An item on The Street reports that Google Plans Its Own Android Phone.

In what is likely to be seen as disruptive to the wireless status quo, Google is working with a smartphone manufacturer to have a Google-branded phone available this year through retailers and not through telcos, according to Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar, who has talked to Google’s design partners about the plan.

This move would fulfill Google’s pledge to bring a new generation of open-standard mobile Internet devices to consumers. Traditional carriers keep tight controls over the features and applications that are allowed on phones. On the other hand, Google will presumably offer a device that lets users determine the functions.

This could be a low cost ‘terminal’ giving access to a whole cloud-computing environment supported by the major players such as Google. That would certainly seem to be the Google strategy.

If talk of the Google phone plan is true, the entrance of a unlocked, low-cost, Web-friendly touchscreen device will probably undercut other Android phone efforts by players like Motorola, Samsung and Dell. Motorola’s entire turnaround strategy is based on the Android operating system. The company is expected to announce a ultra-thin Droid phone at Verizon next month.

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• Report claims fabled Google Phone on its way (inquisitr.com)

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A Real Google Phone

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Canadian text message rates have a huge mark-up according to Srinivasan Keshav, Canada Research Chair in tetherless computing at the University of Waterloo.

In testifying before U.S. senators, he estimated the consumer mark-up on some text messages to be 4,900 per cent. The maximum cost of a text message is “very unlikely” to exceed 0.3 cents. Nevertheless the oligopoly of the large cellphone companies charge pay-per-use texters 15 cents to send a text message and, beginning next month, Rogers will join Bell and Telus with an additional charge of 15 cents to receive a text message. In the United States, carriers recently increased their per-message rate to 20 cents for those without a text plan.

It is unfortunate that the cellphone oligopoly pushes the pricing as high as the market will stand. This is stifling demand and in consequence Canada lags others in the development of the Mobile Web. Thess companies would be very much better off financially with more reasonable pricing multiplied by vastly increased usages.

The new Rogers CEO seems to understand this, but will his view prevail when for so long the dog-in-the-manger price gouging has been the rule.

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Canada Text message rates have huge markup

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The Cellphone is hardly a toy in the kitchen according to the NY Times.

One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone.  It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

Although restaurant chefs have often resisted new technologies, cellphones have now crossed the technology barrier from the office into the kitchen.

Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, says his iPhone has greatly simplified the math in his cooking.  He said that he sees multifunction devices like the iPhone as the real technological revolution for chefs.

For amateur cooks, new cellphone software helps control the chaos of planning, shopping and cooking dinner at the end of the day.  You can always use software from BigOven.com, a Web site with about 167,000 recipes. BigOven has a free iPhone application, searchable by ingredient, by rating, and by course.  This has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released in October.

Of course there is a question of how much of the recipe and ingredients can easily be seen on a small cellphone screen.  Here you may possibly need Recipes reduced to their Twitter essence.  In other words all compressed into 140 characters and spaces.

Maureen Evans is the person who thought of this approach.  You can now follow her tweeted recipes at twitter.com/cookbook.  They are now followed by more than 13,000 people.  Evans is now fielding numerous calls from cookbook agents and the media.

While Evans loves her stacks of cookbooks with “verbose top-heavy instruction from celebrity cooks that tell you how every minute of the process is supposed to look and smell and feel,” she also sees a place for “just a small amount of assistance to get dinner on the table after a long day at work.”

Having such information readily available on a cellphone clearly meets a real need for many people.  Meals on the go just got even more portable.

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Cellphones, the latest kitchen tools

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Nothing invites customers to call more than an obviously free call.  That is clearly signaled here in North America by the 1-800 number.  Although there are an increasing number of other free long-distance telephone numbers, not everyone will recognize them.  In the same way, in the UK an 0800 number signals that certainly from a landline your call will be for free.

Even though people are becoming more used to online chat lines or messenger services or even communicating with companies via Twitter, there is nothing better than talking to a live customer service representative. The Henley Research Centre concluded that 68% of people feel that organisations which offer 0800 numbers care more about their callers.

Now BT has recently announced that 0800 numbers will soon be free to call for its mobile customers as well.  BT Mobile is the first mobile company in the UK to make mobile calls to 0800 free to dial.

0800 numbers are a popular choice of telephone number for many organisations in that they help to attract more calls. Research by the Institute of Direct Marketing showed that companies with an 0800 number can increase their response rates by up to 185%.  A number of companies provide 0800 numbers and the best will provide additional functionality that may include fax to email, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), call whisper (a voice message to the receiver of the call identifying the source) and other value-added services.

