Hugh Spear's Blog

envelos is live at www.envelos.com

2009-11-10T22:35:36+11:00

As mentioned in a previous entry Dialogue has re-created an easy to use SMS product from a decade ago called envelos. This product went live earlier today. I'm hoping we can get some customers during this early phase so we can get feedback on what is good and what could be better. So please check it out at www.envelos.com.

Remember envelos?

2009-09-23T23:05:21+10:00

A little bit of history. Back in 1994 we developed our first product at Dialogue. It was called pagemail, and it did one thing well. It allowed you to send SMS messages from your computer. Over the years we developed that product further, but it was always an application which you installed and ran on your PC.

Then in 1998 we were asked to created a service hosted on the internet, that could provide an email to SMS service for Vodafone in the UK. This would become the Vodafone product Mobile-Alert. But the infrastructure behind this was something which would shape the company thereafter.

We had taken our E3 SMS gateway and put an application on the front of it. We realised that we were now able to do a lot more than just run a service to notify you by SMS when you had a new email. We had an internet hosted SMS gateway.

We had this gateway but we didn't know what to call it. So we had a bit of a discussion and came up with a word which wasn't a real word, but it kind of sounded suitable. The word was envelos, which we sometimes explained as a conjunction of 'envelope' and 'services'. The envelope was the almost universal symbol of an SMS on a mobile phone.

The other thing which turned out well about envelos was that it didn't necessarily sound like English. It was international and we thought that this could only help.

Over the past ten years we have used the name envelos less and less. But now we are getting ready to use it again. It is the new pagemail, but as it isn't an application you install but a web based SMS application, we won't use the name pagemail. But we will use the original pagemail 'paper plane' graphic.

We hope you'll like envelos and find it easy to use. It is almost ready for the world to see. Just a short wait now.

Dialogue Wins Prestigious ACOMMS award for WAP Billing Service

2009-08-18T13:51:50+10:00

Here below is the story. It is one of me shamelessly taking the credit for someone else's hard work. The someone else is Pete Neal Dialogue Australia's General Manager and sterling product manager for our Mobile Payments product stream, together with our UK based technical team. Just for the record, Dialogue were shortlisted for two awards and won one. Our other shortlisted entry was our Mobile Site Builder.

There are only 8 awards available for the whole telecoms and internet industries. I think we did very well.

Dialogue Wins Inaugural ACOMMS Award

12 August 2009, The annual prestigious 2009 Communications Alliance (ACOMMS) and CommsDay Awards were announced this week with Dialogue Communications and Singtel Optus winning the inaugural Innovation in Content Delivery and Services through Partnership Award.

Judged by an independent panel of industry experts, the Award had to demonstrate innovations, clearly show benefits to consumers and how the content was driving the uptake of services.

Accepting the Award on behalf of Dialogue Communications, Hugh Spear, CEO of Dialogue said, “It is very rewarding to have been nominated and then to win this Award against some tough competition. Through our partnership with Optus, consumers can now make payments for mobile content seamlessly from within their mobile phone’s WAP browser.”

The off-portal, on-bill WAP billing solution is based on Optus’ industry leading Atomic Premium Plus platform. The significant benefits derived from this solution are increased protection and ease of use for consumers.

“By scoping out the consumer experience and building connectivity to Optus’ Atomic billing engine into our Mobile Payments solution, we have been able to deliver further consumer protection to ensure they are fully informed on pricing and terms before each and every purchase, Hugh Spear said. As the WAP billing payment pages are hosted by Dialogue, compliance with Optus’ WAP billing guidelines is guaranteed, removing much of the burden of compliance from the Content Provider. He continued, “Merchants also see a benefit from increased consumer confidence, leading to more visits to their mobile content storefronts and higher levels of repeat purchases.”

Dialogue have signed a number of partners to the WAP billing solution in Australia and it is expected that this number will grow significantly through the next year. Speaking on the market, Hugh Spear said, ”The widespread adoption of WAP billing has the ability to change the mobile payments landscape in Australia. He added, “By protecting customers and lowering support costs the case for its introduction becomes a compelling prospect for the industry.”

