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I spend alot of time testing mobile services using SIM-cards bought from all around the world. Some of them are prepaid, some of them are postpaid. There is just one universal truth abouth them: the operator online services to manage them universally suck.

This is a question to every single operator out there: Why do you make my life so difficult? I just want to spend money on your services.

I´m starting to believe operators don’t actually want my money.

Some pain points I have:

- Atrcious process to top up SIM-cards. SMS PIN-codes back and forth, passwords sent my snail mail, three day waiting to get access to my online account. Why can´t I just type in my phone number and my PayPal account and have a SIM-card topped up?

- Impossible to see my online purchase history. This one is even more crazy – the web interfaces the operators had back in 2005 were bad. The ones in 2011 does not seem to have improved, in fact they are worse! And typically they are buried somewhere deep down on operator web sites so that you can´t find them. Oh – and they keep switching the URL:s around so that you can´t bookmark it.

- Data roaming for prepaid is still spotty. I just can´t wrap my head around why it is so difficult to solve. Or the fact is – it is a solved problem, it´s just that the solutions are buggy and work 50% of the time. (And don´t get me started on the cost of data roaming that makes it an unusable service for any  normal prepaid customer)

- Money magically disappearing from SIM-cards. It seems to be a well established truth that on prepaid cards you have to live with money sometimes disappearing without any explanation. I´m sure there is an explanation for it, it´s just that the operator don´t care about explaining it to their customers.  E.g. someone calling the voicemail service and me being forced to pay the roaming-tax for travelling with my phone. Imagine if money just started disappearing from my PayPal account without explanation!

I was on the phone with Vodafone Germany who refused to explain why money was missing from my card. The only thing they could say was that I was probably subscribed to some Premium SMS service. How´s that for an explanation?

- Impossible to find the price of a service. Here´s what I want: an online tool where I can check what it will cost to use a SIM-card aborad. For example – lets say I have a prepaid card with operator A and is travelling abroad and roaming with operator B, how much will my I pay for an SMS, MMS and data? Getting this questions answered seems more difficult than solving who murdered JFK.

And don´t get me started on customer support reps that can´t actually solve any issues.

Whew..glad to get that of my chest. I feel so much better now. I love you all!

(Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago but did not publish it until now so the dates are a bit off)

Yesterday was one of the most exciting days in the office in a long while.

A colleague, lets call her M, came back after lunch and discovered that her iPhone4 had been pickpocketed. I tried calling it and to my surprise it seemed to be on. I asked her if she had installed MobileMe and the “Find my iPhone” feature. To my big joy and surprise she had!

We logged on to MobileMe. Since it was still turned on I was expecting that she had just dropped it at the restaurant. I assumed that if it had been stolen the thief would have turned it off. The seconds slowly ticked by as MobileMe was trying to track the phone. A few seconds later it got a fix. Lo and behold – the phone was not in the café! It was in another part of town. The accuracy was roughly the size of a city block. Another colleague recognized the spot as being the home of Stockholm’s largest internet/gaming café (according to their website Europe’s largest gaming café!). The hunt was on.

It was the middle of the day so the quickest way to get through traffic was to get on the subway. It took us roughly fifteen minutes to get to the café. By now, the phone had been missing for roughly 30 minutes. I spent several nights at the café (years ago) so I know exactly what it looked like.

Courtesy Google Street View

On the way there, M asked me what we should do if we found him. I had not thought about that, but assumed we would figure something out once we got there. Even though it was in the middle of the day the café was almost full of school kids playing World of Warcraft and there were plenty of dark corners where someone could sit unnoticed. We rushed through the café and a colleague back at the office kept track on the map of MobileMe where the thief was. High on an adrenaline rush I ran through the dark rows of WoW-players, trying to see an iPhone4. Just as I was going to tell the manager to lock the front door the iPhone had left the internet café and headed north. Since there is a slight delay in the map updates from MobileMe this means we probably met the thief as we entered the café.

We rushed on and a few minutes later the phone disappeared down into the subway. By now I was ready to give up the search since I figured it would be impossible for MobileMe to track the phone in the subway. But amazingly it kept updating the position and I got on the subway too. Just two stops later the thief got off and so did I.

By now my collegaue back in the office could see that I was close to the thief. MobileMe has a feature that allows you to remotely make the phone start playing a sound. He did but unfortunately I could not hear anything. When we tried the remote sound feature later back in the office we found out that the sound it produces is very low and if someone have the phone in a pocket it is almost impossible to hear. A few seconds later the phone was turned off and the hunt was off. So a sad ending to an exciting story. But it sure was fun while it lasted

Greg Haller, vice president of consumer solutions at Verizon:

“Some have asked – Verizon, what are you thinking?” Haller said. “Is there really a need for another store? We think so” because it will provide choice, opportunity, simplicity, and competition. “We’ll help customers find apps and let them decide how they want to get them,” Haller said.

For consumers, the proliferation of app stores can only be a good thing. As long as Verizon’s app store does not become mutually exclusive with Blackberry App World or Android Market. Just like we have plenty of different stores in real-life with different niches, why wouldn’t app stores go the same way? Let them compete with content, prices, availability and convinience.

