Even the taxi drivers in Vegas tell me that 2-3 days is enough. I’d been in the city for nearly 6 days when I decided to take a stroll through the MGM Grand on the off chance there was something interesting to be found.

As it happens, there was. As I got toward the exit I heard the roar of a lion come across the Casino sound system. This isn’t an entirely new experience. The constant jingle jangle of slot machine noises mixed in with the latest music hits seems to numb everyone, especially the fat women in oversized XXXXXXXL Vegas T-shirts, complete with genuine 40 minute old mustard & ketchup stains pulling on the slot machine levers like genetically modified oompa loompas.

I continued walking then once again I heard the roar of a Lion. I spotted a grouping of annoying looking tourists (A subcategory of German tourist, I reckoned, based on the above average sampling of male and female mullets on show) with cameras out. Then I spotted the Lion cage.

Ah yes, Vegas. Tucked away in the corner of the Grand is a large glass cage filled with polystyrene looking ‘rocks’ and, one imagines, lions, somewhere. As I walked closer, I caught sight of two animals, stretched out, lying on top of what appeared to be a glass (or strongly reinforced plastic) walk-way that led through the cage. The bonus being that you, as a puny mullet-sporting human, could stand in this walk-way and gaze up at the two huge lions dozing a few feet above.

Cameras at the ready, along with tired and overused explanations of ‘wow’. Dear me. The lions were doing the sensible thing and ignoring everything. They looking, to me — I’m no expert, mind — entirely bored out of their mind. They were doing absolutely nothing except dozing and, I felt, glancing in no small amount of pity at the tourists brandishing flashing cameras at them. There is, if you’re feeling a bit existentialist, little difference from the cheeseburger filled Texan snapping away with his $40 Sanyo and the dozing lion waiting ’til it gets fed.

I documented parts of the experience for you, dear reader. I too, jostled with the Germans and Texans and ‘got in there’ for the photo:

That, there, is a lion, doing sod all. And that, I realised, is why the exhibit owners were busy pumping a lion’s roar (different every time, I might add, they must have an array of roar samples to play every 10 minutes) into the vicinity to give some degree of excitement and authenticity.

Here, then, is a picture of the enclosure:

To the left, you see the glass walk through, yes? Do you see the lions sitting doing nothing, above the staring, gaping tourists? Right, now turn your attention to the chap on the far right inside the cage.

Yes, inside.

That caught my attention. Everyone else was busy looking at the animals. I was wondering why the chap, and a colleague, were standing 10ft away from a pair of very certainly wannabe man eaters.

Even more interestingly, I noticed the chap was actually texting.

10ft away from a dozing lion and he was texting.

On a Helio Ocean, no less.

I walked through the walkway to get a closer photo.

I couldn’t get the angle to actually capture a picture of the handset, but take it from he, it was an Ocean. His chap to the left was also arsing about on his phone.

Don’t ask me what they’re doing. I imagine they are, in some way, taking care of the lions. Otherwise I can’t quite think of a decent reason for their location.

I’m willing to bet I’d have a rather challenging time knocking out a text message inside a lion cage, even if they were dosing. So, to these two chaps, I say kudos. And, er, don’t make the text message too long, eh?

I trust both chaps had their phones on silent as well. This would be the entirely wrong time for your WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO ringtone to start screaming around the cage as two annoyed lions raise their heads and stare at you intently.

In case I haven’t quite got my point across about Vegas in the previous passages, allow me to finish with this picture:

This is inside the walkway underneath the lion enclosure. Yes. That is a flat screen TV. And Yes, that TV is showing footage of the lions wandering about their plastic cage. And yes, there are people staring.

There isn’t much for the lions to do inside the small cage except sleep. So I expect the TV footage is there as a sort of apology for those who really wanted to see lions, er, doing something.

2 hours ’til I leave Vegas. Can’t wait…

A while back I met with Jote Bassi, Marketing Director of Anam, he was telling me about their Smart Services Platform. Which, incidentally, is what Telus, one of Canada’s biggest mobile operators, has just implemented.

Telus had an issue with their prepaid base — some customers were able to send text messages when their prepay balance wasn’t in credit. Anam’s platform has fixed this, but not only that, Telus is now primed with a highly capable system that will enable a ton of additional services should they wish to implement.

