Tom Hume

Here's a thought which has been bouncing around my head for the last month or so, and which I've mentioned to a few folks: there is a fundamental conflict of interest between companies providing the ability to send and receive text messages on mobile networks (i.e. SMS aggregators), and organisations who want to use text messaging as a communication tool.

The SMS aggregators typically maintain expensive direct links into mobile network operators - often into many of them. They'll sell connectivity (i.e. the ability to send or receive text messages) and employ a variety of pricing schemes which typically include one-off set-up charges, monthly rental charges (or enforcing minimum monthly spend on messages), and per-message charges for sending (or sometimes even receiving) text messages. This last scheme typically involves slightly marking up the charges that the mobile network operators apply.

In addition aggregators have pushed the idea of "keywords" onto the industry: they rent a single number, then redirect messages sent to that number to different destinations based on a keyword at the start of each message. So an appointment reminder service might own the keyword "REMIND" on a given phone number, at the same time that a ringtone seller owns the keyword "TONE" on the same number, and when a message comes in that starts with "REMIND" the aggregator can ensure it gets sent to the right destination.

Keywords are a great way of maximising the money aggregators can make out of individual phone numbers; there's no meaningful limit on how many keywords you can have on a single number, and aggregators can therefore make keyword-based products significantly cheaper to run than those that own all communication sent to a given telephone number. I've written before about my views on the disadvantages of keywords; companies like Trinity Mirror have had experiences which seem to back these up - and they're not alone.

Their commercial imperative for aggregators is therefore clear: get as many customers on-board as possible (using keywords to sell cheaper SMS receipt services and make better use of a limited resource of phone numbers), and generate as much message traffic as possible.

But now look at a customers perspective: they use text messaging in everyday life in a very conversational, informal manner. Traditional rules of grammar and spelling go straight out of the window when you're typing a quick note using a phone keypad. Plus every text they send is costing them money, whilst every one they receive is masquerading as a message from a friend and distracting them from whatever they're doing.

Clearly end-users have a different perspective: if they use SMS, they want to do so as quickly as possible - using as few messages as they can to get the job done. They should also expect SMS services to be forgiving: if their mate had to send in the words "FOOTBALL SUBSCRIBE" to get a football alerts service, then "SUBSCRIBE FOOTY" ought to work too. Were the provider of football alerts using a keyword-based service, they wouldn't ever receive the latter message.

So, here's the conflict: whilst it's in the vested interest of aggregators to make SMS services use more messages and to employ keywords, this is exactly the opposite of what makes a service attractive to end-users - and is therefore the opposite of how providers of successful services should behave.

What's the solution? Recognise that an SMS aggregator is not the best party to understand end-user needs and design a workable, appropriate service over text messaging, and talk to someone who is (plug: like us).

We wandered up to Wokingham for a few hours this afternoon to pay a visit to my girlfriends mum, who's recently discovered SMS and rather likes it; much like my own mother, who's completely uninterested in going online but appreciates the directness of barking commands or spitting sarcasm in 160 characters.

In the course of the afternoon, a text message came in from another one of her daughters, and she started tapping out a response. Whilst in the process of doing this, she was quite open that she takes ages to write messages because she insists on using proper punctuation and grammar, which was rather quaint. But then she revealed that she refuses to use predictive text because "no-one but me knows what I'm going to write".

There was a sense of pride, and also a guardedness, in the way she said it: and it was a really neatly packaged reminder that there are people who are not only indifferent, but actively hostile towards developments which they perceive as taking control away from them - even if such developments come with the best of intentions.

I received a tattered brown envelope this morning, stuffed full of photos and containing a scratched-out note. I couldn't work out what font it was written in, but the offensive content was obviously the handiwork of Mr Walsh. Also included was this lovely photo of us all taken when he was last in Sussex:

(Front, L-R: Maria, Mark, Tom; Back, L-R: Dave, Steve, John, Kevin, Me)

A few snaps from the office Christmas bash; as James has written, we wandered up to the excellent Seven Dials restaurant, were shown to the vault (the restaurant is situated in an old bank), and were served with fine wines and fantastic food - the mushroom risotto was particularly fantastic.

Life-changing announcements, intercontinental phone calls to absent friends, secret santa, and just getting everyone together in the same room: what a great way to round off a year!

I wandered up to London this evening to go and see Frank Nuovo of Nokia talk at the Design Museum. I hadn't seen him before, and found him a good speaker, if a little self-promotional (which is hardly surprising given his achievements - I'm sure in his position I'd be insufferable).

I didn't take any notes during the talk itself, but a few points I can remember now (sitting on my train back down to the seaside) include:

• Details of how the design group at Nokia were first responsible for many of the aspects of phone UI which we take for granted today: the grouping of keys into control keys (softkeys etc) and alphanumeric keypad, the placement of the on/off button well away from these, and so on.

• Comparisons between the phone market and wrist-watches: both are very personal and expressive products which nevertheless perform an important functional role.

• How the cycle of design begins with technology and runs through design, style, fashion, and art, before returning to technology again - as we begin to understand more about the limitations and possibilities of this technology.

• A lot on Vertu, the Nokia-owned (?) company which hand-crafts small numbers of handsets at vast cost to its customers - the core idea being to return to an Olde Worlde craftmanship feel in handset design.

