John Gale over at MobileTracker was kind enough to tip me off that Opera Mini, the terriffic browser that works on the 95% of phones that don’t have the power to run full blown Opera has been released worldwide today. You can read the full release here: Opera Mini Worldwide

If you haven’t tried this slick browser that is less than a 100 k download you really should, it could change your opinion about mobile web browsing.

The New York Times launches a rather peculiar “loyalty programme” today, I couldn’t help thinking that they were missing a sizable opportunity by not including a mobile phone dimension to their idea. Actually, the principles can be extended to any loyalty programme and are potentially very exciting.

Before looking at these though, it’s worth briefly examining the NYT idea, as it’s an interesting lesson in ….well, how to waste everyone’s time it took to set it up.

Loyalty programmes work on the principle of retaining and rewarding your existing customers. While there may be a secondary benefit in that new customers might be attracted to your brand because of the programme, this isn’t really the objective. They make sense as it’s far cheaper and efficient to maintain a relationship, rather than initiate a new one.

The NYT idea isn’t to retain and reward its existing readers (and God knows, they need to, in these days of plummeting offline newspaper readership), but rather to offer NYT subscriptions and merchandise as a reward for purchasing other company’s products. So if you eat at certain restaurants and shop online at certain stores, you collect points that can be exchanged for free copies of a newspaper. Hmmm, not terribly exciting as rewards go, is it?

But then we realise that all they’ve really done is tie in with two existing multi-partner/multi-reward programmes (Rewards Network, covering 9,000 restaurants and 10,000 hotels; and Advantex Marketing International, covering 200 online shops) to offer the NYT as a reward alongside a veritable cornucopia of other stuff, ranging from the exotic to the mundane to hard cash. Such is the choice that it would be very surprising if more than a handful of collectors bothered to redeem rewards for free newspapers.

Indeed, I’d be quite surprised if this light-summer-breeze-in-a-tea-cup earns them back the cost of the phone calls that were needed to set the deal up.

Let’s leave that aside though and focus on what the mobile phone could do to enhance a loyalty programme generally.

I’m going to use Nectar in the UK as an example. But most programmes could use the principles. Nectar are also a good case study as they should be more mobile savvy than most as they’re currently in partnership with Carphone Warehouse, the UK’s largest mobile phone retailer. Before them, they had Vodafone on board, so they really should know their mobile phones.

The most obvious way Nectar could join the 21st Century is to allow their collectors to check their balances on their mobile phone. This could be done via a simple Java (J2ME) application that is downloaded and sits on the phone. Whenever a collector wants their balance, they fire up the application, which handshakes with a central server over a WAP connection, established for a matter of a few seconds. The app would then be fully updated with latest points balance, a statement, a list of current merchants giving Nectar rewards, series of special offers and examples of what the current balance could be redeemed for.

This gets Nectar a valuable presence on the mobile phone, reminds the customer to collect and relieves live calls from the call centre. Plus, it positions Nectar as something dynamic, in-touch and not just for the blue rinse brigade. Cool.

But let’s take this one step further. How about launching a sub-brand to Nectar, targeted at the youth sector. Let’s call it Sweet! The principle of spend, earn points and redeem for rewards remains constant. But Sweet! incorporates retailers targeting the youth demographic - clothes, music, mobiles etc. But the whole collection and redemption process takes place on the mobile (albeit supported via traditional online channels).

So the collector spends, points are loaded onto the phone, admin is on the mobile via the J2ME app outlined above and rewards are ordered and where possible, sent to the mobile in the form of ringtones, music, games and other content.

Sweet! has the added benefit of opening up a whole bunch of new collectors, who wouldn’t be seen dead using a collection card, like their Mum, anymore than today’s Mum wants to stick stamps in books, like their parents.

So my question is, why is no one doing either of these things? Or are they? If I’ve missed someone doing something interesting in this space, please leave a comment or drop me an email.

[Image from dear old Wikipedia.]

In my 2006 Predictions, I suggested that Gizmondo, the inept wannabe entrant into the handheld gaming market, must die.

Sure enough, less than 20 days later, Gizmondo Europe have filed for bankruptcy. I don’t doubt that a similar fate awaits the US arm in due course.

Gizmondo must be a classic case study of inept management, not to mention inept investment. As with all these things though, it’ll be the employees and smaller suppliers who will pay the heaviest price.

