Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecomsA little bit of everything

I am at the age where I should be staying in nice 4 stars hotels with the Irish breakfast waiting for me and all my worldly comforts, luckily I hate that kind of lifestyle and am happy to bunk down even luckier my family are happy to do the same, don’t get me wrong everyone loves some comfort but local knowledge, no 8am knock on the door, being able to come and go as I like and eat when I like means I prefer to stay in these “new kind of hotels”

I have used VRBO for the last 4 years all over the world, always excellent but these are kind of impersonal, you generally are renting from an owner and there are instructions where to pick up the keys so local knowledge is a little weak. I have used these guys all over though, San Francisco 3, Florida 2, Europe 6 times and they quality of the properties are usually superb.

One of the “new” guys on the block, in my eyes anyway is Airbnb which despite the unusual name is a fantastic company. I speak from experience on this one having spent the last two weeks with my family wondering around Europe staying in Airbnb properties. They really are excellent with local knowledge and properties from a couch to a castle plus they are having a party in Dublin tonight and I will be there with some MAXROAM goodies. I see in Techcrunch today that this area is also hotting with the launch of One Fine Stay.

Last but not least is the all new Hostelworld, have you seen their new website? , excellent job and now so easy to navigate, Hostelworld is the granddaddy of them all with over 24,000 properties worldwide,with availability in 23 languages and multi-lingual customer support in 4 continents. You can know book your flights with Hostelworld also. Hostelworld are partners of ours at Cubic Telecom.

Do you have any holiday or travel tips?

With the release of Amazon’s latest Kindle I was doing a little noodling last night and a thought entered my mind

its $139, why not just give it away, YES, GIVE IT AWAY, so I have been doing a little research and I think it makes perfect sense. With almost $2 billion cash on hand this would be incredibly easy.

Figures bandied about from numerous sources suggest that Amazon have sold almost two million Kindles which are now contributing more bottom line in the last qtr than Amazon’s existing book business, Amazon is selling more Kindle e-books than hardcover books. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a recent interview that he expects to ebooks to pass out paperbacks with 9-12 months.

Obviously this is happening at breakneck speed and needs to spread out even quicker,The market is also waking up now with at least 20 Ebook readers expected to hit the market before Christmas.

I think Amazon have an incredible opportunity so how about this?

The $139 Kindle is free, it still costs $139 but it comes preloaded with that amount in credit. Amazon decide to give away 1 million of these, now they have multiplied their Kindle user base by 50% in a single quarter, if you were to presume that their profit is 20-30% the total cost of the exercise is around $100 million but there is a huge payback in this, with this level of ordering Amazon would surely be able to squeeze their technology providers for another 100-15% so their costs on Kindle reduce across the board.

Amazon could double their Kindle user base over 1 year, begin to dominate the whole market, get 2 million new accounts with the all important credit card details and do this without putting a dent in their cash mountain.

Mad or not, what do you think?

We are just back from our holidays and I really thought that with Foursquare and a ton of MAXROAM credit that we were going to find all these little off the beaten track places or these amazing places to eat suggested by my 791 friends a number of which live are or are from the cities, London, Amsterdam and Paris we were visiting.

We landed at 10.22am on the 7th of August and I checked in at Costa Coffee in Gatwick Airport awaiting instant help. Five days and 40 check-ins later, we left London without a comment, not a “buy a sandwich here” or ” you can’t miss this” although Twitter suggested a ton of places to visit including nice invites to visit companies in London.

Arrived into Paris

Again three days and 18 check-ins later, not a hint no suggestions, no directions, no one interested in directing our hard earned cash into their premises. although again lots of hints from twitter most of it excellent.

We Moved onto Amsterdam next and again tons of hints/leads from Twitter including the fantastic Amsterdam Zoo (don’t miss it,seriously) not a squeak from Foursquare, nothing, nobody even inviting us in for a smoke or a herring breakfast.

Two weeks moving around Europe, 97 check-ins, intensive Foursquare usage and nothing, not a blip, not an invite, not a hello, not a coffee invite, this for me is one of the real issues around location (besides its amazing opportunity to sell stuff when it comes)  it appears no one is that interested in Europe in the current Foursquare model,we can check-in but it brings us no value.

