The Pondering Primate pointed out a press release from an SMS gateway provider that lists the top ten ways businesses in the UK are using text messages:
1. Recruitment agencies: people looking for temporary work can now register to receive SMS alerts about potential work from recruitment agencies. By sending a broadcast SMS to suitable candidates recruitment agencies can save considerable time and money.
2. Entertainment information services: SMS is being used to deliver an variety of entertainment information services such as ringtones, logos, jokes, competitions and horoscopes to customers. This generates significant revenue for many organisations.
3. Clubs and bars: many clubs and bars are using SMS to notify customers, who have opted in, about special drinks promotions and events for when they are in the area.
4. Internet service providers and hosting companies: SMS is being used to notify engineers when systems go down or if suspicious criminal activity is occurring across a network, meaning that problems can be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
5. Couriers: courier companies are using SMS to provide information to their couriers as to where to collect and deliver mail. Additionally it is being used to alert customers when items, such as concert tickets, are being delivered, so that they can ensure they are around for the delivery or can reschedule for a more convenient time.
6. Schools, colleges and universities: students and parents can now be alerted by SMS if buildings are closed due to bad weather, etc. This saves them having to wait for updates on local radio or having to call to find out if buildings are open, etc.
7. Hair salons, dentists and surgeries: individual patients can now receive automatic text reminders telling them the time and date of appointments. Patients can also postpone and reschedule appointments via SMS meaning that appointments are less likely to be missed.
8. Mechanics and body shops: mechanics are using SMS to notify customers when their cars are ready. This can save both the garages and customers time, because as soon as a job is logged as completed the customer can be automatically alerted, whether they are at home or at work, etc.
9. Charities: charities are using SMS in a variety of ways ranging from using it to alert people about fundraising activities or as a means to collect donations with enabling people being to make a pledge via a text shortcode with the donation being taken from their next bill.
10. Insurance companies: mobile users can now receive quotes and cover confirmation from insurance companies via SMS, which has helped to enhance customer service as users can have access to information 24 hours a day.
Okay, it’s great that companies are adopting SMS, but is anybody doing anything interesting? The vast majority of these are simply voice call or e-mail substitutes. Feel free to share any good ones you’re aware of in the comments.
I’ve been meaning to post this from We Make Money Not Art for a few days and finally got my act together.
MobZombies is a location based Zombie fleeing game, where virtual zombies chase the real world you. The longer you survive, the more zombies appear and the better they are at chasing you.
But, the game deliberately doesn’t take account of the real world, which is where the fun might be. So maybe you have to run through a wedding party to avoid being caught or climb a 10 foot wall.
Another example of the digital world meeting the physical.
Mobile operators in the UK are moving their sponsorship spending out of sports and into music, says Dow Jones Newswires. They’re saying sponsorship for sports like football has become too crowded, and music events help them better reach a wide array of young users.
You know how some web sites have a fascination that’s almost voyeuristic - I’m thinking of things Hot or Not, still going strong after all these years.
Now there’s a another one, in the form of a new feature from Treasure My Text, the sms online storage company I wrote about last week. It seems that many users are quite happy to publish their sms for all the world to see and it’s rather compulsive.
Messages vary from the obscure and personal to witty or sexually explicit (and I do mean explicit!). You can even sign up to an RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest.
Treasure My Text are calling it a Slog (SMS Log) and I can see that Slogging (by which I mean reading Slogs) might be the big thing this Autumn.
It’s been 8 months now since we looked at Java game downloads in the UK, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the market has developed since then. After all, 8 months is a whole generation in terms of technical and user development in mobile.
According to ELSPA’s Official Mobile Games Java Download Chart, compiled from data provided by the 5 main operators in the UK (ie Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, Orange and 3) the state of the universe looks like this:
1 LEMMINGS - IFONE
2 WALL BREAKER - INFUSIO
3 TETRIS - IFONE
4 PUB POOL
- INFOSPACE
5 WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE - GLU MOBILE
6 SWAT SNIPER -
INFOSPACE
7 LMA MANGER 2005 - JAMDAT
8 PITFALL GLACIER - DIGITAL
CHOCOLATE
9 MINI GOLF CASTLES - DIGITAL CHOCOLATE
10 PITFALL JUNGLE -
DIGITAL CHOCOLATE
There’s a couple of things to note here, though.