Dialogue is an international leader in the WAP billing space, operating WAP billed solutions across six countries and three continents and was the first accredited payment intermediary for the UK PayForIt scheme. Dialogue is also the sole Billing Aggregation partner for Hutchison Australia’s Bonus Sites WAP billing environment.

For me the significance of this story is that the Australian mobile content market desperately needs some good news. The industry has been damaged by high complaint levels and now a very strict Code of Practice. With current revenue share levels it is difficult for content retailers to do well. This kind of solution tries to give the content providers back the chance to be innovative, but with a clear and easy to understand interface at the point of purchase. In a way it cuts through all the veil of regulations controlling opt-in and subscription charging, by clearly and formally telling the end user what they are about to buy and how much it costs. It is a solution which can really cheer up the Australian market. We now need the other mobile operators to follow the lead from Optus, so that we can provide a true WAP Billing experience to all mobile consumers.

SMS Software doesn't rust

2009-06-18T10:25:28+10:00

I got a support request in my email yesterday. I used to get these in the nineties which was about the last time I was able to write software. The support request was for a product that Dialogue had licensed to a large corporate customer a long time ago. The customer has been happily using the software ever since, but now had a query about whether and how it could access the software in a new way.

The software in questions was Dialogue's PageMail Expressway application which we created in about 1998. It is a multi-user version of our first SMS application PageMail which was distributed widely from 1995 to about 2000.

The company with the query has been sending about 15,000 SMS messages per month to their staff and wanted to integrate SMS into a new CRM application they had.

I was a bit out of touch with how the software worked, but after a bit of digging found the necessary documentation and forwarded it to our support team. What I noticed about the documentation and the source code was that it was a decade old! I was quite surprised because in that decade a lot has happened in the world and in terms of software and operating system environments. I was impressed that the software still worked and that it was still useful.

I did a quick check across the office to find out who had the oldest software in use which still made money. I won hands down (partly because I'm twice as old as most of our staff!).

I remember how hard it was back in the mid to late 1990s to persuade companies that SMS was a useful technology, but the ones who gave it a go, certainly found that it was 'sticky', and as the technology involved is so simple it can be connected up to many different systems to add to their utility. We spent a fair bit of time designing our software well so that it could be integrated into whatever the customer wanted to use it for, and those design principles look like assuring the software a continued lease of life.

I perhaps shouldn't be surprised that software still works a decade later, it isn't subject to the same environmental impact as say a car or an office chair. It doesn't use something which has become obsolete, and provided computer systems are backwardly compatible, it will continue to live.

So the only thing which was ever likely to go wrong was the the customer would cease to need SMS in their business, and I've not found many businesses that go down that path.

So my message for the day is that SMS software has probably got at least another decade to run.

Mobile phones... its still all about battery life.

2009-06-11T08:53:52+10:00

I currently need to recharge my mobile about every 12 hours. That means plugging in at night and also leaving it plugged in while I'm working at my desk or plugging in whilst I drive. I'm a reasonable person and would be very happy if I could reduce that to recharge once every 24 hours then I would be very happy.

Therefore I was interested to see the story about Nokia researching the opportunity to charge mobile phone batteries from ambient radio waves. It is also interesting to note that Apple promise increased battery life and talk time in the forthcoming upgrade to the iPhone. I'm glad to see that in spite of all the other advances on mobile phones, battery life is still high up on manufacturers priorities. The issue just won't go away. Isn't it weird how things have changed so slowly in this respect?

Of course things have changed really quickly and batteries now are smaller and more powerful than ever before. But the phones have gone from walkie-talkies to small laptops in terms of power consumption so we've not shown the progress we've made.

'Talk-time and battery life' first became a catch-phrase for me in 1997 when I attended a roadshow held by Talkland a UK mobile service provider. Ivan Donn from Vodafone turned up to espouse the virtues of the Vodafone network and some of the phones they had. One of these was a dinky Ericsson handset with a not very memorable number. Ivan listed the key features of the handset as weight, talk-time and battery life. Those were pretty much the only things other than the appearance, to differentiate one handset from another. These days there is so much more but if your battery is flat they aren't much use.

