dotMobi, the Internet new top level domain for mobile content, launches to the public today, opening up registration to the public. I won’t say much about it here, because I am not exactly unbiased*, but read what BBC and Financial Times are saying. Whatever your opinion on the usefulness of new top level domains, it’s clear that the launch of dotMobi is creating a lot of buzz about using the Web on your mobile, which is a “good thing.” Also, it’s important to understand that the dotMobi guidelines for Mobile Web content development are based on the best practice guidelines developed in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. For more information, or to register a dotMobi name, visit mtld.mobi or take a look at the dotMobi blog for up to the minute news on the launch. *Disclosure: Vodafone, my employer, is an investor in dotMobi and I have personally been involved in its development. → Read More

If you read sites like TechCrunch, then it is a fair guess that your friends and family probably think you are some sort of computer expert, someone they can turn to when they need computer related help and advise. This is often a blessing in disguise because once you’ve been successfully identified as an expert, often what was supposed to be a five minute quick question soon becomes a time consuming reinstall and/or virus health check etc. After a while you begin to fear the knock on the door or the phone ringing, feeling you will never be left alone again! Well thankfully help is at hand, more precisely thousands of hands. Last week BT announced their new home-based broadband customer support service, BT Home IT Visit. BT Broadband customers can now arrange for an engineer to visit their home and install broadband from £50.00 per visit. In addition, anyone with a BT line can request a Home IT Visit for assistance with any IT-related problem or situation for £75.00 for the first hour and £25 for each subsequent half-hour. said Emma Sanderson, Director, Value Added Services for BT Retail Following three months of successful trials, BT now has a team of up to 2,000 specially trained engineers nationwide who can visit customers in their homes to help them get on-line and get the most out of their broadband. Customers, for example, can request an engineer to help set-up a wireless router or network, and attach printers or other devices. An engineer can also give your computer a health check and show customers how to back-up data. In addition they can give help and advice with installing and configuring a new PC, including backing-up and transferring data across from an old PC. The Home IT Visit service follows the launch in March of BT Home IT Advisor – a service which gives customers a single point of contact with a team of BT trained advisors dedicated to providing comprehensive support for customers’ PCs, networks, applications and up to 20 devices for the home. The service can even create a ‘virtual engineer’ in your home by enabling an advisor to securely ‘log on’ to a customers’ computer remotely and troubleshoot a problem for no additional fee, above the £9.99 a month subscription.Great news then, you’re off the hook. So when the next door neighbour calls round with “just a quick question”, → Read More

If you are a British expat like – Alex Barnett and Ben MetCalfe - then getting hold of Tetley teabags, Heinz Beanz and/or Marmite can prove difficult. Asking friends to send you food parcels every now and then maybe one solution. Another maybe to use UK2YOU, a new UK focused website with more than 200 shops ranging from Hamleys to Harrod’s to Thornton’s chocolates which delivers to all E.U. Member states plus most of North America and much further afield. UK2YOU was created by a partner of a British Foreign Office employee to service British expats and those people abroard wanting to buy British goods. Noticing a gap in the market UK2YOU only promotes shops that “deliver” to the international audience and thus takes away the annoyance buyers sometimes feel when getting to the checkout only to find the shop doesn’t deliver to their country.   → Read More

They say there is a mug born every minute and the internet is clearly no sanctuary for mugs. Irish Actor Stephen Francis Brady recently launched a new website with the intention of giving away £1 Million ($1.8 Million) to someone out there. How very nice and grand of him but it’s not his money! He has setup a website called “Step up to a Million“ or should that be pyramid selling in disguise. However, with room for only 21 people, amazingly the first four spaces have already been sold for more than their asking price on eBay. Now with only 17 places left Stephen is planning on going viral with ”Step up to a Million“ and believes that the last remaining places will also get snapped up. he says “Winning the money is just a bonus, the real goal is to generate huge interest and traffic to the sites of those 21 involved. I then plan to have the draw which will hopefully take place on live TV, which in turn will generate even more interest. Each time a space goes, demand grows for the remaining places and when people see the site I believe they will continue to come back as they will be curious to see who the next place will go to”. The idea behind his website is to sell 21 banner spaces that start at £1 and double in price each time a space is sold and believe it or not, it only takes 20 double-ups to reach over £1 million.  TV Presenter, Mark Ryes who secured space No.3 for nearly five times the asking price says, “It’s a good Idea and something different that might just work, hopefully it won’t lose momentum half way to the top, but that’s the chance I took.” Everytime I see sites like this I groan because they are all trying to replicate the success of The Million Dollar Homepage - oh well Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. Not to be out done, there is also Entrepreneur Island which is a contest and a way for youth to get advertising to back their business idea. Kari Peters started the site so she could raise capital for her business ideas and provide support to other budding business people. She will also use some of the money to buy a real island and turn it into a members-only resort for the 100 lucky Web site members. All this for a sign-up fee → Read More