Firstly, we have no data about how much each title sells, which is a little disappointing. It’s also worth noting that a game promoted by a larger operator can sell less per user than a smaller operator, yet still be ahead in the charts. So, we really do need volumes to be able to usefully coment.
Secondly, it is only games sold via the operators. Since we’ve seen recent claims that off-portal sales of content have now reached about 70%, we are in theory only looking at 30% of the market here. This could be very skewed in terms of results, as gut feel tells me that most savvy mobile users and gamers would be buying off-portal, leaving the laggardly rump buying from their operator.
If that is the case, the operator chart would reflect an innate conservatism and a preference for games that don’t exactly push the envelope.
So here’s a call for a better chart for us play with, which would include off-portal sales too. This doesn’t have to be exhaustive, but certainly some of the bigger indie games sellers and resellers.
Anyway, with that in mind, what does the chart tell us?
Well, certainly oldies are still dominating the download scene. Are they really better, or are developers failing to get to grips with the new medium of phone-based gaming? Or is it a reflection of the type of gamer buying from operators, we discussed above?
The other interesting development is the sudden arrival of Digital Chocolate on the scene, with 3 titles in the top 10. This is the company founded by Trip Hawkins, who previously founded Electronic Arts, which practically invented the modern computer game. Trip is a master of the sound bite (he describes mobiles as "social computers" and "sieze the minute" is a nice description of mobile gaming) and founded the new company specifically to take advantage of the new mobile medium, attracting some impeccable investors on the way.
It looks like he might just be able to pull off that very rare trick of creating two hugely successful companies. Sure, it’s early days, but signs couldn’t be much more promising.
UK text-message figures are out for July, and the number of messages sent continues to grow, hitting 2.7 billion last month. This made me wonder how US figures stacked up, and I was a little surprised to find that the CTIA says 5 billion messages a month are sent in the US.
Of course, there are more than three times as many mobile users in the US as there are people in the UK, but I have to say these numbers still come as a surprise, particularly when that averages out to roughly 25 messages per subscriber per month — though I guess that’s easily skewed by kids, particularly those messaging IM networks (the average is 45 per person per month in the UK). In any case, it shows there’s a solid volume of text messages being sent in the US — so bring forth the content and applications.
TechDirt reported last week about a phone developed by Fujitsu for DoCoMo for the elderly. Among other features, it slows down speech to 70% of real time, so old folks can understand what you’re saying to them on the phone.
Frankly, I’m not sure oldsters need to slow speech down - they may be a little deaf perhaps, but do they need this?
Anyway, I think a great application for this technology would be for when you’re trying to talk to someone in a language that isn’t your own. I live in Germany, for instance, and struggle daily with the fiendish tongue. But when on the phone, I just go to pieces and pathetically ask "sprechen sie English?" to which the normal reply is "a little bit", followed by perfectly constructed sentences that most Brits wouldn’t be capable of.
But if I could slow them down a little, it would actually give me half a chance of understanding.
Also, if I could insert one of these things into my wife’s brain (she speaks English and German exceptionally quickly) we might be able to practice German conversations as a family, from time to time.
The good thing about the approaching Oktoberfest (a must-visit attraction at least once in your life) is that "Ein Bier" is pretty easy to ask for - one of the first language skills I mastered.
An article in New Media Age says that “only one in 20 business people understand the difference between Wi-Fi, 3G and GPRS technologies” according to some new study. I’m stuck trying to figure out why that’s important. It’s an indictment of carriers’ marketing and service failures more than a sign of user ignorance.
