The newest entrant to the Irish mobile scene launched last week and I can already tell you, its got WINNER written all over it
Go check 48 here
The stand alone brand powered by O2 Ireland and running on the same Quartet platform that Tesco Mobile runs on in Ireland has come out of the gate at an incredible speed.
Its offers are just incredible, €10 a month for membership which includes unlimited calls and SMS to any Irish mobile network plus you can add on 2GB for a month for €8 bringing “unlimited” for most users for €18 a month.
I ordered a few sims online for testing last week, get yours here
The SIM arrived in a couple of days with an 089 number as the mobile prefix, we ported it online with a very simple online page and were good to go in a few hours with a normal 087 prefix on it.
This is all any user including myself will need so I guess I’m good to go.
Couple of little points to beware of though.
Not every Payzone outlet we tried had 48 credit on it system.
They cannot take credit cards online yet.
The unlimited calls only include 20 minutes calls to fixed lines.

Other than that I think 48 “months” has a bright future ahead of it.
It will be interesting to see how Ireland’s other youth mobile brand responds.

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I have watched the mobile coupon space for almost 4 years now and haven’t seen a huge advancement or to correct myself I haven’t seen it getting to the stuff we were hacking around with 4 years ago.
A post by Andrew Grill has awoken my interest in this space and let me tell you this is definitely going to hot up over the next 18-24 months.
Andrew points to an article in The Times by Jonathan Birchall.
“As it loses customers to lower cost private label rivals, Procter & Gamble, the largest US advertiser, said recently it was “shifting funds where effective to coupons and consumer promotions that deliver better value”.
Bob Recchia, chief financial officer of Valassis, a third party distributor of coupons, said last week that the company had had a “good” fourth quarter in its newspaper insert business, and expressed cautious optimism about demand in 2009″

Cellfire are probably the most recognizable brand in this arena but I think that they also haven’t the model correct yet.

Cellfire still require you to enter your zip code, this is a step to far in my opinion, I think an “opt in” then to be pushed adverts based on your exact location is an absolute must.
Four years ago we were hacking with location based IMEI scanners and left it lie as we felt it was too far ahead of the curve, now with 3G getting location pretty much down to 250 metres in Europe its time to reevaluate this technology.
This is where Loopt, Locle, Google and lots of other companies will find their value not on where your friends are but where the bargains are.
Just a Sunday morning musing post but would love to hear your opinions??
Would you like an advert with a discount from say The Gap when you are within 500 metres of their store?.
If you take up the advert you get some free minutes and your carrier/The Gap share the rewards.

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Truphone have taken a giant step with their release of V4.0
Users are now able to make calls without being connected to the internet, The system commonly know as dial-through involves the Truphone system making call to a local number and at the same time making an international call, the server then marries these calls seamlessly with no interruption to the user.
It gives users an easy way to make calls no matter where they are, and still benefit from cheap Internet rates.
Full press release below.

Tuesday 27th May, London, UK: Truphone will tomorrow add call-through and call-back functionality to its mobile Internet telephony service, enabling its customers to make low-cost calls even when not connected to the Internet. The combination resulting from the existing Wi-Fi calling and the new call-bridging functionality will mean that customers only need Truphone to benefit from Internet rate calls, wherever they are.

Core facts
1. Truphone Anywhere is of most benefit to customers making calls to international numbers while out of Wi-Fi range. It is of particular advantage to people making international calls from their home country who have a deal that includes bundled or low-cost minutes for domestic calls. Typically this includes North American mobile users, monthly contract customers and many prepay customers with minimum top-up amounts. European pay-as-you-go customers and those with international discount packs should check their tariff to determine how they can make savings.

2. UK example: to make a 10-minute call from the UK to an Australian landline:
- price with Orange Pay Monthly: £0.50/min x 10 = £5.00
- price with Truphone Anywhere: £0.03/min x 10 = £0.30
- how: an in-bundle call to Truphone’s UK server, plus a £0.03/min Truphone call to an Australian landline.

3. US example: to make a 10-minute call from the US to a Chinese landline:
- price with AT&T International Dial Standard rates: $3.49/min x 10 = $34.90
- price with AT&T World Connect (additional $3.99 per month): $0.15/min x 10 = $1.50
- price with Truphone Anywhere: $0.06/min x 10 = $0.60
- how: an in-bundle call to Truphone’s US server, plus a $0.06/min Truphone call to a Chinese landline.

