Can anyone help out Jeb:

Ewan, you wouldn’t happen to have the settings for tethering a MacBook to a Nokia would you? Since I upgraded to Leopard I haven’t been able to tether. Thanks.

I’m meeting Tariq, CMO of Nimbuzz. I’ve been using Nimbuzz non-stop for weeks now — it’s a wickedly cool mobile instant messenger service with VOIP (and a lot of other cool facilities) built straight in. Take a look at the Skype integration — it is very, very smart.

I’m meeting with Tariq tomorrow to see what’s going on. Standby for some QIK videos too.

What’s your mobile instant messenger of choice? I know Whatley swears by Agile Mobile.

Have a read of this — just got it in from 3:

3 is now offering its most competitive Mobile Broadband deal to customers by reducing the price of its Pay As You Go USB Modems (or Dongles) to £49.99 - a saving of £50 on the original price point.

The new retail price for the black and green ZTE Dongle and the Huawei E220 Dongles will be available in-store, from www.three.co.uk and by calling 0800 358 7278 from 1st May.

With the current Pay As You Go price plan customers can get a 1GB data allowance with a £10 Add-on, 3GB with a £15 Add-on and 7GB with a £25 Add-on. Each Add-on lasts for 30 days.

3’s most popular 3GB package allows users to send up to 2000 plain text emails, do 100 hours of surfing the web, and download an additional 100 two minute video and 200 music tracks.

So, in the UK, if you want to get mobile broadband without a contract, just stump up £49.99 and you’re done. Obviously you need to top up with a tenner whenever you want to use your dongle, but this is brilliant, brilliant pricing.

Three really are trailblazing the mobile broadband marketplace. I’ve no doubt that the dongles will be flying out the shops even quicker now. They’ve definitely caught a lot of other operators sleeping. Vodafone reacted strongly with their £15/month offer — and T-Mobile, originally one of the leading lights, has been very slow to catch on. Orange is nowhere to be seen with a recent offering.

As for o2, I confess I haven’t actually seen their offering as yet. I’m sure they have one…

If you were thinking about a Three dongle for when you visit the UK or if you’d just like-to-have-one for the bottom of your laptop bag, then get yourself into your nearest 3 shop tomorrow morning.

A reasonably well known fact amongst anyone who’s been to the Vodafone Newbury HQ — or anyone who works there — is the presence of a fully functional Vodafone shop on site.

I’ve been hearing about it for years so it was with no small amount of child-like-wonder that I felt drawn to it after I’d got my badge at reception.

“That’s fine, Mark will be down soon,” said the receptionst.
“Er…,” I said, looking at the Vodafone shop, “Right. I’ll, er… I’ll just do a bit of shopping, OK?”

The receptionist nodded and I did the virtual equivalent of a hop, skip and a jump toward the shop.

I had a browse about and thought was very careful not to accidentally buy anything, such was the temptation.

Employees reportedly love the place. I looked on as a chap walked in and requested a huge pile of sim cards from one of the assistants behind the desk. Nice. Another lady at the desk was busy buying a new Samsung whilst some chaps who’d clearly just finished a meeting on-site were discussing the merits of one of the bluetooth headphone systems. The shop was, in short, doing a roaring trade.

Obviously your average Vodafone staffer has a good reason to patronise the place (especially with their price plan benefits). The shop is mega-up-to-date. You’d expect this seeing as it’s probably about 25m from top dog Arun Sarin’s office. All the latest and greatest handsets were on display and a lot of staff (identified by their badges) were checking out handsets and new offers. The shop’s sales advisors were, as you might expect, shit hot. More on that later.

As I browsed around, Mark arrived and said hi. I explained I was after a Blackberry and a look of comprehension spread across his face. He was remembering my various annoyed posts recently about me losing not only my E90 but my Blackberry too. We left to start our meeting. When we later returned to reception, Mark explained that one of the reasons they’ve got a shop in the Vodafone HQ is, quite apart from the real, valid benefit of helping out staff and keeping the company’s employees updated, they often get walk-ins. Because the Vodafone HQ is accessed from the A34 dual carriage way, it’s sign-posted ‘Vodafone HQ’. A lot of folk misunderstand and regularly used to walk into reception wanting to buy things. Heh. The Great British public. So, if you’d like to buy a phone or talk to Vodafone, you can do so at their HQ. Neat.

How many other mobile operators can claim this?

In fact, how may other operators have a shop on-site? I’ve always admired the concept and I think it’s to be applauded.

