Vodafone has decided to team up with China Mobile and Japanese operator Softbank - formerly Vodafone’s Japanese arm - to create a new lab charged with developing new tech, services and applications.

Unsuprisingly, it’s web based services that will receive the bulk of the attention, including widgets that should be compatible with any handset or operating system.

The choice of partners looks to be interesting one - one operator from Japan, a country pretty much one of the most established and cutting edge in terms of mobile development and China, still a relatively new market but with lots of room from growth, and one all the established players have got their eye on. Hopefully there’ll be some intriguing applications coming out of this old mobile world-new mobile world collaboration - that is, if they can find something that appeal to users on low end handsets with slow connections equally well as speedy networks and high-end devices. After all, web browsing has proved far more popular for high end device - perhaps widgets will give operators a way to get in at the lower end.

The nice people at WOM World are sending me a handset to try all of Nokia’s OVI services which will form the basis for a few reviews over the next few weeks. If you have any questions about any element of the service please drop me a note in the comments and I’ll be sure to cover it.

This week, through a haze of man-flu, I’ve been thinking about how mobile services and operators bill for their services and why it’s all a bit backwards.

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In the UK at the moment there is a big fuss about bank charges - the fees you pay to a bank if you exceed an agreed overdraft, bounce a cheque or similar. The law says that whilst it is OK for banks to charge fees on these occasions to cover their expenses, they cannot charge a penalty (apologies to anyone with any actual legal knowledge who will probably be wincing at that over-simplification). Campaigners have now realised that it doesn’t cost £30 to issue a standard letter and so the whole thing has gone to the High Court. A lot of banks are beginning to look unpleasantly greedy and unsympathetic to their customers.

Although clearly not a legal issue, I think other service providers - mobile network operators particularly - would do well to note what is going on at the moment though and realise that quite aside from anything else penalising customers for wanting to consume (this does not relate to the consumer’s ability to pay - it isn’t a credit issue) more of your service isn’t going to win hearts and minds…

Take 3UK’s mobile broadband offer as an example - in all other respects an excellent value service, but a typical case. Additional megabytes over the pre-purchased bundles cost 10 pence:

1GB per month costs £10 - effectively 1 pence per megabyte. The excess use charge is ?10 times that rate.

3GB per month costs £15 - effectively 0.5 pence per megabyte. The excess use charge is ?20 times that rate.

7GB per month costs £25 - effectively 0.3 pence per megabyte. The excess use charge is ?30 times that rate.

So the highest monthly-rate subscribers pay a penalty of a 30-times multiple in price if they exceed the bundled amount and this is typical across all the network operators.

Clearly excess use can’t be free - but there’s not a good reason for this sudden hike. It has been argued to be a capacity issue - the operators want to prevent excess use to ensure quality of service for all - but a consumer can simply buy several connections if they wish… their supply is not limited by network capacity.

Certainly pre-paying for service should make it cheaper and guaranteeing to purchase larger blocks of service should provide a cost saving - even my schoolboy economics can grasp that, but once exhausted why should the best customers - those who provide the most predictable revenue streams - be punished for attempting to purchase even more service? Cynically, I suspect firms build their pricing models to scare consumers away from maximising their use of the bundles, which increases margin (AMPU).

So what’s the answer? I think it’s the ‘per month’ element that is skewing things here. Back in the ‘bad old days’ it made sense to bill ‘line rental’ by month, but now we also pre-purchase quantities of service within these monthly payments and there’s no need. If bundles of messages / data / international calling were identified separately they could simply be charged as needed…. Used up the 200 text message bundle you purchased before the next billing cycle? Just purchase another at the same price - it lasts a month too, starting today. It could be a manual process or automatic with the usual ‘maximum spend’ controls to protect against unexpectedly large bills. Firms really looking to attract and retain customers could go further - offering to retrospectively upgrade the bundle to a higher one or allowing it to last longer than a month in low-use periods, but now I just want to have my cake and eat it…

What do you think?

