Location search is slowly coming of age, after a childhood rich on promise but suffering numerous setbacks. Like all childhoods, it’s also seemed to have lasted forever, especially for the parents anxious to rid themselves of the endless expenditure and see their prodigy stand on its two financial feet.
OK, enough of the childhood metaphor.
TeleNav have just published their Top Ten list of stores people are searching for on their GPS devices in the US. They are:
1. Wal-Mart
2. Starbucks
3. Best Buy
4. Target
5. Home Depot
6. Sprint
7. Radio Shack
8. Lowe’s
9. Costco
10. McDonald’s
The press release doesn’t publish numbers along with the list, so it’s hard to judge if this is very meaningful information. But assuming that there is some critical mass, I find it interesting for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it’s hard not to find a Starbucks or McDonald’s in the US, based on my (admittedly limited) experience. You can pretty much drive in any direction randomly and come across one very quickly in an urban area. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible to plan a route that didn’t take you past at least one Starbucks if you wanted to drive across any US city?
So, why bother to programme your GPS device to find you one?
Indeed, if you were desperate for something to eat, surely a generic search, as opposed to a specific one would be more sensible, such as “fast food” or even “processed reconstituted meat products” if you were feeling a special need to get burgered?
The other consideration is that I’ve always proscribed to the view that local search is mostly useful to people who don’t know that area - for example, visiting tourists or business travellers. But there’s quite a few names on the list that just wouldn’t be relevant to these types of users. I mean why would a tourist want to find a Home Depot? To do a little DIY on their hotel room?
Which seems to imply that many people are using Location Search to find information out about the area in which they live and work, which I find both illogical and curious. Maybe there is a market for find-my-nearest searches and the historical problem was that it was all just too early. Again.
A space to watch. Could LBS finally be about to graduate, leave home and get a job. D’oh!
I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for several years now. I’ve always been happy with them — they offer good prices for their services, and their customer service has always been great (as I’ve written before. But I’m left reconsidering that this morning, as apparently T-Mobile has decided to block messages its users send to Twitter’s 40404 short code. (Updated: T-Mo and Twitter say it was a tech issue, see below.)
This is depressingly stupid. As a customer, I’m frustrated as hell that they’d do something like this. I’m hard pressed to think of any good reason why they’d block it, since they get paid for every inbound and outbound SMS their users send and receive from the short code. Maybe too many people ran up large bills and complained (but then why only block outbound messages, and not inbound ones?); maybe they saw a lot of traffic going to Twitter’s short code and decided there needed to be a “deal” in place where Twitter paid them for access to “their” customers. It’s not yet clear what the thinking is, but I’ve got a message into their PR folks asking what’s going on, and why.
Perhaps even more galling is the response some people who have complained about this have received from T-Mobile’s Executive Customer Relations department:
In your email, you express concerns, as you are not able to use your service for Twitter. As you have been advised, Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider, and therefore you are not able to utilize service from this provide any longer. You indicate your feeling that this is a violation of the Net Neutrality.
T-Mobile would like to bring to your attention that the Terms and Conditions of service, to which you agreed at activation, indicate “… some Services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming. We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to Service, cancel or suspend Service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion.” Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.
Wow. That’s almost as nice as the way messages I send to 40404 get the response “Service is temporarily down. Please, try again later.” — which make it look like there’s a problem with Twitter, rather than the reality that T-Mobile’s intercepting the messages and not delivering them. You know what’s even better? I get charged for that bounceback message:
I’m pretty disappointed in T-Mobile at this point. Other people are getting all up in arms about net neutrality, but I see this more as net stupidity — after all, what good can come of this for T-Mobile? None, none at all.
Update: Things appear to be fixed, and Twitter says it was due to an issue between T-Mobile and Twitter’s SMS vendor. Well played to Twitter for portraying it as a bug (regardless of whether it was or not), but T-Mobile hasn’t done much to help themselves here. While it’s understandable that their CSRs may not have heard of Twitter, for their “Executive Customer Relations department” to pop off with the response they did is still incredibly lame. Not to mention stupid, if this was actually just a technical glitch, and not a matter of policy.
Another update: I got a reply from T-Mobile’s PR folks:
Carlo,
Twitter users are welcome to stay connected through T-Mobile service.