After my meeting I walked slowly over to the shop and I was met at the door by a chap. His role, it seems, was to be point man. Understand your problem or issue and point you in the right direction. Smart.

I stumbled through an explanation of losing my Blackberry and then wondered out loud if I could add one to my account.

“Sure,” the chap said.

“Right, well I’ve already got two ‘lines’ on my account — an E90 and a mobile broadband stick.”

“That’s no problem, we can help,” he said, printing me out a numbered ticket for assistance.

“Er, right,” I said, a bit confused, “But I’ve already got two lines so, don’t you have to call customer services or something, check if you can give me another line?”

“It’s fine, Sir. We can fix that here,” he told me, pointing me toward an efficient looking chap by the name of Hasan.

“Yup, no problem. Wait just a moment while I look at your account,” said Hasan, “OK sure. Which one would you like?”

Smart. Bish bash bosh. I’m live now on a 8310 Vodafone Blackberry on a 12-month contract. Very good, knowledgeable service. Everything I’ve come to expect from Voda’s retail staff.

“You should be on this insurance plan,” he says to me as he finalises some account settings, “That way you’re only paying 3.50 per handset. Your stick is covered by the other line’s insurance.”

Nice. I’m razor-sharp on insurance now after my recent escapades.

I probed Hasan about the 120mb ‘unlimited’ data plan. For a company facing the very near possibility of massively declining voice revenues, one imagines that they’d like to take more cash of me for data. And I’d like to pay… Just not per meg.

Hasan politely explained that there was no news there… yet. I would pay a premium above the 7.50/month for higher quality, priority data — and for a larger ‘fair use’ allowance. Something like T-Mobile’s Web’N'Walk MAX at 20 odd pounds a month. Voda won’t quite take my money as yet though.

“Anything else I can help you with?” Hasan asks. Dangerous question to someone like me, that.

“Errrrrrrrrrr,” I mumbled.

“ERRRR yes. Nokia N95 8GB. Just… you know, off chance and the like… I’m in the market for one.”

“There’s a new model out tomorrow,” Hasan prompted.

“Aye, anything today? What can you do me an N95 8GB for?” I ask — giving up on being sensible.

Hasan consults his screens.

“Free on 35 pounds a month,” he tells me.

GAHHHHH. I blew 308 pounds on Vodafone last month so 10% more is just… I need to reign in my spend a little.

“You could give it to me on another line,” I ask.

“Sure.”

GAHHHHH. Difficult. I all of a sudden had visions of explaining to SMS Text News contributors James Whatley and Ben Smith that I really do need to have multiple devices. The E90 does this, the Blackberry does that, the N95 8GB does that..

Almost.

I almost gave in and did it.

Then I got control and moved on. Woe.

Anyway, smart idea that, a Vodafone shop in the Vodafone HQ.

Want to see some video? Here I am showing off QIK to Hasan. Not exactly smooth footage as I was busy demonstrating the app.

Bit of a political situation here.

I was sat in the Vodafone HQ reception this afternoon bashing away on the email waiting for one of my friends to finish his meeting so we could go for a coffee after work.

I had not configured my Vodafone USB stick to work with the Apple Air — on account of the Air not having a disk drive for the CD. I *think* you can download Vodafone Mobile Connect software for the Apple from the Vodafone site — but, that, well, it wasn’t that useful to me when I was sat in reception without a connection.

So I used my 3 modem stick (on trial from the 3MobileBuzz chaps) instead. When my friend arrived, he was understandably unimpressed to see the 3 logo sticking out of the Air. I took some ribbing.

However, here’s the explanation. 3’s USB stick comes with both PC and Mac drivers — the stick actually has a small amount of on-board memory. It’s a genius concept. So when you put it into any computer, you can quickly install the drivers easily. For PC … AND MAC.

The Vodafone stick only has PC drivers.

So I did a bit of jiggerypokery and some guesswork at the Moto service station this evening and managed to use the 3 Mobile Connect software to add a profile for my Vodafone stick and configure it to work.

Just in case you find yourself in a similar bind, here are the settings that worked for me:

ANARCHY!

ANARCHY!

Yes! I am now officially never using a wireless hotspot again. Not unless I have a stupidly crazy business critical need to do so.

I am sat in the M&S Moto service station outside Reading (that’s pronounced “Redding” for our international users, not ‘Reading’ as in “I’m reading a book”). I am waiting for the ridiculous traffic on the M4 motorway to subside so I popped in here after leaving Vodafone to check email and fuel up.

