Posts Tagged ‘vodafone’
Dec 7
Lies, Damn Lies and the Royal Statistics Society
So it began “There is the Flat Earth Society who believe in the mobile web, and the Spherical World Society who believe in Apps and App Stores”. Fitting therefore that we sat in historical London’s heartland, home to the most prolific educational establishments of the 16th-19th century, famed for their very public debates on key issues of their time. Gone are the public burnings of radical individuals who dared to suggest the world was round. Here now is The Royal Statistics Society which played host this week to the MDA Mobile App Store Conference. The Society, of which 40% of its Presidents have had titles (Lord of the Least Squares Fit, Sir Standard Deviation, The Marquess of Mean etc) was a fitting location to get the latest on App Store trends and numbers.
First up, with his special name of almost Royal appointment, Dr Winsor* Holden of Juniper Research gave good statistics. 15% of all mobile downloads are for the iPhone and iPod Touch already, 86% of all downloads and 77% of all revenue were games and 80% of all downloads were “off store”. I was quickly reminded that more than 50% of UK people don’t understand percentages, though I think the audience here were bright enough to know the national lottery is stacked against them and it was broadly well received.
Next Amer Hasan, Vodafone’s “Mr Widget” set out Vodafone’s store. I was attracted to his comment that “Vodafone is now accountable to developers”. He then talked about JIL, who certainly sounds friendly but later turned out to be an acronym for Vodafone’s Joint Innovation Lab. Where he failed was to not give any statistics - “I’m not sharing any numbers” was his answer to one of the questions, which I think in statistics circles would be considered not fitting of a gentleman.
Bright AI’s David Lane, MD of a mobile application development house woke me up with his pitch titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of App Stores”. Unfortunately it was indeed a Spaghetti Western of a presentation and I’m glad we at Taptu are developing our own apps for our users (comments welcome!) But Bright AI do have significant developer experience and he did indeed sprinkle some stats – 70+ million registered credit cards on itunes – 97% of apps approved by Apple and live in days.
Katie Lips chaired a panel and she herself asked the most interesting question on the iPod Touch. Citing a stat that more apps are downloaded by iPod Touch users than iPhone users and that most of these are games, is it actually games that are driving the market? – answers on a post (card) please.
Lilo Neste from Materna identified Apple as leading the way in digital content sales with itunes. She then went on to prove that boring corporate statistics-free presentations are alive and well, even from within London’s ‘Statistics Central’.
Finally Keith Varty from Nokia finished things off in grand style. With a ‘Did You Know Video?’ he did great statistics in great style. And Nokia does have great numbers; 1.1 billion customers and a new phone made every 13 seconds – this reach being the big attraction for developers to look at Nokia and the OVI store.
So did anyone get burned at the stake for daring to believe the future is about Apps? – not if the Royal Statistics Society have anything to do with it. App stores are now ‘normal distribution’.
* for our distant readers, our Queen has a castle in Windsor which is in the English county of Royal Berkshire – something that Taptu search is only too pleased to reveal.
Tags: mobile web, royal statistical society, vodafone
Posted in Community and social networks, Events and conferences | No Comments »
May 16
The Future is Flat: Mobile Data Flat Rates Go Prime Time
It’s a big milestone for the mobile internet – At the beginning of this month, Vodafone announced some new consumer tariff plans in the UK market which include 500 MB of flat rate mobile internet access. Previously, mobile internet access was charged at a significant monthly premium. Now it’s included “free” in the standard tariff plan.
Don’t get too carried away with Vodafone’s spin on this. Vodafone users aren’t going to be queueing up to change their existing tariffs just yet. Compare the minutes and texts between these new “Vodafone best-ever value tariffs” and “Vodafone’s most popular price plans” on their UK website.