Quick news in from the team at Mippin regarding the Red Herring Top 100.

Refresh Mobile and our mobile portal Mippin have been selected as one of Europe’s Top 100 “Most Promising” Companies Driving the Future of Technology in the annual Red Herring 100 Awards.

Congratulations — well deserved!

Europe gave the thumbs up for mobile usage on planes, after Emirates, Continental Airlines and Qantas decided to introduce the service. Now, it seems, New Zealand is next in line.

According to the New Zealand Herald, the Kiwi’s national carrier is planning to introduce an in-flight texting service.

Meanwhile, several reports have highlighted that despite European and antipodean enthusiasm for in-flight SMS, Asia and the US aren’t planning to introduce any mile-high connectivity any time soon. I can’t help but think it’s a bit of a miss opportunity - surely long haul flights are where the boredom sets in and the texting fingers start getting itchy?

Nokia has officially unwrapped N-Gage, the games platform that’s come from the ashes of the now very much defunct gaming handset of the same name. The N-Gage games service has gone live with just a few titles, including FIFA 08, Asphalt 3: Street Rules, World Series of Poker Pro Challenge with a handful of N series devices - N81, N82, N95 - able to use the service at launch.

Nokia has also unveiled an N-Gage community area for the service, for gamers to find friends, arrange some multiplayer gaming or participate in tournaments and chat with other N-Gage users.

Nokia will need to spread this to more devices if it wants to get some serious take-up, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t planning to add to its roster in the near future. Cleverly, it’s also made sure there’s an N-Gage web portal so gamers can get their fix on the internet as well as mobiles - so that’s expanded the potential user base to just about everyone, then. It’s also promising 30 gaming titles in the near future - including old favourites like Tetris - but I can’t help but think that having them available at launch would have been a better bet.

After Ofcom decided to allow mobiles on planes last month, the EC said it’s paving the way for more of the same from other European Union member states.

The era of pan-European in-flight mobility will be ushered in by two measures announced by the EC this week: a “Commission Recommendation for a harmonised approach on licensing which will promote mutual recognition between national authorisations for mobile communications services on aircraft” and “a Commission Decision which sets out harmonised technical parameters of onboard equipment for in-flight mobile phone use throughout the EU that will allow member states to recognise each other’s licences for mobile communications on board aircraft without risk to mobile networks on the ground”. The EC will also make sure safety concerns are dealt with by the appropriate bodies.

Interestingly, after the EC has pushed so hard on cutting roaming charges within Europe, it’s remaining mum on how to regulate the cost of connectivity on planes, saying the market is too young for it to interfere and it will be up to the service provider to set pricing. It sounds like we could be in for some expensive calls and texts up there.

When I’m in the States, I listen to Pandora a lot. It describes itself as ‘a new kind of radio station that plays only music that you like’. It does this via a rather complicated matching process (”the music genome project”) and I’ve found it fantastic.

I can’t get the service in the UK because the absolute idiots that run the music licensing in the UK weren’t able to come to an understanding with the Pandora team. The licensing folk really are stupid. Class A stupid. I’d love to have it out with them. I’ve spent about 100 pounds worth on music I’ve discovered via Pandora, I think. But I don’t discover new artists when I’m in the UK as easily since Pandora limits my access via IP.

You can, if you’re really determined, spoof your IP and get access. But I just don’t have the time or inclination to worry about it.

The key with Pandora is that it’s music matching technology actually works. All you need to do is type in the name of just one artist. That’s what I did. Then Pandora creates a ‘radio station’ based on that and populates it with songs that you’ll probably like — and it does this with 100% accuracy as far as I’m concerned. You just stream it through your browser. Nice, simple, easy. I often have it on for hours at a time.

I’m delighted to see that Pandora is now available on selected handsets from Sprint and AT&T. This kind of service offering would make me change provider or change handsets. I’d like to see more of this from operators — focus on value added services (and, hey, charge me for this, I’d pay a few pounds or dollars a month for it) rather than screwing customers on commodity services.