For example, if Telus choose to do so, they can more or less ’switch on’ Anam’s SMS money transfer service that I covered a while ago.

I think Telus — and the other North American mobile operators — would do well to look to value added services such as Anam’s SMS money transfer service. There’s no stopping the relentless march toward the bit-pipe generation. Mobile voice and data access is a utility and, particularly with the recent ‘unlimited’ service plans hitting the marketplace, it’s very much becoming a commodity. There’s not much you can do about this happening. You can panic, you can jump around firing off press releases and doing deals that add no value to the customer and that nobody uses. Or you can face reality, deal with the commoditisation, accept it and look to offer additional services around the commodity.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the marketplace over the next few years. I think Anam will play an increasingly important role in helping operators get past the ‘pain’ and into the ‘gain’.

News just in from Acision — I popped by their stand and had a natter with Todd Van Hoosear. He tells me that Acision has just scored a huge new carrier win (they can’t yet announce the name yet). This win has put them over the edge into domination territory in North America. So much so that they will now be delivering traffic for 3 out of 5 of the tier one mobile operators in the States — roughly 60% of the country’s text traffic.

Good news, eh?

But just who did they win? Well… I wonder.

They already work for T-Mobile and AT&T.,.

Ah I like the concept of this, massively.

Amazon has decided to deploy the world’s most popular brand — SMS — as a medium for transacting business. Finally. I’ve long been using Amazon’s mobile and wap sites to place orders on the train and the like — and I look forward to being able to do this by text in the UK shortly (if they plan to launch there). Alas at the moment it looks like this is just a USA thing at the moment.

Here’s what NW Innovation had to say:

The firm said that Amazon TextBuyIt will allow users to use text messages to find and buy products sold on its web site. The text messaging service allows users to both search for, and purchase any product. According to Amazon, when a customer orders a product, they will receive a phone call with final details of the order and ability to confirm or cancel their purchase.

Here’s the service description on Amazon.

Heh, just caught this…

Link: Txting’s not a Fab Game plan - Gazette Live

And the policy of texting players on a Saturday night to let them know they’ve been dropped is tacky. As an Italian, it’s surprising Capello has a system so lacking in style.

.. I can just imagine these poor players sat waiting ’til the small hours to get a text from the manager. You could have a right laugh with them if you used one of those anonymous text services, couldn’t you?

Dear David, the new haircut sucks, so we’ve dropped you. Sorry. Love Fabs.

Silicon Republic is reporting that Ticket Text has launched service in Ireland. Good luck chaps!

A Dublin-based mobile firm that delivers tickets for sporting and music events by text message has launched its service in Ireland with a variety of events on offer.

Ticket Text last year struck a major deal to sell its ticketing services to Ryanair’s 53 million-a-year customer base and the company has now deployed ticketing software from Toronto-based AudienceView, whose technology is used by the Football Association, PGA Tour, MGM Mirage in Las Vegas, Toronto Blue Jays and NEC Birmingham.

News24 in South Africa has this story about a British/South African pilot who is being ‘held’ by the Zimbabwean Government for various and allegedly tenuous reasons.

SMS… always useful, particularly when you’re surrounded by 15 burly security people and you can type a text out in your pocket.

Just picked this one up from Arab Times Online.

Link: Arab Times :: ‘Interior’ to monitor SMS messages, websites

The lawyer was responding to a statement released earlier by a high-ranking security official saying the Interior Ministry is planning to monitor SMS messages and websites to prevent primaries from taking place.

That’d be one heckuva monitoring job…

Just days after Emirates announced plans to offer in-flight mobile connectivity, Qantas has revealed its going ahead with a plan to provide passengers with SMS and e-mail functionality on planes, also using Aeromobile kit.

The launch follows a trial which finished earlier this year. During 2008, Qantas will start rolling out the service on some domestic B767-300 and A330-200 aircraft. Aussie flyers wanting to use the service will need either a roaming-equipped GSM mobile for texting or a GPRS BlackBerry for email - voice calls aren’t on the cards.

