Mobile Banking made Easy

Over at GoMo News, Cian was wondering How do banks and operators feel about mobile banking? An insightful post that’s worth a read.

We all know this is one hot area and there are plenty of vendors out there ensuring that the ‘key’ aspect, Authentication, need not be beholden to the Operator; the game is still open to anyone.

Here in Beijing, China Mobile has a simple solution to all of those pesky commercials that have held up European Operator’s mobile money projects: buy a bank.

Update: Testing Times

Some very good news from the Symbian Foundation further to my 19th Feb post highlighting changes to the Symbian app approvals process.

Last Friday evening, I received an email from Symbian advising that Sogeti will remain a Symbian Signed Test House, and will accept Certified Signed submissions at a flat fee of €150 per submission. Also, the cost of Express Signed Content IDs will reduce to €15 from 8th March.

Thank you Symbian.

If you’d like some insight into the future of Symbian and Meego, Rafe Blandford and the team at All About Symbian have posted a great video of their MWC conversation with Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki. Worth watching or reading.

Press Release: MO-Call offers cheap SMS for the iPhone

LONDON – Morodo Limited is pleased to announce that cheap SMS is now available for everyone with an iPhone. MO-Call for the iPhone is available in the iTunes store or simply go to http://mo-call.mobi on the iPhone to open a free account and install the application.

Morodo Managing Director, Andrew Reid, said. “MO-Call customers love the call savings our iPhone app delivers, now they can save a fortune on their SMS too. It’s so easy to use, just open the MO-Call app, write your text and send it. I’m pleased to say that we offer the same massive discounts against Network Operators and alternative Operators like Skype”

“Customers don’t need to download a new MO-Call iPhone app to use the new SMS feature.” Said Morodo CTO, James Barnes, “All they need to do is open the app, go to My Account, write and send their SMS. It’s as simple as that. We’ll be adding a lot more messaging features in the near future ”

MO-Call enables low-cost and free calling and SMS direct from a mobile phone or computer. Offering seamless connection of low-cost and free calls, MO-Call provides savings of up to 90% over Traditional mobile and Fixed Line networks. MO-Call works through a browser or plug-in software applications that can be downloaded, free of charge, from the MO-Call website www.mo-call.com

The World’s Largest App Store

Yesterday PocketGear announced their acquisition of Handango with a bold claim to being the world’s largest app store. With 140,000 apps, covering 2,000 devices and downloaders from 175 countries, they may very well be right, only GetJar comes close in cross-platform.

As GSMA members in the Wholesale Application Community have realised, addressing the mass market, device fragmentation demands app store consolidation. They’re a bit late coming to this party. In my view, the Operator On-Deck app store has about as much chance of success as the Operator On-Deck Internet Portal.

Congratulations PocketGear!

Testing Times

Via Tomi Ahonen I discovered Mark Suster’s post App Is Crap. Mark argues that the app is a distraction from the main event in the browser. He’s right. The mobile web runtime environment could be delivering a whole lot more, and maybe it will with HTML5? Maybe it can already with Flash? When the network is fast enough and the device is truly open, the app will be dead. Until that time, it will be a closely guarded revenue generator in the value chain.

Just last week I received an email from the Symbian Foundation advising that the Symbian Signed certification process is moving in-house, Third Party Approvals are no longer permitted. Symbian will be charging €120 a pop for signing approval, until now Test Houses such as NSTL, Mphasis and Sogeti, have priced out from €200 per app. Bravo to Symbian for realising a revenue stream, Apple should have made a tiered developer scheme with chargeable fast-track approvals available a long time ago, but this really does not sit well with the Foundation’s Open Source ethic. If the platform is Open, I should be able to pay any accredited expert to test my app and provide approvals based on published standards. Surely?

Nokia laid their cards on the table at MWC and without actually saying it, made it clear that in their view Symbian has some years to run, but the future is Meego. Sure, there is a lot of cool stuff coming for developers in Symbian^3, customers are going to love the fact that we can do more, but don’t palm us off on a nicer UI, better APIs and the illusion of Openess whilst maintaining a vested interest in the success of Nokia, the Ovi Store and Ovi’s own approval process.

