Pat Phelan: Bits, bytes and telecomsMobile, Roaming and Social Media

The Techcrunch 50 blur has already begun and buddy Allen Stern (looking forward to meeting him on Monday) has just saved me a ton of time and energy.
The usual thing for me is to collect hundreds of business cards, lose some as usual and spend the flight home sending emails re-introducing myself to the people I have already made contact with in case they lost my card
DropCard eliminates this.

“Here’s how the service works. You setup an account on DropCard that includes all of your social networking account information. Then I head out to a conference or event. I meet someone new and have a good discussion with her or him. At the end of the conversation, the point where you would normally exchange cards, you now ask the person for their email address. You send their email address via SMS to DropCard. DropCard then immediately sends the person your contact information including social network profiles, name, email, etc. Now the other person can friend you up on the other networks and never has to worry about trying to locate your business card”

I have already set this up on my iPhone so anyone I meet will get my card after meeting them. Thanks guys
One thing, you were looking for suggestions, why not go global, talk to my friend David Marcus of Zong, he could set you up with global short codes, I would definitely pay a tiny premium to insure I dont loose a contact.

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Its 3.15am in San Francisco and my “body” just woke up, maybe its to remind me to celebrate

This time 12 months ago I was in bits, we were launching MAXroam in 48hrs, bags of stuff wasn’t ready and I had to do a dry run demo for Techcrunch 40 with Jason and Mike in just under 12 hours.

A lot has changed in a year, MAXroam 2 launches on Monday, we are taking part in Techcrunch 50 as part of last years alumni group, I wont get hung up on the TC v DEMO argument, they are what the are, we launched at TC and its been wonderful for us.

So the positives, we have over 100k customers, we hit the milestone of saving our customers the first million on roaming fees, we got our ass kicked by a few people and we made lots of people very happy.

Would I change anything?
Nothing

The very best of luck to the Techcrunch 50 finalists next week, its all about those guys now and I know they will rock.

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02 have announced the launch date for their prepay iPhone 3G package in the UK

Its pretty OK, well it would be a great deal for me as I haven’t made one call on the O2 network since buying my iPhone despite paying them €45 a month.
What’s interesting about the package is if you register the phone with O2 they will give you 12 months free unlimited data or you could unlock it and move it to 3 who already have some excellent packages for data.

“Pay & Go customers can now enjoy the iPhone 3G without a monthly contract. The new iPhone 3G 8GB for Pay & Go will be available for £349.99 and the 16GB version for £399.99.
This also includes unlimited browsing and Wi-Fi for the first 12 months after you activate your iPhone 3G*. At the end of the 12 months you can continue to receive unlimited browsing and Wi-Fi for just £10 per month. We’ll notify you before the end of the 12 month period by text and you can easily unsubscribe if you choose to do so.
It will be available to buy from 16th September in O2 stores, The Carphone Warehouse and Apple stores.
Please note visual voicemail and call merging are not available with Pay & Go. You’ll also need to change your data settings to use services such as Mobile Internet. Take a look at the activation tab on this page for more information”

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I lost my Vodafone dongle last week and decided I had better replace it and report it, strolled into Vodafone Oliver Plunkett St in Cork and stood around for 55 minutes on Friday awaiting someone to be free. I had the IMEI, phone number and bill with me, see below, totally covered and insured.

So this morning I get a letter saying claim denied and low and behold they have my own phone number rather than the dongle number on the claim.
I called Vodafone claims management where I dealt with one of the usual smart alec’s who told me it was my fault as I must have filled in the claim wrong, I didn’t, the girl in the shop filled it in and that I would have to return to the store to fill in another form as they couldn’t email me one.
So I have just wasted another hour, that’s two hours in a week.
There must be an easier way people
Will they pick up on this post, I doubt it.
You know what’s the worst, they never even turned off the lost dongle SIM and this morning tried to bullshit me that it had been turned off.

