M-Payments are Dead

This week's Telemedia newsletter popped into my inbox this morning and the headline article about m-payments really struck a chord with me. Much as I've been a fan of mobile technology for the last 16 years, I have rarely used mobile payments - as in charging something to my network operator. I use PayPal on my mobile, I've paid using credit cards and I've charged things to my Amazon and my Google Play accounts. Aside from very rare instances of premium SMS (for voting or a charity donation), I can't think of an instance where I've ever thought 'oh it would be so much easier to pay via my network operator'.

Paul Skeldon goes into it in more depth here.

Premium Rate Services have now been renamed to Phone Paid Services

Phone Pay Plus (formerly known as ICSTIS) has just published a comprehensive report (77 pages no less) on the UK market for what was formerly known as Premium Rate Services and now known as phone-paid services.

There are some interesting facts that come out of it such as

• 48% of UK customers had made use of phone-paid services at some point in the previous six months (so that's TV voting, chat, ringtone, horoscope, directory enquiries purchase by either mobile phone or fixed line etc)
• It is estimated that the phone-paid market had contracted by 15% from an estimated GBP1080 million in 2007 to GBP920 million in 2008 (still a pretty healthy figure mind, all things considered)
• The level of innovation is low (particularly in fixed line phone-paid), which limits the potential for developing more interesting services which is a factor in the decline in market size
• Video could be ripe for growth in this market (video seems to be the poster child for all areas of digital at the moment)

Anyway, if phone-paid services are your thing, then this report is going to be worth a look. You can download the full PDF here. Other Phone Pay Plus research can be found here.

Via 160 Characters.

Technorati Tags: research,mobile,premium rate,phone paid,UK,mobile media,fixed line

Monday morning news

I have a fair few tabs open on my browser, so in an attempt to reduce that number, here are a few Monday morning links for you. Some of the links are mobile, some are not so pick and choose what you see fit!

MIG is innovating with its new PSMS Refund Manager built specifically for the broadcast industry:

"Refund Manager will enable consumers who interact with mobile competitions or votes, outside the campaign timeframe, to self-serve refunds. The product has been designed specifically in-line with PhonepayPlus regulations to give broadcasters the confidence, and the toolset, to run fully compliant premium rate mobile interactive services."

VentureBeat reported yesterday that venture firm EDF is attempting to take legal action against an entrepreneur who left a negative comment about them on VC review site The Funded. The entrepreneur advised against dealing with EDF ‘unless you are desperate’. What a dumb move. [via The Equity Kicker]

 Jemima Gibbons' take on my Friday favourite, The Tuttle Club. We hang out at The Coach and Horses on Friday mornings in London's Greek Street and I'm proud to tell you that I was at the very first Tuttle and am thrilled to see how it's growing. Brighton Tuttle had its first event on Saturday and it looks like Birmingham will be following suit soon too. More on the Tuttle Blog if you're interested.

Vision Mobile has come up with a 'who's who in mobile' chart. If you're interested in understanding how the mobile industry works, then this chart is probably worth a look.

Technokitten pal, Lisa Devaney, kindly includes me in her list of 'other media people' as a response to The Guardian's Top 100 list. She compiles an interesting list.

Microsoft spoofs the ad business - and does it rather well!

Technorati Tags: mobile,psms,Tuttle

ITV is hit with £5.68m fine for phone-in scandal

Yes, it's true, Ofcom has fined ITV £5.68m for it's phone-in scandals. It sounds like an awful lot of money, but considering they made £7.8m from uncounted votes from the TV programmes in question and about 10 million telephone calls were affected it doesn't actually sound that big anymore. Coupled with the fact that ITV generates profits of upwards of £150m a year it really is small fry.

However, the broadcaster has promised to compensate its customers who were affected adn to give back the sum to charity. Ofcom took this into consideration when deciding upon the fines. The penalty is almost three times higher than the previous record of £2 million that was imposed on GMTV by Ofcom in September 2007.

The programmes that were found to have 'serious editorial issues' between 2003 and January 2007 were Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Gameshow Marathon and Soapstar Superstar. The full breakdown of the fines can be found here.

ITV wasn't alone in the phone-in scandal stakes. Other TV and radio stations, including those of our much-loved BBC were also culprits. A full breakdown of that can be found over at the BBC.

Let's hope that's the end of these scandals and we can get back to using telephony and messaging appropriately in participation TV.

