Jumping the gun on Mobile free phone

One of mobile’s biggest shortcomings is that, while more and more people use them, no one can call a free phone number. This has gone from being a bit of a pain in the butt to now becoming a business critical issue for everyone from TV shows to call centres to everyday businesses.

The prospect, then, of the ability to finally make free calls – paid for by the recipient – from mobile is one that has everyone in the telemedia industry and most people in any consumer facing vertical market jumping up and down with excitement.

So imagine everyone’s delight when MIG and Orca Digital both announced at the top of the year that they were now ready for business with five digit voice shortcodes that would let businesses have easy to remember numbers that callers could contact them on using mobile, for free.

But to truly work it has to be a cross network solution: each operator has to allow it to happen via their network so that the business offering the number to the punters can be called by anyone with a UK mobile, regardless of the network they are on.

And this isn’t in place yet.

Claims that these services are live and work cross network are simply not true right now. Everything Everywhere, the UK’s biggest carrier by user numbers, and Virgin Mobile, which uses Everything Everywhere’s T-Mobile network, are not on board with this yet – and are furious.

There is no big issue with the carrier: it will be signed up to free phone voice short codes by, it says, the end of Q1 and thenceforth these services will run and be cross network. But right now claims that it can be done are, to put it euphemistically, economic with the actualite.

Now a few calls to those concern finds that their exuberance to get these services out there has seen them jump the gun. Speaking to them they say that they are just announcing that they will be able to run these services once EE is on board and are just priming the market.

But since this is a business that every aggregator is going to look to get into because of the massive potential it has, many noses have been put out of joint, not just at EE who had to field calls from aggregators and customers as to why they weren’t told.

Moves like this, while not born out of malice, are very damaging to the industry. Telemedia already has ‘issues’ with mainstream business: this sort of premature marketing doesn’t help mend that.

What is surprising is that it came from two very well respected companies who don’t normally go in for this sort of thing.

Anyway, enough finger pointing. No one meant any harm, but it serves as a lesson in making sure you are clear with what you say you are doing. Many publications fell for it (including me, earlier in the week) and helped create this storm. Let’s hope this isn’t a taste of the tenor of the year ahead or people like me won’t know who to believe.

2012: the year the dots got joined

2012 promises to be the year that everything gets connected. Mobile devices have not made everything mobile, but rather have made the internet portable and personal. And this means that suddenly everyone is connected to everything, offering all manner of opportunities across all facets of the consumer world for telemedia companies.

While this move towards a connected world has been evolving slowly, 2012 is going to be the pivotal year when this interconnectedness takes the online world to new levels.

So, for starters we are changing our strap line to Connecting Consumers to Content, Media and Entertainment. While many may see this as just a cosmetic change, it really reflects the role that telemedia plays in the digital world. While it centres around payments and content delivery, what you chaps have is the ability to monetise this interconnected world and help both consumers and content providers create services.

So how will this new ethos be reflected in what we do? Our media products – this weekly newsletter, our monthly e-zine, our magazine, blog, TV channel etc – will be available across platforms and will continue to cover all that is happening out there in connected world and what opportunities there are and who is exploiting them.

On the events side we are revamping and extending what we do to connect the telemedia industry with the key vertical markets that need your help and input. Kicking off on 25 and 26 April in London we have the second outing of the  mGambling and mSports Summits and a new event focussed on the opportunities for mobile and telemedia around sports.

This two dayer will be followed on 15 and 16 May, again in London, by the Connected Media, Entertainment & Commerce Summit, which will bring together the key elements of previous T360 elements to put media companies, broadcasters, publishers, web companies, events companies, and other commercial entities in front of the telemedia industry to create new services and new deals.

These UK-based events will be followed up on 17 to 19 October with the International World Telemedia Event in Marbella, where the industry can deal with its own issues and network amongst itself – hopefully in some late summer sunshine.

Details will be live online soon, and we will push out the URLs when the sites have been polished and tweaked following their Christmas break and we will of course make sure you are the first to know as the details take shape.

This panopoly of events reflects how what we are now dealing with is a connected world of entertainment and services – both on screens, in papers and at live events – and promises to be an educational rollercoaster ride of a year. To get involved drop me an email paulskeldon@me.com and for sales information contact jarvis@telemedia-news.com and we look forward to seeing you throughout 2012.

That’s so 2011 – what’s going to be 2012?

Happy old year! So that was 2011? Urrgghhh. Well, there is a recession on and things are a bit bleak right? Well, 2012 looks no brighter for the wider economy, however I think the telemedia industry is set to be OK. Already we are seeing more people spending on small treats – a bit of adult here, a spot of mobile gambling there, a load of social networking everywhere – and this trend is set to continue.