No word again on the pricing or where the service will be used. It’s interesting that Qantas is only offering the service on inter-Australia flights - you’d think that longer haul trips would be more likely to induce the sort of boredom texting relieves. I wonder if it’s a regulatory issue?

In a country the size of China with all those hundreds of millions of subscribers, when things go wrong, they can go wrong on a very large scale. Just ask China Mobile. According to Xinhua, seven online advertising firms “arbitrarily sent commercial text messages to over 200 million cell phone users” on China Mobile and China Unicom’s networks.

Xinhua said China Mobile will block SMS coming from the seven advertising companies and will work with all the operators to sort out rules on SMS advertising.

200 million messages - how did they manage it? The paper says that there isn’t much punishment for companies sending out junk SMS. That said, you would have thought the cost of sending out 200 million texts would be prohibitive enough.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I love reading about these kinds of applications.

Dialogue, the mobile solutions specialist, has launched a dedicated text number for Northumbria Police non-emergencies. The number is 0778 6200 815.

The Police Control room receives the text messages — and critically — it can REPLY as well. Often in the past, I’ve written about services that are, alas, one-way. Two-way is always best. That’s what text is about.

Here’s how it works:

The two-way SMS is a simple to use service whereby a text message is sent, it is then converted into an email and delivered to the police communications centre. The caller then receives a return SMS within seconds to say their text has been passed to the police, who will reply to this enquiry within 24 hours, with a reminder if this is an emergency you must dial 999. Any further communication can be made via email, which is automatically converted to a text message and sent to the caller.

Obviously if someone is currently stabbing you with a knife, there’s a limited amount of value that a text message can offer at that time. 999 remains the number for contacting the emergency services — it is a shame that you can’t ‘text’ 999 though.

I hope Dialogue follow-up with some news on how the service is being used soon.

You can get a loan in Sweden via your mobile phone in seconds. It’s quite a neat service, from a mobile industry perspective. If you’re short of a few hundred quid (for example), you can text, text, text and woosh, get an unsecured credit line. Perfect for funding that hugely unnecessary iPhone purchase.

But the sting in the tail? Interest rates — that often are more expensive than the initial loan amount. When it’s so easy to take out the loan, fiscal difficulty can follow quickly. Tech.co.uk has more…

SMS loans sending young Swedes into debt - News - Tech.co.uk

Officials in Sweden have voiced their concerns that increasing use of so-called ‘SMS loans’ by young people is causing a mounting problem with debt.

The unsecured loans can be obtained by simply sending a text message to one of approximately 30 companies operating the money-lending scheme.

(Thanks Mark)

Esendex aren’t sitting on their arses. There’s a lot of mobile companies that are. I like to see innovation. Innovation in spades, that’s the way ahead. And Esendex are really pushing the envelope, conceiving and implementing useful SMS related applications.

Only recently they launched an SMS-to-blog service and today they’ve gone live with Voice SMS.

The product page is here.

Essentially, Voice SMS enables text messages ‘to be heard’. This isn’t an entirely new service. It has been possible to offer this kind of facility if you’ve got a shitload of patience, a bucketload of money and a team of developers standing by. Esendex have made it push-button-simple though.

You simply use their service to submit your text message into their system. It converts your text into an audio message — they’re using ‘market leading transcription software’ so I imagine it’ll be as good as what you and I are used to — then the Esendex server places a voice call to the recipient. This is billed exactly the same as a standard SMS by Esendex. WHen the recipient answers, they’re played the audio message and given the option to acknowledge receipt (can’t quite do that with text messages). If the call goes to voicemail or is engaged, the Esendex server just redials.

I can think of a lot of applications for this.

Doctors appointments. Server-fail messages (”Server 101 has failed, please could you log on and fix it.”). Tons of applications.

Nice one Esendex.

You can get a free 7 day trial and start testing right-away here. Or phone them up, ask to speak to top chap Adam and tell him that I said you should talk.

Ed over at Technology Evangelist was giving a presentation recently and decided to demand interaction from his audience by text message. Here’s what he did…

As an experiment, I set the first slide of the presentation to say, “Text Me:” followed by my cell phone number and explained that anyone in the audience could send me a question at any time. Additionally, I explained that unless they were already a contact of mine, I wouldn’t know who they were so feel comfortable asking whatever you’d like.

