some fast moving world of Mobile Data, just basic voice and text thanks along side a value handset - all of which ties in with what Douglas Adams told those in Cannes back in 2001.