4. Truphone’s ‘Tru Zone’ pricing means call charges are always predictable and low, without any additional calling plan or change to a contract.

5. By default, Truphone Anywhere is set to ‘always ask’ for domestic-to-international call-through only. However, a customer may also choose to make Truphone Anywhere the default calling mechanism in other call scenarios. Depending on the customer’s tariff with their usual operator, Truphone Anywhere may also save money on international calls made when roaming abroad.

6. From a technical perspective, Truphone Anywhere works through a combination of GSM calls and techniques known as call-through and call-back. Respectively, these mean:
- the first leg of a call is made to Truphone’s server and the second leg is a Truphone call via the Internet to the called party.
- standard call initiation is suspended and, instead, an SMS containing both calling party and called party numbers is sent to Truphone’s server. The Truphone server initiates a call back to the handset, a Truphone call to the called party also from the server, and connects those calls together at the server.

7. Truphone Anywhere is an integrated feature in the latest version of the Truphone service, 4.0, and works on handsets that are already compatible with Truphone. New and existing customers can get or upgrade to Truphone 4.0 at the Truphone Web site or by sending an SMS message with the word ‘Tru’ to 202 683 8200 (from North America) or to +44 7978 88 11 11 (from everywhere else).

8. Truphone is a mobile operator for the Internet age, delivering a UK-based service accessible from around the world. All Truphone customers can make free and low-cost mobile VoIP calls over Wi-Fi and the Internet. Truphone-to-Truphone calls are always free. A Truphone customer may opt to make any call over GSM rather than via either Truphone or Truphone Anywhere, if they prefer to do so.

Quotes

James Tagg, Truphone’s chief executive officer, said:

• “Saving money on mobile phone calls can be extremely complex; there are many solutions and services available, but often they address only one type of calling scenario. The Truphone philosophy is different and we believe that people should be able simply to dial and save.”
• “To deliver this we have integrated two clever and sophisticated solutions into a single, easy-to-use service.”
• “With our friends and business contacts scattered everywhere and often only snatched time in which to call them, low-cost international calls – on the go, and without having to think about how to make them – become very attractive.”

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Nice set of results from Vodafone Ireland today and a great set of results from the group as a whole which unusually saw their chairman Arun Sarin announce his intention to leave.
Sarin will step down in July, Vodafone posted a full-year profit of £6.66 billion ($13.2 billion)

In Ireland Vodafone has finally announced its intention to push the broadband button following its purchase of Perlico.

“Vodafone is offering a broadband service for €49 a month. This includes connection, line rental, broadband up to 2MB, local and national landline calls and unlimited calls to three Vodafone numbers”

Voice minutes increased by 9.3% to 1,551 million from 1,420 million.
Text messages increased by 22.1% with total texts growing to 936 million from 767 million.

Nothing on data which must be growing week on week by 20%, no data packages talked about either.

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O2 appear to have woken up with the first bunch of competive products I have seen for Ireland.
Recently they launched “Release” which offers unlimited calls or texts to any network for €99 which is a definite step in the right direction and Ireland’s first unlimited plan.

Now it appears that its the turn of the prepaid market, O2 today launched “Clear”

Its a postpaid account with only 30 days notice needed to cancel the contract. This will definitely appeal to the everyday consumer who at present is being hammered on prepaid.

Along with the Clear plan they will set up “O2 alerts” on your account to advice you of overspend.
I thought I would never be saying this but I have no problem whatsoever doing so.
Well done O2

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Mobile phone carriers behaviour never ceases to amaze me but this one takes the biscuit.
Frank had a problem with his mobile and got a loaner from the Cork Vodafone store, they gave him a phone and a charger, he went back to collect his own phone and forgot the charger (estimated value €5 IMO)
Lets leave Frank take up the story from here

“‘You had a charger with that’ she says to me…
‘Ah, damn, yes, I did – I forgot it, I’ll drop it up to you tomorrow…’
‘Perfect, do that and I’ll have your phone for you then.’
I thought I had misunderstood, but no, she was indeed telling me that I could not have my own phone back until I returned the charger. I was surprised, and described the battered, ancient old charger and asked if she could make an exception.
No. I could not have my phone until I brought the charger back. At this point I was still more surprised than anything and was laughing about it, and I practically begged her to make an exception, promising to drop the charger back the following day – but she wasn’t budging”

Frank had enough and Vodafone has lost a very big spender whom is now shouting from the rooftop about what a bunch of twats vodafone are for the sake of a fiver charger.
Will these guys ever learn?
They had a chance to up sell Frank and rather than repair his phone offer him a brand new one and extend his contract, he is in the top 30% of vodafone spenders with an almost 50% above the average Vodafone bill in Ireland.