I dont always agree with Niall but I think this post is worth a read ” Why Foursquare is overhyped” he makes some excellent points

I’d love a world where I could see 8 to 10 real friends and family checking in to different locations but that just isn’t going to happen any time soon as they have mostly all just discovered Facebook and think Twitter is a step too far,

With the advent of location on Facebook will we see the an improvement on the above? I dont think so

With the advent (shortly) of location on Twitter will we see an improvement on the above? absolutely

What do you think?

Just back from an incredible two week hop around Europe, we were supposed to get in Berlin but circumstances in London cut that back to London. Paris and Amsterdam.

Some pictures below

London

Paris

Amsterdam

This issue looks as if it could turn very nasty.

Last week the UAE rulers announced that on October 11th it will block all Blackberry data transmissions in the Kingdom, citing “security concerns” the government has said  that it cannot monitor BlackBerry communication because data is encrypted and handled through servers abroad.

Yesterday RIM the manufacturer of  Blackberry cancelled its launch party for The BlackBerry Torch in the U.A.E. which was due to take place in the Burj Al Arab and in an even more bizarre move issued the below statement telling the goverment to forget it.

This has serious implications for business travel into the region and I am sure will reflect poorly on The Gulf as a whole.

RIM has spent over a decade building a very strong security architecture to meet our enterprise customers’ strict security requirements around the world. It is a solution that we are very proud of, and it has helped us become the number one choice for enterprises and governments. In recent days there has been a range of commentary, speculation, and misrepresentation regarding this solution and we want to take the opportunity to set the record straight. There is only one BlackBerry enterprise solution available to our customers around the world and it remains unchanged in all of the markets we operate in. RIM cooperates with all governments with a consistent standard and the same degree of respect. Any claims that we provide, or have ever provided, something unique to the government of one country that we have not offered to the governments of all countries, are unfounded. The BlackBerry enterprise solution was designed to preclude RIM, or any third party, from reading encrypted information under any circumstances since RIM does not store or have access to the encrypted data.RIM cannot accommodate any request for a copy of a customer’s encryption key, since at no time does RIM, or any wireless network operator or any third party, ever possess a copy of the key. This means that customers of the BlackBerry enterprise solution can maintain confidence in the integrity of the security architecture without fear of compromise.

Updated (thanks Aswath)

It appears that Blackberry operates some strange rules, it seems that they have given full visibility to the authorities in the USA

A colleague told me a few months ago that “the market isn’t you Pat its the ordinary mobile user”  at the time this seemed like a huge slap in the face but over the past period I have spent quite a bit of time speaking with “Normob’s” about their requirements.

I smiled a little yesterday when I saw Clive Thomson mixing up himself and Normobs in Wired.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

Well Clive the bad news is the generation you are speaking about are geeks, not the ordinary Joe on the street, the ordinary Joe is incredibly happy with Voice/SMS although I agree not with voice-mail. I would be one of Clive’s perfect candidates with 3 times as much data usage as voice and a complete dislike of voice but again I am not a normob.

So to give Clive a little overview of those real world mobile users. I will borrow some stats from my friend and mobile rockstar Tommi Ahonen’s blog.

4.6  billion subscriptions.

$1.1 trillion in revenues

1.1 billion handsets every year

“Voice is a viable communication method in the Developing World for about 85% of the mobile phone user base. That is 2.5 billion people – twice the total population in the Industrialized World”

I love the idea of status (Presence), why would I waste time calling you if I knew you were busy but its been tried and no company has got it right, we were using it three years ago but its promise hasn’t delivered.

So Clive maybe the next time you have to dial a number please remember you and about 3 billion people will do the same over the next 24hrs, oh and you are not a normob.

So what are you Geek or “Normob”?

I have been thinking about writing this for the past few weeks and my buddy Om gave me the shove to do it yesterday with his post “FourSquare’s Crowley on Facebook, Check-in Fatigue & the Copy Cats”

This post is absolute killer to write given my past positivity and possible giddiness on location based services.

Om tells Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley “that he has a problem – even hardcore users and fans like me are getting bored with Foursquare and finding it hard to constantly check-in”

I think the problem is way bigger than that, way way bigger, I dont want to “check in”, I want to know right now if a friend is near me, if I am buying something that is cheaper nearby by or are there any specials nearby. This just isnt happening at the speed the rest of technology is moving at. Check-in just isnt enough for me, it make no change to my mobile behavior and  ”John recommends the ribs”  is not enough for me to keep trying to love location at the moment.