It seems that Pandora is actually free of charge for Sprint customers with the Sprint Vision Pack; and with AT&T, Pandora appears to be free — but you might have to pay for data (AT&T recommends their MEdia Max data plan). So as long as you’ve got the relevant plan, you can be Pandoring ’til the cows come home. More information here.

Digital Fountain enable efficient and reliable transmission of any content over any network — so says Marshall Porter, Digital Foundtain Director of Mobile. We caught a cab together to the convention center this morning and I took the opportunity to fire questions at him about the show.

Marshall (who used to live in the same part of London as I did — Bloomsbury) has found CTIA to be a lot bigger, with a lot more going on, than previous shows. Business is good for Digital Fountain — especially since they’ve just added three more ‘whopper’ clients. Marshall, sadly, can’t quite announce them, but assures me they’re in the league of Digital Fountain’s other 80-odd clients (think Sirius Satellite Radio, XM, Nokia Siemens — even Honda).

“Honda?” I asked him, “You what?”

“Cars,” says Marshall, “Honda are very interested in delivering content — or information — to vehicles.”

Ah. Makes perfect sense now.

You can read more from Marshall on the Digital Fountain blog.

A SpinVox modification I’d dearly like to see — and pay for, big time:

See where the email copy arrives, it displays the phone number in the body and in the subject?  I don’t do phone numbers any more.  It’d be really cool if the subject said ‘New converted voicemail from Dan Ilett‘ — all the system would need to do is lookup my address book.  Maybe it could query my Plaxo address book dynamically to see who’s been calling me and get the name from there?

Anyone else find reckon this would be useful?

Heathrow Airport’s new terminal, ‘Terminal 5′ has been attracting a lot of attention of late, not least from environmental campaigners Greenpeace. They’re intimately acquainted with new technology and new media — here’s a good example: They’ve been using BAFTA nominated MoBlogUK’s system to deliver a blow-by-blow account of their Terminal 5 campaign today.

It’s not just pictures — but video too. Check it out here.

If you’ve been reading the news about Emirates and Qantas’ launches of in-flight mobile access and wondering when such mile-high talk and text would be coming to the UK, Ofcom has the answer.

The regulator has announced that it will permit mobiles in aircraft as long as the airline has the backing of either the European Aviation Safety Agency or the Civil Aviation Authority. Ofcom gives the proviso that phones must still be switched off on take off and landing and connectivity can only be switched on once the plane reached 3,000 metres.

Initially, airlines will be able to offer GSM and “if the service is successful it could be extended to 3G and other services in future”, Ofcom says. Is this the death of work downtime on planes as we know it? And how long before there’s an air-rage incident because someone couldn’t keep their voice down in-flight?

CBS Mobile has teamed up with Aggregate to help users find the type of news stories they want to read, after teaming up with Aggregate Knowledge. CBS Mobile will recommend articles to its readers by using behavioural targeting - picking out patterns in what is being viewed, clicked and read - anonymously and in aggregate - by mobile users with similar interests.

“For instance, if a user reads an article about “super delegates” they might be led to a story about the upcoming democratic primaries because others who read about the super delegates went on to read about the primary. Consumers will see article suggestions initially in the form of “Your Headlines” functionality,” CBS said.

Aggregate will also help CBS provide better targeted ads and services, the company said, with the service set to go live on CBS Mobile news site this week. With mobile news sites having a much smaller screen to deliver content to than their PC equivalent, it makes a lot of sense to try and get those stories at tightly focused as possible and crowdsourcing has already proved successful on sites like Digg.

On top of their existing BAFTA nomination and on top of last month’s MediaGuardian Innovation Award the chaps at MoBlogUK are going nuts with delight to have been nominated for a further TWO more BAFTA awards. They’re now nominated in three categories:

- Interactive
- Interactive Creative Contribution
- Interactive Innovation - service/platform

This is for their work together with Channel4 on the Big Art Mob project — which aims to put public art on the map, via the medium of mobile.

