CTIA announced today that that the Common Short Code Administration (CSCA) has opened registration for 6-digit short codes. Up until now Short Codes have been limited to 4-5 digits. For those of you who do not know, a short code is a special telephone number, but shorter than a full telephone number, that is specifically designed to address SMS and MMS mobile marketing messages from mobile phones. Examples of Short Codes you may have come across are the ability to send a text message to GOOGL (46645), Mozes (66937) or to vote on American Idol (7827).
As you can see, examples of the kind of wireless communications that short codes enable include consumer voting, marketing campaigns, direct downloads of ring tones and wallpaper, text alerts, bill paying and donations.
“The expansion of our CSC program is just another example of how wireless is revolutionizing the way we communicate and connect with the world around us,†said CTIA – The Wireless Association® President and CEO Steve Largent. “Only wireless can offer businesses the ability to meet their customers on the move and with this announcement even more enterprises can enter the game.â€
The Common Short Code Administration says the addition of the 6-digit format represents a 10-fold increase in available codes.
A short cost will cost you though. A vanity short code like Google (466453) (5 or 6 digits) will cost you $1000 dollars a month while a randomly given short code will only burn you $500 dollars a month. You also cannot sit on a short code as 3 months of inactivity, and or other abuses, will cause you to loose it.
One of the biggest barriers to creating an SMS text messaging based donation drive is that the carriers (who handle the billing) take 50% of the cut. This has prevented a lot of organizations from taking advantage of the extremely useful way of raising money. This, again is mainly because the service was set up for retail purposes. But companies like Mobile Accord (the premier company for handling your SMS donation campaigns) are actively working with organizations and governing bodies in the wireless industry to get the carriers to significantly cut their revenue share on charitable donations. Industry insiders have told me that regulations are being worked on to make it more affordable for these types of organizations to take advantage of the mobile space.
There is also a limit as to how much the carriers will let a group raise via Premium SMS (PSMS) which is currently capped at $10 per donor. This is simply because the usual price for purchasing mobile content over a phone never tops more than $10 and the carriers do not want to get involved with managing the risks involved in collecting large sums of money.
Well, I just read this article that explains how a mobile marketing company in the UK called Incentivated found a way of extending the amount of money people are able to donate to a Cancer charity called Macmillan via text.
British born artist and cuneiform/writing expert Tom Kemp could very well be an artist close to MOpocket’s heart. Kemp uses drawing tablets, scanners and a Palm Vx handheld with TealPaint software to produce works of art that explore the relationship between the human hand stroke and the digital medium. The largest of these works of art, Analysis (4 feet by 16 feet), is made up of one-thousand smaller works which were made on a Palm Pilot and then reproduced and enlarged either by printing or laser cutting. Each mini work was then laid out in a zig-zag down the page, starting at the top right. After each successful palm painting was completed it was added, chronologically, to the work. Some works also stand on their own and have been shown in galleries and art shows throughout London and the European continent.
Kemp explains that “The digital quality of the painting is quite apparent. The Palm screen has a low resolution. Because each small painting is printed at actual size the individual pixels are clearly seen. These contrast with the obvious swiftness and complexity of the movements used when wielding the tiny electronic brushes. The graininess of the pixels can’t hide the humanity of the original movements.â€
Kemp also created works of art with a software he developed called “Particle Painterâ€,“ which mimics the movement of charged particles. Each positive and negative particle leaves a colored trail of its movement around the screen as it interacts with other positive and negative electrons (kind of like the apartment I share with my girlfriend). The colors, type of trail and movement of the particles can be adjusted and manipulated at anytime. A Particle Painting by Kemp entitled â€You Live Here“ was commissioned by Oxford Publishing last year to celebrate the 125th anniversary of its famous bookshop in Broad Street. It ran down the entire length of the building at Beaver House tower at Blackwell Ltd.
You can â€try your hand“ at â€Particle Painting“ for yourself here.
A signed, limited edition poster of Analysis is available. Click here to find out more
Moconews reported via 14U News the other day that AOL Germany plans to launch a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)some time this year. According to a Berliner Zeitung interview with AOL Germany’s CEO Charles Frankl the service will essentially be a pocket extension to AOL’s internet platform providing AOL customers with AOL’s communicaiton and content services (probably along with AOL advertising) in the palm of their hands.
AOL users will have access to AIM, photo albums, blogs and more via the AOL mobile phone service.