Let the games begin!

Link

Tomi T Ahonen:

Mobile can drive visitors to your store. But please don’t think of the idea of the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report’ and its style of personalized spam ads delivered by location. That idea of location-based ads delivered to random walkers-by is a myth, it is economically not viable and it is hated by consumers.

Obviously, I was not alone in thinking “proximity marketing” is a bad service that have been marketed wrong by the mobile marketing firms.

At various times in my career I have been asked to make a report on a subject. Almost always when asked, the recipient has asked me to create the report as a PowerPoint-presentation. There is some notion among people that, somehow,  if you describe something in PowerPoint instead of as a text document there is some magical process which makes the information easier to grasp.  But what can be easier to grasp than a few lines of beautiful prose under an “Executive Summary”-heading in a Word-document?

Now, I am not the first to complain about the many wrong uses of PowerPoint. Peter Norvig, now the head of research at Google, wrote about the use of PowerPoint way back  in the dark ages (i.e. the year 2003). But still, things have only gotten worse since his essay so it bears to be re-iterated.

I have stopped asking whether to use Word or Powerpoint. These days I always opt for Word. If someone requests a PowerPoint-summary I ask them to book a meeting with me where I can present my findings properly. And the other way around, whenever I ask someone to make a report  for me, I ask them to use Word.

The common complaint I get back is that using Word takes much longer. And it’s true, using Word takes longer. But it is not the writing that takes longer. When you put something down in text you have to think hard. Because writing is difficult. So I don’t ask them to make me a Word-document to be mean. It just makes it much easier to find  half-truths and un-finished trains of thought. And the other way around, writing almost magically helps me clear my thoughts and understand the subject at hand.

So the next time you have something to present, use Word. You can thank me later.

Jag har helt fastnat för Reddit.com. Reddit är en sajt där användarna skickar in nyheter och sen röstar man på vilka som ska synas på framsidan. Ett ganska välkänt koncept som används på andra stora nyhetssajter: till exempel på Digg.com och Slashdot.org.

Men det är något speciellt med Reddit som det är svårt att sätta fingret på. Det är som ett årgångsvin som växer på en ju mer man använder sajten. Framförallt har den  lyckats attrahera en community som är trevlig och rolig.

Här är två exempel från den senaste veckan bara på roliga saker som har hänt:

1) Den här kräver lite bakgrundsinformation. I USA går det TV-reklam för deodoranten Old Spice och “Old Spice Man” har blivit något av ett meme. På Reddit nämde någon att han skulle vilja ha Old Spice Man som röst på hans telefonsvar. Några dagar senare händer detta. Bara några timmar senare har någon satt upp följande sajt: oldspicevoicemail.com.

2) I diskussionenen “What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen at a party?” skriver en av användarna att han lånade sina farföräldrars hus för att ha en fest utan att berätta något. Användarens farfar, 79 år gammal, svarar honom. Sånt händer väl inte varje dag?

Edit 2010-07-17: Det visade sig senare att 2) bara var en hoax. Tråkigt! Men det var ändå väldigt underhållande för oss som följde det medans det hände.

I promised myself I wouldn’t blog about this. But  I need to comment on the iPhone 4 reception issue since the internets seems to have gone haywire.

1) Apple closing discussion threads on the issue is not, contrary to popular belief, censorhip. Censhorship is when you are prohibited by law to not discuss certain issues. From Apple’s point of view the reception issue is a done deal and there is no reason to post it yet again in their support forums. But if anyone wants to continue the discussion they are free to do so elsewhere (which obviously is the case already).

2) The consumer reports testing is silly and overrated. They are testing the phone in a lab. Just look at their video. Obviously it is not mimicking real-life conditions. The big question is if the iPhone 4 drops more calls than other comparable phones during normal use.

Just changed the theme of this blog to a much simpler one (Thank you Jim!). I wanted something that is easy on the eyes and encourages long reading sessions in front of the screen. Because you are all planning to do that, no ?

On a sidenote, my wedding is next week so I have put all my spare time into wedding arrangements. Alot of people ask me how planning a wedding can take so long time. To them I say, try filling a hundred small bags with rice and tie them up with a ribbon and see how you like that.

But as soon as the honeymoon is over I will be back writing! For some reason I have been finding stuff that I want to write about every other day for the past few weeks. Now I just need the time to put them into coherent writing.

And speaking of writing, I have a big question I need to ask you all as soon as I am back. But I will save that for later.

Jag har testat Last.fm tillsammans med Spotify ett tag. Smått menlöst men ändå roligt. Av någon anledning är det väldigt roligt att se statisitk över vad jag lyssnat på. Så håll till godo, här är mina favoritartister enligt Spotify:

(Att Orup är med skyller jag helt på att andra använt mitt Spotifykonto på olika fester…)

Nu har jag installerat Mac Mini och Plex och kopplat till TV:n. Det funkar fantastiskt bra! Längre post kommer med detaljer.

Enda nackdelen är att jag spenderar jag alldeles för mycket tid på att kolla på Diggreel.