Ofcom vs the lifeboats

The register has publised a rather shocking article on Ofcom's plans to massively increase the amounts it charges to the voluntary rescue services. I wasn't even aware that the lifeboats and mountain rescue organisations had to pay for their comms - far less that they were expected to pay commercially realistic rates for it.

As a person who has worked in a number of startups I generally err at least somewhat towards the opportunity and enterprise end of the spectrum, but this seems to be taking the free market principle to a grotesque extreme - and human life obviously doesn't have any value in the models they use.

To iPhone 3G or not to iPhone 3G

All very tempting - big touchscreen and nice web browsing etc. Perhaps it could be the successor for my current E61i. Having scanned some of the huge amount written about it there are a few concerns though ...

• No tethered use as a modem for my laptop. This seems to be a deliberate decision to keep the operators happy.
• No IMAP IDLE support - again I suspect deliberate in order to drive folks towards the subscription based MobileMe service. There is at least one app out there that addresses this though it isn't an official app and so require jailbreaking the phone.
  
• Can't mark emails as read without actually opening them - that's a biggy!
• Uncertain how well it will work with SyncML based OTA sync services such as ScheduleWorld and MyFunambol - though there is now a free funambol client in the app store I understand.
• To get an ssh client at present requires jailbreaking - OpenSSH.
  
• On screen keyboard as opposed to blackberry style physical keyboard - though have generally heard good things from folks who have tried it.

Now just need to find somebody who has one and can confirm/deny the details of the above!

PS. The latest carnival is up over at the Mippin blog.

Mowser is now in dotMobi

I am late as ever in noticing but am delighted to see that the Mowser assets have been acquired by dotMobi. Great to see those ideas continuing on as part of a greater whole! It is well described by Russell Beattie, Mike Rowehl and James Pearce.

The feed aggregator approach - Mippin

Following on from the demise of Mowser which went for full on transcoding of sites to allow efficient access from mobile my attention was caught by Mippin. They portray their service in the same way but require that the site provide an RSS feed so in fact what they are is a feed aggregator.

That said they do it very well - all nicely tied together and a nice widget to help people get your site onto their phone etc -

Monetisation is via advertising - with some careful validation done to ensure that a user isn't trying to monetize a feed that isn't theirs - and implemented in conjunction with admob so the site publisher gets the primary revenue.

All in all a very smooth experience - though the key question as ever is whether they can get enough footfall to make it all worthwhile.

PS. Carnival #126 is now up.

UPDATE: After my messing around yesterday I got as far as enabling advertising but then didn't have time to go and create an admob account so left it without one defined. It turns out that in these circs Mippin will serve ads from their own account - and a number of them were of the sort you tend to see in late night TV or spam email - not ideal!

This morning I have created my own admob account - with "age appropriate ads" disabled. The short term effect is that no ads are yet appearing but hopefully when they do they will be a little more appropriate!

UPDATE2: This is apparently not intended (see comment below) and they plan to fix it today so that ads don't appear at all until a valid admob id is provided.

Surfing the web on mobile

Sad to see that Russell has had to throw in the towel over at Mowser. Rather emphasises the fragile nature of startups and how they are completely dependent on the belief of their backers, but also, as Russell himself says, it also brings the whole mobile web proposition into question.

Mowser acted as a proxy which reformatted conventional websites for viewing on mobile. It is thus related to, though much less intrusive than, the various transcoders being inflicted upon users by various mobile networks.

These have generally caused problems for mobile content and site providers due to their indiscriminate deployment and lack of any coherent and consistent way for a site to avoid transcoding.

For the last few months Luca Passani of WURFL has been driving a campaign against indiscriminate reformatting and has proposed a standard methodology for mobile optimised/aware sites to avoid transcoding. Recently one of the major transcoder providers, OpenWave, have signed up to this. Hopefully more will follow!

In a few years time everybody will have a device and connection which allows full on web browsing and we will be looking back on all this somewhat bemusedly wondering what all the fuss was about. In the meantime the mobile web sadly must remain a somewhat brittle thing, and thus unlikely to really crack the mass market.

PS. The latest carnival is up at 3-Lib.

Analytics for the price of an ad

Mobilytics have created an intriguing little service where for the price of a small ad on each page of your mobile site you get free detailed usage stats covering referrer, search sources, country, carrier, and handset etc etc.

Even better if you have over 10000 page impressions a month they will share 70% of the revenue they earn on the ad space back to you.

What a nice simple and compelling idea!

PS. The latest carnival is up.

More data charge lunacy

I guess I should start with a small disclaimer. This was reported on the register and they have been known to skew their facts a little from time-to-time. That said - back in December they published a remarkable article on data charging gone wrong.

The problem with this - and other similar stories that do the rounds - is not that the operator can set some rules and then charge based on them. The problem is that the typical end use has no idea when they will be charged or not. There is no warning given - first you know is a five figure phone bill.

*If* vodafone really act like this then they need to look very hard at their processes and procedures.