Between Brackets

The Belgian operator Mobistar introduces mobile internet everywhere. On billboards around the cities they advertise “Internet Everywhere for 4 euro’s a month”.

For 4 euro per month you get 1GB of data. Wow, that’s a lot! Oh wait, there’s a little asterisk next to the “4 euro”. Here’s the summary of fine print: you need to pay 0,83 euros for each day that you surf. hmm, that would be like errr almost every day.

For the occasional surfer it may be interesting but for frequent users this promotion is not interesting at all. In fact it is more expensive for daily users than monthly subscriptions…

I was very excited when I saw the billboard, but after reading the small print I was left a bit disappointed…

Want to know more on the promotion?

Nokia apparently offers the new N96 phone with a selection of BBC TV series in Australia. The N96 is a DVB-H mobile which means that it is capable of showing mobile TV. Problem in Australia is that there is no DVB-H available yet.

Although the European Commission approved DVB-H as European standard in March 2008, the same goes for much of Europe: when it comes to offering DVB-H services there is not too much to be found. There are a few services available in Europe, for example the Netherlands and Switzerland, but most countries are still in the trial stage. Let’s hope the introduction of phones like the N96 will change that, as side-loading TV shows to your mobile phone is not that much fun as the real thing.

Last Monday I went to the first mobile Monday in Belgium. Actually some years ago an attempt to kick-start MoMoBel was made, but it slowly died as not enough traction could be generated. But as the mobile market is maturing rapidly this time around will probably be successful.

Do come by, you can get to know other Mobile aficionados, have a drink and learn a lot about what’s happening in the Belgian mobile space (actually that’s where I learned that De Redaktie was working on a mobile version of their site as posted before).

The next Mobile Monday will be November 17, for more info go to the MoMoBel wiki.

PS: another post on MoMoBel, and another.

People are used to music on the move for quite some time (mp3 players). Big phone manufacturers have launched a large range of music playing phones last couple of years (Sony Ericsson Walkman, Nokia N series Music Edition, iPhone). Most phones come with installable software to download music from your computer to your phone, but this is not always the most easy operation in the world.

Increasingly phones do offer the possibility to buy music directly as the different manufacturers roll out music stores in different countries. A different approach are initiatives such as ‘Comes with Music’ by Nokia, in which a – one year – unlimited subscription to music comes with the phone but that still requires you to download music to your computer first. Yet another model is the one that last.fm offers. Although one can argue that this is more of a radio station as you cannot select songs freely yourselves, the music recommendation is working quite well, so you can listen to music you like most of the time. Recently, it has become possible to listen to music via last.fm on your smart phone (iPhone and Symbian S60). Data plan rates and bandwidth issues are still prohibitive here, but the bits and pieces are there, and it is working quite well.

Recent research reports (via fiercemobile) that a significant number of users are willing to pay for music subscription on their mobile as long as the price is right. If the music stores can also improve the geographical issues that are forced upon users (for example you cannot access the Sony Ericsson music store nor the Nokia Music store in Belgium for the moment), these services may really become a success. But the service will have serious competition from other music-on-your-phone models that are being pushed into the market.

Interesting to see what models will work and which ones won’t, suffice to say that downloading music from computer to your phone will still be around for a while.

The VRT (Flemish Radio and Television Network) is experimenting with mobile (what a surprise ).

They have set up a beta site http://m.beta.deredactie.be. They use the Mobixx platform to scrape their official site and make it easily accessible for mobiles.

It’s a clean site (ok, maybe the colors code be a bit lighter, but it’s still beta), but it works well.
Hopefully we’ll be able to access the TV news and background stories on the phone soon in an open video format so we can all enjoy it on our mobile phones.

Here are some pictures of the site (on a Nokia S40 browser):

After many major Belgian newspapers started offering mobile content (http://m.standaard.be, http://m.tijd.be, http://www.gva.be/palmnieuws/) it’s time for the job sites to go mobile (at least in Belgium):

• http://m.vdab.be
• http://m.jobat.be
• http://wap.vacature.com

It’s great to see so many things go mobile? We’re finally reaching some momentum.

Another thing to notice is that there seems to be a consensus to use the “m.” to denominate mobile sites. I have not found statistics about this yet, and if I do I’ll certainly post them here.

