It's always fun keeping your network inspector tab open. While looking around the O2 UK website, I found this page all about eSIMs. For some reason, it wants to know the user's phone number. I put in a random number, and it refused to let me in. Putting in a genuine O2 number let me through. So what is it doing to validate numbers? It is making an API call to this URl: https://www.o2.co.uk/o/customer/mods/lookup/447700900123 After a bit of testing, this is how I think it works. If you …
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A few weeks ago, I received a billing email from my phone provider O2. While glancing at it, I noticed all the images were broken. Viewing the source of the email showed that they were all coming from http:// mcsaatchi-email-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/o2/... What happens if we visit that domain? Ah, the dreaded "The specified bucket does not exist" error. At some point the images were served from that domain but someone deleted the bucket. This is a problem. Amazon doesn't reserve…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, most of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination. Energy efficiency is the next battleground for electronics. As the price of electricity soars, people will become less and less enamoured with charging their devices every single day. Even if cold-fusion brings us unlimited free energy - plugging your gadgets into a wall just seems so primitive! That's where BlueTooth Low…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, the follow-up post has fallen down the memory hole. You can still read Sharon's response to it. Well, we can finally unwrap one of the little projects The Lab has been working on. Along with the Department of Energy and Climate Change we're aiming to stick QR codes on customers' energy bills. The proposal has the grand name of: "A consultation on proposals to amend domestic energy supply licence…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. We had an amazing time at Over The Air 2013. We’ve teamed up with ThingMaker to digitally scan attendees. Our long term aim is to release on GitHub a collection of faces which artists and game designers can re-use. The definite highlight was scanning Annie, one of the veterans of Bletchley Park. Our thanks also to Faberdashery who were able to supply us with filament for the 3D printer in exactly the r…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. I really loved the idea of geolocated ephemeral content. And I was a little disappointed that the business never saw the potential for it. Maybe I'll find a way to relaunch it in the future. I’ve been attending Mobile Monday London for years. It’s a great (free!) way to meet people in the mobile industry, to learn about new trends, and to demo products. Because I know so many people there, it’s always a bit ne…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTEqKd92kcI Pop quiz: How many MB did you use watching that YouTube video? When dealing with data usage, a familiar cry in the telco world is “Customers just don’t understand what a MB is!” Is this true? The theory goes something like this… Some elements of a phone bill are easy to conceptualise. Customers understand how many minutes they’ve used, texts they’ve sent, etc. T…
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Sixteen months ago, I climbed a rattly staircase behind a restaurant to a fairly typical "start-up loft". My first taste of InMobi. I was enthralled! I've spent the last year driving the developer relationship process in the company, watching as we've grown from 15 people in a small room to 70 people in swanky London offices on the Strand. InMobi has sent me all over the world - South Africa, San Francisco, Romania, Barcelona, Bangalore, Cologne, and Bath! It has been an amazing adventure, …
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WARNING This article and pages it links to, contain information about pornography and sex education which may be offensive to Daily Mail readers. These are the hurried lunchtime writings of a chap with too much on his plate. So, O2 has apparently angered the Internet Gods by switching on its Adult Content Filter. This means anyone who wants to look at adult material on the web will have to pay a fee to prove they are over 18. Of course, their filter is broken - so it's caught sites like…
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