About the same time in the late 1990s I remember being given a Motorola phone which was about a centimetre thick, together with an 'industrial strength' battery which was over a centimetre thick. Motorola also had a charger which would take about 4 batteries and you could then travel around with plenty of spare batteries for when one goes flat. That idea was a pretty practical way of solving a problem without having to improve the technology. I wonder why we don't see more of it now?

Over the years I have learned to treat battery longevity claims with some suspicion. They never quite last as long as we thought the manufacturer claimed, and by the time you have been through a few charge cycles, you can't rely on the original manufacturers figures anyway. So I guess this 'always on' life style we are encouraged to adopt, keeps the battery meter high on the list of things to check on a regular basis. Sadly all too often this meter is telling us to recharge.

Recharging is not always easy. Generally each phone requires a different charger. So I was also pleased to hear at the GSM 2009 conference that at long last the mobile phone manufacturers are planning to adopt a common interface. If we can just get each country to adopt the same socket size then we're really going places. Thank goodness car cigar lighters came to the rescue of people who travel regularly, so long as they hire cars too!

Of course the Nokia research into harvesting power from ambient radio waves is going to need a bit of backup and that could be in the form of utilising solar power, in a similar way to the plans from LG with their solar Car Kit, which was also on display at the GSM 2009 show.

If the work being done by Nokia's researchers in Cambridge plus some solar power as and when it is available can keep me from having to plug in to recharge more than once a day, then I'll be a happy man. Then I'll wonder why laptop manufacturers can't do the same, but thats another story.

GSM World 2009 - just another iPhone beauty pageant

2009-03-09T17:22:29+11:00

Forewarned is forearmed

I went to GSM World in Barcelona in 2007 and the person who picked my pocket bought a motorbike with my credit card! This year, I vowed, it would be different. I am now back in Sydney having made it there and back without being robbed, unless you count the cafe prices!

Captains Log

So what was there to report on you might be wondering? Well in 2007 the biggest story was of a company which didn't exhibit and their product which wasn't available. The company was Apple and the product, you've guessed it, was the iPhone. Everyone laughed that the biggest story wasn't even bothering to turn up. Well this year again we have the most obvious biggest story as the iPhone again, and again no Apple. It is the biggest story now, not because the iPhone product has changed but because everyone else has piled in to join the 'me too' tribute.

For example this handset from Toshiba, the TG01 is a pretty nice looking device. Toshiba will bring all of their production qualities to the product that they have developed from their other businesses. But it can't be said that that they haven't at least nodded a debt to the iPhone in terms of industrial design.

Even Nokia with their 8800 seemed to be trying a bit too hard to have an iPhone.
Though as the photo shows, just when you thought it was a complete wannabee out pops a stylus and you start thinking of the P900! Especially once you look at the handwriting recognition.

Such was the desperation to have an iPhone that some manufacturers even employed designers to make their models a bit too close to the real thing. Why I wonder did Huawei make us delete all our photos of their touch-screen phone? Well we didn't let some strong arm tactics stop us getting the photo as you can see.

And Sony Ericsson seemed to be reaching a point of full convergence in an attempt to beat off the opposition in one fell swoop.

Their new handset the iDou has 12.1 mega pixels of camera power, plus flash, something looking like a PSP in terms of user interface, touch screen super powered Walkman with oodles of memoery, oh and a phone.So whereas Mr Jobs from Apple wanted to merge an iPod, a Phone and the Internet into the iPhone; Sony Ericsson want to emphasise much more the multi-media player aspects of what they have. It does appear to be everything including the kitchen sink and I did hear a couple of commentators wondering if it smacked of desperation. Either way it will be a must-have toy for recreational users, so long as the battery life holds up.

So if everyone has an iPhone clone or at least something which may one day come off the production line rather than the 'artists impression' drawing board, then how are we going to tell the difference between these devices? Well by the quality of their applications I hear you reply. Quite so, so that is the reason all have an App store. Pity the poor developer trying to support his or her application across so many environments. Makes you wonder whether there is a business in writing a runtime environment which works over each operating environment - but that would be java and probably not a wheel anyone wants to reinvent. Maybe web apps are the way forward?