This is a prediction that I get no satisfaction from getting right. But there’s a few others in the 20 we gave you that will please me when they happen.

- Ben Godfrey on the Mobile Opportunities conference

- Canon DSLR phone? (BIOS)

- NTT DoCoMo to Sell 3G FOMA Windows OS Handsets Made by HTC (NTT DoCoMo)

- Dump Verizon, Vodafone told (The Times)

- Wireless: Cellphone industry goes gaga for radio (IHT)

- How Cell Phones Roil Japan’s Stocks (Textually)

- Connexion’s Future Rival (Wi-Fi Networking News)

- Say Tello For Presence (Om Malik)

Rupert Murdoch was interviewed last night on BBC Radio 5 Live, according to Media Bulletin. You can listen here, including downloading the iPod for posterity.

His main conclusion though is that media is about to enter a Golden Age:

“I think we’re on the eve of a golden age for media, but all these wonderful inventions are nothing if you can not put something on them. You’ve got to have content and that’s what our business is, creating or reporting news and creating entertainment,” he said.

When Murdoch speaks, we have to listen, even though there’s a huge pinch of “well, he would say that wouldn’t he?”. Can you imagine what would happen to News Corp’s (already languishing) share price if he’d said something like:

“Well, yer pommy bastard, you’ve got me bang to rights. Offline media is doomed, online is all about pay-per-click, where we have no presence or expertise, and a hell of a lot of content in the future will be generated by Citizen Journalists.

Bugger me sideways, I’m too old for this game, Sport, so I’m handing over to me kids.”

And yet this sentiment would be far closer to the truth.

He also pointed out that in the UK, newspapers are stronger than ever. His evidence? That their reach has increased due to their online efforts. This from a company which once considered (what? two years ago) shutting down its online newspapers as they were cannibalising offline sales. While they eventually saw the light and reversed the decision, News Corp, along with all old media, still haven’t figured how to make as much money online as in the old days of print.

So is the wily old fox out of touch or merely playing the best game he can, while frantically trying to change his cards, behind the scenes?

It’s difficult to tell with Murdoch. But the telling thing for me is that he still appears to be backing Labour and its heir apparent, Gordon Brown.

There’s a myth that the Murdoch newspapers influence the results of General Elections in the UK. I think this is greatly exaggerated. I believe that there’s a healthy element to the theory that they cannily read which way the electorate’s heading and back the winning horse. This allows Murdoch to maintain the myth and to call the shots with a new generation of politicians.

While it’s not too late for Murdoch to change his support or his company’s strategy, in my opinion, nothing shows that he’s so out of touch with things, as to publicly support Brown at this stage. He’s simply failing to read the mood of the country.

Maybe we’ll see Brown and Murdoch ride off into the sunset together after all these years. But maybe they’ll both pull rabbits out of hats and surprise us all.

There’s been a bit of an uproar in the US the last couple of weeks over the online sale of people’s mobile phone records. The basic idea is that you go to one of these Web sites, pay $100 or $150, give them a phone number, and within a few hours, they send you the last month’s worth of call records for that line. This has been possible for quite some time, but has come into public focus lately, spurred on in part by some bloggers buying a former presidential candidate’s records, and now politicians are getting in on the act, trying to make it look like they care and score some political points by saying they’ll introduce laws to make the sales illegal.

Carriers, meanwhile, “applaud” the bills and “supports the efforts” acting tough on this issue — Verizon in particular has a history of suing these people and describes that as “aggressively protecting customer privacy”. But, they’re masking the real issue, and the media is letting them get away with it.

The real issue is why operators are letting them get this information. There’s no doubt that selling this information should be illegal. But so should letting it out in the first place. It’s unclear exactly how these companies get the records, but it’s probably through some form of social engineering. The ease and speed with which they get the records is particularly troubling, and indicates either the system is easily gamed, or they have contacts working inside the operators. In either case, there needs to be some serious motivation for carriers to lock things down. If the information wasn’t so readily available to begin with, people wouldn’t be selling it.

So the brokers aren’t the only accountable ones here, the operators are responsible for leaking the information too. And without significant motivation to patch the leaks, they won’t do so. They’ll just keep on suing people after the fact for selling information they shouldn’t have let out in the first place. After all, what sounds better? “Verizon Wireless Carelessly Shares Users’ Call Records”, or “Verizon Wireless Takes Aggressive Legal Action To Stop Attempted Theft Of Customer Information By Florida Firm”? To be fair, some government-types have mentioned raising operators’ responsibilities, but I’ve got little hope they’ll do anything meaningful. Until the penalties actually mean something, it’s hard to see carriers really caring.