Rumors that T-Mobile blocks the service are false. T-Mobile confirmed
with Twitter that there was a technical issue between the two companies’
systems that temporarily prevented some customers from utilizing the
service this past weekend. That issue has since been resolved and the
companies are working to prevent such incidents from re-occurring.
Regards,
T-Mobile USA, Inc.
Manager, Public Relations
Again, I’m glad to hear that it was a technical issue and nothing nefarious. But this reiterates just how lame the CSR’s response to the person who wrote in to complain was.
Like so many other industries, the green business craze is evident in mobile. Nokia stressed its green cred at its event in Amsterdam last week, and just today, Vodafone and Ericsson announced that the operator would use Ericsson’s Power Savings feature in its base stations. The feature “significantly reduces energy consumption in mobile networks and therefore makes an important contribution to cutting carbon-dioxide emissions,” and Vodafone admits it also cuts operational costs (though it buries that bit after all the greenspeak).
Then, in a brilliant bout of meme convergence, a friend mentioned that he’d been especially productive at work today, having worked out the costs of carbon-offsetting a packet of crisps. I then joked he should put it on a web site, and get sponsorship from UK potato-chip giant Walkers. But I one-upped myself: why not get a shortcode, then get Walkers, and whoever else, to tack it on their products with a “Offset the carbon generated in the production of these crisps by texting CRISP to 12345″? Users then get charged 10p or whatever via PSMS, and get a warm fuzzy green feeling to boot.
Instigated by somebody ethical, who we’ll label a “hippie” just for the ease of discussion, maybe there’s some value here (though, as always, operator revenue-sharing makes it tough). Or there’s plenty of potential for the non-ethical type, who we’ll call a “capitalist pig”, to make some good coin: the friend worked out the cost of offsetting the crisps to be 1p for every 1.3kg. Charge 10p and that’s quite a profit margin.
The ever-helpful Google reveals that related efforts are already underway. Avis UK lets customers offset their car rentals with a £1.50 text, and a group called the World Land Trust gives people in the UK the ability to offset 53kg of carbon dioxide with a £1.50 PSMS as well. It’s not immediately clear if either is taking the hippie or capitalist pig approach (though I’ll note that CarbonFund.org sells offsets at $5.50 per metric ton).
Still, I can’t imagine we’re far off from seeing offers like this get tacked on to individual products, offering a short code plus a product-specific keyword, given the current faddish nature of carbon-offsetting. Hopefully it will be legitimate, and not a scam.
The WSJ has a couple of good articles about Motorola and Palm today, taking a look at their efforts to turn things around.
First, the paper’s venerable Word on the Street column takes a look at what might happen if the company got broken up. A lot of investors, including Carl Icahn, think that Motorola is vastly undervalued, and reckon that its public-safety radio and set-top box units are worth around $30 billion. Combined with Moto’s $4 billion in cash on hand, that’s almost equivalent to its market cap, which effectively means investors see its handset business as worth next to nothing. Icahn thinks the handset unit would sell for the value of a year’s sales, or $20 billion — money that would go to shareholders.
Moto’s new CEO, Greg Brown, “is seen as a deal maker and open to restructuring,” while its current finance chief has made comments that he’s open to big changes. Here’s the rub though: Icahn assumes it as given that somebody would want to buy the handset business. It’s a tough sell, given the tightening of global credit markets, and it’s not at all clear who’d be interested (and able to) pony up that much cash.
But the bigger point I want to make here is that any such deal would only be a financial fix. Current shareholders might be better off, but the operational and strategic problems at the company wouldn’t automatically be fixed. For the business to succeed, either as part of a joined-up Motorola, a standalone business, or as part of another company, problems must get solved. For Icahn and other investors, the problem is just the financial one; but solving that one in the short term could prove disastrous (not to mention less profitable) in the long run.
While Palm’s in similarly dire straits, the piece on it is a little less contentious, focusing on its new executive chairman, Jon Rubenstein. Reading it generates at least a glimmer of hope that Palm can turn things around, though it must correct a mountain of problems very quickly. It sounds like the changes Rubenstein has initiated have been beneficial (though, of course, it sucks for employees to be let go two weeks before Christmas), but so much hangs on its new Linux-based OS, due next year.
