This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was all about Application Stores. Finally all the big names in the mobile world are responding to Apple’s success with the iPhone application store. It’s about time too, but as to whether the responses from O2, Android, Nokia etc. are more than just lip service, only time will tell.
It should be good news for anyone who creates mobile applications and as we’ll soon have our very own mobile application that you can download for free, it should be good news for us too. Application stores are just another way for us to tell people how to not pay for dialing 0870 and 0845 numbers.
The only question for us, and it’s a big question, is whether the mobile operators like O2 will allow an application like ours into their store. Remember that the main purpose of our application is to deprive mobile operators from the profit they currently make from 20p/minute 08 numbers which could be dialed for free using our application.
It really was close, like a few votes, but in general the voting was pretty low for all 7 contestants. Not very surprising as voting was only open between sometime Friday and midday the following Monday.
Also, interesting to note that if everyone of Palringo’s employees had voted, they would have wiped the floor.
Anyway, thanks for everyone who voted for saynotopremum!
We found out today that BT has decided to scrap it’s charges on 0870 and 0845 numbers! This is obviously moving in the right direction and hopefully other landline providers will follow.
It’s not all good news though, 0844 and 0871 numbers will still be charged as usual which still leaves the consumer with the annoying task of remembering which numbers are which. It also does nothing for mobile users who are still being charged to call ‘free’ 0800 numbers.
Still, generally the more news this issue generates the better because many companies don’t realise the implications for their customers of having an 08 contact number, having been misold the product in the first place. Worse still many people don’t even know that they are being charged to dial 0800 numbers from their mobile, so the fight continues!
We’ve just submitted ourselves for the mobile monday peer awards 2009, we’re up against 8 other startups vying to represent London in Barcelona in February.
I needed to knock up a short video for submission and it included a clip of the java mobile application we’re working on at the moment, so here it is if you’re interested (there’s no sound on this one).
I’ve noticed we get a lot of visits from people who do an internet search for saynoto0845 or saynoto0845.co.uk etc. (it’s possible that you’re one of them). I’m trying to catch them all on this page so that I can explain the situation.
There seem to be many many squatter sites all registered with similar names hoping to cash in on lost people looking for a premium number translation site. There are two genuine premium number translation sites that I’m currently aware of:
The one you’re currently reading - try the Number Search page.