Take photos for example. At the present moment eight out of ten mobile phones have camera’s. With AOL [mobile phone service] our customers will be able to in the future load their pictures onto the Internet or exchange the photos with other AOL members via their mobile phone. Our customers will also see an AOL starting screen, which can be personalized. Essentially, Whether you prefer weather, AIM, Blogs or news you can get to your favorite [application] with just one click. [this translation from the German is a very loose one based on my poor but manageable German skills]
Frankl had no comment as to whether or not the service will provide a flat rate data plan needed to make such a service attractive to Europeans (most European wireless operators do not yet offer flat rate data plans like they do here in the United States… and it is costing users a tiny fortune). On that note, there is no word from AOL’s base about whether or not AOL will launch an MVNO here in the States and compete with MVNO’s like EarthLink and SK Telecom’s MVNO Helio which similarly offers its “members” mobile access to social networking sites like Myspace and other internet services.
AOL just released a social networking platform of their own called AIM Pages which integrates with people’s already well established AIM buddy list. AOL would do good in trying to leverage these programs by either launching their own MVNO or making a deal with a carrier to make these services more easily available and manageable from a mobile phone…. Especially with all the hyped news lately about how IM will overtake text messaging (an argument I have some qualms with but will save for another post). And it is more than obvious that AOL wants to enter the VoIP /telecommunication game when it it announced a new AIM service (AIM Phoneline) that allows free telephone calling. I mean, lets face it. AOL is in a lot of trouble lately (even AOL Germany, the company making the venture into an MVNO is up for sale) and the only thing they got going for them, the only product they offer that people (both subscribers and non-subscribers) really still use anymore is AIM… and until AIM Pages they have done almost nothing to leverage that. Which was why I was shocked when Frankl’s response to the question “Will you permit usages of services such as Skype?” was “If the customers wish, I do not have anything against it.”
AOL does produce AIM platforms for various mobile devices as well as a plethora of mobile services. Mobile AIMing, however, which AOL makes available either through Mobile WAP (not a nice experience), text messaging (a costly experience) or their own software (which is neither the prettiest or easiest thing to use) has so far for me not been such a pleasant experience. I used to, for example, get my AIM messages forwarded to my phone via text message. For one thing this got really expensive really fast as most people sending AIM messages from the computer did not keep in mind the 160 character limit creating multiple messages for me to handle. And then came along the problem of AIM Robot Spam, “girls” asking me to look at their profiles which where obvious links to porn sites. Anything that facilitates spam on a phone is not a good thing…. so like my old AOL email address I shut mobile AIM text messaging down. So then I went to buy the AIM software for the phone I had at the time (which was the Treo 650). The software was very buggy, did not sign in all the time and even when it did it would not run in the background when I went to do other things (one time it even let me sign in using my old password after I changed it). I now have their Symbian S60 version running on my Nokia N70 which is horrible. It does not put your contacts in the familiar groups they appear in on your PC and, like the Palm, appeasr to have problems running and staying connected when I navigate elsewhere on the phone. Both solutions had, of course, the same problem with AIM spammers.
AIM Spamming is also a problem they will have to solve if they wish to truly embed it with a wireless service.
To the platforms credit and future potentialities, however, I did once use AIM mobile to ask the Moviefon robot about movie times and locations. And I have seen it run pretty smoothly on Sidekicks. So its not a total loss and their is a lot of room to grow on this if AOL does it right… which they probably wont. When it comes to catching up to new ideas AOL still runs at Modem speed…. and because they are still running at that speed their chances at being ingenuity leaders in the next big thing, in this case mobile, is even more unlikely.