Are you a Paparazzi in training?

Got a cameraphone? Do you spend your time celebrity-spotting in training to be a fully-fledged paparazzi? Then if so, Mr Paparazzi might be for you. You can send in your pictures and Big Picture will attempt to sell them for you if they're hot. In addition, they have a celebrity tracker text message service with each message costing you 50p and you'll get no more than 10 messages a week tipping you off where the latest celebs are hanging out... thus keeping you up to date like their own paparazzi. Hmm, £5 seems a bit steep to me for a week's worth of messages, but if this is your kinda thing, then I guess it's a small price to pay if you get to sell your picture for £1,000. It's all backed by Big Pictures, which is arguably the world's biggest picture agency in the world.

Scoopt set up something similar a couple of years back and is still going strong now it's backed by Getty Images. Scoopt accepts pictures of all kinds and has even teamed up with the fab Shozu so you can upload your pictures in one click. This means they get a better quality picture than the ones Mr Paparazzi will get via MMS, and it's not restricted to celebrity pictures. And it doesn't cost you anything to send your picture in (save for your standard network data charges).

Monday musings

• Bill Thompson discusses security risks in the new i-phone and the wider implications of a networked customer base and how the corporates need to adapt to our needs and not the other way round. I think he has a point but it's a challenge.

• The BBC suspended all phone competitions last week and is under scrutiny from Ofcom for malpractice over the phone lines and fake competition winners to a variety of programmes including Children in Need, Comic Relief and Blue Peter. The media has also responded.

• Any phone can be a credit card as the clever folks at Masabi has come up with a new way to manage secure transactions using your mobile phone using just 3kb of handset memory.

• Desperate for the loo? Don't know where your nearest one is? Then help is at hand with Mizpee. Trouble is it only works in the US and I find it hard to believe they have every single loo in the US on their database. But hey, maybe they have. Anyone tried it?

• User generated content, social media and how to make money from it. Well these were the topics tackled by the w2forum last week. Unfortunately, no-one had any definitive answers as it's still too early to know how best to monetise this area.

"Roy Vella, Head of Mobile Payments at PayPal, summed up the feeling in the room when he pointed out that none of the best-known social networking sites on the web, such as MySpace and FaceBook, were initially about monetisation, and that “the monetisation stuff” is only happening because there are so many eyeballs.
“You want to know how do big companies make money out of all those eyeballs” said Vella. “The answer is, I don’t think we know yet.”

Vella also warned brands that they would need to exercise caution if they were going to try to establish a presence on social networking sites, mobile or otherwise. “If you threw a party and a corporation showed up, how would you feel about it?” he asked. “It’s a new space, and we all have to tread carefully. The way to succeed is the way it has always been – to delight customers.”

• Half a million web 'n walk users on t-mobile in the UK and expected to rise to 1m by the end of the year.

• Nokia has launched a mobile gig guide for Leeds and Reading festival.

Oh dear oh dear, those premium rate scams aren't going away

See to the end of the post to get the latest updates on the story.

The recent premium rate TV scams just won't go away (Richard and Judy, Channel 5, and even Blue Peter et al). TV production companies (for they are not blameless) as well as mobile services companies have had their knuckles well and truly rapped by ICSTIS and having their names trailed through the press. But it seems the media hasn't had enough, and they may well be right.

Tonight, at 8.30pm, on the BBC, there's going to be a Panorama programme which alleges that 1000s of GMTV viewers (GMTV is a very popular morning chatshow for all you non-UK readers out there) have been ripped off to the tune of £45k per day (that's allegedly £10m a year) by entering competitions they had no hope of winning. What's even worse, is that they allege that the telecoms firm behind it, Opera, knew all about it for the last FOUR years. The BBC news report summarises it here where there's also a link to a video clip about it. And Brand Republic and The Guardian cover it too.

To say it's not looking good for GMTV or Opera is an understatement whether or not they are guilty - it's trial by media and who knows what the *real* truth is but there will be a general feeling of there's no smoke without fire so I'll be watching with great interest. And the word on the street is that Channel 4 is planning it's own Despatches programme on the same issue. So it's not terribly good for the premium rate industry as a whole. So I suspect there'll be a lot of discussion at World Telemedia this week in Amsterdam about how it affects us all in the industry - both client and supplier-side.

There's already some good debate on the issue over at SMStextnews (although I don't agree with some of it - but read for yourself and contribute and make up your own mind).