Can I borrow your extra eye for a minute? The idea of streaming video from your mobile is not new, actually there is quite a list of initiatives already. Interestingly, by sharing these streams these services provide you with a live view of a location, somewhere in a city but also at a sports event or a concert.

When such services are combined with geo-tagging like seero does, it becomes even more interesting: you can search for a location with a simple location search, like : I want to see what is happening now on Times Square, near the Taj Mahal, or during a football game. Provided there is someone streaming from there, you can immediately have an impression of what’s (not) happening there. When both the location and the time are archived together with the footage you can even perform historical searches such as ‘what happened there at that moment in time’.

Services like these are still in their infancy, but the number of providers and handset capable of geo-tagged streaming increase rapidly so the number of live streams recording the world may grow rapidly. It is interesting to see in what direction this moves, but at least it seems there is yet another way of being spotted somewhere by your friends, even when they are not there themselves.

I’m not complaining, no Sir! I live in Antwerp (the second largest city of Belgium) and often travel by train to Brussels (the largest city). And I must say the 3.5G coverage along this axis is rather good (it’s not a 100% but it’s really usable). It’s when you leave the densely populated areas that reception deteriorates a lot or when a lot of (business)people are around, since throughput is still limited (maybe I’m imagining this, but I get this feeling anyway).

Now the Belgian operators have sent in a request to place another 1526 antennas, which should improve the 3G coverage. Today there’s a total of 6643 antennas, which is thus to increase by 23%. However, the new antennas would mainly serve to improve 3G coverage (not voice, which is covered for 99% of the territory).

No one’s really sure whether or not this has consequences for people’s health. Let’s hope there’s no cover-up like in the tobacco industry.

src (dutch)

Every now and then we’re going to review a Mobile Community or a Mobile Social Network and let you know what we think of it, like it or not ;p

The first we took a look at is: itsmy.com

What it is

Here’s what it is advertised to be: the US and UK leading mobile community – More than 2 million users. It’s off-deck.

Reading this I was of course very tempted to try it out.

The try-out

It’s a pure mobile-phone-only site, no old-webbish version.

I registered and didn’t immediately provide a phone number. This was a bad idea in retrospect, because the validation of my phone number afterwards didn’t work (a second attempt to register with the phonenumber, failed -therefore something must be wrong with the mms-stuff). So now I’m thinking I’m missing out on all kinds of features that are for validated users only. That’s a shame.

The basic features to which I do have access and which I tested are:

• making friends
• sending messages to friends
• flirting
• watching movies (I didn’t see anything remotely interesting though)
• I created my own avatar (go visit my homepage at http://patrizz.itsmy.com – works with mobile only!)

Some of the features for validated users only are:

• uploading/sharing pictures and videos
• you can create your own avatar

Messaging is basic, you need to go to your itsmy inbox to see whether you’ve got new messages or not. No sms alerts.

The figures

They date from last year, but are pretty iumpressive:
• 600.000 mobile internet homepages.
• 500 million page-servings per month.
• Support for 3100 cell phones and browser types.
(source: http://www.contentfutures.com/archive/newsletter-template/newsletter44-07-11-07.html)

Business Model

The site is a brand of Gofresh (http://www.gofresh.de) “the mobile social company”.

The site is ad-supported. In a bold move, however, they are giving the users control over the ads they want to see (src: http://www.inquisitr.com/970/itsmycom-gives-users-control-over-ads/)

I couldn’t find any figures on how much they make with these ads. But Antonio Vince Staybl the CEO of Gofresh made the following statement in 2007: “If the development of social mobile advertising keeps the current pace of growth, the traditional advertising industry must pay attention not to be overtaken by us.”

The conclusion

If I look at the usage figures, then it is a very lively community.

The support team, however, seems to be dormant or on permanent leave (I asked them to help me get my account verified but never got an answer)

The site itself is a bit dry and not really fast on a mobile (nope, not even on 3,5G I’ve checked ). But it is really feature packed, and can be fun to use to share pictures and video’s among friends.

Mobilistas unite!

September 22th there will be a informal gathering of mobile enthousiasts under the Mobile Monday flag. Don’t expect high profile speakers expect for yourself of course

Registration and more on the subject: http://www.mobilemonday.be/.