To their credit, it is not like AOL does not “get” mobile, especially if their recent purchase of Tegics “T9,” the application on your phone that makes it easier to input text on a dial pad with predicative text, is any indication. And while I was at CTIA this year I stopped by the AOL booth where they showed me a pretty array of mobile applications and software such as a Location Based Enabled CityGuide Mobile application, a MapQuest GPS navigator platform as well as a mobile browsing service that, like Google’s, automatically adapts web pages to mobile screens (which got a pretty good review at WapReview). Another thing they showed me was a Shozu like application that allows AOL Pictures users (AOL members and AIM users alike) to automatically post photos taken with their mobile device to their AOL Pictures account, regardless of their wireless carrier. Lets not forget mobile.aol.com where you can get access to other AOL content such as AOL Search (powered by Google)AOL Mail (which AOL also has a mobile application for), news, weather, sports, entertainment and the Yellow Pages. AOL Mobile’s website also has the usual Ringtone, Wallpaper sales (via Zingy) as well as a pretty easy to use “Mobile Dashboard” in which you can register your phone to work with various AOL mobile features such as “reminders,” IM text forwarding and set things like quite time (features cannot yet be changed from the phone itself). Besides selling ring-tones and wallpaper and its IM to Text option, AOL has not made any other ventures into the realm of SMS text messaging… which you think it would with its big emphasis on using things like keywords to navigate AOL channels. So all that mixed with the recent news of potentially launching an MVNO means that AOL understands, like Google CEO Eric Schmidt that “Mobile is going to be the next big internet phenomenon. It holds the key to greater access to everyone - with all the benefits that entails.”
Two things, however, are going against AOL. One is their usual lack of pace in taking on the next big thing. They seen to always be chasing what’s hot and cloning it with a “we can do it to” attitude. It is not a company that likes to gamble or take risks.
The second issue is whether it is really relevant that AOL makes this move at all. In his interview, Charles Frannkl the CEO of AOL Germany said that an AOL MVNO will allow AOL customers to access AOL features easier on their mobile phone. But AOL is reportedly loosing customers, a world-wide loss of a few million a year in fact. This has lead to AOL looking for other ways to make revenue such as through advertising on their new freely opened website portal. But supposedly, the loss of direct customers is having a noticeable negative impact on web traffic and use of other AOL services. As the Economist pointed out in a recent article.
AOL estimates that just over half of its unique monthly visitors are subscribers, rather than surfers with no other connection to the firm. So as subscribers leave, AOL will steadily lose page views. Moreover, each subscriber generates about six times as many page views as non-subscribers, says Henry Blodget, president of Cherry Hill Research, because subscriptions represent households rather than individuals, and because AOL members are heavy internet users.
This has led to a desperate campaign inside AOL to find all sorts of ways to increase web traffic from non and former subscribers as well as a website and search engine over-run with ads (so badly that it is reported that AOL employees don’t even use their own search engine). Purchasing Weblogs Inc, AIM Pages and reaching out to the blogosphere in general has been just some of their strategy as they wait and see if their parent company, Time Warner, will loose its patience and just sell the company… that is if they can find a buyer. Warner has even been trying to sell AOL Germany and other parts of AOL Europe for sometime now.
So is an MVNO a solution for a company that is loosing its costumer and loyalty base at a few million a year? Sounds like a bad business idea to me. The other applications are nice but are one in a dozen of similar applications that are out there and in which case the AOL brand name does not help in their ubiquitous usage rates. I think that, for the most part, only AOL subscribers will use AOL mobile products and as I said, that number is dwindling.
AOL does, however, have a real opportunity to lead way in Mobile IM with AIM. The question is whether they will do it in a timely matter before some one else, like the carriers or MySpace or Google or Skype beat them to it. AIM, for now, remains the largest IM social networking platform. If anything can hurt it, it has to be having another IM platform dominate the mobile sphere. If Skype, for example, gets put on every handset and is made free and easy to use… it will become the “always on” IM platform that everyone has on them and thus has the potentiality of becoming the default IM platform rather quickly.
Making AIM and all of its features the ubiquitous choice for Mobile IM would also do a lot to help boost its MySpace competitor AIM Pages and help really bring social networking to the mobile world.
Just in time for some light weight mobile industry beach reading for Memorial Day, the new MVNOHelio has released the premier issue of its quarterly printed Helio Magazine. As the intro puts it: In this premier issue you’ll find interviews, essays, art and fashion - as well as articles on the history of pranking, the union of fine art and video games and how mobile technology is transforming the face of South Korea. The zine like publication is part of Helio’s effort to restyle what it means to be a mobile carrier for its “members” (Helio does not call its users subscribers).
Helio Magazine is one of the best carrier branded magazines out there… actually its the only carrier magazine out there. Every MVNO has a niche. It appears as if Helio’s niche is lifestyle. And they certainly are doing a good job at that.
More from the intro:
Helio hopes to showcase some of the most inventive new work coming out of the digital age, while simultaneously providing a revelatory look back into the history of artistic and social expression - because without the past, the present is a pretty blank page.
By focusing on the art, culture, technology and the ways in which the Internet affects our global social consciousness, we hope to create an insightful, intelligent platform for new work. We also want to entertain, educate and look really damn good in the process.