While people can’t afford to go on holiday or buy a new car, they want some joy (that hasn’t been ban yet has it?) and so turn to the myriad services offered via telemedia. So for 2012 we will see a load more mobile gambling, mobile gaming, social voting and TV interaction.

These little treats of services will help at least maintain the industry and help development of more low budget, small services for mobile. It will also be driven by the developments we are going to see in other, more high tech sectors that will have a direct impact on the telemedia sector as they get reverse engineered back into what you offer consumers.

Driven by the tidal wave of development this year, we will see huge numbers of people using mobile payments in everyday activities. M-payments is the topic du jour and so much work is going into it that we have to see some sort of full commercial, mass market deployment early in 2012.

Everyone from PayPal to Google to The Mobey Forum to even (perhaps) Apple will be on board with this. Retailers such as Starbucks have already made forays into letting consumers pay using mobile phones and it alone has seen 20million mobile transactions in the US. The consumer hunger is there.

The only thing that needs to be decided is how it will happen. NFC is on everyone’s mind as the way to make mobile payments work, but it is just a platform really – and the tech isn’t there in enough handsets yet. Yet.

There are still many hurdles to overcome with getting m-wallets and cards and so on working and trusted, but personally I feel that the weight of marketing behind this and the curiosity of the early adopter brigade will make this happen in 2012.

Fears over security – largely groundless – will evaporate as it is used. It only remains for the banks and operators to work out how they will work together and it will fly. In the meantime we have telemedia micropayments. In fact, even if mobile wallets and NFC do take off, there will be a growing thirst for micropayments on mobile and this will be filled by you guys. The mobile payment revolution starts here.

In 2012, we will also see a great deal more augmented reality services. This Christmas has seen many come to fruition and its my hunch that we will soon see AR as a much better alternative to barcode and QR code scanning – and becoming mainstream as result.

Right now you can use your phone to conjour up dancing characters around your coffee or chocolate bar, you can turn your ketchup bottle into a recipe book (albeit recipes that use ketchup) and you can even win a Mercedes playing a game based on AR. But this is just the start. AR has been grasped by the marketing world as it near enough delivers magic to users – images that just appear around what you point your phone at: it is mind bending. But its application goes much further. There is no reason why we won’t be wanting to augment everything we do.

And it will happen in 2012. In February 2010 I saw Layar demo-ed at Mobile World Congress and was blown away, but it seemed like a technology that was (1) in search of a market and (2) expensive and hard to do, so someway off delivering. November 2011 comes around and its so prevalent that its free to the end user via Blippar, Zappar and more.

This is extraordinary and will propel AR into the mainstream very rapidly. I believe that we won’t be scanning QR codes in June 2012 to buy something in the eBay pop up shop, we will just point our handset at the item, get all the details and buy it.

But there is more. We will be using it to enhance reading the newspaper (even on an iPad – you will double screen: read the paper on the iPad and use your smart phone to call up the AR). It will change how we watch TV and will totally alter everything from shopping to advertising to adult and beyond.

Finally, I believe that the tie up between mobile and the real world will be the big thing of 2012 – starting with live events, it will flourish everywhere and augment life. Live events already feature heavy mobile components and we will see more and more of this – with AR and with other services – as 2012 progresses.

Mobile will become an integral part of doing anything. It will be how you pay, your ticket, your programme at the theatre or cinema, art gallery or classical concert. It will let you get content from the performance you are watching, it will let you buy merchandise and it will let you order  your interval drinks.

It will also be the conduit through which artists and promoters, venues and ticket sellers stay in touch with you, build a relationship with their customers and turn a one off experience – a concert, play, exhibition, football match or whatever – into something that lasts for days, weeks or months after the event.

The London 2012 Olympics will of course drive a lot of this in the sports space this coming summer and will be a proving ground, but expect it to creep into every facet of life.

So, while the world’s economies goes to s**t, there are some fun things to look forward to. I can’t wait for a virtual riot AR app so I can superimpose rioters on rich people’s cars or find the best escape route when the kittling begins in earnest.

Happy new year!

Is Apple sniffing around m-payments with iTunes tweak?

It is certainly a happy day for those that set up MIG – I love the sound of money being trousered somewhere out there in telemedia land. I remember when the guys left O2 and set MIG up. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so it proved. Good enough for Velti to stump up the readies and build it in to its burgeoning portfolio.

