Twitter messages as Text QR Codes = QRitter
via Denis

Stowe Boyd on QR Codes and Kaywa
Stowe, try also Feed2Mobile... or Twitter2Mobile;)

Fantastic news! After the BBC's first small steps into QR Codes, Swiss National Television goes one step further. See SF Mobile Internet.

They started using a Short Code for size reasons (as we do here at Kaywa if space is scarce) and I hope we will see a more universal (Short Code) URL soon - so that it can be read by any QR Code Reader as for example the preinstalled QR Code Reader of the N95, which has stunning sales figures (Nokia: official figures).
Naturally there is also a Kaywa Reader for the N95 - try it out.


Universal QR Code for the SF mobile site:

rQRCode, A Ruby library for encoding QR Codes by Duncan Robertson (a BBC software engineer)

rQRCode is a library for encoding QR Codes in Ruby. It has a simple interface with all the standard qrcode options. It was adapted from the Javascript library by Kazuhiko Arase.

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile introduce flat-rate plans

Verizon Wireless was quickly followed by AT&T and T-Mobile - three of the four largest wireless phone companies - announcing the new flat-rate plans, which cost about $100 a month. All three companies had their new plans available by the end of last week. Sprint, the fourth of the large phone companies, said it is testing a flat-rate plan.

[...] Verizon said. The basic plan costs $99 per month and covers domestic voice calls and some Internet use. For an additional $20 a month, customers can add text messaging. And for a total of $139 per month, video and mobile e-mail are added. AT&T’s plans are similar to Verizon’s and includes Apple’s iPhone.

It's still high, but if I look at my spending, it would already be worth the buck. In comparison:

Orange Swiss ARPU continued to drop from EUR 189 in the fourth quarter of 2006 via EUR 186 in the third quarter of 2007 to EUR 184 in the fourth quarter. The non-voice part of the total revenues amounted to 19.2 percent at the end of 2007, compared with 18.5 percent at the end of 2006.

61 Euro/month = $90/month. So if you target the heavy mobile phone users, the Verizon's $99 per month are certainly defendable.

And how much did the first flat-rates cost for internet? It was similarly high in the beginning. So there is much room for improvement - prices can only go down;)


See also:
The Switzerland Telecommunications Report 2008 where Orange has an ARPU of Euro 55 and Swisscom of little more then Euro 40.

More here (in german)

Via Howie

Once in a while I like to announce new blogs with QR Codes.

Google homes in on revenues from phones

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years”, Mr Gundotra said.


[...] mobile users increasingly want[ed] to browse beyond an operator’s own site.

“The world is changing. Users want an internet without fences. They know how to type in Google.com if they want to get to it. Two years ago the operators were still playing the role of gate­keepers but that is no longer the role for them,” Mr Gundotra said.

Graduates 'sms' in job l3tt3rs

University graduates are using text message abbreviations and gaming slang in their job applications, prompting alarmed employers and education institutions to run special courses in written communication.

But although many employers feel graduates are poorly trained in grammar and appropriate language, they do not want to confront universities because they want to keep good relations during the skills shortage, said Ben Reeves of the Australian Association of Graduate Employers.

[...] Annabelle Puddy, the national head of recruiting for Accenture, said it was a particular problem among students who had studied for a technical degree such as software engineering.

"We're absolutely dumbfounded at the amount of students who use very relaxed [language], as though they're communicating with their friends on text messaging or email, so everything's abbreviated in their applications," she said.

Very interesting and not supriseable to me. The blurring of the leisure-work boundary was initiated by companies themselves ("be flexible"). With the new generation it's a done deal and students with a technical degree are just the avantgarde what is yet to come for the mainstream.

In 2005 I wrote here:

As Mick Masnik notes, the boundaries between work/school and personal life will fall and the mobile device has a lot to do with it. The world we are coming from was one where physical space ruled our life – a place for home, a place for work, leisure spaces and in-between spaces. With the advent of the mobile phone, our life is no longer dependent on physical space and we can connect with others in whatever space we are.

Additonally in software engineering most students already have done projects for themselves and it becomes ever more difficult to say what kind of work is leisure and what is a job. Savvy individuals in this sector also feel that they have gained more power, especially when there is a skills shortage on the job market.

So I guess it's up to the companies to adjust as much as the employees. I predict however that in certain sectors companies will not have much choice.

On the Mobile Intelligence diagramm, the QR Code is shown in the intelligence layer.

What I agree with wholeheartedly is that a QR Code gives you context: time and space context. Mix that with my personal context and you have something very powerful.