I suppose the good news is that the public now understand their chances of actually winning anything in these competitions (the odds are slim), the roles ICSTIS and OFCOM play in regulating this area (OFCOM is already providing more specific guidance on 'impossible' quiz questions like the infamous 'What's in a ladies handbag? Ans: A rawl plug.') and forcing the premium rate telecoms suppliers to clean up their act and put proper audit processes and systems in place. And long overdue that is.

This one ain't over yet.

Update: Opera has a statement on its website about the situation...

"Earlier this year Opera Interactive Technology took positive steps to improve its administration procedures and can confirm that all competition contestant entries throughout the entire competition period are now considered equally and fairly, whether handled directly by Opera Interactive Technology or by its telecommunications partners, using a randomised computer programme.

This process implemented as at 1st March 2007 has been observed and reviewed by Deloitte’s and has been successfully passed as satisfactory and in full compliance with the latest ICSTIS guidelines.

Opera has in no way benefited financially from any errors in procedure in the past and will continue to keep its processes in line with any future OFCOM or ICSTIS guidelines.

Opera Interactive Technology has today removed relevant staff from normal duties with regard to GMTV competitions pending further investigation."

Update 2: GMTV dumps Opera Opera declines to comment. And these are the same people who won an award for 'best management team' from the folks who compile the annual Media Momentum list. Hmm.

How not to do mobile marketing for fundraising

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. I've just read a press release about what should be, a neat little campaign to raise funds for a not for profit entity. It's a straightforward text to win campaign where you can win some 'money can't buy prizes' (although what these are exactly is a bit vague to say the least) and you get charged £1.50 which helps raise funds for the entity. In addition, you get sent a link to download some free games. The promotion is live and now out in the wild.

Well, I like to try this things out and see how well they work or not and found out the following...

1. I sent my text message in and got a reply quickly with a URL to download a free mobile game.

2. I clicked through to a wap page with no branding from the entity or who it was or where I was but nevertheless, downloaded a few games pretty easily. There was a good choice of games available and some links at the bottom of the page to the games company's main pages where I could search and buy other games. It even recognised my handset type!

3. BUT I don't know whether or not I was charged the £1.50 as there was no evidence of that on the text message (note, I didn't get a wap push message - just a SMS - I should have got both).

4. AND I don't know what, if anything, both the nfp entity and the games company are going to do with my mobile number in the future. Nor was there any provision for STOP to unsubscribe.

5. MOREOVER there are no terms and conditions... at all... anywhere. I scoured their website, I scoured the wapsite (which isn't theirs anyway, just a page of free games already (?) available if you know where to look on the mobile internet). I have no idea who the promoter is, how long the promotion is on for, exactly what the prizes are, what the criteria for winning are, how I know if I've won etc etc. It's all a balls up.

So, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I call up to see if they realise what they've done. They had no clue. They had no idea of their omissions or what the consequences might be. Their response was that the company supplying the technology said it was all ok and above board. Hmm. I do know of the supplier companies in question. And if that really is the case, then it seems they either don't know their onions. At all. Or can't be bothered to share what they do know about onions. Very very disappointing. And could get all of them into trouble. So shortsighted as well I'd say.

This ought be a great little promo being used to generate much needed funds and should be a bit of fun in the process. For the sake of a bit of time and effort and a bit of cash, they could have got it so right. I understand the limitations of no budget, but when you have a website which you can update yourself (they've put the press release on there), then how hard is it to put up some terms and conditions and details of the competition itself? And for a bit extra, I have no doubt at all, this could have been done on the wapsite too. And getting it right should be a reassurance factor for customers so they're more likely to spread the word about the campaign. As it stands, I expect teenagers will get hold of the URL for the free games and just pass that on to each other and completely bypass paying the £1.50 (that's if £1.50 was ever charged in the first place).

Anyway, I said I wouldn't dob them in, so I haven't mentioned the companies in question in the hope that they sort out what they need to do, and fast, as this campaign is now live and being actively promoted in their community. And I do hope they get some proper legal advice too re terms and conditions, PSMS compliance and what they *must* make available and how and to whom so they can fix the mistakes they've made.

Grrr. Mobile Marketers - pull up your socks! This is 2007 and NOT NEW any more. You really should know better. Surely we can get the basics right. No wonder the TV companies are in a pickle with SMS voting shenanigans if we can't even get a basic text to win right.