Congratulations to the team there at MoBlogUK and kudos to Channel4 for having the confidence to greenlight the project in the first place.

I called Alfie, one of the MoBlogUK co-founders and asked him how he felt. He took a second then responded with, “At last, something I can tell my mum about to make her feel proud.”

Right on Alfie!

SIMchronise, the mobile data synchronisation experts based in Dublin, Ireland, have just launched PhoneBackup for the Irish market. I just got a note in from CEO Philippe to let me know the details.

They’ve been doing some wicked work for a wide variety of companies since 2005 — their first public product is PhoneBackup, which, as you might imagine, does what-it-says-on-the-tin. Always a fan of things like that. PhoneBackup works with a wickedly large range of handsets — from LG to Motorola, Samsung, Siemens, Nokia… in fact here’s the full list:

PhoneBackup takes a regular backup of your handset’s phonebook and costs EUR 2.50/month paid by premium text message. Credit card, debit and paypal options are coming shortly.

Services such as PhoneBackup rank in my ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL list of services every mobile user should use. There is nothing worse than losing your contacts. I get emails regularly from readers telling me about their own personal screw-up. It’s a double-arse if you’ve had your phone stolen and not backed up your contacts. Take five minutes and get your contacts backed up. It’s worth it.

Now you can only use PhoneBackup if you’re based in Ireland at the moment — but the service is coming to the UK, Italy and Belgium shortly and will no doubt be on the radars of incumbents Mobyko and Zyb.

Every success to the SIMchronise team for the launch!

Bubble Motion, the voice SMS specialists, have knocked up a whopping $14m of investment for their second round today. Congratulations!

Existing investors Sequoia Capital participated in the round together with newcomers Comcast Interactive Capital and NCD Investors. I haven’t yet managed to have a play with Bubble Motion — I’ve been admiring it from afar for years — I think I need to actually *go* to a country where it’s deployed and have a play with it. Our ancient United Kingdom operators have relegated me to the poor boy at the back of the classroom — none of them have yet deployed BubbleTALK.

135 million use BubbleTALK (yes, one hundred and thirty five MILLION) around the planet. It does what it says on the tin — you click, talk and send your voice message to anyone.

I’m going to try and sit down with Bubble at CTIA and find out more.

Mobile entertainment applications and content provider Viva Vision has received a $2 million capital injection from Medical Capital Corporation, which the company says it will use “to scale its business, support its growing user base, and further grow distribution”.

Last year Viva Vision introduced a mobile slideshows business line, with content both produced by in-house production studios, and by media companies. The company also sells video on demand content and video-to-mobile applications. It already counts the likes of Verizon Wireless among its users and has added eight new carriers to its list of customers over the last year. The company has also seen impressive growth in user numbers - hopefully this funding injection will help it continue in the same vein.

I’ve been using Pingie for a while now. It’s a really, really simple RSS-to-email and RSS-to-SMS service that is just genius.

You can follow SMS Text News on multiple mediums — RSS (of course), web, Jaiku, Twitter — but if you’re in America and you’d like text updates (standard rates apply), Pingie delivers.

If you’re not in America — that’s me, now — then, you can’t get text updates — the service only works with these networks:

Instead I get the updates by email which is, for me, just as useful. I’d pay to get updates delivered by SMS though.

Swedish ad-supported gaming company Didmo has revealed it’s bringing its mobile content platform to the UK, as well as the US, Germany and Spain, after notching up 220,000 downloads a month in its native Scandinavia.

The service works by allowing users to download a free full-version of a game in an ad supported shell. To get their hands on the game itself, users have to watch four seconds of full screen advertising first.

After 24 hours of free play, users can either opt to download another game for a day for free or buy the game outright - and that sounds like it could be dangerously addictive for gamers.