• How Nokia categorises its handsets into families (the Active, Premium, Fashion, etc. ranges) and how these have evolved over time. Particularly striking was a sequence showing handset faces morphing to represent the evolution of the devices over time. In every case bar that of the Premium family (precursor of Vertu), the screen and control keys have become more prominent over time.

• A number of internal videos produced as pseudo-"mood boards", to demonstrate the feel of particular handsets, families, or customer segments.

Afterwards, I wandered to a local hostelry and hooked up with Jim, Martin, Ewan and Chris - for industry gossip and a chance to play with a couple of N-Gages: which alternately thrilled me with their multiplayer Bluetooth games and appalled me as I experienced first-hand the joy of disassembling the things in order to change games.

This will probably be my last post about bluejacking, this site is starting to look a bit over-focused on the topic.

Over the last week, my girlfriend (who works at a large local school - 2,000 or so pupils) has been wandering around the school with a Bluetooth phone set to discoverable, and named after her. I couldn't think of a more tempting target for a bluejacker than a member of staff. She didn't receive a single message in this time.

However, on the train home from London one evening I was bluejacked; my Powerbook is called Susan (don't ask) and "Bertie" asked me how I was. "Bertie" then stopped receiving responses. We were in transit at the time, but I looked around and couldn't see anyone who looked younger than twentysomething.

My conclusion from this entirely unscientific and anecdotal study? Bluejacking is the province of students and young professionals, not teenagers. It's not a widespread activity by any means: captive audiences on trains provide a distraction for bluejackers. It's not a means of communication, as such: I have yet to hear of a 2-way conversation been carried out over the medium. As such it poses little threat to SMS revenues.

Here's an unformed thought: mobile billing has always been about aggregating small charges: a text message here, a voice call there. Implicit in this is the idea that tiny changes in consumer behaviour, expressed over a large population, can make a big difference to those profiting from these changes.

For example, imagine you're a hypothetical UK operator with 15 million customers, and you get them, on average, sending a single 30 pence MMS message each month. That level of traffic is pretty minimal, and I'm sure wouldn't help analysts perceive MMS as having been "successful" (as if there is any such binary test for success with these things!). But it would bring in £3.60 p.a. per customer, which translates to £54m annually purely in message charges.

I also suspect there would be knock-on effects - that receiving an MMS typically stimulates a response as a text message, or as a call. Or that owning an MMS-capable phone makes you more likely to use other chargeable services, like gaming or an online portal.

Even without these extras, it's significant extra revenue from a small change in behaviour. I'm not suggesting that bringing about such changes is easy, of course. But many new services seem to target a small subset of overall mobile users, and ask them to pay significant sums - a pound per month, 5 pounds per month. As operators demonstrate every day, this isn't the only approach that works.

I can't believe this is an original idea - if anyone has seen a reference for it elsewhere, please pipe up.

The problem with SMS spam is not so much receiving it as its interruptive nature: you think you have a message from a friend, stop what you're doing, open it, and it's some crappy promotion you don't care about. We're (unfortunately) quite used to being pushed information that doesn't interest us, it's this masquerading as a contact that we care about which really grates.

How about this as a suggestion: have a setting on your phone which says "only alert me to messages from people in my address book". If a message from anyone else turns up it's dealt with as per normal (appearing on your phone screen and in your inbox), but your handset doesn't vibrate, beep, or otherwise get your attention.

This wouldn't get rid of the problem, but it'd be a practical step towards reducing its annoyance.

I've had a camera-phone (or phone-camera, depending on your religion) for about a year now. It's long since passed having novelty value for me, and I find myself using it regularly even now. I even send MMS messages occasionally: mainly to my girlfriend, though occasionally to one or two other people who I'm fairly sure can receive them OK. A couple of weeks ago I was chuffed and amazed to receive an MMS from Disneyland, Florida; I still can't work out quite how it got here.

When Dom and Eva came over a week or so back, they brought digital cameras with them - and being quite into their photography, did an awful lot of snapping away. The result: some really high-quality photos of our cats, one of which now graces my desktop.

And there I sat, quietly bemoaning the shoddy quality of my 640x480 pixel Nokia toy, which seems to blur half the pictures it takes, has no flash, no zoom, and produces nothing remotely professional in output. I was thinking about this over the weekend, wondering when decent quality cameras would turn up on phones, when it struck me: it doesn't matter.

I'm not saying that cameras in phones won't become higher in quality or more full-featured: as this stuff gets cheaper to manufacture, they might as well get better - the difference in cost between a poor camera and an average one will become negligible.

But think about the audience for photos taken on cameraphones; right now, they're still used a lot by tech-savvy folks like myself, people who write online journals, and so on: folks who want to look at their photos on a PC or laptop. This is changing (more and more people I know are getting them), but there's still a tendency towards the gadget-lover amongst cameraphone owners, I'd say.

Long-term, this won't be the case. Long-term, pictures taken on cameraphones will be viewed, principally, on other phones. And this is my conclusion: the important thing is that images produced by phones look good on other phones, not that they produce high quality media.

It's just like text messaging: just as a phone keypad makes text entry difficult but possible, and the results are poor grammatically but worth sending nonetheless, so an embedded camera which takes poor quality photos is still worthwhile and acceptable if these photos are only being viewed on a tiny screen.

Apologies if this is obvious. I'd never considered it before.