Ian Forrester from BBC BackStage is holding a VERY last minute Geek Dinner tonight.   “If your in London today and would love to meet up for Dinner with Howard Rheingold of the SmartMobs and Virtual Community fame please email on mobileian at cubicgarden dot com or text me on 07870554816. This is very last minute and we are going to have a meal rather than the usual geekdinner. So expect to pay for a meal and drinks. The venue is undecided and will be decided on at some point during the evening. But I expect it will be near Victoria or Kensington.” Howard Rheingold is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and on-line host for The Well. The author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, and Tools for Thought, he lives in Mill Valley, California → Read More

It seems the expected merger of BT and Vodafone has taken another step forward. Currently BT have an MVNO agreement with Vodafone to provide BT Mobile and today Vodafone announced it has signed a deal with BT Wholesale to sell the telco’s fixed-line broadband services alongside its traditional mobile packages.  According to VNU, “Vodafone refused to comment on whether there would be a charge for the branded service or whether it would be provided free for mobile customers.” I recently wrote about the need for Vodafone to find a fixed-line broadband partner and to quickly enter the quadplay market. I felt then, as I do now that BT is their best option, as both companies are facing stiff competition and heavy loses following the recent round of M&A and free broadband offers:   “Telefonica bought O2 after BT offloaded it.  O2 then recently bought BE. Deutsche Telecom already owns T-Mobile but is facing pressure to open up its fixed line domestic market to foreign competition.   This year Orange and Wanadoo, both owned by France Telecom, merged under the Orange brand.  Will Telecom Italia buy Tiscali especially after the recent HomeChoice acquisition? And of course NTL and Virgin Mobile merged earlier this year. All of these acquired or merged companies have one thing in common.  They are all looking to provide a quadplay offering – voice, video, data convergence plus mobile -  to move beyond simply being fat communications access pipes.”  So if BT & Vodafone do ever decide to make their partnerships more formal, would the new company be called Bone - as in give the dog a bone – which is conveniently cockney rhyming slang for telephone ;-) → Read More

I first started blogging in November 2002, using Dave’ Winer’s Radio Userland. The blog was called Second Thoughts and it covered topics such as web services, DRM, open source, start-ups, Microsoft and Google. Oddly looking back at some of the posts, nothing seems to have really changed, other than the fact I moved my personal blog to Six Apart’s Typepad in July 2003 and changed the name of my blog to Vecosys. Right now I’m once again thinking of changing my personal blog provider. In the past, several blog platforms came along and briefly caught my attention but on further inspection they only flattered to deceive because they didn’t really offer a great deal more than Typepad and the hassle of moving didn’t justify the time. What I was looking for was a blog platform that “natively” adopted and/or integrated some of the newer Web 2.0 features. e.g tag clouds, digg, flickr, delicious, ping-o-matic, microformats etc. Arguably having a Web 2.0 blog is eminently possible today using a mixture of plugins and/or raw xhtml code but sadly I once again haven’t got the time to set it all up. One notable exception that I did briefly consider was Marc Canter’s People Aggregator which recently implemented a whole slew of new Web 2.0 features; federated ID, microformats, structured blogging, social networking etc. but sadly I found PeopleAggregator hard to use mainly because the UI design layout is a bit like Marc’s famous hawaiian shirts; very colourful but equally very busy, very loud and hard on the eye to look at. [note: judge for yourself, Marc will be doing a demo of People Aggregator at Mashup London:September 21st at BT Centre, St Paul's,London] So in my continued quest to find a new blog platform, it was a nice suprise to come across Terapad last week. Terapad is a London based, self-funded startup which has clearly looked at the current state of the blogging market and concluded that there is still a space in the market for a new player. “Blogging has been technologically very active recently, but feature-wise it’s been completely stagnant. We’ve capitalized on this and added all the features of major corporate websites to the blogging equation.” said Stephan Tual, CEO TeraPad. Having used it for a few days, so far I like Terapad, its not just another blog platform. It seems TeraPad have successfully integrated a wealth of web → Read More