Obviously I was planning on using a wireless hotspot. I took one look at the uninspiring Moto wireless offer (five quid for an hour) and the T-Mobile one and thought, “No.”

No. That’s it. No need. We move on. What IS the point of paying twenty quid a month or crazy prices per hour when you can get a 3 USB mobile broadband stick for a tenner a month? Or a Vodafone one for 15 quid a month?

The fact that these services now actually work reliably should most definitely encourage providers of wifi hotspots to seriously evaluate their business models. I most certainly am not smiling politely at the owners of this Moto service station for flogging WiFi at me and I won’t be going out of my way to drop off at any of their other properties unless I absolutely need to as a result.

There’s definitely still a market for professionally managed services — I’m thinking iPass or Boingo — and I am still holding on to my The Cloud hotspot service for the time being. But now, when I’m UK-based, I will most definitely be using mobile broadband.

Got a few non SMS Text News related meetings today down at the headquarters of everybody’s favourite mobile services giant, Vodafone. Heading down to the famed Newbury HQ — I’m looking forward to it. I’m going to see if their on-site shop will do me a good deal on a Blackberry. You never know!

At the Internet World yesterday I popped by the Dynmark (the “texting people”) stand and caught up with their top man, Oscar, to see what was going on:

If you’re looking for a link to Dynmark’s e-txt desktop text service, it’s at here.

Passed by the Apple Store the other night at 1am in the morning.

These two security chaps — one in the foreground, one in the background, seemed to be having fun. Working at the Apple Store in the evenings must be a helluvalot more entertaining than some security jobs.

I really like the idea of sticking a GPS Snitch in my car and just leaving it there. It’s a small device, not that much bigger than a set of keys and it continually reports its position so you can track where it is.

Useful for checking up on creative teenagers or for finding out where your other half is when she calls for help. I’m not sure if the Snitch is available in the UK — it’s $399 and requires a minimum of $14.99/month depending on the amount of usage.

I’ll email and find out.

Canadian execs are demanding overtime - for reading messages on their BlackBerrys. The country’s civil service union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) told The Ottowa Citizen that companies who expect their workers to be permanently checking their mobiles should pay for the privilege.

Ed Cashman, PSAC’s regional executive vice-president told the paper: “These are gadgets and the expectation is, if you have one, you are available 24/7. Most jobs don’t need that degree of availability. If you want that degree of availability, you have to pay people for it.”

Or of course the workers could just switch the devices off…

Seen a crime and want to report it anonymously? If you’re in the US or Canada, you can now dob people in using SMS, thanks to a new application from mBlox and Anderson Software called TipSoft.

It’s already being used by community action group Crime Stoppers and is already up and running in 16 Canadian cities. Another 32 cities in the US will be deploying the system soon, and after that, the application could be on its way to the UK.

Rather handily, the anonymity is two-way: the tips go from users’ phones and are delivered anonymously and the police can reply back without having access to the phone number of the user who sent in the tip. I wonder how it sits with privacy legislation: if cops really needed to get hold of the tipster, is there any privacy legislation that would block them?

There’s no denying haptics have a certain cool factor. Obviously they’re appealing to venture capital firms right now: motion-sensing software company InvenSense has attracted $19 million in a series C round of funding, led by Sierra Ventures and a load of other big names like Qualcomm Ventures and DoCoMo capital.

InvenSense, whose applications include image stabilisation and navigation, will put the funding towards “company growth and evolv[ing] both the company business and product strategy”. The company reckons motion sensing will take off in mobile gaming and in smart user interfaces.

Motion sensing is a fascinating area, but applications are still in niche and more gimmicky than useful. Still, it’s a chicken and egg problem: phones need to have the appropriate tech inside them to make use of motion-sensitive applications, and without the apps, why put the necessary tech into the handsets? Hopefully, with some funding and some R&D, the motion-sensing people out there can come up with some must-have apps.

Thank you for your patience — we’ve added ‘Recent Comments’ back to the front page thus:

It’s still a work in progress. It looks like the old ‘Recent Comments’ although it now uses the Disqus feed transparently. We set it to update every 10 minutes. Let me know your feedback.

TechCrunch has the gossip:

The key measure of Twitter usage is total users, total active users and total messages sent. And according to a source close to the company, these are the current Twitter usage stats:

March 2008
Total Users: 1 million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 2 million/month

Those stats have roughly doubled just since January, when Twitter had just 100,000 active weekly users. Previously it took nine months to double in size - In April 2007 the service had 50,000 active weekly users.

Now I wonder how many of those Twitter messages are international text messages at a few pennies per message?