So far I am enjoying Helio’s “we are more than just a carrier” mentality. It’s so L.A. I am curious to see where it gets them.
The magazine follows the theme’s that are found when you press the menu button on the phone which means that everything from film (video), photography (camera) music (music) style (phone options) and lifestyle (calendar) etc are covered. Its published by StreetVirus and is moderately (and stylistically) loaded with advertisements from some hip companies that A) I have never heard of before and B) I can see Helio having some business relationships with such as Draw Pictures and Buffmonster.
The writing is pretty snazzy as well. I love the write up on Steve Buscemi called “Elevating the Everyman” and the history of pranking article titled “The Jokes On You” was pretty funny. An article at the end on the Mobile Cultural Mutation in Seoul, South Korea (where the other half of Helio owes its existence) was surprisingly insightful (and can also be read here)
And for those of you that did not follow that link there is also an online blog like version of the magazine at www.heliomag.com which “picks up where the printed mag leaves off” offering some online versions of what can be found in the printed version and which, unfortunately, has some navigational issues (but I am sure that the kinks will be worked out soon enough).
My guess is that you get the printed quarterly magazine as part of you Helio membership, which, because of the prices of the phones and the plans (membership), is not for everyone. But that is ok… if you are not in Helio’s demographic then you are not in its demographic. That is what MVNO’s do.
I winder if they will make it available on their deck as well?
Nevertheless, I was going to read my Cingular bill on the beach this weekend but now I got more entertaining mobile reading to bring with me
For a hands on review of the Helio Kickflip see here. (A critical review is coming shortly)
For other Helio news covered by MOpocket see here.
Also remember that there is a new Carnival of the Mobilists website. Also in Carnival news Khosla Ventures have agreed to sponsor the Carnival of the Mobilists from June 2006 until the end of the year. The sponsorship will take the form of cash prizes every month, as well as the Best of the Year Carnival prize which we run in December. Every month, the best Carnival Host will win $500 and the best Post will win $250. Of course, if you host and post, you could win the lot!
In December, the Carnival will hill again hold the Best Post of the Year again, hosted at MobHappy, where the Carnival will be awarding two cash prizes before the holidays, of $1,000 and $500.
You can read more about it at this weeks Carnival.
The Spanish American War based 3 percent federal excise tax that appears on your monthly mobile bill is no more. US Treasury Secretary John Snow announced today that the Bush administration plans to eliminate the tax, which originated as a luxury tax on telephones to fund the Spanish American War, on all long-distance wireless and wireline services.
Says Snow, “The federal appeals courts have spoken across the board. It’s time to ‘disconnect’ this tax and put it on the permanent ‘do not call’ list.”
Snow is a funny funny man.
Also in the works is a Senate measure that would remove the 3-percent tax from local wireless and wireless service as well. Mywireless.org must having a party as this was one of their major fights! Congrats!
For some past articles about the tax and the story behind it and the fight check out these past MOpocket articles here and here.
Getting rid of the FET will cost the U.S. Treasury $13 billion in refunds during 2007 and 2008. No immediate action is required by taxpayers. Simply claim the refund on your 2006 tax return.
Five second year Masters students at the School of Information (formerly SIMS), UC Berkeley have developed a project/product called iBuyRight which turns any cell phone into a social responsibility scanner of sorts.
The idea, the students say, is to empower consumers at the point of sale to make more socially conscious decisions before they buy.
My N70 arrived from Nokia and I have been using it as my main phone for the past couple of days now, replacing my Nokia 6682. What a phone the N-70 is! So far it has passed my “use in everyday life test” beautifully never freezing, stalling or needing to be rebooted (this has been my experience with several S60 phones).
The phone also draws a lot of attention. Whenever I whip it out, and yes sometimes I do it on purpose, people seem to immediately notice that I am holding a cool looking and great functioning phone. Have you seen my cool new European phone Doug? People who I have let play with it have all had positive reactions all commenting on its easy hardware and software user experience. The reaction most of the time is simply, “wow! this is a solid phone.” The phone even passed the parent test where my father spent a good deal of a family dinner playing with it and marveling over the Symbian S60 OS (a rarity here in the US). Trust me, that says a lot.
The phone has a different sized charger plug then the Nokia’s around today (much smaller). Because they only had European socket charges they had to send me a converter plug to use with a standard Nokia charger. I am sure a US version will come with a US plug but I can see this new plug size as annoying some people.