Litigious words? Please don’t insult my intelligence by stating that the Symbian Foundation is culturally independent of Nokia, who else is making Symbian smartphones of note?  Soon there will be more than one hundred Android devices on market. Symbian needs all the help it can get, we’d like to give it but we’d also like to draw on a mercenary army of expert, experienced and independent testers to do so.

Image: Rohde & Schwarz

Who would pre-purchase an iPad?

How many people are buying an iPad this weekend? I have no idea, I’m not a gambling man. If you asked me to hazard a guess? Maybe not so many right now, but wait until a toddler picks one up.

OK, stop laughing, seriously; if my son was still four years old, I would buy him one. The iPad looks kid-proof, no moving parts, no camera, hey, not much of a battery charge, what could possibly go wrong? Like the OS, net access is easily controlled.

The iPhone isn’t something you can give a child to play with, it’s mummy or daddy’s phone. An iPad will keep the little blighters occupied for hours without being an inconvenience when you want to communicate. When they’re asleep, you can use it to read a book, watch a movie, play music, catch up on your mail, browse a newspaper or flick through a magazine. You’ll pick it up as easily as you put it down.

The iPad has all the makings of yet another connected device middling-income folk wouldn’t want to be seen without. If you’re a harrassed parent, the price is something you’ll just put on the credit card.

Image Babesta

Monetising Mobile Apps: Shazam’s Coverage means Conversions

Speaking at MIDMEM, Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher stated that his ‘name that tune?’ app generates some 300,000 track purchases every day. From song tagging, he estimated a 13% conversion rate. That’s quite impressive, even off the back of 50m downloads.

Attributing the success of the app Fisher recognised the value of covering all mobile platforms, not just those most popular in the press. I completely agree, commercial app developers should be embracing device and OS fragmentation, not choosing sides.

We live in a world with some 2,000 different global name brand legacy and new model mobiles, if you’re serious, it’s not hard to keep them covered.

via musically

Opera acquires AdMarvel

Here we go, Opera comes out fighting ahead of MWC and buys up mobile advertising management AdMarvel. Opera CEO, Lars Boilesen says:

“In our fast-growing industry, mobile advertising represents an interesting long-term revenue opportunity. Every month, nearly 50 million people access the Web using Opera on their mobile phones and together with AdMarvel, we think we can play an important role in the evolution of mobile advertising,”

Riding on the back of positive reviews for Opera Mini 5, Opera Mobile 10 and the recent mass exodus from IE, things are looking up for Opera.

Bottom line: would I pay Opera to manage my mobile ads? Yes, I would, as they have proved yet again, they know and understand mobile.

Google Nexus One Customer Service Train Wreck

Would you like some cream with your schadenfraude pie? Hoof on over to the Google Mobile Help Forum and have a quick read through the Nexus One pages.

It would seem as though the likely-to-know-everything-about-you-lads forgot perhaps the most important thing in shipping the Production 1 Nexus One ’superphone.’ Customer Service. Whilst every other manufacturer can get away with debugging P1 in the marketplace, they do have the benefit of operational support systems, both their own and those of their Operator customer’s.

Google has gone live on a rushed hardware release with only a forum and an email address for customer support. They are promising a response within 48 hours. Well, you live and learn. I am sure they will throw a lot of money at this and recover.

Perhaps the Internet is being unkind and Google are victims of their own success? To a certain extent, maybe that’s true but you don’t need to go to MIT or Stanford to understand the importance of Customer Service. No, you just need a dash of common sense and a soupçon of humility.

Image: McCord Museum

…and a Happy New Year

If a somewhat belated one.

A little busy last week closing down the latest release of the MO-Call app for PC (and very soon, Mac), taking on new developers and pushing through some great new features (bookmark Rich and Peter’s MO-Call blog to make sure you don’t miss out on our new releases).

Here in Beijing, as in the UK, we’ve had a record snowfall and apparently there is more on the way. Unlike the UK, public services are still working…and so are we.