A piece on the BusinessWeek site today, called “Mobile Ads: Not So Fast” caught my eye:
Ads on cell phones have long been hailed as the next big thing. But flipping through industry forecasts, Didier Kuhn says, “I don’t believe the figures I am seeing.” And he doesn’t mean that in a rah-rah kind of way.
Kuhn, CEO of a mobile advertising company acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in May, views most analyst predictions as way too rosy. Gartner (IT) expects $11 billion in global revenue from ads on mobile devices by 2011, up from less than $1 billion a year now. Strategy Analytics sees an even bigger $14.4 billion revenue pie by then, accounting for a fifth of all online ad spending. These forecasts are “incredibly steep,” says Kuhn, relieved that his company, ScreenTonic, has Microsoft to watch its back as the market develops. “It will take slightly more time for the industry to grow.”
When did BW figure out that these analyst predictions might be just a tad optimistic? Because up until now, it’s been happy to feed the hype, repeating the same sort of wild predictions it today derides.
So which is it, BW? Or is this just another case where the media is happy to whip up the hype around something, just so it makes a nice, big, juicy target to knock down later?
An interesting comment from Steve Procter of iTAGG over at SMS Text News. Orange UK released some usage stats this week which say its 15.4 million users sent 7 million MMS in August, leading with the fact that it’s up 37% from May, though overall usage still remains pretty low.
But Steve raised an interesting point in his comment, saying that iTAGG is seeing a lot of small businesses get into SMS, particularly with auto-response systems, in which users send in a text or SMS, then get an MMS in response: “I think what small businesses are realising more and more is that delivering something simple back via a wapsite is tedious; for them to build in the first place and then for the user experience in trawling through several screens to collect the item. Sending back an MMS, now it works across the board, is simple and easy.”
Obviously there are limitations to the information that can be sent back in an MMS versus that which can be displayed on a mobile web site, but it’s easy to see the logic here. Small businesses can take advantage of the ease of a short code over typing in a URL, while also not having to depend on their customers having a data plan, or being willing to pay per-MB charges. The size of the MMS remains a drawback, as could the cost, dependent on how much they spend to set up a mobile site. Also, completely eschewing a mobile site in favor of MMS could have search implications.
Any thoughts on this? It seems like a decent way for small businesses to send back certain types of information to their customers — but perhaps in concert with, not instead of, a mobile site.
A Canadian oil worker managed to run up an $85,000 phone bill with Bell Mobility after erroneously thinking he could use his handset, and its $10 unlimited internet plan, as modem for his computer. We’ve seen this sort of story before, dating back to Joi Ito’s GPRS roaming bill in 2004, and more recently with plenty of iPhone users who are now familiar with international roaming charges.
On the one hand, people should make themselves familiar with their tariff. On the other, operators don’t generally do a great job of making that very easy. Indeed, the guy in this case says, “I told them I wasn’t aware I would be charged for hooking up my phone to the computer.” Whether that’s his own fault or the operator’s is somewhat irrelevant — the real issue is that they never bothered to let him know he was running up a huge bill.
It seems like it would be pretty easy to have a system that sends the user a text message when they incur a certain amount of charges — indeed, some operators offer such a feature. This is useful not just for people who aren’t aware of the details of their plan, but in the case of fraud as well. Whatever the small cost of such a system would undoubtedly be saved by helping to prevent the PR damage from these sorts of stories.
Bell Mobility has been kind enough to lower the bill to $3,243 — the equivalent amount of charges on the best data plan that allows tethering — as a “goodwill gesture”. Again, on the one hand, the charges are legitimate, as the guy isn’t arguing that he used the phone as a modem. But on the other, a little proactivity from Bell Mobility could have saved them this PR mess, since the media has a voracious appetite for these tales. But, I guess they figure all that damage will only cost them $3,243, so it’s worth it.
Update: Tarek pointed out a part of the article I skipped over:
“The thing is, they’ve cut my phone off for being like $100 over,” he told CBC News. “Here, I’m $85,000 over and nobody bothered to give me a call and tell me what was going on.”
That makes it even more galling. If they can do it for voice, why not for data?
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