Smart Wallet Coming from Google

The Smart Wallet is coming says the Herald this morning.

I’m sorry but I have to laugh. A number of us have been trying to convince Vodafone and Telecom in New Zealand to do this for years. All I used to hear was ARPU and its not core business, while I was saying imagine having half a percent of the revenue. It’s a ubiquitous device people, your mobile is the only thing you always have on you, perhaps besides your wedding or engagement ring.

Ericsson had a proof of concept drinks vending machine in Auckland where you could  text for a drink at least 15 years ago. New Zealand used to be a centre of excellence for Voda back then. NZ was the first to mass adopt EFTPOS in the world, many other firsts, but then we fell asleep. ARPU doesn’t just have to be about data and voice revenue people. Ask eBay what business they are in, its not selling products, its financial services and transaction facilitation, I’m sure they say it better.

Sometimes its hard getting people to listen at the bleeding edge, but imagine if you had listened way back then, which was before Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki‘s garage!

I remember loads of coversations with people like Adam Clark at M-Com, going back even to our days at Advantage back in the late 90’s, along with other members of the Wireless Data Forum where we worked hard to try to drag people into the future such as in this Herald story from the turn of the millenium.

Sorry folks its soap box time. We have so many clever people in this country and yet our leaders don’t recognise the opportunities to cash in on their expertise and knowledge. Years ago we lead the world in many ways including banking  and financial systems, EFTPOS, retail barcode scanning and much more. We still have the expertise, but we seem to have dropped into a spiral of this is the way we do business, its prudent, reliable and safe. Or perhaps they are saying that ots too late because Google is already doing it. But guys, we told you to do it before Google existed. Google isn;t forever and it doesn;t mean that noone can get great ideas of the ground.

If you follow publications like Harvard Business Review, Futurist Magazine and other forward looking publications, they will tell you that your greatest assets are your people, your staff. When was the last time you sat down and asked them what they thought, right down to the intern who’s pushing the mail cart? Why do so many people leave their companies because they feel they can do it better? Recent surveys say half of Kiwi workers want to leave their jobs. It wasn’t all about pay as the following quote shows:

“Asked what they most wanted to improve about their workplace, employees’ top gripes were “systems and processes” (41 per cent), communication (39 per cent), and rewards and recognition (38 per cent).”

There are those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wondered what happened. There are also those who said it would happen but couldn’t get people to pay attention until after it happened. Of course being first doesn’t mean being best or being dominant.

Now as to testing with NFC. I watched a demo with NFC in the Netherlands in 2009 and it was cool. There were 2 phones in Europe at the time that had NFC, both from Nokia. Now that Vodafone is going to have a look at NFC in NZ, how many models of phone do we have that support the technology today? How long would it take before an early majority of people had a capable device? Just because Google is looking at NFC, does that make it the best technology? Are there alternatives? If we were best placed to implement mass adoption of EFTPOS and bar code scanning, could we be well placed for m-Commerce on mobiles? Ask Rod Drury or Adam Clark.

I’m just saying……………

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How Did the Telco’s Do in the Christchurch Earthquake

So when the quake hit Christchurch, what happened to telecommunications? Naturally in an emergency people need to communicate and there were some interesting situations. In an earlier blog I wrote about your emergency kit. So here are some interesting lessons from Christchurch and any other emergency situation:

Without electricity portable phones don’t work. If your phone requires a transmitter from the junction box to your portable, it’s not going to be transmitting anything. Many people still had copper phone lines even though they didn’t have electricity. Analogue phones still worked and Telecom in my opinion did an awesome job getting people to donate their old phones and shipping them down to Christchurch. I wonder if anyone has taken up the opportunity to start importing old style analogue phones into New Zealand, it must be a great medium term revenue opportunity!

Analogue Phone

With today’s Smartphones, not only did everyone rush to use their mobile to call their loved ones to check if they were ok, they were using mobile data, social networks, tweeting, sending photos and even video, which the media wanted to gobble up, but which clogged the networks for people wanting emergency services. I think the Telco’s did a pretty good job of getting generators to Christchurch and keeping comms up as much as possible, but they have created a bit of a monster that is only going to get worse. In chasing ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) they encourage us to find every possible way to connect on our mobiles, but then what happens if the mobile network gets congested? Obviously they need to work on increasing their emergency capacity as well as normal usage. They are our lifeline. How were they for you?

As I also mentioned in the emergency kit blog, if you’re trying to do all the things I mentioned above, your mobile battery is going to go flat and if you have no electricity that becomes a major problem. New Zealand has been way behind the rest of the world, or perhaps Kiwis haven’t figured it out yet, but we need alternative ways of recharging our mobiles in the absence of an electricity supply. There are lots of products that will allow us to do that. Car kits if we have access to a car. There are kits that allow you to use those conventional batteries you keep in your home and getaway kits (do you?) and also devices that hold enough charge for 2 or 3 charges and then get thrown away. I have one of those for my iPod which I purchased at San Francisco Airport, its brilliant!

Ipod Charger

WiMax and the end of TV as we knew it

A TV aerial on the roof is something most of us have grown up with. For holiday homes, flats or when on holiday rabbits ears created loads of frustration when they detuned one station as they gave you access to another, but they did mean that you could easily have TV in temporary situations from the batch to the hospital ward. VHF and then UHF aerials are still on most roofs in site, but that is going to become a thing of the past.

The first step is that VHF TV which has been the most common frequency range around the world is going to be switched off as governments in many countries reallocate those frequencies to WiMAX. This will be happening next year in many parts of the US a week or so after the Super Bowl.

Downunder in New Zealand we continue to lag some of the new advances and the VHF frequencies will be available to the TV stations until 2015. It will be interesting to see whether they are still needed for that long given that Satellite TV in the form of Freeview and Sky are already used by 55% percent of the population.

How can they do that? Don’t we need free to air TV? We aren’t necessarily losing it. In New Zealand the free to air TV stations are moving to Freeview, which is pretty much satellite TV with less channels and the only cost is the set top box and the satellite dish. This overcomes most of the issues about poor reception and providing reception to remote areas. But of course it bodes the end of little portable TV’s, but then you can now watch Sky TV on your phone with 8 channels for $2.50 a week, so maybe it is just a change of medium.

So what’s so special about WiMax? Nothing really except that it provides much geater range (up to 50 km for fixed stations and 5-15 for mobile) than the traditional 802.11 wireless networks, can povide much greater speed and when networks are built you can use it in your car. This sounds crazy but it’s really just a follow on from the systems used in large warehouses and buildings first created by Symbol, which pioneered many of the features still used today including frequency shifting for security and handover from one access point to the next as people moved around a building complex. In fact it is not only coming head on in potential competition to mobile cellular but telecommunications networks such as Sprint and Nortel are racing to get frequencies ad become the preferred supplier of 4G networks.

According to Computerworld’s Juha Saarinen, Telco’s in New Zealand are ‘squatting’ on some of the frequencies to prevent 3rd parties to spoil their fun in the 3G networks as they roll out new technologies to increase the speed of the cellular mobile network which is much easier to control and to derive plenty of ARPU (telco’s main measure of success Average Revenue Per User). If WiMax offers higher uploandand download speeds and efficient handover when required, then many people in urban areas might be less interested in WCDMA?

What could they be afraid of? Free access, and they should be afraid. Nottingham Trent University is trialling a network which will give free access to everyone in the city. There are free WiFi hotspots all over Europe, 154 free sites just in the Netherlands. Then there are free Mesh Networks, but that’s yet another story.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)