One conclusion we can draw from this severe case of "imitation being the sincerest form of flattery" is that the Mobile Internet is now very much a reality and whereas people only went there from old phones in small numbers, the iPhone has seen to it that people not only want to go there, but in some cases don't need to go there with any other kind of device. That is at least one bit of great news for Dialogue and its fabulous Mobile Site Builder. That has iPhone optimisation and I expect will be optimised for all these other devices once they hit our streets. Then you can really have a build once strategy and an easy life.

iPhone vs Android (HTC G1) - iPhone wins but Android is a future contender

2009-01-08T17:05:13+11:00

First Look at the HTC G1

Having registered as an Android developer I could legitimately buy myself an unlocked HTC G1 Android phone. This early Christmas present would give me an insight into how far Google are likely to eat into the market which Apple are starting to own.

An encouraging article on the "Google's Ambitious Android" gave me hope that the G1 would give Apple cause for concern.

At first sight the G1 is thicker and clunkier than the slim iPhone. It is thicker because it conceals a full Qwerty keyboard which levers out from the side. Whilst on the subject of input and controls it has a trackball, touch screen, volume control (similar to iPhone) and camera button on the edge and menu button, back button, home button and make call and end call buttons. So many controls you'd think it would make it easier to use. But unfortunately it didn't. I think I found that having to switch the phone's orientation every time I wanted to type something in was a bit annoying. That said it did make it easier to type in things like passwords than it was on the iPhone's soft keyboard.

I got everything working and everything except email access (IMAP) to Exchange seemed to work well. The Google applications worked especially well as you'd expect. I particularly like the use of Contacts and Calendars which appeared to be just another view to the same things in Gmail. For the first time I didn't need to think about Synchronising, something which I have never got to work properly regardless of the device. They all fail eventually and you get forced to decide that one set of contacts should overwrite another. With Android at last you don't seem to need to do that.

Android vs iPhone

Overall I'd say that Android is a promising O/S and there is good developer support and good commercial components backing the services provided. The G1 is a pretty good handset but no way as intuitive as the iPhone. I've probably given the iPhone more of my time but as I recall I liked it from the very first moment. I think that this is the problem faced by the competition, Apple has put together a fantastic package, consumers have given it the 'thumbs-up' and the market share is reflecting that.

A recent article highlighted the success of the iPhone showing that it is number 2 in the world of Smartphones with 17.3% of the market. It has overtaken the Blackberry and both have chipped away at Nokia's dominance. Another article showed that the iPhone has 30% of the US market, and combined with Blackberry two thirds of the US smartphone market is spoken for.

I guess it is a measure of the impact of the iPhone that all new smartphones need to compete with the feature set introduced by Apple: touch screen, tilt sensitivity, applications store etc. And there is absolutely no reason why the competition can't copy these features, they should even be able to improve on things like storage, camera quality (and phone quality). But putting these features into such an aspirational package is probably difficult and integrating so well with the market leading media retailing portal (iTunes) is probably impossible.

But Google, more than any other brand has something really special to bring to mobile. The range of on-line Google products and the opportunity to make them mobile is tantalising. Indeed the iPhone already provides access to several of these products. Couple this with the Open Handset Alliance and you have Apple taking on the rest of the world's handset manufacturers.

So who now are the contenders for leadership in the Smartphone category?

Although, for my money, the G1 is not up to the job of knocking the iPhone off its perch, I wouldn't bet against Android in the longer run. These are two horses that are definitely in the race. However I'm starting to worry about Nokia who have been so dominant for so long. I hope they can really reinvent the smartphone paradigm.

One would think that Windows Mobile could have got better sooner to really be a contender. They have some catching up to do and need to show more leadership in this market, can they do this without more internet bases assets? I'm not sure, but they may be wasting their dominance in enterprise email systems. RIM are rising to the challenge, especially with the Storm and they have a niche hold on the business market. I think long terms they will stay in their niche and hold onto it, but some of their market will be lost forever to cooler products.

GSM Asia Macau November 18-20 20008

2008-11-19T21:24:39+11:00

Just finished two days at the Exhibition of the GSM Asia conference in Macau. After ten years or so of attending the major European event for the mobile industry, I thought I should checkout the Asian equivalent. I wrote a list of what I wanted to see before I got there and hoped to find ideas to help me to point my business Dialogue Communications further in the right direction.

