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

This is an amazing story.
His holiness Pope Benedict XVI is on qik
Memories of 1979 and a field in Limerick coming flooding back, “young people of Ireland I love you”

“Today we came to know that the The Vatican has started using Qik (qik.com/h2onews) to document Pope’s travels and events that will primarily be made available through h2onews.org.
The first large use of Qik in this scenario will be during the World Youth Day (WYD), the largest youth event in the world that will be held in Sydney from July 15 to 20. WYD08 will be the largest event Australia has ever hosted. It will attract over 125,000 international visitors and will mark the first visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Australia”

3 the European based mobile phone company has today totally banned it customers from using their mobile broadband devices outside their home country.
The surprising move by one of Europe’s most progressive carriers is supposedly in the best interests of their customers. This may affect a number of European telecoms players who are working with 3 to use their IMSI on various products. The story is just breaking and I will update as I get more.
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Looks like thinks are hotting up at Zyb
The social phonebook is almost a reality. There have been a number of changes to the site and its looking superb.

I recently met with the team and was sworn to secrecy until today. The new release will include API’s to all social networks, location, back-up and store your contact plus full presence for all your contacts.

Keep up with friends and family
See where your friends are on a map
Share calendars and photos with friends
See friends’ social networking activity on your phone

Keep in touch
See who’s free to talk
Send and receive group texts
Leave messages on friends’ profiles

Keep your phonebook up to date
Backup your mobile information
Auto updates of contacts’ details
Create your contact hub
With their recent purchase by Vodafone Zyb are going to be a global force to watch out for in my opinion.

Hictu 2.0 has gone live
The social networking site run by Abbeynet and buddy Luca Filigheddu has made a series of upgrades to version one including
1) New improved User Interface
2) Ability to start conversations around Youtube and Google Videos
3) Widget for your blog: you can add a video commenting widget to your blog and people can leave their video comments and share them with their friends on Hictu
4) WordPress Plugin: a specific video commenting plugin for WordPress, a great way to make your blog more and more popular
5) Mood: each post can be enriched with an icon representing your mood, chosen among different cool emoticons
6) APIs: are you a developer? Now you can integrate Hictu into 3rd party applications and services and enjoy the video microblogging!
Its invite only at present but if you leave a comment I will make sure you get in.

Vodafone have today announced a long distance package for their Irish customers. It looks pretty good as a direct dialling product.

Mobile carriers must now look closely at the long distance market and I am surprised that some of the countries weren’t priced a bit better.

Poland with the largest population in Ireland is incredibly competitive at 9c though and I think as a direct dial product this will have serious implications for long distance carriers in Ireland.

Things are moving rapidly for my friends at QIK.
I am hearing all sorts of rumours including some serious progress on the business side.
qik are midway through a huge set of upgrades and the platform stability is now really quite amazing.

With a cool new website and a number of innovative upgrades I think the battle for mobile broadcasting is well and truly over.

There is a new Symbian client 0.08.70 that further raises the bar on live recording, make sure you download the new version, its on the left hand side on the homepage once you login.

An improved flash player

You can now create groups and finally and most importantly users can now create their own events, this one is going to be huge for events and I am sure it will be excellent for the Open Coffee BBQ.

One of my favourite items on qik is Bernie Goldbach’s Sunday newspaper review and I think more items like this would cause me to view it even more.

I have been running surveys among friends and can only seem to find a tiny (sub 2%) group of people who are buying the new 3G iPhone in Ireland.

Whats going on here?
With queues already in place at the Apple store in New York, O2′s UK website being swamped by demand and a seriously upgraded phone on offer I was expecting to see excitement instead I am met with “so what” response.
Of course it may be down to the fact that we have one of the worst packages on the planet with the iPhone or maybe that O2 just haven’t engaged with the customers but I think it may be down to the fact that the first launch didn’t exactly get out the door successfully and people aren’t seeing the iPhone in the “real world”

I was at a wedding last Saturday and saw a guest holding his iPhone at chest height awaiting comments or inquiries from people around him, when it didn’t happen it was sheepishly put back in his pocket.

The Nokia N95 8GB has also got of to an amazing start with more and more of them on the street now plus the package that Vodafone don’t seem to want to talk about (5GB for €29.99 a month, APN is hs.vodafone.com) appears to be catching on and the obvious mess that O2 have made of the tariffing compared to the rest of the world appears to have again destroyed any interest in the device.

Canada have gone through the same pain as ourselves with the iPhone pricing and it has developed into a huge backlash against mobile operator Rogers with the launch of an anti iPhone site and almost 50,000 people voicing their displeasure.

I love voicemail
I just don’t love it the way Mike hates it
“Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it”

It used to be dead to me until I found SpinVox a couple of years ago, previously I would hardly listen to my voicemail and if I missed you well that was your tough luck.

Now its changed.
Now you leave you message for me, SpinVox converts it to text and sends it to me as an SMS and an email, I come out of meetings to a perfectly formed “2do list”, if I don’t want to speak to you I never have to but I never miss a message now.
It works perfect when I am abroad also as MAXroam has free incoming SMS so I don’t pay for any of my voice mails no matter where I am on the planet.
To celebrate the rebirth of voicemail SpinVox uber geek James Whatley has given me 3 SpinVox test accounts to give away, don’t worry about access numbers or anything like that MAXroam will look after the telephony side and SpinVox will look after the Voicemail.
Leave a comment to be in with a chance of winning.

Yes Telecom landed Ian Dobsyn, from Manchester with a £31,500 ($62,441) bill recently for downloading FOX’s Prison Break
Surely the mobile companies have some sort of early warning systems for this kind of behaviour but unfortunately no is the answer. Most mobile companies dont possess the ability to bill live data usage and usually the bill is retrospective or certainly delayed.
Mr Dobsyn had to resort to the law and got the bill almost elimanated.
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Have you ever sent a message that you didn’t want to send from your own email or anything associated with you.
I know I have
Well a solution is here, Privnote- “send notes that will self destruct after being read”

Go to Privnote write a note, copy the link and email it to your recipient, your recipient clicks the link and gets below

Your recipient reads it, the note is destroyed, should anyone click the link again they get the below message

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