Got this in from one of my industry sources: Vidrunner — ostensibly similar to QIK and FlixWagon, Vidrunner could be, he reckons, the Next Big Thing.

(Especially if it runs on a RAZR….)

Leo De Haan, top chap at Black Bull Films, avid film maker and SMS Text News fan, grabbed me as I strode through the office today.

“Do you know anyone who owns or works in a hotel?” He asks.

“Errr,” I think, “I used to know the chap who runs the London Hotel School,” I blurt out, still thinking.

“We’re looking for a seedy hotel reception for a film location,” he explains.

Right! Leo and colleagues are busy working on a film noir thriller. Murder most ‘orrible. That sort of thing.

I couldn’t think of a decent seedy hotel reception for him and I don’t know anyone that owns or works in a hotel. Do you? You can contact Leo directly on the website above or email me.

Mobile messaging operator TynTec believes — as I do — that the growth of the medium of SMS is being limited by perception. Their release today goes into more detail — I’ve published it in full as I think this issue deserves wider awareness.

I’ve been in many meetings with serious business people making serious commercial decisions who, time and time again have dumped SMS as their medium of choice — or flat out rejected it — because the operators or service providers were unable to offer ’service levelled’ facilities.

The next problem was defining ‘high quality’. I’d explain that our supplier used X or Y and therefore the SMS feed we could offer was ‘high quality’. Then the Commercial Director — our potential client — would arse the negotiations up by telling us that ‘his mate’ that ‘he met at a dinner party the other week could get him high quality texts for 2.01p each.’

In the end I often just had to smile, calmly and walk out the meeting. It came down to price every time because we couldn’t easily measure quality. So I most certainly agree with TynTec’s suggestions below.

Link: webitpr | Tyntec Calls For SMS Service Level Agreements

Mobile messaging operator TynTec (www.tyntec.com) today calls for the mobile industry to adopt service level agreements (SLA’s) for enterprise SMS to aid the adoption of the technology in businesses.

SMS’ growth as a business tool has been stifled by its perceived unreliability and the incapability of traditional SMS providers to offer traceability, security or delivery guarantees. TynTec is calling on all providers of enterprise SMS to bring about greater accountability in their services in order to encourage enterprises to adopt the technology as a communications tool.

At the moment, SMS is generally being offered to enterprises without specified service level agreements defining the reliability, security and traceability of messaging. The widespread adoption of SLA’s by the enterprise mobile messaging community would enable buyers to quickly benchmark services and make educated decisions about suppliers.

Michael Kowalzik, CEO of TynTec, said: “The lack of defined service level agreements has been one of the major stumbling blocks in the adoption of SMS in the enterprise. Before adopting a technology for mission critical applications, businesses need to know that they can offer the appropriate degree of reliability and measurability. If you can’t offer an SLA you’re asking a company to essentially sign up to an unknown quantity – something that’s acting as a brake on the enterprise SMS market as a whole.

”Its clear that some providers can’t provide an enterprise quality service and, if SLA’s were the expected norm in SMS providers, then companies would quickly be able to tell the wheat from the chaff and home in on an appropriate solution.”

TynTec is a mobile messaging operator, offering enterprise quality SMS services to companies such as O2, British Airways and Skype. The company has multiple points of deep level (SS7) connectivity into the global mobile network, enabling it to act as an operator-level messaging provider. Using these capabilities, the company can offer a unique level of reliability and measurability in SMS services.

I registered on Sniff and thought I’d try it out. Only thing is, I need people to try it with. Fancy giving it a go?

Tell me and I’ll send you an invite from my console.

Deary me. Just saw this when I was looking at Tom Whettem’s Facebook profile for the piece earlier. He’d just become a fan of SMS Text News, making him the 8th.

Eighth!

250,000 readers. If you fancy joining, and, er, becoming a fan, you can do so here.

If you don’t have access to Facebook’s integrated text notification service — and you don’t, if you’re living outside of America — then this new application, ‘SMS Notification‘, is for you.

I got a note from developer Tom Whettem to let me know they’d gone live. He writes:

Up until now, the only users that had this option were located in the US on Facebook approved list of network operators, now with SMS Notification you can receive all your notifications straight to your phone whether you are in UK, Australia, USA or any of the other international mobile networks that SMS Notification supports.

When you install SMS notification registering your mobile could not be simpler. You get an iPhone for your profile page from which your friend can send you free SMS messages and other options like the ability to send image or animation pokes as well.

