(This post appears on ReputationOnline) Vodafone has suffered a massive blow to their corporate reputation in recent days. A security error on their site allowed anyone to find customers' email addresses and phone numbers. It's still unknown if any accounts were compromised due to the flaw - nor is it known if there was any wholesale plundering of the sensitive personal data. Mistakes happen - …
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(Disclaimer - I used to work for Vodafone. I don't any more.) A rather nasty flaw with Vodafone's "My Account" service was recently pointed out by Denny de la Haye. Vodafone will quite happily tell you the email address of any customer who has set up the "My Account" facility. Denny@dennyUgh. @VodafoneUK's website exposes my email address to anyone who knows (or randomly enters) my phone…
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This is the presentation I gave for Charity Hack 2010. Charity hack qr codes from Terence Eden If you're on mobile, you can view the mobile friendly version of the slides. Audio and video coming later. The gist of the talk is - use QR codes to drive mobile donations. Use return SMS to encourage people to share with their friends. …
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Three failures and one giant lost opportunity Failure 1 - Targeting This version of the Tesco shopping app is only available on Nokia phones. Nothing wrong with that - Nokia are still the biggest phone seller on the planet. So why allow the advert to be shown to Android users? It will annoy users, reduce your CPM, and make users less likely to click on adverts in future. Failure 2 - Sizing …
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I've got a rather neat femtocell - the Vodafone SureSignal. It extends the 3G signal into my house by way of my broadband. To stop anyone leaching my broadband, you need to register "approved" phone numbers with the SureSignal. So - given that the Kindle has a Vodafone SIM card - how do we find the Kindle's phone number and register it with the SureSignal? There are three ways you can find…
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I've just taken delivery of a shiny new Amazon Kindle 3. I'm looking forward to giving it a thorough review - but here's a quick comparison between it and my venerable Elonex 511EB. Click for bligger (more…) …
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This is the presentation I gave for OpenTech 2010 Opentech updated from Terence Eden If you're on mobile, you can view the mobile friendly version of the slides. Here's the audio of the talk. 🔊 OpenTech2010 Presentation: Why Doesn't Your Site Work On My Mobile Phone🎤 edent 💾 Download this audio file. The gist of the talk is - more people have mobile web enabled phones than ha…
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A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk…
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Peugeot's new mobile advert has a couple of critical flaws - but has just enough innovation to redeem it in my eyes. Read on to find the two basic mistakes they made, how to solve them, and the cool feature you should be incorporating into your adverts. (more…) …
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Google has rightly received praise for its reworked "Contacts" functionality. But there is still a rather glaring error. One of the things I love to do is add images to my contacts. It gives me a visual cue when I'm scrolling through looking for a person, it prompts my memory when I see the face of a friend calling me, and it helps me remember what people look like. As you can see, I'm pretty …
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I was honoured when David Wood asked me to present at his first "brown bag" lunch lecture at Accenture. Normally I would run through a presentation of this length at several different venues and thoroughly hone it before presenting at a high profile event. As you'll see from the slides and video, it's still a bit rough round the edges. I based this talk on Jonathan Zittrain's excellent Future…
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I've mentioned Nokia on here a few times. For a mobile focused company, they seem to have a real problem with mobile advertising. It starts well enough with an animated GIF. The site it links to is music.nokia.co.uk/ - cleverly, Nokia redirect mobile users to a specific mobile version of the site. That's where it all starts to go wrong... (more…) …
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