There are a couple of interesting things coming though and one of my “likes” is MyTown which allows me to check into products as well as the normal location stuff, whats interesting if I check into products I could be offered better deals on those products, this is a really interesting developement in G-Lo.

Am I down on location?

Absolutely not, I believe that it will become part of our daily live but we really need to get the industry and @dens to move along now.

I came accross an interesting post today from twitter
The Old Spice videos which I absolutely hated and which drove Niall into an absolute frenzy in which he called it “Best Use Of Social Media In An Ad Campaign Ever” didnt improve sales and in fact the week after the campaign sales are down 7%.

But buzz did not add up to sales, according to advertising news service WARC. Red Zone After Hours body wash sales have fallen seven percent, despite the ads. Yet BNET argues that Mustafa is such a media darling that nixing the campaign would be a PR disaster. So why are sales down?
Jezebel argues the brand sent mixed messages. The ad’s tagline was “Smell Like a Man, Man,” yet Mustafa opens the ads with “Hello, ladies.” Who was supposed to actually buy the body wash? Plus, Old Spice has long been associated with our grandfathers.

For me this is the crux of “social media” , we all knew about it and I mean by us a small techie group who went around patting each other on the back and telling each other how brilliant a move this was by Old Spice.
Whilst I want to run around and say I told you so, well I told you so
I didn’t write this just to pick on Niall though or the campaign
Hopefully we wont get carried away again with this echo chamber, it certainly doesn’t help, social media is part of the marketing plan, its not the marketing plan.
And if someone mentions brand awareness they will be suitably chastened in what I hope will be interesting comments.

I have listened to the positves and the negatives from the iPhone 4 debacle for the last few weeks and I seriously can’t believe how this non story is still running.

I am obviously not an Apple Fanboy however I do use the iPhone, I am also an Android user.
Job’s frustration is easy to see in the below video and the Q&A

So lets at least look at the facts

1. 3 million iPhone 4 sold in 3 weeks.
2. .55% or around 15,000 people have called to complain about their device.
3. iPhone 4 returns are running at 1.7% for the period its been on sale.
4. iPhone 3GS returns for the same period were 6%
5. Average returns in the phone industry for all manufacturers are around 6%
6. Testing is paramount at Apple.

This is gone beyond a joke at this stage, I have used the iPhone 4, its reception is no different to any other phone I use including The Nexus One.
Like Scoble I would be of the opinion that its a great device, could Apple be better in the online community? I think so, I think with the correct media management this “story” could have easily been dealt with. Attacking your competitors and showing they also have faults was certainly not a good move and I was shocked at Apple would head down this avenue.
I think its time to kill this story.
Get a bumper, hand it back if you don’t like it but thats it.
What do you think?

A number of pretty interesting posts popped up over the weekend by a couple of guys that I really admire and finally they got me to return to this forum.
The first post is by Robert Scoble “Why I can’t kick the iPhone habit” Like Robert I have had the Desire, The Hero, The Nexus heck I even had the Droid, nice naming protocol by the way HTC and in the exact same manner as Robert I am of the opinion that I am much more productive on the iPhone as opposed to any of the Android handsets. I have tried seriously to get into the Android and even put away the iPhone for a month I simply feel Android is just not there yet even though long term I know and have written that its going to be the winner, it will get there but not yet, the store feels clunky even on the 2.2 release and the UI just doesn’t seem to flow as well as the iPhone.
Next up is Louis Gray “Why I turned in my iPhone and went Android”
Again lovely guy but I think his argument is incredibly weak, he opens with choice and openess, this openess thing on Android is a myth in my opinion and if you want choice walk down to your local phone shop there is plenty of choice.

“A bet on iPhone 4 today may be a vote for the best phone of today. But a bet on Android is a bet on the future. I am betting on an ecosystem and an application environment that encourages best of breed developers”

Well if thats what you think I wish you the best Louis, I think you are wrong, I think that Apple may have a chance of suceeding also, I also believe that Apple “advertising” system will bring huge rewards for developers in the future far above and beyond Android.

I am not an Apple fanboy though and have serious issues with the device, the battery is weak, 3.25pm everyday its dead unless I get some power into it that morning, I carry a supplementary charging device with me everywhere and the data usage is huge whilst roaming. It is however unrivaled for the moment and I stress “for the moment” , I would never write off Nokia though, they are just too big a company not to come back and for anyone writing them off I would remind you of one word “Motorola” and no I don’t feel like a victim James.