Mobile companies, all of them couldn’t give a damn about customers, all of them, not just Vodafone and it appears we have no choice but to put up with it.

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Today we have made a number of significant updates to Twitterfone.
We have had some failures on SMS delivery, this is now rectified, if you didn’t receive your SMS just go to log on page and we will give you a local number to verify your number.

Most importantly we are happy to announce that twitterfone has today added 13 new countries bringing us to 17 countries. You can now change countries and just ring the local in country number to send you tweets to twitterfone. We are delighted to welcome the new twitterfoners.
Our Coverage now extends to
UK
USA
France
Ireland
Israel
Japan
Spain
Italy
Switzerland
Belgium
Finland
Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
Australia
Canada
Germany
more here from Greg @Mobilecrunch

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A paragraph from an excellent post from Luca Filigheddu got me thinking about voice and where its at and where its going.

“All that being said, it’s very difficult for me to see another major disruption coming in the short term to impact mobile communications. I’m referring to changing the way people use their mobile phone to communicate. In a nutshell, people are used to performing two simple actions: dial a number on their mobile phone’s keypad and click the green button”

I think the same kind of idea was pitched last week regarding Twitter by Kara Swisher

The average customer is so far down the line that all of us as voice/data operators need to give them a little time to catch up with us.
We have some amazing products as Luca mentioned but ask the average guy on the street about voip or internet telephony and its 100% guaranteed that the first word out of his mouth will be “Skype”
Myself and Luca have always discussed this matter when we have met in person, sometimes the discussion becomes quite lively, I actually discussed the same matter with Moshe Maeir at Etel over a year ago. Something bought this home to me again on Thursday, I was having coffee with two friends whose company are responsible for building and maintaining one of Ireland mobile companies radio network, I happened to mention femtocells and was greeted with a blank response, this is a company at the very edge of cellular network design.
So the question is.

How far ahead of the loop are the early adopters?

Can companies cash reserves hold them whilst they wait for the customers to catch up?
what’s your opinion?

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The contacts in your mobile phone are THE social network and with a number of companies attempting to gain access to this it was only a matter of time before back-up kings Zyb made a play for this.

The ZYB Phonebook will, for example, enable you to:

* see the live physical location of your friends – if they want to share it with you!
* see their availability for a call including the time zone they are in if it’s a different time zone to yours – so you don’t wake them up in New York
* share your calendar with people – if you’re maybe working together at a conference for a week
* receive their online activity streams from services like Facebook and Twitter – getting the latest status of your closest friends whilst you’re away from your computer
* see the photos they have just posted on photo sharing sites like Flickr
* and of course, for the nearly quarter of a million of you who are already using ZYB, continue to receive auto-updates of your friends’ contact details as well as an online back up on zyb.com of all of the contacts, calendar events, photos and text messages on your mobile – so if you lose or change your mobile, you haven’t lost your most valuable data
If you would like to add me on Zyb, my profile is here

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This is an interesting one which crossed my path today.
SIMable unlocks your SIM, it allows you to put your SIM in any network locked phone and talk without the hassle of having to get your phone unlocked.

“SIMable is an innovative little chip that frees your SIM card to work in the vast majority of mobile phones. We all know that the very latest 3G devices can be very difficult and expensive to unlock and SIMable is the 10 second solution without invalidating any warranty on your precious handset.

Fitting SIMable is quick and simple and full instructions can be downloaded here. This involves pressing out a very small hole in your SIM card and we even include a free cutting tool with every purchase. Once done simply align SIMable to your SIM card, insert into your locked mobile phone and start talking”

SIMable works in a variety of devices, hopefully this list will expand soon

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