London based Mobiboo, the UK’s first commercial VoIP phone network to be allocated a UK mobile number range, 07911, today announced the official launch of its mobile VoIP service. “The cost-savings of VoIP have already been proven by companies such as Skype. Mobiboo has gone one step further to replicate a true mix of traditional mobile, DECT and landline phone services to provide both residential and business customers with a credible alternative, thus giving real value for money. In a nut shell, a mobile number, DECT functionality and landline pricing with the additional coverage available with WiFi.” explained Richard Newsome, Commercial Director at Mobiboo. The service will enable users to make calls via UTStarcom’s F3000 handset whenever they are in range of an open WiFi hotspot or wireless router. Mobiboo has also partnered with The Cloud, Europe’s leading hotspot provider, giving good hotspot coverage in the UK. Mobiboo VoIP has significant cost-saving implications, both domestically and when travelling abroad, as international roaming charges become non-existent and calls to UK landlines from hotspots for example will cost just 2p per minute, whilst calls to other Mobiboo phones continue to be FREE. Having recently travelled to France, I found out that T-Mobile would like to charge me £7.50 per megabyte to browse websites on my MDA mobile using GPRS/UMTS. There is no roaming data deal!? Not quiet the £1 a day “Web n Walk” offer.   So instead of being ripped off, I decided to use the wifi connection in my room to check my email, surf the web and used my Skype mobile client to make calls. The result no call charges or extortionate data charges and no tears over the bill ;-)        → Read More

Tom Foremski has written a post on Silicon Valley Watcher about Waggener Edstrom UK boss, Paul Abrahams, admitting he doesn’t get the value of blogs.  I feel a Gerald Ratner moment coming on.     Basically Paul Abrahams, heads up the sizeable UK office for Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s long standing PR firm and advises Microsoft on many strategic aspects of its Public Reputation (PR). [Note: Microsoft is WaggEd's largest client, and also it's largest cash cow, a very close relationship now well into its third decade] According to Tom, it seems Paul recently wrote a column for PR Week (UK) about the impact of blogging and in it he said. ”regarding all this stuff about blogs, I just don’t get it…” Tom kindly pointed out that it might not be a good move on his part to advertise such a lack of understanding of blogs!?  Especially given the fact that, Microsoft had lost its top blogger Robert Scoble not too long ago, and there was much discussion about whether the software giant understood the value of Mr Scoble’s incredible work in presenting the company in a favorable light. “Mr Scoble created many millions of dollars in positive publicity for Microsoft, on a salary of less than $100K. I don’t think WaggEd could have done a fraction of that, for 100 times the payment Mr Scoble received!” Again according to Tom “Maybe WaggEd UK does understand the value of blogging and wants to shut it down before it cuts into its lucrative earnings from Microsoft?” But wait on the WaggEd’s website their is a blog by someone called Frank X? It seems Waggener Edstrom Worldwide President, Frank X. Shaw, who leads the Microsoft team at the agency [that's him in the picture below] and who is ultimately responsible for all global PR efforts across the account has a blog!? Furthermore according to Frank’s blog, “Frank is an avid follower of the blogosphere and tracks the impact bloggers have on corporate reputations, stock fluctuations, crisis situations and product launches. Frank began writing a daily blog for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide employees in April 2003. He covers a variety of topics on the agency’s intranet relating to innovative public relations and the technology industry, and offers a witty perspective on “water cooler” subjects.” I guess Paul doesn’t read it then. Thankfully Frank knows what to do about corporate reputations and stock fluctuations, as a result of poor PR in the blogosphere. I have just subscribed to Frank’s blog and now look forward to his “witty” post on the matter → Read More