Perhaps the most visible value-added service that such a company can provide is memorable 0800 numbers.  With the right combination, callers will be able to remember the number without needing notes. It will always be a matter of individual choice as to what works best, but repeating numbers like 056 7444 or 068 8866 certainly look like winners. In some cases, particular combinations of numbers may even be interpreted as a sign of good fortune in some cultures.  Now that is clearly value-added.

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0800 – the UK version of 1-800

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Previous figures had suggested that the recession was slightly dampening mobile web growth.  You would hardly know that from the latest Comscore  data showing that the number of people accessing news and information on their mobile devices more than doubled in the past year from January 2008 to January 2009.   (Tip of the hat to Warren Riddle)

Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.  Here is a table from their press release.

That excludes access to social media but as Frank Reed suggests, the increased involvement with social media, whether Facebook, Twitter or some other is changing the way people, particularly those under 35, are accessing their online contacts and information.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

“We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches. While smart phones and high-end feature phones, like the Samsung Instinct and LG Dare comprise the Top 10 devices used for news and information access,  70 percent of those accessing mobile Internet content are using feature phones.”

In January, 22.3 million people accessed news and information via a downloaded application. Maps are the most popular downloaded application with 8.2 million users, while search was the overwhelmingly favored use for SMS-based news and information access, with 14.1 million users. Overall, 32.4 million people used SMS to access news and information in January.

This is all good news for advertisers, who are struggling to find an effective place to reach people in a year in which their budgets are significantly smaller than last.

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Strong Mobile Device Usage Growth Despite Recession

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Not surprisingly customer service in the telecom industry is in the news again. 

Wireless carriers are not known for their customer service – most marketing messages are about having the cool new phone or cheaper family plans – but perhaps they should pay more attention to it. It seems that Telecoms are struggling to handle complex, changing service demands. 

The result is that in the telecom market, Poor Customer Service Drains Brand Equity. According to a new study by Sametrix Inc., word of mouth (WOM) has a significant financial impact. Vince Nowinski, Sametrix’s director of methodology, puts it like this.

A lot of the emphasis in the industry is around technology and customer acquisition; there isn’t a lot of energy spent in customer loyalty. But you can’t really overcome having a large number of people saying bad things about you.

In the wireless industry the top two factors for a positive WOM are the strength of network (i.e., the product) and the ease of doing business. Detractors’ negative word-of-mouth behavior represents a significant hidden cost and net drain on the bottom line.

According to the study, a customer who recommends a company and its products (a Promoter) is worth about half a new additional customer in terms of WOM marketing value. A Detractor (i.e., someone unlikely to recommend the company) accounts for a loss of about one-and-a-third customers in terms of losses in customer retention.

The other item points out rather provokingly that Customer Service Overkill Can Kill You.

I was recently raving to a friend about the wine selection at a local wine shop. He told me he knew about the place and agreed it was top notch, but he also said  he no longer shops there.  Turns out my friend feels the wine shop staff is “overly nice.”

That also perhaps is linked with a pushy sales person who will not leave you alone, when you really prefer to take your time.

It all comes back to those fundamental words of Peter Drucker, “Help is defined by the recipient”.  The only way to find out if your customer service is right is to ask your customers. .. that is provided you as CEO have the nerve to really listen and the intention to act on what they are asking for.

It is not rocket science: what is needed is really very obvious.  If you need any further ammunition to get all the troops on side as you transform your organization into one that serves (an increasing number of) customers, here are some useful references:

• The Benefits of Being Customer-Centric 
• 7 Habits Of A Truly Customer-Centric Selling Organization
• The CEO Also Has to Be the Customer Experience Officer 

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Customer Service Is Defined By Customers

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John Markoff in his New York Times blog post, Google, iPhone and the Future of Machines That Listen, raises some important issues. He is talking about Google’s new speech recognition service for the iPhone, which was released on Monday. 

He suggests that it will understand you most accurately when you speak to it just the way you enter queries into the Google search box. .. The accuracy is far from 100 percent, and probably not even 95 percent (Google execs demurred when I asked if they had any meaningful accuracy statistics). My experience is that it captures your voice query substantially more than half the time, and that in itself is a revelation.

More and more people seem to be finding that voice recognition systems can often do the job.  As cell phones become smaller, it seems likely that speech technology will become the preferred way to input instructions and questions.

