Is it really that difficult for mobile content providers to try and work sensibly with customers, rather than trying to trick them into spending a few beans without appropriate warning?

Last week I received an anonymous WAP Push message. Opening it I was taken to something calling itself MobileTube with a logo that was clearly passing off. There was a page with quite a few videos on it, with a long scroll  bar. I clicked on one video, which was downloaded to my phone and turned out to have no sound and no apparent meaning either. Close browser.

The next day - note that, the next day - I get an SMS telling me I’ve been charged £1.50! Actually I get two SMSs, despite the fact I only downloaded one video. One was enough to see it was rubbish.

And again I get an anonymous WAP Push. Scrolling to the bottom of the page and there are terms and conditions, which says that downloading clips costs 150p. So you don’t see the £ sign on scanning it. Scam! Checking back again later, they had added a bit of text at the top of the page saying terms and conditions at end, with no internal link.

There’s a customer service number, but it’s not linked either, you have to note it down to call it.

And nowhere does it tell you where to send stop to, as the WAP Push has no originator. A google for “mobiletube” returned nothing relevant. Going to the URL in the WAP Push shows a site underdevelopment message in German.
Crazy Frog rides again - killing our industry!

A few people are making smell o phones it would seem. I’ve seen this patent from Motorola and this dart-shaped prototype from Nokia.

However, there’s an issue with machine-made scent, apart from the fact it smells bad, of course. And that’s you can’t switch off a smell once it has been released into the air. Sound and light are both very controllable, but once a dose of scent has been released, tough, it hangs around.

So let’s hope these don’t catch on.

Seems like the US teens have caught up with the rest of the world, at last, on texting - article.

No wonder not many people buy stuff from operator portals - a recent study shows that the minimum number of clicks required on any US carrier portal to download a game was 17. Downloading music varies from 18 to a mind-numbing 39 clicks!

First of two articles on mobile advertising in the marketing magazine MAD now published.

And I’m quoted in NMA.

Funny how we still dial a telephone, and I’m thinking “in print” for being in a magazine, even when it is on line.

Most user generated content is completely banal garbage. Look at Twitter. I really don’t care if someone in Santa Clara just bought a latte, I mean, surely even that person’s friends couldn’t care either.

However the views of previous customers are a fantastic way of assessing a product. Amazon probably started it, but now I’d never book a hotel without checking Trip Advisor first. Of course you have to discount the gushing and the excessively grumbly comment, but you can spot the trends. If everyone is relatively happy with their stay, that’s great.

I also checked a restaurant in London once, as I had web access from the hotel. The reviews were spot on, although I can’t remember the name of the site.

However nobody seems to be doing this particularly prominently by mobile, even though it’s the obvious vehicle. Where I have seen it, it tends to get lumped in with social networking or location based services, whereas I think it’s a great flagship product in its own right.
As ever promoting such a service is difficult, but you’d expect hotel and restaurant owners to encourage positive reviewing. Maybe there’s a need for a Rate Me service? Maybe that’s a short code opportunity.

(And yes, rateme.com is a hot-or-not service that, at time of checking, was not running.)

When I worked at Digital, people joked about being assimilated by the Borg, meaning they were going to work for Microsoft.

Well, I went back to dustbag.co.uk to order more vacuum bags, and found that the original merchant system had been replaced by Google Checkout. The process was very smooth, automatically picking up my Google account, adding credit card details, and then moving to a full checkout. The process was simple, quick and elegant. All the Google brand values (including minamilist design) applied.

Is this the start of true web brands? By that I mean a brand that appears in many places on the web, not just the brand’s own store. Google This and Google That appear all over the place now. The closest before that was Amazon affiliates, and that only really happened on the smaller sites. Even massive publishers use Google AdWords.

Interestingly Google tends to get between the consumer and the originator brand. My dust bag order confirmation e-mail comes from Google Checkout - not from dustbag.co.uk, whose identity has just vanished. Google giveth - I used Google to find the site in the first place; Google taketh away - the receipt appears to come from them.

Similar things happen when mobile operators “partner” with Google. The operator brand vanishes, and even if they share shavings of pennies off the ad revenue, the Google brand prevails.

The mobile industry’s low quality standards seem to be extending into uptake figures. Even with DoCoMo. This article says that they are delighted with 20% update of flat-rate data. I’ve heard that Vodafone will be pleased with 15% adopting their new flat rate tarif.

Why are they not pitching for more, far more? Surely data revenue must be icing on the nicely moist voice cake, it can’t add that much cost to running the network while even the flat rates are really low.

Did you know that public phones are protected by law in the UK?

Full legal report here.

Well, Akismet is doing a nice job of blocking spam from the comments, however the huge volume has vanished. Akismet has stopped four messages since Alex installed it for me the other day. Prior to that I was getting a thousand a day.

So it looks like some major spam shop has been shut down. Good.

Update:  The volume has gone up again, but only into the hundreds.