Beem mobile payment - a fad or the future of cash?

I should come clean straight away and say I do struggle to understand why I might want to make day-to-day payments using my mobile phone - but then I am nearly 40 and so perhaps I am missing the point ;-)!

I was interested to see the new payment service from Beem which was announced recently. This so far allows users to pay for pizzas and taxi rides from some providers in the London area by sending txts from their mobile phone.

Their business model is Oyster-like in that the user's Beem account is charged up via debit card payments whenever it falls below a minimum and so Beem will generally be left holding a credit balance on which they can earn interest. They take fees from merchants as well but these are allegedly significantly lower than for more conventional payment methods.

Unfortunately the whole service is based on users interacting by sending structured SMS messages. Very paypalmobile-esque.This leads to two significant issues:

1. The user error rate will be very high leading to large support costs and loss of user confidence.
   
2. There will be significant moble messaging costs associated with operating the service.

This strikes me as being an almost ideal example of how not to do a mobile payments service. With this sort of service user confidence is everything!

Looking a little more broadly it will be interesting to see the progress of the ongoing convergence between travel passes and contactless payment mechanisms e.g. the barclaycard+paypass+oyster combination card. Perhaps in due course it might make sense for these to converge with the mobile device? I remain to be convinced.

OS aspects of Android start to appear?

One of the big disappointments of what has been written about the T-Mobile G1 so far is that the email client appears to be pretty poor unless you happen to use Gmail - probably a showstopper for me since non-gmail email is one of my core on-phone activities.

I was interested and reassured today to come across the k9mail project on Google Code. This project is based on a fork of the actual email client source code from Android and is working to improve it in a number of ways.

Early days - but great to see that OS self help cycle starting to kick off on a phone platform!

PS. Latest carnival is up over at ubiquitousthoughts.

Tidal flow --> Data --> Fruit & Vegetables!

Intrigued to see the Guardian article describing a planned data centre in the north of Scotland backed by Morgan Stanley.

The Pentland firth area has huge potential for tidal power generation but the problem of how to get all that power (plus that generated by the extensive wind and wave resources of the area) from such a remote area down to where it is needed in the central belt of Scotland and beyond has yet to be solved convincingly.

This plan takes the opposite approach and moves one of the key power consumers in the modern economy close to the renewable energy supply. It is after all much easier to provide reliable data connections to a remote location than large capacity power transmission. As a side effect it also brings jobs to the area.

All very worthy so far but there is also an intriguing twist in the tail is mentioned on the main contractor Atlantis Resources' site. The heat generated by the data centre will not just be vented to the environment as normal but will be used to heat the adjacent Mey Selections greenhouses on the Castle of Mey estate.

What an all round excellent idea!

PS. The latest carnival is up over at mopocket.

Yet another mobile browser

Interested to see that well known blogger and ex Mowser teammember Mike Rowehl is now working for Skyfire - the 3rd party windows mobile browser.

I guess in some ways it is questionable whether or not we need another browser choice, but the state of mobile browsers on average is still fairly ropey and a little competition may well stimulate some more improvement.

PS. Registration is now open for MoMo London 3rd birthday party on the 10th of November.

Soon we can all be Mr Bond ...

Interested to see that the concept of using a mobile phone as a remote control for a car (as demonstrated by Bond in The World is Not Enough!) is finally making an appearance as a real product - though only a car show prototype at this stage.

Not quite at the level where you can lie in the back seat and accelerate wildly up the ramp in the car park yet though. Current functions allow only:

• "Control ambient lightning
• Control front and rear seat settings
• Lock the car
• Open the rear compartment
• Switch on and off the lights (blinkers, main lights…)"

Of course in the Bond film the phone was a Nokia Communicator so perhaps we need to wait for that version for those features ;->!

4IP Launched

The Scottish launch event for the 4IP fund was in Glasgow last week.

It is derived from Ofcom's work over the last few years on how public service media will be created by the new "public service providers" of the post-broadcast age.

While much of the current discussion around 4IP is very web focussed, it is clear that mobile will also play a key part in this future, and so can potentially benefit from support from 4IP.

Ofcom vs the lifeboats

The register has publised a rather shocking article on Ofcom's plans to massively increase the amounts it charges to the voluntary rescue services. I wasn't even aware that the lifeboats and mountain rescue organisations had to pay for their comms - far less that they were expected to pay commercially realistic rates for it.

As a person who has worked in a number of startups I generally err at least somewhat towards the opportunity and enterprise end of the spectrum, but this seems to be taking the free market principle to a grotesque extreme - and human life obviously doesn't have any value in the models they use.