Vend a Sim.

I'm always looking for ways to stop the mobile networks imposing their indefensible roaming charges on me. The simplest way was always to carry a second phone that was 'unlocked' and buy a local 'pay as you go' sim-card, then text the new number to anyone who needed to find you.

The hard part about this plan was finding a local mobile store that would sell you a sim-card without local identification or some tedious sign-up process.

Now in the UK at least, travellers can get themselves a sim card from the network of their choice from a vending machine. This photo was taken in Heathrow's Terminal 4, just outside the arrivals gate. It might not last for long. The current paranoia about terrorism might not sit well with the ability to just appear on the mobile grid and disappear again, but in the mean time, it's a great service for travellers.

Text message ads. Cutting edge after 10 years.

In 1999, I was involved in a small company advocating the power of SMS text messaging as an advertising mechanism. Almost 10 years later, the data is starting to prove us right, but mobile advertising is still a little too 'out there' for most marketers.

A survey in the US by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) suggests that although text messaging is popular among young adults, the 160-character format has yet to become a mass influencer.

For those who do send messages by this media, the response rates are higher that traditional advertising. 70% of respondents to the DMA's "Mobile Marketing: Consumer Perspectives" study who had acted on mobile ads said that text messages for a product or service had prompted their actions. That was more than three times as many as responded to a mobile Web offer or coupon.

So, when will mobile advertising will become a common campaign tactic. For most marketers and advertisers, mobile is still only getting experimental budget at most. In one survey, 33% of 'mad-men' surveyed said "no way!" to mobile marketing while 35% said they might dabble in the coming 12 months.

Sometimes it just gos to show, even when you think you are early in a market, you might not realise just how far behind everyone else is.

TopUP TV is Top Down Thinking

Television is being shaken up. No longer is the British consumer stuck with 4 and a bit channels - now they can choose from multiple providers and multiple platforms. One of the offers available to consumers with selected 'Freeview' boxes is TopUp TV.

Both the packaging and the website of TopUp TV promises programming from MTV, LIVING, UKTV Gold, Paramount Comedy and Hallmark Channel. What they don't tell you, is that you pay to get one program per day per channel and you don't get to decide which one.

In a world where 'on demand' is on the rise, here is a service that charges the consumer for a force-fed sample of media content. What's more, the media content is often tired re-runs of programming that was originally 'free to air'.

This week, while trialling the service, the box decided that I could not record my preferred freeview channel because one of the TopUp Tv channels was downloading something. The screen provided me with a rather unhelpful error, that wouldn't tell me which program was being downloaded, or give me any option to stop it. When I asked customer services about it later, they advised to to deactivate the whole channel. The offending program? Fawlty Towers!!!

This week, programs that were offered included Coupling (original air date 2000), Fawlty Towers (original air date 1975), Sex and the City (original air date 1998). The shiny new Two and a Half Men, offered on the new Warner Channel 'failed to download'...

TopUp TV were invited to comment and said only "Top Up TV Anytime now has a large and growing base of loyal customers who are enjoying the flexibility of having great programmes available on their DTR to watch at a time to suit them."

For this media consumer, it misses the mark by miles.

o2 iPhones Out of Stock - or are they?

Walking past the o2 shop in Richmond today I saw a large white easel with a professionally printed sign on a thick poster-board.

The sign, in branded font said "iPhone 3g. Sorry we are currently out of stock. Ask in store for more details or visit....."

One imagines that if they KNEW they were going to be out of stock, to the point where they had special street signs created, why didn't they just order more stock?

Is this a case of trying to create a buzz, but thinking about it a bit too hard? Or is this a case of trying to manage a situation that really did take them by surprise?

The website suggests the sales forcaster got it wrong and under-ordered. But they can manage to create special signs and turn them around!

Contextual Advertising - Airbus and Qantas

This morning, CNN mobile featured a story about a QANTAS plane that had to make an emergency landing.

The Boeing 747-400 jet had left Hong Kong an hour earlier en route from London to Melbourne when part of its fuselage broke away, leaving a hole running four metres down the right side. Passengers described hearing a loud bang before air and debris rushed through the cabin and the plane "dropped suddenly" as the pilot made an emergency descent to Manila.

At the bottom of the CNN story was a single banner ad - for Airbus.

One wonders if the media planners wait for such stories "If a competitor airline is featured in a news story, place ad" or whether the algorithms that dictate these things on a contextual basis, just got lucky?

Meetup not quite mobile

This morning I attended the quite useful 'Open Coffee' - a great little weekly networking event for digital entrepreneurs organised by Saul Klein.

Saul uses a couple of platforms to manage the logistics of the event. There is an over-arching network hosted on Ning and London event details are plugged into Meetup.com

Meetup sends an email to registered attendees to ask them to rate the event. Yesterday this email arrived while I was still at the event, on my Blackberry Pearl 8100. Save to say the link did not redirect to a mobile friendly page.

Seems to me, that the best way to rate an event, for those who have the devices (and a lot of Meetup's audience do), is on the move. Immediately while fresh in the mind. It's probably on a product road-map somewhere, but at least in my mind I came away with the thought that the user experience had not quite been thought through in detail.

Will Farrell's Chelsea Shirt

Tonight's More 4 UK showing of the Daily Show with John Stewart showed a smudged blur on guest Will Farrell's shirt. The offending football jersey was an old Chelsea strip. The logo, despite the censorship said 'Fly Emirates'.

One imagines that it was not the Comedy Channel that tried to obscure the brand, else they would have got a different shirt from wardrobe.

Why then did Channel 4 go for the pretty poor obfuscation?