I’ve done this quite regularly for a lot of presentations I’ve given — indeed we also provided this as a service for a lot of conference organisers alongside the basic Eventscope online networking service. We still do it for a few clients. Instead of using the chairman or speaker’s personal number, we generally use an MSISDN text number from the likes of FastSMS. Audience members text their questions which are displayed on a console for speaker/chairman to refer to on-demand. It’s generally a popular offering.

Ed seemed to have some good feedback from his experiment:

Post-presentation, I had a chance to thank each of the 13 people who SMS’d me messages during the 1-hour presentation while driving to the airport to catch a fight. I also follow up on a few questions I didn’t have a chance to answer in much detail during the live hour.

Nice one Ed!

According to the Gulf Times, the newest version of Qtel’s Mozaic mobile chat service has been a stunning success:

THE newly launched Mozaic SMS Chat - an interactive text-based service from Qtel - has been a massive success across the country with over 11mn messages sent to and from users in the first week, Qtel said yesterday.

The service was originally launched in Sultanate of Oman where over 100,000 people joined up to make new friends, stay in touch with old friends on MSN, Yahoo and ICQ and use the virtual ‘chat rooms’; all via their mobile phone with the familiar SMS interface.

MyAdhan has the original details on the launch in last month.

View the service’s site here.

The “more bars in more places” mobile network operator has summarily increased the cost of text messaging from $0.15 to $0.20 for out of bundle text messages.

Why? Because they can. Nobody cares. Americans don’t care. Individual Americans — some who have been emailing this site — certainly care, but broadly speaking, strange as it may seem, no one can be bothered to protest. I still find it intensely annoying.

This is I’m sure because most people are either on an unlimited plan or they’ve got their texting well and truly controlled. If you’re stupid enough to pay $0.15, the current absolutely outrageous price for texting out of bundle, one imagines you’ll be eminently content to pay $0.20.

The good news is that the more mobile operators increase their prices, the more premium services like AskByText at $0.99 look really good value.

If you’re a heavy user, AT&T’s unlimited-everything plan looks a rather good deal:

$134/month and it’s all included. Love it. Or just get $99 for unlimited everything from Helio if you’re ok with CDMA.

Got the original gubbings for this via Engadget.

I picked up this story from TVNZ that states Vodafone NZ doesn’t bother archiving text messages transmitted by its customers — and that Telecom NZ is planning to do the same by the end of this year. The storing of text messages is an additional headache for operators. Let’s be clear, it’s certainly not rocket science — a few decent servers can handle an archive, no problem — but it’s just an arse for operators, especially when they’ve already been paid for and delivered the service.

But, text archives are becoming more and more useful for Police investigators. (That, and the cell location data from the towers too)

The TVNZ article points out that both NZ operators aren’t going to bother archiving text messages in future, unless legally mandated to do so.

So there’s a question. Should your operator store your text messages indefinitely?

Regular reader Keith knocked me over this question:

Quick question … do you know how I would be able to have SMS text messages sent to me go directly to email or better yet to a MYSQL database so I can start a database of SMS phone numbers?

Well, this is eminently easy. What say, you, readers?

It’s Fine Day today — the UK regulator, PhonepayPlus published details of the companies that it has fined for breach of its regulations last month. Most of the fines are 5,000 or 10,000… small beer, really, especially compared to last month’s 175,000 pound whopper fine for SMS.ac.

2Ergo is banished to the naughty step as a result of one of it’s clients operating a rather suspect free text online service that charges users £1.50/fortnight and whose server appeared to misunderstand the ‘STOP’ opt-out command, a huge no-no when it comes to the PhonepayPlus regulator panel. Effectively, once you signed up, you couldn’t unsubscribe…

2Ergo were reportedly quick at reacting when the regulator came-a-knocking and this stood them in good stead when it came to working out the value of the fine. However:

In coming to its decision on the level of fine to impose, the Panel was particularly concerned by the service provider’s breach history, noting that this was the fourth time within the past year that breaches had been upheld against this service provider.

Deary me. Not good!