So what did I find?

The first thing which can't be ignored is that the show is tiny compared to the 3GSM show in Barcelona which is almost too big to do any business. There ware around 180 exhibitors according to the publicity, but I felt there were even fewer. They split broadly as follows:

1. A few major telcos: China Mobile, CTN, Orange, Telenor.

2. A couple of handset providers, none of the big ones and no new handset announcements. I was hoping to see the HTC Android phone, but no luck.

3. A few infrastructure companies, particularly ones selling into China.

4. Most of the rest were application companies in various states of maturity. I will concentrate on these as they were the most interesting.

Application Companies

The application companies were mostly European and looking to sell their wares to the Asia Pacific market. As one would expect they were mainly trying to sell to the mobile carrier community (the GSM shows are really a beauty pageant for the mobile carriers to see what is around). What I found interesting was that whilst there were a few client only or server only application companies (e.g. serving mobile sites, delivery content or providing ringback tones), the majority had a client and server strategy. Typically it would work like this:

Java client on the handset.

There would be a J2ME client on the handset which would do to something cooler than a normal handset. In some cases this was display full screen advertising whenever there was an inbound call or SMS. In other cases it was form filling to construct SMS and then encrypt it to get to the server. There were also several mobile banking applications which did typical banking type activities.

Smart server either inside our outside the carrier's own IT environment.

In the case of Broca this would be some server which could decode the encrypted SMS forms. In the case of Frog2Frog it was a server which would provide the adserving and reporting. In the case of GIgafone's 'Ringmate' it would provide the advertising to be passed to the client.

The think which to me was facinating about these systems was the difficulty of providing a credible solution in a cost effective way. Here are the challenges:

Challenges to Client/Server application providers.

Supporting multiple client platforms. In order to have a 'whole market offering' one must support the following environments: Symbian (various flavours for different Nokia series and Sony Ericsson), J2ME for the non-symbian phones from the far east (e.g. Samsung), Blackberry (increasing its market share at the expense of Nokia at the moment), iPhone (again increasing market share at the expense of Nokia), Windows Mobile (big in the states), Android (will be big and has Motorola support). Plus there are many carrier specific implementations of these environments. It is almost impossible to keep up with the demands of providing applications for all these handsets unless you are very well funded and/or can sell a huge number of applications. Therefore we have to consider how happy the carriers will be when the real world fact of patchy market coverage hits home. I may be very wrong about this. I do remember that in 1997 I thought ringtones wouldn't take off because they sounded rubbish and only worked on Nokia phones. So beware my advice!
Servers that must be bought and hosted by carriers. Admittedly not all are in this camp, but several are. At the present time carriers are not too keen to find CAPEX so this is a bit of a challenge.
Servers that must be populated with information from the carriers closely guarded databases. This is a bit of a challenge too, but if you want to do the best job of ad-serving then you want to get hold of this sort of thing.

So faced with these challenges I ask myself why these companies would not simplify things a little in order to help things along?

Simplifying the product set.

The first thing I would do is to do away with the handset application. The iPhone webapps style of working is the way I'd go. Build a mobile web site which is very optimised to different handsets. In the case of the iPhone it is difficult to know which is a webapp and which is an iPhone app in some cases. The advantages of this is that it is easy to develop, deploy, maintain and delete. The disadvantage is that it needs mobile web access and may not look as good as an 'on device application'. But I can live with that.
The second thing I would do is to remove the need for CAPEX and installation at the carriers premises. These are two things which will ensure there are no quick sales. So I'd either work with 3rd parties who are already well embedded with the carrier, or have a standalone operating model of the server side which can give the carrier 75% of the functionality out of the box.
The third thing I'd do is to come up with some very flexible pricing models to suit the carriers view of the world. I won't go into too much of the detail here, but if you get it right you'll make sales and then make money.

Back to my list of what I wanted to see at the show. I've just looked through again and have ticked about 10%. I did actually see that many of the companies exhibiting were clever but not resourced well enough to take their products overseas. I felt that there were good opportunities for Dialogue to strengthen its own proposition and to help to promote some of these companies into our increasing range of territories. This wasn't on my list of what to see at the show, but it is nice to be surprised.