Vodafone’s “best-ever value” tariffs
| £ per month | Minutes | Texts | Data |
| £25 | 100 | 50 | 500MB |
| £30 | 250 | 100 | 500MB |
Vodafone’s “most popular” price plans
| £ per month | Minutes | Texts | Data |
| £25 | 500 | 100 | £7.50/500MB |
| £30 | 600 | Unlimited | £7.50/500MB |
I do think that this is exactly the sort of simplification step that is required to open up the mobile internet for the mass market. Mobile internet pricing has been enormously complicated and confusing for users. People are scared that if they use the mobile internet they’ll get hit with big unforeseen bills – even when they have flat rate tariffs, as one Vodafone UK user with a flat rate data card connection found out when he went to Germany and accidentally downloaded a whole episode of Friends that his wife had previously set running on his laptop in the UK – the world’s most expensive premium download at £11,000 or $22,000USD.
Mobile internet has a bright future ahead of it when operators include a big flat rate chunk of data as a standard feature of mainstream consumer contract tariffs. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of pricing in the US and in Western European markets where there is enough 3.5G infrastructure installed to enable it.
Tags: data rates, mobile data, operators, vodafone
Posted in Network Operators, Phone tariffs and costs | No Comments »
May 14
Message in a bottle: How much do you pay for SMS?
Fascinating comparison from Nigel Bannister at Leicester University (via ShinyShiny)
Text messaging costs four times as much as receiving information from Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope.
It cost £85 to obtain a megabyte of data from Hubble, 595km (370 miles) from Earth, as opposed to sending a 5p text, which works out at about £375 per megabyte.
Scientist Nigel Bannister, of Leicester University, said: ‘Hubble is by no means a cheap mission – but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical.’
If you’re a heavy texter, it’s worth investigating a variety of tariffs to find the one that suits you best. And no matter whether you’re more of a voice, SMS or web user, remember to check every so often with your operator to find out whether you’re able to change your deal – without necessarily increasing your tariff.
For example, as we’ve mentioned before, Vodafone has added 500MB of free data to all pay monthly contracts but, if you’re an existing customer, you need to call to get this added to your current deal, as your operator cannot change terms and conditions of your contract without your approval. So what are you waiting for? Call your operator and see if you can get a deal that suits you better.
Meanwhile, if you’re not interested in browsing, but just want the ultimate el cheapo phone, how about a phone for £13 (that’s $25 USD!) on pay as you go. Not a bad phone to have around, that way you won’t shed a tear when it meets a watery grave in a pint of beer this Summer!
Tags: astronomy, costs, hubble, SMS, vodafone
Posted in Phone tariffs and costs | 1 Comment »
May 1
Capture, edit and share: I hear Spike Lee’s shooting down the street
I can’t imagine a chemist walks around thinking everyone else appreciates chemistry the way he does. Yet I’ve grown so used to being surrounded by fellow bloggers, Twitterers and Firefox users, I’ve been known to forget that outside of my fun geek bubble, people are still using Internet Explorer, visiting websites rather than using RSS feeds, and are utterly uninterested by the latest web app’s private beta. Like a massive distortion field, I assume that because all my immediate friends and colleagues have the latest gadgets, it’s fair to extrapolate that everyone else does. It ain’t so!
However, looking into my crystal ball, I can see that things are changing. Sharing is becoming so easy and effortless that, in a NYT article, Nokia said “it surveyed 9,000 consumers last year and concluded that by 2012 one out of every four consumers will create, edit or share entertainment with friends, instead of getting it from traditional media outlets like television or movie studios.”
In the US, according to Forrester’s Groundswell Social Technographics Profile (erk, such a painfully dull name for otherwise pretty cool information!), certain segments of the population are already blowing those numbers out of the water. Already, 39% of 18-24 year olds and 30% of 25-34’s are labelled as content creators, while in the UK, they’re 19% and 10% respectively.
With moves like Vodafone’s decision to include 500MB of data to all new monthly contracts, concerns over data tariffs are going to disappear over time and getting your phone out to capture that unmissable clip to share to YouTube, Qik or Flickr will become second nature! If an image is worth a thousand words, these snap videos will be worth a million, whether you’re just looking to share it with your family or, like yours truly, to hoards of readers.
So go on, pick your weapon and start sharing! Yes, even you, mom! It isn’t just for kids and geeks anymore.
Tags: forrester, sharing, technology, Video, vodafone
Posted in Community and social networks | No Comments »
