Letztens wollte ich mein über zwei Jahre altes Nokia 1800 Prepaid Handy von seinem O2-Netlock befreien und rief dazu die Hotline von O2 an, wo mir zuerst ein falscher Code genannt und dann vorenthalten wurde, dass man den Freischaltungscode nur maximal 10x eingeben dürfe. Am Ende der ca. 30 Minuten dauernden Prozedur hatte ich dann ein dauerhaft gesperrtes Nokia Handy, das fortan nur noch im O2-Netz verwendet werden kann.
(…in English, und nicht auf Deutsch, because I’d love to see comments from non-German speakers as well. Dankeschön!)
Mobile payment solutions, or m-payment, aren’t anything new to the interested mobile user. There are different (technical) models for mobile payments:
During this year’s local BarCamp in Darmstadt (for the Rhein-Main area), I also presented a few slides on M-Pesa & M-Kesho which are quite succesful in Kenya since their launch. Safaricom‘s former CEO, Michael Joseph, also talked about the success & struggle that came along with it during his Q&A session at (the) iHub Kenya earlier last month. Afaik, M-Pesa on Safaricom (Kenya, 51% owned by Vodafone) is a Premium SMS based transactional payment system.
You can google for M-Pesa and also check YouTube for the various videos on M-Pesa and why it has become so successful in EAK over the last three years (obviously, due to the lack of and need for alternatives).
Now, Germany. A country with seemingly more ATMs than public toilets :-), a working payment system, affordable (sometimes free) bank accounts with minimal charges, a cash culture where card-based payment systems are diverse and convenient to handle, but most importantly:the existing mix of cash & cards is an approved system that most often works and doesn’t require much behaviour change.
During another session on future mobile apps (during the BarCamp), fellow blogger Kai-Christian asked the attendees about their perception of mobile apps, and what we would like to see being developed.
As a hardware guy, I naturally love the idea of gadget add-ons that will turn your iPhone/smartphone into an e.g. medical test device, but when I look at the African market – and that was my main intention when I presented the slides on AfriGadget, Ushahidi, the iHub & Co (= what can we learn & adopt from them? South>North exchange) – I think it’s a very valid question to ask about the lowest denominator: telephony & sms, and why we are foccussing on High-Tech only (as opposed to the long-tail in mobile phone users, ~ 80% on simple phones), and why the market for SMS-based services still isn’t as satisfied as it should be.
To me it seems that since 1997, since the introduction of WAP, not much really changed in this sector (in .DE) because everyone was looking for the “killer app”, and this perception only really changed with true internet phones like the iPhone and such.
So I asked if a mobile payment system like M-Pesa would be possible in Germany.
One of the attendees, Silke (who is an expert on commerce systems and also blogs their usage on her private site), instantly replied that these mobile payment systems wouldn’t be successful in Germany because ppl wouldn’t need them (due to the aforementioned availability of ATMs & alternatives).
Software developer & technical consultant with a mobile service provider, Ali Pasha, added another comment to that and explained that there are security issues that come along with using SMS (which is true, because there is no 100% encryption). Given that a lot of Germans are having privacy concerns with Google Street View and objected the publication of street photos (which aren’t that private anyways), security issues are to be taken very serious when it comes to doing business in Germany (and, of course, elsewhere, but Germans seem to be very attached to security issues). No risk, no problem?
There are existing mobile payment systems available in Germany (also some upcoming ones based on Contactless NFC right here in Frankfurt), and I also remember the late Paybox service from early 2000 which is now only active in Austria. I don’t know the actual reasons for their failure in Germany, maybe due to investors pulling back or because of a tight competition with banks & providers, or both, but it’s interesting to note that their failure obviously wasn’t due to users who rejected the system, but because of external pressure. I, for one, remember using Paybox as a happy customer. If there is one thing I’ve learned in business, (then) it’s that the best and most accepted solution isn’t always the one that will prevail and succeed.
What you see here is a screenshot taken from mpass, a German system run by Vodafone (M-Pesa!) – a list of online shops where you can already pay using mpass. Not too many, if I may say so, and I am sure that mpass isn’t as popular in Germany as it probably should (be).
And obviously, mpass isn’t like M-Pesa because it a) isn’t implemented into the SIM (SIM-toolkit) and b) mpass is also only (?) used as an add-on to online shopping, to confirm a payment, while m-pesa provides much more than that (e.g. the direct exchange of credit).
Sooo…. if a similar technology is already available, and if they have been “alive” since 2008 – what do you think? Would a mobile payment system (of any kind) be successful in Germany? Would it take a SIM-toolkit modification like M-Pesa to reduce security concerns among German users? I remember having an M-Banking menu item on my old D2/Vodafone SIM card which never worked, and I am not the only one who never understood this.
