Barclays PingIt finally changes the mobile payment landscape – without NFC

At last it’s here: Jem Finer’s sinfonia for mobile phones… Only joking. At last what we finally have this week is secure, bank backed, peer-to-peer mobile payments thanks to Barclays Pingit app, which went live yesterday in the UK.

While Finer’s – from one my favourite bands, The Pogues – art work, which creates a random Sinfonia as participating phones ringtones are recorded and their location plotted to create a sound map is pretty darn cool (and its so nice to see a man usually found plucking a mandola creating music with phones) the Barclays PingIt launch trumps it. It heralds the arrival of mainstream mobile payments and will, if it takes hold, usher in consumer buy-in with mobile payments.

The details of how it works are here, but basically the app-based service allows you to link your phone number to your bank account so that anyone else with the same can move money from their account to yours by simply sending it to your phone number within the app.

Its so simple and so perfect I have been pretty much jumping up and down with delight ever since I saw it. Of course, the mainstream media has been banging on about how secure it may or may not be, how consumers won’t trust it and whether we really need this, but I know that this is the big breakthrough mobile payments needs.

Finally someone has come up with a simple way of sending money to one another via phones. Doing it between people and merchants can only be a few months away.

This will totally change the mobile commerce and retailing landscapes – and there is not a drop of investment in NFC to be seen. Yet. This kind of tool will revolutionise how consumers view mobile payments – and will slowly teach them to trust it. It will also revolutionise how small merchants such as plumbers and builders start to collect money without having to use cash or cheques. Retailers will soon be also accepting payments this way to. Check outs could soon look very different: you will be able to pay where you stand.

Sure there are some security concerns, but there are with all payment channels. Fraudsters will find ways to exploit it, but it was ever thus and is unlikely, I believe, to destroy the fundamental joy of being able to simply pay using your mobile.

So, while it is pretty much bash a banker season – and I am not immune to knocking the greedy bastards – but Barclays should be clapped firmly on the back for making this happen. Watch as the rest join in. So Moody’s, put THAT in your pipe and quantitatively easy it!

Owner of a lonely heart – and a mobile

Dating is one of the cornerstone services of the telemedia world and it has long had some exposure on mobile. But like so many services that we deal with, complete mainstream appeal seems to have alluded mobile dating.

I know that the likes of Isomob would disagree, but it is still a niche service and not yet entrenched in the public psyche.

But that is all set to change. A TV dating show here in the UK called Take Me Out has, as our news story on Telemedia-news.com reveals, launched an app based round the show. The TV show involves one ‘lucky’ lad having to whittle down a coven of 30 young fillies to select the one he wishes to go on a hot date to the show’s own ‘nightclub’ Fernando’s. Along the way he has to do all manner of demeaning things and its all pretty cheap and nasty.

It has, however, become something of a hit. Not only does it have mass appeal – filling the shoes of Blind Date on a Saturday night – but also it has become something of a guilty pleasure among the chattering classes too.

This broad appeal has seen the show attract millions of viewers and seen the production company roll out an app. The thing is, the app has its own dating functionality built in to it too. Mobile dating, boys and girls, has arrived.

The spin off app is designed to let users set up their own profile and chat, flirt and virtual gift their way to a date with fellow users on iOS, Droid and the web, with Ovi and Blackberry versions coming soon.

What is clever about this new approach – aside from the great branding, ready made audience and air of OK-ness awarded by being related to a mainstream hit TV show – is that is sort of ‘gamificates’ dating through flirting.

Unlike other TV show apps such as those for X-factor and Britain’s Got (no) Talent, which were rather flat and lifeless (although they were a great toe in the water for how TV shows and apps can work together), this app offers a real value add for both the viewer and the TV company.

First and foremost the viewer gets a way of engaging with other fans of the show and having social interaction, game play and, if they are lucky, a hot date (or more!).  The TV company then gets happy viewers.

The TV company also gets an additional revenue stream through the sale of virtual goods – something already seen to be hugely successful on other dating/flirting offerings such as Flirtomatic.

All this leads to a double win for the viewers and the TV industry and marks, to my mind, a great moment in interactive telemedia. Now we have a mainstream programme creating additional revenue using a branded mobile offering that engages the consumer and extends the brand from the hour on TV on Saturday night, to all the time.

Finally, we have someone who gets it. Flirting on mobile works really well. Dating can too. Virtual gifts on mobile are a proven revenue stream – and they make flirting and dating work well. Perfect circle – and a perfect offering that delivers a great experience, extends the brand and has an incremental new revenue stream built in.

This is no doubt the first of many, but marks a milestone in that this, to me, is the first proper revenue generating tie up between mainstream TV and telemedia (and mobile). There will be many more through 2012 I am sure, but the challenge is to look at how to adapt what we already have to make it fit not just the mobile consumer, and not just the brand it is being licenced by, but more to look at how to create services that do both – but in a seamless way.

The Take Me Out app is seamless extension of the show on to mobile and so will attract a lot of traffic and generate a lot of dating and virtual gifting – all because the user is confident of the service and is ‘in the zone’. This is the key thing to making interactive products around TV shows,    extending their reach into places people are happy to pay to go.

Capitalising on a connected Christmas

While Christmas may now seem like a distant memory, lost in the fog of being back at work, drizzle and cold weather, it has been hard to escape Yuletide tales this week, as everyone and his dog with an interest (and some without!) release their figures as to just how mobile this Christmas was.

No longer is there any debate that mobile commerce is a cornerstone of the festive season, but more it is a race now, each January, to get the figures out there as to just how mobile it has been.

And it seems that it has been a festival of mobile-ness – most notably on tablets: but more of that anon.

According to IBM, mobile shopping grew by 186.5% between December 2010 and December 2011 as people found doing their shopping while slumped in front of the TV very attractive.

Adobe meanwhile has suggested that, in the run up to Christmas, tablet users were the biggest online spenders. No surprise there: you have to have wonga to have a tablet in my book.

Adfonic found that clicks on its adverts – which it uses as a lose way of measuring mobile browsing – grew steadily in the first half of December 2011, then took off from about the 11^th, as people panicked and started shopping.

The biggest ‘surprise’ was that Adfonic saw a peak on Christmas day from 10am until 3pm. This was put down to people getting devices – iPod Touchs, iPhones, iPads, games consoles and similar – for Christmas then mucking about with them until sitting down to a boozy lunch.

So what does this tell us? Well it shows that mobile and tablet commerce is here to stay and is slowly becoming the preferred way of consumers buying things. But longer term – such as the rest of the year ahead that isn’t Christmas – it means that we now have a substantial user base of consumers that are now m-commerce savvy and this is what the telemedia industry needs to exploit.

We need to look at how to tap into this growing enjoyment and understanding of how to use mobile to consumer and tap into that. A good first step would be a visit to the excellent Mobile Retail Summit at the Victoria Park Plaza in London next Thursday (26^th Jan) (http://mretailsummit.com/)

Then look at how the wider world of mobile commerce – that exploits the whole commercial potential in any vertical market of mobile – can impact your business at Telemedia’s own series of Connected Summits taking place in April and May at the Kings Fund in London.

25 April: MGambling Summit 

26 April: MSport Summit

15 May: Connected Media & Entertainment Summit

16 May: Connected Marketing & Commerce Summit

Details to come soon... 

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.