There’s no reason an average user should have to, or be expected to, navigate all these acronyms and technical terms, either in marketing or as part of the user experience. The marketing part is pretty easy — quit selling technology and start selling services (ie picture messaging, not MMS and the Internet, not GPRS). Perhaps the user experience is a little trickier, but I’d venture that the only time a normal user would run into these terms would be when something goes wrong and they’ve got to fix (or try to fix) something. While maybe that’s not preventable, it could be handled better.
WAP, 3G, GPRS, MMS — these are all meaningless terms. What concerns a user is what their phone can do, rather than how it does it. Do they care if it’s 2G versus 3G? The likely response is “what’s a G?”
It’s one of Russell’s favorite rants to decry (and rightly so) the fiasco of getting handsets set up properly for MMS, so I won’t cover that ground again. But the point is still valid: a customer shouldn’t have to do this stuff, or have any technical knowledge to make this stuff work.
Is it too much to ask for users to be able to walk into a shop, go “I want that one” and walk out with a phone that can properly access the services they’re interested in and can clearly understand, at an easily digested tariff?
I spotted a column by Dave Birch in the Guardian from last week (when it looks like Emily posted it on Textually as well) that’s pretty interesting about how mobile phones are being used to facilitate payments in African countries.
It’s nothing advanced as Simpay or PayPal for mobiles or anything like that — it’s using prepay credits as currency. We’ve seen operators that allow P2P airtime credit trading, which has spawned micro-resellers in places like the Philippines, but this sounds a little different. It’s a grassroots use of prepaid credits, which carry enough value to people that they’re accepted for payments — and even as bribes by government officials.
It works by people buying scratch-off vouchers, then texting the voucher number to the payee, who then applies it to their account. The only drawback is that while somebody could pass the number on to pay somebody else, they can’t split up the credit. Yet, anyway — it seems like if the operators there are smart, they’ll do like the Filipinos and make their systems open to this kind of thing, and reap the benefits.
A few years ago, as a fairly new and keen young parent, my wife and I went on a First Aid course to learn what to do if a child was injured.
One of the themes of the course was that, to an extent, kids have to learn themselves what’s dangerous and the consequences of that danger - the hard way, unfortunately. They gave an example of a paranoid parent worrying about her kid getting his fingers trapped in doors, so she simply took all the internal doors out in her house.
Sure enough, the kid never got his fingers trapped in a door - until the day he went round to a friend’s house. So, he had to go through the learning and howling process, at some point.
Mike Masnick makes a very similar point at TechDirt today, making an appeal that we should be teaching kids how to use the internet and avoid the "bad stuff" rather than just filtering it out. He says, like the finger in the door story, that sooner or later, kids will find them on a computer without filtering and won’t know how to handle this.
This is a very good point and one that I’d endorse wholeheartedly, with a small caveat. Very young kids use the internet these days - certainly 5 and 6 years olds, if not younger.It’s difficult to teach these kids anything to apply critical judgment and I think it’s this kind of age where filters are useful. Once they’re maybe 10 or older, you can start teaching them to think for themselves and they certainly should be capale of this, at that age.
Once they’re about 13 or 14 though, they’re going to look at the bad stuff anyway and they’ll be able to bust out of any filtering attempts you care to put in place. So while I’m not advocating encouraging them to try the stuff - like you wouldn’t give them packs of cigarettes to try - if they want to look, they will, as that’s juts part of growing up.
The place where filtering is much more useful, for all ages, is filtering out the nastier examples of spam email that pervades all our in-boxes, including our kids’. Irrespective of how tolerant you are as a parent, no one can possible thinking advertisng stuff like bestiality and worse, to children is anything but completely unacceptable.
Of course, these issues are about to be faced by mobile as well as the computer based access. The difficulty here is that, unlike a computer which can be relatively easily monitored (just keep popping into the room they’re using, unexpectedly from time to time) the mobile is almost impossible to police. This means that we’re going to see a lot more debate as the media and parents wake up to the possibility that their kid can look at nudey ladies on their phones.
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