I think one of the main arguments for M-Pesa (from provider perspective) is that users are forced to stick to a SIM (and the network), while mpass works from all networks. Is this due to a European law which regulates, but also limits the competition? I don’t know. But what I do know is that there’s often a different reality to what has been evaluated in field studies, or what we (as interested users) may assume of the market. Just as M-Pesa had been adopted to the Kenyan market by its users – “misused”, if you will. I like that. I’d like to see a similar development in Germany, if only to further explore what’s really possible with basic mobile phone functionality like telephony or sms.
What do you think?
Dieser Tage habe ich mich gefragt, ob es noch einen besseren Anbieter für meine Mobilfunkbedürfnisse als Blau.de gibt. 9 cent in alle Netze, 9 cent für SMS, 0,24 € / MB versurftes Datenvolumen und dazu noch eine bequeme, automatische Aufladung, so dass der ursprüngliche Nachteil von Prepaid entfällt.
Alleine: das E+ Netz ist so dermaßen beschissen, dass ich mit meinem Telefon manchmal keinen Empfang habe. Ist das Handy (ein Nokia N95, letzte FW) im Dualmodus eingestellt (GSM oder UMTS, je nach Verfügbarkeit), bucht es sich als UMTS-Gerät ein , im Display wird 3G und ein deutlicher Antennenempfang angezeigt – aber Telefonate kommen einfach nicht durch. SMS kommen dann entsprechend auch mit Verzögerung an. Abhilfe schafft hier nur die Rückstellung auf GSM-only (und das ist auch nicht 100% verlässlich).
Ich habe auch noch eine Fonic SIM-Karte, die ich in Verbindung mit der Tagesflatrate für 2,50€/d und einem 3G Modem (im Netbook und als PCMICA Version fürs Notebook) verwende. Fonic bietet fast gleiche Konditionen wie Blau.de, allerdings im O2-Netz und ohne Kreditkarten-basierter automatischer Aufladung.
Das eigentliche Problem scheint also im Netz zu liegen – oder aber Prepaid-Kunden haben eine andere, geringere Priorität im Netz (kann das sein?). Beide Netze (E+ & O2) sind nicht so rosig, und das obwohl wir hier mitten in FFM in fast direkter Sichtweite zur nächsten Basisstation wohnen.
Im März 2007 schrieb ich schon mal über meine Erfahrungen mit Vodafone (DE), deren Arroganz bis heute anzuhalten scheint. Vodafone hat eine (vergleichsweise) super Netzabdeckung bzw. -verfügbarkeit, vermag mit dem Rest aber nicht zu überzeugen.
Ab dem 3. Quartal kommt das Nokia E72 auf den Markt, welches eine gute Mischung aus den beiden favorisierten Handytypen Nokia N95 und Nokia E71 darstellt (QWERTZ-Tastatur, Monoblock, 5mpx Kamera). Selbstverständlich liegt da die Überlegung nahe, dieses Gerät im Herbst über einen subventionierten Handyvertrag anzuschaffen und dabei einen modernen 24-Monatsvertrag abzuschließen, der preislich mit den Prepaidtarifen konkurrieren kannn.
Bisweilen verwende ich hauptsächlich die günstigen Internettarife der Prepaidanbieter sowie deren 9cent Einheitstarif(e). Bei T-Mobile muss man sogar teilweise noch eine Tagesnutzungsgebühr iHv 0,19 € bezahlen, dass man überhaupt surfen darf. Solche hohen Kosten sind natürlich auch ein Grund dafür, wieso mobile activism in Deutschland immer noch nicht richtig ernstgenommen wird. DSL ist vorherrschend und mobile Internet”flatrates” zumeist bis 5GB Inklusivvolumen gedeckelt (oder aber ab 1, 5 oder 10 GB in der Geschwindigkeit drastisch reduziert). Im E+ Netz (= Blau.de, Simyo, AldiTalk, etc.) ist sogar nur eine UMTS Geschwindigkeit bis 384kb/s möglich, was mich aber nicht wirklich stört.
Manche Entwicklungsländer sind hier bedeutend fortschrittlicher und günstiger! Und ja, dies hängt sicherlich von vielen Kostenfaktoren ab und lässt sich nicht 1:1 von Land zu Land übertragen. Fakt ist aber unbestreitbar, dass die Mobilfunknutzer in Deutschland unverhältnismäßig mehr zahlen als eigentlich nötig. Bestes Beispiel neben dem überteuerten mobilen Internetzugang sind die immer noch hohen SMS-Gebühren. Lese ich dann ein Angebot (z.B. T-Mobile iPhone Tarife), in dem mit 40 InklusivSMS geworben wird, kann ich nur traurig lächeln. Sind subventionierte Handys ein Grund für diese Mischkalkulation? Oder sind die deutschen Verbraucher einfach nur zu träge für eine Revolution?
Zurück zu meinem Empfangsproblem: gibt es einen Anbieter, der preislich mit den o.g. Angebot konkurrieren kann und dabei eine gute Netzverfügbarkeit anbietet? Welche Angebote / Verträge habt Ihr und könnt Ihr etwas empfehlen? Vielen Dank!
“What’s the best mobile device for blogging on the way?”
I just twittered/tweeted (?) this as a question and decided to turn it into a blog post, so please feel free to comment.