And with the whiff of nostalgia swirling around me as MIG sort of leaves home, I turn my attention once again to mobile payments. Things really are hotting up and again NFC doesn’t figure. Last week I marveled at how Starbuck’s was doing 20million mobile transactions through its payment app over the pond. This week, I am drawn to look at a minor tweak Apple has made to iTunes that may yet be the beginnings of the company’s foray into mobile payments. And, love them or loathe them, what ever Apple does has the potential to reshape a market. Or even define it.

Its latest wheeze is this. As part of its upgrade to the Apple Store app, Apple introduced a new service called EasyPay. The service itself is simple enough: it lets a user photograph a barcode and then look up information about the product based on that barcode. It then lets a user charge that product to his iTunes account.

EasyPay is still a very limited service: it is currently only working in the US and only works for in-store purchases of “select accessories” sold in Apple’s own retail operation. That does not even include the purchase of big-ticket items like computers or phones. And according to this article in the New York Times, doesn’t look like it will add them in the future.

And yet, and yet… Apple has 225million iTunes account holders (as of June, and since then at the very least my wife as also signed up); it is a very powerful proposition getting them to use iTunes to start to buy things, even if it is with barcode scanning.

What I like about this is what I like about Starbucks’ approach: it is simple and effective and doesn’t involve too much fancy pants technology being retrofitted. It also fits in to what people already do.

The threat to the telemedia industry is that its billing tools get shut out of the loop, but Apple won’t run the mobile payment world – it may pioneer some interesting aspects of it, possibly even things we haven’t yet thought of – what this does do however is start to get people paying with mobile and, perhaps more importantly, getting brands and retailers thinking about how to use mobile payments and not be put off by all the guff about NFC.

The retail industry is still wrestling with how to use mobile and closing the circle with payments is a key to not just getting people shopping on mobile, but the retailers themselves thinking mobile. And once that happens then the opportunities for telemedia services and telemedia billing are enormous.

Starbucks bucks the m-payments trend – to the tune of 20million payments

As 2011 draws to a close – well there are only seven weeks until Christmas, eight until 2012 – I am already ready to dub this year the year of mobile payments. In reality, I should be calling it the year that everyone started seriously talking about mobile as a key payments channel for online, on mobile and retail payments as we are still waiting for many of the mobile payment tools launched this year to become mass market.

But while the world and his dog have been postulating how mobile payments will work, coffee giant Starbucks has quietly turned its app into a very successful mobile payment tool.

I wrote about this in this esteemed organ back in January when Buckies launched th payment app in the US and, to blow my own trumpet, I did say how significant it was. And so it has proven to be. As of the end of October, Starbucks has processed 20million payments through its mobile payments tool. That's pretty impressive.

While many people have been (over) excited by NFC as a payment enabler and while the arguments over how to power various kinds of mobile payment, Starbucks has snuck a simple barcode based system into its loyalty app and, latterly, it's ordinary app. And people have been using it with alacrity.

So what does this mean for the Telemedia space? Well, I think it offers a massive opportunity. For sure, eventually we will be using mobile as a means of paying direct from our bank accounts, probably over NFC, but for the short term at least, brands should be looking at how they can make their apps and m-web sites and mobile-based loyalty schemes transactional. Not transactional in the sense of being ale to by something from a site, but in using them to pay in stores.

Starbucks has the advantage that it's loyalty scheme works by storing up points on a card that can be used to get money off, so they sort of had the plan in place already. Even so, the coffee company has made a simple way to get its customers using mobile to pay - 20 million times in 10 months.

For Telemedia companies, the opportunity lies in convincing other brands -- particularly in the retail sector, but not exclusively -- that the kind of tools on offer around Payforit, pSMS, PRS and the many alternative billing tools available can sit behind apps that allow consumers to pay for things with mobile.

It is a stop gap, but it is potentially a huge one that is really where the mass market for Telemedia payments exists.

This Christmas will be a mobile one in the retail space, with customers researching what they want to buy, being marketed to by people wanting to sell them things, people comparing prices while in stores and, in my case, sitting on the sofa late at night, a glass of wine on the go, and actually doing the entire christmas shop via an iPad.

I will be using Amazon, where possible, so will be paying by one click (so a kind of mobile payment). Next year, assuming the collapse of the Eurozone leaves us with more than just some sticks and a cart full of manky turnips to eat, many people will be using their mobiles to pay for things. Many of them will have been using NFC enabled Droid phones running Google wallet for months by then, but there will still be a Telemedia opportunity, so go grab some of the action.

And I am doing my bit: my book -- M-commerce -- is aimed at explaining how mobile can change how all businesses operate, and payments is a big part of that. Buy it here in good old fashioned paperback or, if you are thoroughly modern, get the electronic version here – it'll make a great real or virtual stocking filler!