The market is hotting up in the American question and answer text service marketplace with the arrival of ASKbyText. I had a note in from CEO Steve Smale with the details this morning.

If you recall, I tried out rival incumbent, Johnny27 regularly while I was in San Francisco (did you know that skiing generally burns 500 odd calories an hour?) and I can see a lot of demand for question answering services there.

ASKbyText, operated by Com’cetera, is entering the market at half the cost of Johnny27’s $1.99/text cost. ASKbyText is charging a simple $0.99 per question answered — I think that’s a far better price point for mass market adoption.

They’re live on US shortcode 70589 today — and they’re heading to the UK, Ireland and Australia imminently. In America? Try it out and let me know how you get on?

Every success to the team at Com’cetera!

Avanquest, the global software developer and company behind text service, ‘Text Message Server’ (perhaps a rather unimaginative name — still, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin), have announced that Oxfordshire County Council has launched a text alert service for flood information.

Floods in Oxford are a bit of an issue. Here’s a BBC story from July last year with more details. Back in July, following excessive rainfall, the rivers Cherwell and
Isis/Thames, which traverse Oxfordshire, flooded. Advance warning of a potential flood gives property owners the chance to prepare and take the necessary action to minimise damage. Move stuff upstairs, sandbag the whole place, that sort of thing.

Text alerts for possible impending floods will, I suspect, be extremely, extremely valuable for residents whose areas are prone. It’s very easy in this connected world to sometimes get disconnected from the hive. Simply going out for a meal for the evening then going home and going to bed without viewing any television or listening to radio can result in you missing vital updates. Rare for people to leave their mobile handsets at home though — so texting is a brilliant medium of choice for updates.

I’m not sure about the process is for signing up to receive alerts — when I find out, I’ll update this post.

BeamMe.Info is a cool new service for web publishers that places a small link next to content, so that users can quickly and easily send the info to their handset via SMS. There is a ‘Beam Generator’ that will generate the code, which you merely paste into your website, wherever you want the function to be.

BeamMe.Info securely asks for a user’s mobile number and sends the information via SMS. The webmaster never sees the mobile number, and it’s not stored anywhere, since there’s no registration or anything. Very easy for readers, with no barriers other than an SMS-capable handset.

Standard SMS rates apply to receive the SMS, so readers don’t incur large costs. However, for the webmaster, they’ll be billed per message sent. Rates are mostly <$.20, and are tier-priced according to the number sent. BeamMe.Info also has budgeting built-in, so webmasters can set a monthly limit, and the logos will disappear until either a new month or the budget is increased.

[Via: Textually.org]

AQA can help…

Jeff Jarvis, writing in today’s Media Guardian, makes some interesting points about Twitter and the medium of microblogging (or, picoblogging, I think that’s a better term — Microblogging conjures up images of sentences, whereas a picoblog is, to me, just one sentence).

Given that Twitter first started via text — and that a large amount of Twitter users use the medium of text to interact with Twitter, if you haven’t taken a look at Twitter recently, it’s worth a second look.

Link: Why short is tweet for the blogging community | Media | The Guardian

When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter - which enables users to publish 140-character-long messages via the web and mobile phones - I thought it was silly. Or rather, the uses to which it was being put were silly: people announcing that they’d just woken up or what they’d had for breakfast. I couldn’t have cared less. But then I should confess that when I first used blogs and podcasts, I didn’t fully comprehend their impact either. So, when my son and webmaster told me I should take another stab at Twitter, I did. And I now see it is an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.

If you’re new to Twitter, try it out by subscribing to the SMS Text News Twitter update here. You’ll get the headline of every post sent direct to your mobile by text message moments after we publish it.

Oh dear. According to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, graduates are using text-speak when they’re writing applications, with the problem particularly widespread among those who have studied technical courses, like engineering.

Shirley Alexander, a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Technology, Sydney, said recent years had seen an increase in students writing assignments in leetspeak - gaming slang, using numbers to replace certain letters, such as ‘3′ for ‘E’. But there was no hard evidence grammatical skills were in decline, she said.

It’s good to hear the academic’s take on this - a few people unable to use a spellchecker does not a grammatical decline make.