Yes, mobile blogging, blogging content to an online blog as most posts/ideas come up when I am on the way to work/home/downtown. Blog content does not pop up in my head when I am at home, sitting in my dark little roof chamber, but instead when I am travelling or walking through the city and then suddendly there are these “Oh my, I neeeeeed to blog this” moments. Does that sound familiar to you?
What’s mobile?
I am already using a 15,4″ laptop as my primary computer, where I am compiling most posts using Blogdesk (for Win), pulling images from my mobile phone and getting online through a local Wi-Fi connection. Whenever I am travelling with my laptop (which doesn’t happen that often), I use a GPRS or even UMTS data connection to surf the internet via my mobile phone which is connected to my computer via Bluetooth. This is how I went online in Kenya, and this is also how I go online whenever there’s no local Wi-Fi available.
However, I often have this urge to blog directly from a more mobile device, a gadget I am always carrying around with me. What’s this? The mobile phone, of course!
So, where’s the difficulty?
Mobile devices often only offer pure text posts without any hyperlinks as editing alone is quite a pain. Entering text is usually done using a small T9 keypad, and some phones also offer dedicated QWERTY keyboards.
So I am using a Nokia N95 which enables me to take decent images (the picture quality isn’t as good as on a normal digital camera because of the CMOS sensor and its reduced size, but it’s more than sufficient for blog posts), it enables me to take decent videos @ 640×480 VGA with 30 fps but with the limitation of a mono microphone and no optical zoom and connects to the internet via HSCSD, CSD, GPRS, EGPRS, HSDPA and WiFi. The N95 even comes with an advanced video editor so that I can edit a video right on the phone! While this obviously takes some time and isn’t that easy, at least it’s possible.
The difficulty is to upload multimedia content onto the internet! This is exactly where most phones still lack a simple solution. Nokia eventually realized this and introduced the Ovi platform earlier this year, but it’s still in closed Alpha mode, so I guess we’ll have to work on a better solution. And not everyone is using Nokia phones. What about Apple iPhone users? And what about those that are documenting their life on blogs through SonyEricsson phones?
Mobile phone manufacturers apparently want their users to upload content to their own walled gardens. This blog here doesn’t run on blogger.com, ovi.com, wordpress.com, vox.com and other sites. Do they seriously want me to upload MY content to any obscure community platform? Hey, facebook is already enough in terms of walled gardens – I want to control my own content on my own website. I have a domain, webspace and am running a blog which is powered by WordPress. I want the content from my phone to directly load into the given space here.
And this is why I’ve split this post in two different parts: the a) software and b) hardware issues.
The hardware side is rather simple: considering that most phones offer sms services, blog entries may – in their shortest form at a length of 160 characters – be directly sent to a blog via sms. I can do that. I can upload an sms to my blog. Simple. And then there’s also e-mail: my blog comes with a (secret & currently inactive) e-mail address so that I could also send an e-mail to my blog which would then be posted online.
The short message, multimedia message and e-mail services are the common denominator on most phones, meaning: even Mama Wambui on the vegetable market in a rural town in Central Kenya may post blog content from her simple Motorola C139 phone via sms. But how does she read it?
See? Blogging simple and short text to an online platform isn’t that difficult. The difficulty lies in editing it and enriching it with hyperlinks, multimedia content and responding to comments.
When I started thinking about this subject, I initially thought that mobile blogging depends on the right device. Well, maybe it helps to have a computer so that surfing the net isn’t limited to a mobile device which just doesn’t offer the same comfort you’d have on a “normal” computer. But I quickly realized that instead of always blaming my not-so-perfect multimedia phone for the lack of this and that function or usability, I should instead look out for the right software, plugins, services that enable me to post from a mobile device in a way that offers more comfort than a short text which is limited to 160 characters. Mobile blogging is a software issue!
Meaning: the only difference I see between good and bad mobile phones in terms of their blogging capabilities is that some recent smartphones come with browsers that also work with Javascript and other advanced technologies which are sometimes needed online. I don’t need YouTube on my phone, but would like to comment on a K2 theme in WordPress where the comment function is based on this AJAX thing.
For pure reading of online content – and that’s what most of the current phones are capable of – I was already happy while using my old Nokia 6230i. In fact, I succesfully blogged an update on December 30th last year from a lobby in a hotel in Mombasa, using the OperaMini browser on the 6230i. It just worked.
I think that mobile blogging is a nice feature on a phone, but until it becomes as easy to post content as it already enables me to read online content from a mobile device, the only real killer application I can currently think of in the mobile sector is mobile banking/payment. Who knows – maybe in just a few years time devices will be advanced enough so that it all melts into one single application and service. This is why Google came up with the GPhone – coz it’s a software issue, not so much a hardware thing.
In part 2 I will try to compile a list of modern mobile phones that offer some comfort, and in part 3 I will try to highlight how to actually upload multimedia content from my phone to my blog (which I still have to figure out, hence this blog post :-).
Stay tuned!