Today Skydeck, a California-based start-up came out of ’stealth mode’ and launched what is on the face of it a consumer-focused call log analyser - according to their blog the site daily retrieves calling records from the user’s mobile operator (US only at present) and its main feature tracks usage of inclusive minutes and texts displaying them in a browser toolbar and enables some calling analysis. Useful to monitor tariffs and spending, but so far, so what…? Although new to the consumer space this kind of feature is widely available to businesses already. Consumer use is an evolutionary step that fills the time until all tarrifs are ‘unlimited’… useful for minding the pennies.

What really excites me about this new service though are the other features: the ability to search calls, a ’smart’ address book and the ability to view your ’social network’. Setting some of the buzz words aside, this got me thinking - my phone calls are now the only part of my regular communications that I don’t have any information about… Every month I stare blankly at the meaningless pages of unfamiliar numbers on my phone bill, but I can’t see the detail it hides. For e-mail I have spotlight (Mac) or X1 (Windows) to discover lost content. Tools such as Xobni or LinkedIn’s toolbar add varying sorts of social analysis to Outlook for business or Facebook, Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed provide news streams for personal use. I can even now analyse my voicemail with my e-mail tools thanks to SpinVox’s delivery by e-mail. However, this data, the analysis I can do on it and all the mechanisms I can use to share it with those who (may) be interested is missing a major component - my phone calls - which for me are almost exclusively mobile. My phone’s call log presents a little of this data, but it’s view is a chronological one and there’s no function to analyse what it records (although possibly Nokia’s Mobile Web Server shows some promise in providing access to this information)

To understand my calling pattern, not by cost but by person is the key: Which client haven’t I updated recently? Who’s being left out of the planning discussions? Who do I rely on for help without realising it? Who calls me most?

Initially, the ability just to tag and analyse contacts would be a huge leap forward… but imagine if this data could be integrated with the existing tools. I could finally have a complete picture of my communication - recalling phone conversations and e-mail exchanges easily and truly understanding my real ’social network’… One based on actual contact, not just the need to politely accept my colleagues friend requests (although I do like you guys!). Daring to dream a bit more widely… this data could be integrated with my contacts list, made available on my phone, used to change ring tones or to inform client billing…. Or it could just help me identify when my boss called me the other week so I can find the right diary notes I made (less exciting, but possibly more career-sustaining!)

So bravo Skydeck! Keep developing the network analysis tools, get integrated with some UK carriers and let’s see what magic happens… this is a rich untapped vein.

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Of course, in addition to calling analysis, total communications enlightenment would require call transcription too - a kind of ‘always on’ SpinVox, a personal Echelon. Which leads me to close with an old joke:

Q: How do you let the NSA know you want a job with them?
A: Ring anyone and tell them.

I thank-you

The world has finally got its first commercial in-flight mobile service, thanks to Emirates and supplier AeroMobile. Emirates saw its first call on flight EK751, on a plane travelling between Dubai and Casablanca yesterday.

According to AeroMobile, it’s the first time that voice calls have been allowed on commercial airline flights, after the European Aviation Safety Agency and the United Arab Emirates-based General Civil Aviation Authority gave the system the thumbs-up.

It looks like AeroMobile and Emirates have really done their research here. There’s a second aircraft coming online soon, so the service isn’t just a one-off, BlackBerry email and other GPRS data applications will be available later on this year and there’s even a politeness policy enforced making sure that passengers keep their mobiles on silent. If Emirates get the pricing right, it could be the testbed that proves demand for in-flight mobility.

Managed personalisation services company LiveWire Mobile, a subsidiary of NMS Communications, has snapped up mobile music firm Groove Mobile for $14.5 million. The deal will let Live Mobile add ringback tones, ringtones, full-track music and video downloads to its offerings, which it will deliver through a single storefront to its operator customers.