Another important influence here may be changing population age structure.  Senior citizens may prefer to talk to their cell phone, rather than trying to hit those incredibly tiny buttons.  Even if someone mumbles, what they say includes extremely rich data.  With the right software, the cell phone can undoubtedly figure out what is wanted.  At worst it can ask a question or questions for greater precision.

On the other hand (no pun intended), if you hit the wrong key, the cell phone may still assume that this was intentional.  Trying to figure out when the cell phone should question you on whether you intended to hit that key would not be easy.  It would also lead to much frustration as the cell phone refused to accept your command.

There are challenges either way, but I believe those facing speech technology will prove to be solvable in very user friendly ways.  With all the resources the big guns are applying here, it is likely that acceptable, commercial solutions will be seen within 18 months

‘

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Voices mumble, fingers fumble

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If it carries the Google label, then undoubtedly search will be involved. Marc Vanlerberghe, Google’s Product Marketing Director, has been explaining how Google is integrating search into Android and the T-mobile G1 phone and it’s already impressive. There is also a Google video that goes into more details. (Tip of the hat to SearchEngineWatch)

What becomes more exciting is when you mate up search fully with speech technology, which cannot be far down the road.

For a glimpse of what is coming, see the Google video where human language technology experts at Google, Franz Josef Och and Mike Cohen discuss their exciting research in machine translation and speech technology with Alfred Spector, Google VP of Research and Special Initiatives. GOOG-411 was just the tip of the iceberg. (Tip of the hat – Google Operating System)

Related: G1, Gphone, Tphone – what will you call your Google phone?

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Searching With Your Google Phone

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Could your cell phone become your ATM (automatic teller machine)? RBC Royal Bank seems to be moving in that direction. There’s a new mobile payment system by RBC that lets users text money from their mobile phones.

Already, more than 1,100 people have signed up for the RBC Mobex mobile payment service, which was launched last Tuesday for a trial run that wraps up in January with a consumer pilot program yet to be announced. In another technological advance in the works, RBC is lab-testing a system that would let users pay by waving their cellphones at the checkout instead of using a Visa credit card for small purchases.

It almost seems to be beyond the mobile future that Andy Rubin, Engineering Director, of Google foresees:

Smart alerts:

Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention.

Augmented reality:

Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful.

Crowd sourcing goes mainstream:

Your phone is your omnipresent microphone to the world, a way to publish pictures, emails, texts, Twitters, and blog entries.

Sensors everywhere:

Your phone knows a lot about the world around you.

Tool for development:

Your phone may be more than just a convenience, it may be your livelihood.

The future-proof device:

Your phone will open up, as the Internet already has, so it will be easy for developers to create or improve applications and content.

Safer software through trust and verification:

Your phone will provide tools and information to empower you to decide what to download, what to see, and what to share.

As Rubin mentions, already there is a incredible acceptance of the mobile phone as a necessary life support system:

There are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those). While it took 100 years for landline phones to spread to more than 80% of the countries in the world, their wireless descendants did it in 16. So it’s safe to say that the mobile phone may be the most prolific consumer product ever invented.

Who could argue with that prognosis?

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Future Mobile Phone Online Banking Now

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Finally the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. Or as Reuters informs us, T-Mobile USA introduces Google-powered phone.

T-Mobile USA, a Deutsche Telekom AG unit, will sell the first phone powered by Google Inc’s Android operating system under the brand name T-Mobile G1, said its partner Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday. The phone, made by Taiwan’s HTC Corp <2498.TW>, is seen as Google’s answer to Apple Inc’s iPhone and is the Web search leader’s biggest push yet in the cell phone market. The G1 phone has a touch-sensitive screen, a computer-like keyboard, Wi-Fi connections and includes most Google applications and services, including Google Maps with StreetView, Gmail and YouTube. The new phone will feature Android Market, where customers can find and download applications to expand and personalize their phone.

The Google phone certainly looks very attractive. However they should have listened to Marty Weintraub. His advice is to Think SEO Before You Name Your New Company! So T-Mobile USA comes up with the name, .. wait for it, .. dah-dah, T-Mobile G1. It’s hardly catchy.

It would appear that Google has decided not to go with a branding strategy here. We will be seeing Google powered phones with all manner of names. For a company that has just released Google Chrome, which encourages us all to search for the name with its Omnisearch box, it is somewhat paradoxical.

Related:
SWOT That Company Name
For More Sales, Should Your Domain Name Be Monday?

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G1, Gphone, Tphone – what will you call your Google phone?

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