Power to…Orange!

  • 28 Sep
  • 2009
Posted by: Rory

The mobile market has had quite a bit of a shakeup over the past few weeks, first of all with T-Mobile and Orange announcing a merger, which, when it goes ahead will create the largest mobile operator in the UK, something that feeds into my next point, Vodafone rejigging their brand. Because Vodafone will effectively be pushed into last place by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile(3 Mobile hardly counts as a competitor), so they decided to rejig their brand from the tagline of “Make the most of now”, to a bigger focus on mobile internet, with the slogan, “Power to you”.

Lastly, there’s the shock news today of Orange announcing the sale of the iPhone in the UK, thus ending O2’s exclusivity deal, which, in turn feeds back into the first point I made. With Orange set to become the biggest mobile operator in the UK, Apple have seized the opportunity to finally bring the iPhone to mass market. It doesn’t stop there though. Rumours predicted that the network who wins the iPhone contract will only be able to sell the 3G model, though Orange confirmed today that they’d be selling the newer 3Gs, too.

iPhoneOrangeUK

Great news for me as I’m a current Orange customer, but what will it actually bring to consumers looking to buy the device?

  • A lower entry price – I’m very hopeful of this, in fact it’s something I’m almost certain of. Considering Orange’s network coverage isn’t as good as O2’s, along with their reputation, they’re going to really have to try to reel people in from O2.
  • Good deals for current Orange customers - I’m currently an Orange customer and I’m quite satisfied. I’m also pretty certain that Orange will offer very good upgrade options to their current customer base – they always do. Thing is, if they don’t offer me a good upgrade path, I’ll just threaten to switch to O2, which brings me onto my next point.
  • Leverage - Because there’ll be two companies offering the iPhone it can finally be competitive. This means that both O2 and Orange are going to be fighting for your business. If you’re any good at bargaining then you can use this to your advantage, especially if you’re a business customer.

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Wave Goodbye

  • 28 Sep
  • 2009
Posted by: Rory

It’s quite unlike me to be behind with the latest Internet craze, really unlike me intact. I used Twitter before it was endorsed on TV by Stephen Fry, I used Facebook well before the new layout, I had GMail in the first 2 days of developer preview, but I just didn’t get into the latest craze at the time I had the opportunity to.

Google Wave, the next evolutionary step for communication

Google Wave, the next evolutionary step for communication

The craze I’m on about is something you might have heard of, “Google Wave”. Now recently, Google hasn’t impressed me due to some issues with products of theirs that involve money, so when I read this blog post last night about whether Google Wave will replace Twitter, I was very skeptical. At the end of it there was a video of the Google IO developer conference.

I tried as hard as I could to hate the bloke running the conference, but I don’t know whether is was the tech he was showing or him, I just couldn’t help but like the whole idea of Wave.

So what does it do? Well, Wave does what Google does best. It takes something that we’re really used to, takes a sideways look at it and proceeds to change it. But it changes it in such a way that makes it new, fun and somehow easier, even though it has a million new features.

Put simply, it makes conversations, plain and simple conversations. It moves away from the conventional method of relay communication that we’re so used to and makes Wave a truely interactive experience, as if you were talking in real life, but with pictures and rich media.

There’s far too much for me to explain what it does in one post (it took Google an hour to explain it), so I’ll leave it to this video to explain:

What I’m really interested in though, is how it’s going to change our lives and is it really a good idea to have one company be able to control a majority of a major communication channel. It’s true that companies like BizStone, who own Twitter own one major communication channel, but if Wave is really set to replace as fundamental and business critical as email, then having one business control all of that communication is a bit scary.

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