Summary

So to summarise how things looked to me. GSM Asia was a bit disappointing in the number and depth of companies exhibiting, however there were some interesting gems amongst those I saw. I like the client/server application model but worry that it is too ambitious to really get traction in the real world market we are working in. I wish the creators of these systems well however and will be happy to be proved wrong.

Notes from a world tour

2008-10-28T06:05:38+11:00

Iam sitting in a hotel lounge in Santiago, Chile with just one flight (albeit an 18 hour flight) between me and my home and family in Sydney, Australia. I have just been visiting Dialogue present and future offices on four continents, and I thought I´d put down a few thoughts on how things look from my perspective.

It is nearly 30 years since I first went travelling and twenty years since I last went travelling, so I expected to find a few changes. There was no internet 30 years ago, at least not for civilians. So there were no internet cafe´s. Just normal cafes.
There were no mobile phones twenty years ago, but there was Post Restante and there was a lot of enjoyment to be gained from receiving messages which may have taken three weeks to travel to whatever far-flung corner of the world you were sitting.

So apart from noting that things have moved on a bit, what does all this mean for the business? Well the real change is not the technology but the culture. You used to go abroad from the UK to other parts of Europe and see different cars and different food and drink but that has all substantially changed.

Now I find that whatever country I go to, whatever language is spoken by all the races and religions you can think of. The things which are common are the way in which the mobile phone pervades daily lives.
Everybody has a mobile and everybody is using it in just the same way as they do back home. Calls, texts, mobile internet browsing. Less developed countries have a greater need for mobiles as fixed line infrastructure is just not there. Economies and economics dictate that high proportions of users are pre-pay and that sometimes the cost of mobile data is very high. But guess what it doesn´t seem to matter to the kids on the street. They all have the latest handsets and all know how to do things which must boggle their parents´minds!

Then we look at value added services and we have the same things everywhere (and I do mean everywhere):

SMS used in TV eviction voting.
Premium SMS TV Quizzes
Advertising for sexy chat services
Mobile content advertised inside the back cover of TV listing magazines.

And if all of those things are present, then there must be companies out there doing the same thing as Dialogue. Are these global conglomerates who Dialogue competes with in the UK and Australia? No, they are companies that are operating in one or two countries, just like Dialogue but in a parallel mobile universe.

I find it facinating that as well as the obvious homogenisation of our world through the ever growing international footprint of companies like Nokia, Starbucks, Esso and the Accor Hotel group; there is also the halo effect of the ancilliary industries which service the missions of these global giants.

I could always understand how all parts of the world would separately evolve places to stay, places to eat, clothes to wear and music to listen to. Those things were almost primative common characteristics of being human. I just wouldn´t have included things like SMS chat and downloading ringtones as part of the same genre.

Perhaps it is no bigger deal than Sir Walter Raleigh bringing potatoes to Europe from America. Once the Europeans realised they could grow their own, they didn´t need to import them. Perhaps I´m just witnessing the same principle of good ideas travelling well.

So apart from noting that this is an interesting phenomenon, does it have any business value? Well for me at least it confirms two things:

These mobile services are catering for common human desires which are present almost everywhere. Desires to communicate, participate and decorate.
My old quest for justification to expand internationally has just got a lot easier. Whereever we find mobile phones we will soon want to find Dialogue.

In 1980 I used to be amazed at how even the most remote parts of Africa had been reached by both Coca Cola and football. One day people will be amazed at how far and wide the short code has spread!

Campaigns built using the Dialogue Mobile Site Builder

2008-07-10T23:08:25+10:00

As promised earlier here is a sprinkling of sites built using Dialogue's Mobile Site Builder. These were all built by Vodafone Australia's Mobile Advertising Agency who are 'power-users' of Dialogue's tools.

Client: Warner Music

Campaign: The Galvatrons

Client: Warner Home Video

Campaign: Veronica Mars

Client: Johnson & Johnson

Campaign: Listerine

Client: Samsung

Campaign: i450

Client: Microsoft

Campaign: Xbox Console

Client: Village Roadshow

Campaign: Get Smart

Client: Foxtel

Campaign: HD+