As well as new music capabilities, Groove Mobile also has some tasty customers: 12 global mobile operator customers including Sprint, 3 UK and Bell Mobility, not to mention relationships with major music labels including EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. According to LiveWire, the addition of Groove means it now has 42 operators on board. Mobile music is among the most mature mobile services, so it sounds like LiveWire has made a sound move in adding tunes to its portfolio.

I’ve been working most of the day at the Radisson Hotel, sat by the bar, using the fast (and expensively priced) wifi and getting-things-done.

I worked ’til 1043pm… and then packed up and quickly headed over to the Baker Street Tesco Express. They’re smart shops, the Tesco Expresses, because they generally — miraculously — usually have everything you need. I wanted to get some toilet roll. You know, boring stuff like that.

I used my Nokia E90 to confirm, en route, that the shop closed at 11pm. I then flicked over to Google Maps and confirmed the location precisely. It’s a very smart service, Google Maps, especially on the big E90 screen.

Will I get to Tesco Express in time, I wondered? Google Maps reckoned I could be there in 1 minute (by car - I was walking, so .. what.. 5-6 minutes?). I arrived at 1053pm.

I was delighted! Just enough time to get in, located the toilet roll, pay, done.

But no.

The doors were already locked.

Interesting policy.

The bored looking security guard at the door tapped his watch and indicated with his hands that the shop was closed.

Arse.

I tapped on the door and showed my E90 screen to him — displaying the time, 1053pm. I then pointed to the ‘we’re open ’til 11pm’ sign. He just ignored me.

Fuck you then. And your brand. Every little helps is supposed to be the Tesco strapline. Not, it seems, at the Baker Street Tesco Express.

I got out Google and located the phone number. Dialled. I wanted to speak to the manager. Nada. No answer.

So I took some pictures to document the experience.

I’m going to phone Tesco PR tomorrow and find out exactly what their policy is on closing at the appointed time.

It would have been far more effective to display ‘We close at 1045pm’ (or whatever). Folk like me — and the other 10 or so people who turned up at about the same time as me — were relying on the fact that 11pm means 11pm.

This, unfortunately, is the problem with Britain. It’s not a unique British trait per se, you do get it everywhere. But the British are extra good at demarcation (’smore than my job’s worth mate’) and lazy business practices. The chaps in the shop clearly couldn’t be arsed and wanted to leave at 11pm. The manager obviously tolerates it. The area manager either doesn’t have a clue or can’t be bothered either. It’s a big shame and a might unfortunate that the folks working at this store are supremely uninspired. It was more convenient to them to close the sodding doors early than extend service to the appointed time.

I wonder if the store actually opens on time or if it’s 15-20 minutes late, depending on whether the manager can be arsed?

Discussing this with a few folk tonight, quite a few commented, ‘well, they’re not paid much’. I suspect that’s accurate.

Where does it stop though. If someone’s not paid much (where ‘much’ is a relative scale), does that mean it’s fine to accept a shite service?

Possibly. Possibly not. I don’t know. It doesn’t work the other way. I can’t get a bottle of Irn Bru from Tesco for 20p because I can’t be arsed to pay for it, or, if I haven’t got ‘much’ money. The price is fixed.

In other countries — particularly America — there is a desire to please, a higher value of self worth. Plus the tip-economy helps. I’d have paid a few quid for the convenience of that store staying open to the published time. But I didn’t even bother trying to offer the depressed, bored, limp security guard a fiver or a tenner. He couldn’t be arsed. Half of me thinks fair enough. Half of me thinks it’s ridiculously appalling service from a FTSE giant.

Google, as it’s wont to do, saved me in the end. I did a look-up and found a late night mags/wine/beer/fags/sundries place two blocks down. Walked in, picked up everything I needed and exited. Done.

It’s just fantastic that I can query Google quickly and reliably — via multiple methods (browser, maps). Love it.

But if you ever find yourself relying on Tesco Express being open… give yourself 30 minutes leeway. Central management says it’s 11pm closing time, but the employees have other ideas.