Don’t think this is an issue limited to the US, either. A story out of the UK’s been making the rounds about a site that says it can track the location of any UK mobile phone to within 50-500 meters. Users enter the number of the phone they want to track and an SMS gets sent to that number asking if the user consents. What’s unclear is if the company behind the site can access the location information even if the user doesn’t consent, and the consent simply dictates whether or not that information can be shared with a third party.

Surely some will defend this as opt-in, as no different than a user choosing to use a service that locates themselves, say to find the nearest ATM or gas station. But there really is a significant difference between someone pushing their information to a service and being asked for it. Presumably, the company could either game the system so they could track whoever they like, or, as I said, the consent really doesn’t matter. In any case, let’s hope they simply just can’t access the information without someone’s okay. Presumably the carrier bills for these lookups on a per-use charge — so why should privacy get in the way of a few pence?

Update: A guy in Scotland found he could very easily get people’s passwords for their O2 accounts from the operator’s web site — and it took the company 4 days to fix the “glitch” after they’d been notified.

bluepulse, a product of Bluepulse Pty. Ltd in Sydney, Australia may just be the first company to have “cracked the code” to one of the single most significant and confounding problems faced by mobile developers, carriers, handset manufacturers and most significantly end-users.

The company has developed a proprietary technology platform called OADP (Open Application Delivery Platform) which when combined with their SPOT (Small Portable Object Technology), the company claims (and my experience so far as well as that of a number of people besides myself) confirm that their bold claim, that they’ve overcome the barriers of
* compatibility
* connectivity
* billing
* distribution
IS TRUE.

In the real world this means that regardless of phone or carrier, you can download their bluepulse software platform, install a few widgets that are available either free, can be developed by the end user or professional developers or purchased, and in just a few moments experience a substantially similar experience as any other user on any other phone and any other network.

I previously blogged about bluepulse over at my other blog, MobileCrunch where I suggested that we may be seeing the first giant application success of Mobile 2.0. Let me go one further. If what I’ve experienced and what’s been reported to me bears out to be true over some time, what we’re really seeing is the kind of essential technology development that will make Mobile 2.0 possible! Bold words to be sure, but until the barriers come down and users everywhere can have a common experience regardless of where they are or what phone or carrier they have we’ll never see the sort of mass adoption and use that we enjoy with the PC.

In fact, this is a topic that I think bears much greater analysis and discussion; the disparity in sameness that is a huge barrier to global adoption. As much as the IEEE and other standards bodies spend bickering over standardization, why is it that as much as I know about phones, I have to poke around like a newbie every time someone hands me a phone I’ve never seen before? You’d think with the great reduction in number of entry methods on a typical phone (a keypad vs. a keyboard) it would be simple enough to arrive at some basic standards that hold true no matter what the phone.

Think about this for a moment. When you log on to a PC there are some basic steps that are always the same no matter what. You log in, either click a desktop shortcut or the “start” button on your taskbar and from there you activate programs and go about your business. With a phone about the only standards are that you dial numbers and hit send. For mobile data the rules go out the window. This is why bluepulse excites me so much. I put it on several phones from the high end Motorola A1000 smartphone to the Nokia N90 to the Nokia 6820 with its brilliant (but tiny) screen. Although the display real estate is really different the display itself and the operation of the program and the widgets I’ve installed.

Although not all the widgets are free there are enough that you can get a real feel for the application, particularly since it includes a chat client that consolidates AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ into one interface (think Meebo for phones as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch put it).

The one complaint I have relates to pricing of the widgets that are not free. Fees are billed in credits which you can buy with a credit card or (if you’re in Australia) via SMS. The problem is that it’s a little confusing keeping track of what you’re really being charged. If I buy 2000 credits, which is apparently the smallest increment I can buy (and which costs $25) and a widget is 8 credits a day how many days will it take to use up my credits? Of course the answer is 2000/8 which equals 250 (days), but I would suggest that a simple conversion is done that provides end users with some additional information to include cost per credit in your local currency ($25/2000 = $ 0.125 per widget) and your daily spend is calculated based upon the total pulse credits required for your widgets times whatever your cost per pulse credit happens to be. In other words, for US a credit is one and a quarter cents so 8 credits equal 10 cents. Thus, if my daily spend is 8 credits, I’m spending 10 cents per day. I think making this all transparent would be very useful as people gain a lot of comfort from seeing that what they’re buying is only a few pennies. Clarity brings confidence and confidence is what supports purchases.