There still is a little lag time when moving from one option to another but it is a world of difference faster than the Nokia 6682. The email client is also more reliable and, while not perfect, actually usable.
I am also happy to say that the phone has survived falls from multiple stories and full water and windex submergence (just kidding Andy).
Now, I only wish that I could use some of the cool 3G functions that the phone has such as the Video Call and Radio features but you cant have everything, at least in the US.
So far what I have been using the phone mostly for, besides phone calls and SMS, is for picture taking which I immediately upload to my Flickr account via a software called Shozu. I have to be honest in that the picture taking and quality of the N70 took some time to get used to, at least from just after using the 6682. The flash lasts a little longer and the zooming is not as smooth (and is accompanied with an annoying beeping sound) as the 6682. The camera takes beautiful 2 megapixel shots in normal light (with great contrast in colors and detail) but it seems that with any variation of lighting or indoor dark shots like on a night out you pretty much point shoot and see. Subjects at a bar had to stand pretty close to get a decent shot.
For a while I thought that the 6682 was actually taking better pictures, even though the 6682 is only 1.3 megapixels. The flash on the 6682 seems to be a bit brighter (which is not always a good thing). But after closer examination I was dead dead wrong. The N70 photo’s do seem to have a bit of fuzziness to them though and that is what threw me off.
Have not played much with the mobile video yet but the little I have tested seem to play back smooth.
I don’t want to comment on reception because, as a European Phone, its on a 900/1800/1900 MHz. As my Cingular Network predominately relies on 850 and 1900Mhz I have a feeling that I am only picking up one of these bands (the 1900) and it has been noticeably so. My coverage has spotty in some areas where switching the Sim Card to my 6682 worked perfectly. I would imagine that an American version would have the 850 instead of 900. Damn American’s. Why do we have to be so different. Perhaps its a bad idea to use this phone as my main one?
The speakers, by the way, are incredible and have made choosing ringtones difficult as some of them are just to loud and some of them sound to good. The first day I brought the phone into work one of my colleagues said it sounded like a musical train was passing through every time my phone rang. I especially like to demonstrate the quality of the speakers with the built in “Stay That Way.acc” ring-tone, a short woman’s vocal pop ring tone. Amazing.
Anyways, my first impressions of the N70 is that this a serious phone with serious back-bone, literally. And for the first N series phone I have played with I am excited to see the rest.
Here is some more mobile porn for you.
My only fear is what they will do to tone down this phone so it can be released in the blah blah American market.
Since I will be using this phone for my day in and out operations there will be multiple reports on how it fares with other Symbian applications and other daily usages. Think of it as kind of a long term life action review. Stay tuned.
There has been a lot of buzz recently about the recent launch of the new dotmobi (.mobi) domain for Trademarked users.The sites that harbor the domain will be specifically catered and restricted for mobile devices and mobile content. The effort is being spearheaded and sponsored by a consortium of companies which include 3, Ericsson, Google, GSM Association, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Syniverse, T-mobile, Telefonica, TIM, Vodafone and Orascom.
Now, there is a lot of controversy over the new domain which I do not want to get to at length here. Just wanna point out the links here as the reading better then any writing I have time for on the subject write now. But I have written about my thoughts on dotmobi before.
Here are some links to some of the conversation that has been fermenting.
EngadgetMobile makes the announcement and even they site its controversy.
Moconews also points out the deep emotions behind .mobi and also pointed out an interesting fact I overlooked… $45 a year for a generic .mobi domain name! Unless they sponsor MOPocket you can forget about a MOpocket.mobi.
Carlo from Mobhappy has been a long tim critic of dotmobi. This post has a comment from Neil Edwards (CEO of dotmobi).
Then Rudy from M-Trends.org puts his two cents in regarding Carlo’s post.
Jonathan Blum chimes in on his blog about the possible marketing burdens this will cause.
CTIA announced today that that the Common Short Code Administration (CSCA) has opened registration for 6-digit short codes. Up until now Short Codes have been limited to 4-5 digits. For those of you who do not know, a short code is a special telephone number, but shorter than a full telephone number, that is specifically designed to address SMS and MMS mobile marketing messages from mobile phones. Examples of Short Codes you may have come across are the ability to send a text message to GOOGL (46645), Mozes (66937) or to vote on American Idol (7827).