In order to start receiving your Facebook notifications, you will need to add a new email address to your Facebook account. The email address is simply yourphonenumber@smsnotificication.co.uk. You do not have to worry about not receiving your notifications to your original inbox as SMS Notification automatically forwards these for you after sending you an SMS. Users can also use their new email address to receive emails to their mobile phone by SMS.

The iPhone on your profile page looks pretty neat — that’s a screenshot of Tom’s profile one above.

The mini-feed integration is rather swish - here’s an example of that on Tom’s profile:

Nifty.

Oh, and by the way Tom, if you can knock up a method of using two-way SMS services with this, you could enter the Esendex Developer competition and be in line to win a grand!

Go on. You can tell me.

I know you’ve been holding it back for a while.

It’s just, I know too. I know you love me.

Because when we did that video call last night, I got an MMS and, well, it told me everything I needed to know. Thanks to TelcoBridges.

Yes! You too can use this new service courtesy of mobile operator Korea Telecom Freetel (KTF), integrator, TI Square and hardware/software developers, TelcoBridges!

KTF’s 3G (W-CDMA) Video Special Call Service provides video messaging, call recording, and voice analysis capabilities that evaluate voice patterns and gauge the sincerity of the caller.

So, the cheque is in the post. Or is it. Call’em by Video Call and find out

The service is packaged and sold as the “SHOW Love Detector” and the “SHOW Lie Detector” — both a free-based and are, apparently, rapidly gaining popularity across Korea. You can actually run a mobile video call with a ‘love meter’ on the handset’s screen. Heh.

The magic information arrives at the end of the call — in the form of an MMS-based ‘analysis’ of the conversation. (”He thinks you’re fat,” “Don’t, men are all the same,” … heh… I expect it will be a little bit more in-depth than that). The analysis reportedly details the level of surprise, concentration and honesty of the speaker. This Value Added Service is rendered to subscribers on an unlimited-use basis, for a set monthly fee. Nice.

Buongiorno, the mobile media and technology company, have produced a rather interesting research project looking at how (young) people use their mobile devices.

If this is anywhere near your sphere of interest, take a look through their flash site here: http://www.cellsurfing2008.com/.

(Thanks Stefan)

Very nice indeed (Engadget link) Shame it involves getting your soldering iron out.

Last night my other half had a slight issue whilst driving — the car was stuck in one gear and making a strange noise. So she did the sensible thing and pulled over.

Trouble is, she didn’t quite know where she was.

‘Somewhere on the M4,’ she told me, rather panicked, ‘Just after the Wokingham turn off.’

‘Right,’ I said, flicking up Google Maps, ‘Can you see the turn off?’ I asked, staring at junction 10.

‘No.’

‘Ok, can you see anything. Any roads? Any signs.’

‘No.’

At this point I was doing the mental equivalent of slapping my head with frustration. If she had a Nokia E90, she could simply load up Google Maps and bish-bash-bosh, the system would have located her with a brilliant little flashing blue dot in seconds.

But no. She’s using a Nokia E61i. Arse.

‘Ok, got an idea,’ I said, flicking up Google and typing in some keywords to the effect of mobile, locate, LBS.

‘Right. I’m signing up with this location service. Standby. Respond to the text when you get it, ok? Then I’ll locate you and tell you where you are. Then we can go from there.’

‘OK,’ she said, shivvering down the phone at me. Arse.

The first site I found was ChildLocate. I quickly created an account and then tried to buy £5’s worth of credit. The site wouldn’t accept my Maestro (”Switch”) card. So I tried a credit card. Woosh. It worked.

I added Hetty’s number as ‘a child’…. And I waited.

….

I phoned her, ‘Listen, could you reply to the verification text?’ Obviously for data protection reasons, ChildLocate can’t just look up the location of anyone’s mobile. You have to explicitly opt-in.

‘I have!’ she tells me, perhaps through gritted teeth. I couldn’t tell.

I sat staring at the screen. I logged in and out of the service. I couldn’t locate her mobile because the system wouldn’t let me. It said it was ’still waiting for verification’ from her.

Triple arse.

‘It’s ok,’ she says, ‘Mum has arrived — they found me!’

So, excellent. That’s good. She safe and being transported home.

Meanwhile muggins here back at base with the technology — all the might of the UK mobile industry — was rendered less than helpful.

Not good at all.

I daresay there’s a reason why the ChildLocate system didn’t work as I expected it. I logged in a few times in the 5-10 minutes after this event and nada.

Even the online help was asleep:

I’m going to get her an E90.