Anyway, although I’d blogged this before, I felt that this was something too important to overlook and since I don’t know which Mobhappy readers also check out MobileCrunch, I though it would be a good idea to post this here too. I’d deeply appreciate feedback from readers on this too. If you’ve tried bluepulse could you please comment your experience along with your carrier and your phone? I’m trying to get an idea of just how far this “universal compatibility extends. Also, do tell what widgets you’ve tried especially if you’re using some beyond their free stack. Thanks.

Mashups aren’t just for the web. If nothing else, the Audex Jacket, a bluetooth enabled high tech piece of outerwear co-developed by Motorola and Burton proves that fact with panache. I can’t count the number of times I tried to configure electronic gear and sporting attire (for me cycling gear) in such a way that I could hear my music and not have to stop to turn it up or down or change tracks or make some other adjustment. With the heavy gloves and multiple layers snowboarding and other winter sports demand this would be impossible. Especially if you want to protect your expensive iPod or Razr phone at the same time.

To solve this problem, two technology leaders, Burton and Motorola have teamed up to create the stylish and functional Audex Jacket as well as the “Tantrum Audex Helmet”. Designed foremost for the snowboarder, the jackets sport a control console on the sleeve that allow you to fully control both your bluetooth enabled cellular phone as well as all recent iPods. Speakers built into the hood essentially turn your parka into a wearable boombox. The control feature set appears to be reasonably complete with caller id, one touch dialing, a backlight for low light situations as well as volume controls and a mic for phone calls.

Without personally testing it, I can’t really comment about sound quality though my expectation is it is probably average at best as the size of the speakers and their distribution neither provides the isolation of a good in-ear headphone (like the Shure product) or the dynamic range of a more powerful blox speaker. For it’s intended use though, I’m sure it is more than adequate, after all the slopes are hardly an audiophile’s choice of location.

As for the jacket designs; they appear to be reasonably stylish and while they aren’t going to win any fashion awards, I don’t think that anyone would laugh you off the mountain should you hit the slopes with one, although a few of the characters outfits in the longish video that runs on the Burton/Audex site promoting the gear looked a little city coming up out of the Brooklyn subway.

Speaking of the demo video, while I am all for showing a product in action as a means of helping a consumer understand the many functions and features, I do have a word for the Burton/Audex folks; respect the time constraints of your customers. The video should do the job in sixty seconds not require full ten to fifteen minutes to demonstrate half a dozen compelling features. This didn’t need to be a story, and the fact that it tries to be one, would have lost me as a customer had I been one instead of someone checking this out for a story I was writing. In short, it was too long - about 95% too long.

Closing thoughts; this is in my opinion part of what we’ll begin seeing as another broad trend predicted by Howard Rheingold in his seminal work, Smart Mobs, I predict ( I think this makes it number 22 or 23 for the MobHappy Predictions for 2006) that we’ll be seeing more and more tech-integrated clothing this year and that the integration will become smarter, more fashionable, and that we may even see a breakthrough product that everyone “has to have” by year end. Give me bonus points for this one if a famous designer is the purveyor of the breakthrough product.

- Features Less Important Than Aesthetics for New Handsets (cellular-news)

- Half the World will use a Mobile Phone by 2009 (cellular-news)

- Mobiles ‘don’t raise cancer risk’ (BBC)

- China approves TD-SCDMA standard (RCR News)

The Carnival of the Mobilists is back, after a short holiday break. Don’t forget to check it out at Golden Swamp - Judy’s done a great editing job and picked some cool posts about all things mobile from around the web.

Make sure you see the info on Mobilists at 3GSM in Barcelona, where we’re all getting together for a cocktail or two at the famous Ritz Hotel. Whether you’re a contributor or reader (or especially if we’ve got some groupies - well I can dream!), everyone is welcome. But let Rudy know so we can sort out numbers.

All MobHappy authors will be there, of course, as well as a selection of mobile luminaries. It’s going to be the unofficial party of event - see you there!

Finally, if you missed it in the pre-holiday rush, pay a visit to the Best of 2006 Mobilists, with entries from some special guests, like Mike Masnick, Howard Rheingold and Om Malik. There’s some great stuff there!