Mobile Innovation

Orange has joined other UK operators in offering flat-rate data plans. Contract customers will be able to sign up for unlimited surfing for 8 pounds per month (US$15.97) or a bundle for evening and weekend browsing at 5 pounds per month (US$9.98), or a cap of one pound (US$2) per day reports ZDNet UK. However, Orange joins Vodafone in banning VoIP or IM on the network: “The bundled prices won’t include VoIP or IM,” an Orange spokesperson confirmed on Friday. “We advise against using [those services] as yet.”—because it could cut into Orange’s voice/SMS revenue.

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Vodafone will revamp its Vodafone live! Portal and plan a relaunch at 1st June 2007. With the new portal Vodafone will offer a more web-like look and feel of the mobile homepage. Next to popular mobile internet sites like BBC the customer will also find Google Search. Google enlarges its presence in the mobile internet very successfully by starting a lot of co-operations. In March 2007 for instance o2 announced a co-operation with Google (Link).

With the new Vodafone live! Portal Vodafone will also release a new pricing structure for data usage. Vodafone will offer a much cheaper structure. Currently Vodafone users pay £2.35 per MB a day; under the new pricing they can use up to 15 MB a day for £1. When users exceed 15MB a day, they then pay £2 per MB for additional data. High usage mobile internet customers can alternatively subscribe for a monthly browsing bundle at cheaper data rates. Unfortunately the press release does not mention much about a new bundle pricing.

Basically there are two kinds of customers: Those who want to pay what they have used and those who prefer a package. o2 for instance offers three data packages: "Internet Pack S", "Internet Pack M" and "Internet Pack L".
The Internet Pack S serves the pay-as-you-use demand. The Internet Pack M is appropriate for an intense usage and includes 200 MB per month for 10 Euro (200 MB are enough to browse 800 Websites). For users who would like to use more data intense services the Internet Pack L would be advisable since it includes 5 GB and costs 25 Euro per month.

For a sustainable raise in mobile internet usage the bundle pricing will be essential. With bundle pricing you do not just persuade the early adapters, you also improve the confidence of the majority in the pricing and avoid the negative bill-shock effect. Thus the intensity of the mobile portal usage will be strongly dependent on the bundle data pricing.

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According to NMA, CNN is set to re-launch its CNN mobile service this week and has secured car company Lexus as its first advertiser on the platform.

"It will feature a searchable 14-day news archive with over 2,000 stories, as well as a news SMS alert service covering categories like business, weather, entertainment and lifestyle.

The service, which first launched in 1999, will be available in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America to all handsets by entering CNNmobile.com.

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Opera says it's served up 2 billion web pages through its Mini service, bringing the web to phones previously incapable of running an http browser.

This week the Norwegian software company rolled out the third version of Mini, adding features and performance improvements. And we took a look.

Mini is really a service - it's a compressing proxy running on Opera's servers - with a Java applet as the browser. Version 3.0 adds secure connections, which means it's now a lot more interactive. You can logon to web-based email, and log into eBay, for example. This removes the single biggest differentiator between Mini and the venerable Opera Mobile.

The new Mini also introduces a feature Opera calls "content folding", which is designed to collapse those tediously long columns (such as "blogrolls"), which make vertical browsing some pages such a a nuisance. Because Mini stacks a page's columns into one vertical column, it can take alot of scrolling to reach the first item of "real" content.

We experienced mixed results with folding. Alas, Opera Mini doesn't yet have a Jump to the Bottom shortcut key, and it doesn't jump to the first item of real content, as Opera Mobile allows you to do.

These small usability issues aside, Mini 3.0 raises as many issues for the venerable Opera Mobile, as it does for rivals. Given the speed of Mini, and the fact that it's saving a considerable amount of money for users with metered data plans, you wonder why anyone would opt to pay for Mini's older big brother.

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Despite investment by operators in services such as i-mode and Vodafone Live, 73 per cent of respondents to a new survey said don't access the net from their mobile. Slow-loading pages (38 per cent) and navigation difficulties (27 per cent) were among the reasons cited why people would rather hook up to the net using a PC rather than a phone. A quarter (25 per cent of sites were unavailable to those with mobile phones.

The survey of 1500 UK consumers, commissioned by hosting firm Hostway, also found that surfing habits varied depending on how people got online. People were content to browse using a PC than when accessing the net from a phone, where they often wanted to find a specific piece of information. Slightly more consumers would rather access maps (49 per cent) than read news and sport (47 per cent) from their phones.

"At the moment, most websites just aren't flexible enough to be accessed on mobile phones," said Neil Barton, a director of Hostway. "There's nothing wrong with having a flash website with all the bells and whistles you can muster, but you've got to be aware that mobile users simply aren't going to be able to access it. The research illustrates that even if people do wait for sites to load, quite often it's impossible to actually get at the content itself because of the way that sites are built."

The study suggested that users aren't inherently adverse about using the net on the move. Nine in ten said they'd use mobile internet services providing they could be sure that pages would load faster and they'd avoid high charges.

Basic services created the most interest. Survey respondents said that if they could access services quickly, simply and cheaply they would want to access their email on the move (71 per cent) with around half saying that they would also access news and sport (47 per cent) from their mobile.

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Scientists at The University of Manchester have a launched a new project which seeks to combine website accessibility with mobile phone technologies. The aim of the three-year project is to develop a host of new software with the potential to make the mobile web as simple to use as the internet.

Currently, websites generally have to be re-designed to work on mobile phones. This is due to the fact that many conventional websites can't be displayed on small screens. Consequently, both the content and the choice of websites available on the mobile web are limited.

The RIAM project will draw on the experiences of blind and visually impaired users and the technologies they use to surf the internet, such as screenreaders, in a bid to simplify the content of conventional websites so that they can be accessed via the mobile web.

A core part of the project will be the development of a validation engine which will screen websites to ensure they are accessible and mobile web compatible. The validation engine will work in tandem with a transcoding programme which will de-clutter web pages and reorder them into a web mobile friendly format. Once transcoded the aim is to let the user determine how the pages are displayed on their mobile phone.

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