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I am running the new Nokia email client on a number of handsets on test mode at present and it absolutely does what it says on the tin.

Image via Crunchbase

I am using my gmail account and delivery is prompt and definitely as fast as the iPhone on tests and also runs IMAP which syncs with my host account.
I am also testing the Nokia E71 which is very impressive and will follow up with a post later on this at a later date.
More

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I met with Cathy Burke of Travel Counsellors today and regret not meeting her sooner, its a great idea, a bit like having your own personal travel agent.
With the amount of travelling I have done over the last 18 months they would have saved me a fortune in cash and most importantly lots of wasted time.
Cathy also informed me that they constantly beat pricing on most direct booking due to the size of their operation and they have really competitive business class pricing also.

More:

Travel Counsellors is a truly dynamic and global travel company. Founded by David Speakman in 1994, the company has over 900 full time professional agents operating across seven countries and is widely regarded as the most professional home-based travel company in the world.
The company operates in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Australia the US and recently launched in Canada. Travel Counsellors Ireland was established in June 2005 and currently has 33 Personal Travel Counsellors in the Republic.
Customers benefit from having their own personal Travel Counsellor who takes pride in getting to know their clients personally, providing them with the highest possible levels of personal service and taking care of all their travel requirements, down to the last detail.

The personal Travel Counsellors each have an average 19 years of experience, meaning they offer a level of expertise and personal knowledge that few other travel companies can match. They are supported by over 200 staff at the company’s head office in Bolton, Lancashire who look after all administration – including ticketing, helpdesk, IT and marketing – giving them the time to focus on their clients and provide them with a personal travel service that is simply unsurpassed.

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At last I can talk
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has completed a round of investment into buddies QIK.
This is a serious move for Andreessen and longtime business partner Ben Horowitz.
Andreeson who broke my chops a bit on a TC40 panel last year during my MAXroam presentation is regarded as one of Silicon Valley’s smartest and shrewdest guys and this can only mean great things for QIK.
Huge congrats to qik and to Marc, Ben this is a great deal rest assured.

“Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of social networking site Ning, and Horowitz, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s business technology organization unit, have made a “significant investment” in the Foster City, Calif., company and will join its board of advisors, which already includes Salesforce.com Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The company would not say how much the pair of angel investors ponied up.”

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Trust my buddy Andy Abramson to pull this one off

The worlds first call over voip to a passenger on board a plane.

Its really amazing stuff and I’m delighted that Andy got there first, love the bit about his dad also.

“I invited Joanna, she replied and once I figured out how to get Phweet to answer (I had to use Safari, not Firefox) Joanna and I were having a lovely conversation while she was on an Aircell flight. I don’t mean a five second hi, hello. I mean, a real conversation, as she held her Lenovo UMPC up to her face. I even heard the announcement from the flight attendants as she was about to land”

Well done buddy now please don’t tell everyone as I couldn’t bear ” HELLO I’M ON THE PLANE MOMENTS

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Rebtel is one of the pair of telephony products I use every day (the other being truphone)
Well news has reached me that O2 Germany have now blocked the German Rebtel access numbers. I presume that these numbers come from Voxbone or any number of voip DID providers which mean that O2 are blocking all access to voip redirect in Germany and this will affect everyone in the voice 2.0 business.
I have just had a call with Rebtel Founder Hjalmar Windbladh and as you can imagine he is fuming.
O2 are telling their German customers three very different stories

1. They cannot under new regulations connect to these numbers
2. They will not connect to numbers which affect the O2 Germany business.
3. The numbers are turned off.

O2 are really penalizing their customers with this plan, the customers are obviously not going to phone long distance on their existing O2 account so will revert to phone cards or other methods, Hjalmar told me that they had had 100′s of emails from customers who are trying to figure out how to get out of their O2 contracts and move to other German carriers so this is a pretty pointless move by O2.
Yet another own goal by the world’s favourite carrier.

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Anyone got any idea how I am running UMA on an Irish O2 registered iPhone?

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