Spanish start-up PadInTheCity offers iPads for rent in Madrid. Squarely aimed at tourists, a 3G iPad can be booked online for just 25 Euros a day and delivered to your hotel at the time of your choosing. It comes pre-loaded with a constantly growing number of relevant apps such as maps, tourist info, car rental, weather and hotel booking as well as various others to keep you entertained such as Angry Birds, Hootsuite and even BBC News. Once you’ve spent a day (or more) checking out the city with all the information you need at your fingertips, it gets picked up again, from your hotel (and soon from a pre-determined location chosen by you). Brilliant.
Not being a massive Apple fan I’m unlikely to buy one so I love the idea of being able to rent one in exactly the situation when it’s going to be properly useful. I also think it could be great for families, use the likes of the iSpain app to help you have great experiences during the day and then Angry Birds and Youtube can keep the kids quiet in the evenings!
But can’t you find and use all these apps on your smartphone? Sure you can but a couple of full days roaming for data abroad it’s more than likely going to cost you a fair bit more than the 25 Euro cost for the iPad.
Assuming it all goes well in Madrid they plan to role it across other major cities. What do you think? Would you use one?

A year ago almost to the day I blogged on here about the launch of Windows Phone 7 and how it could well represent genuine competition to the Apple and Android ecosystems. Adoption from manufacturers has been slow and over the past 12 months its’ played only a bit part in the wider mobile landscape. Until now.

This morning Stephen Elop, the new CEO of Nokia took to the stage at Nokia World in London to announce the first two Nokia/WP7 handsets. The Lumina 800 and Lumina 710. Make no mistake, in the smartphone space these two companies are one fry-up away from a heart attack, but together they present an entirely different proposition.

Nokia, famed for its hardware and lambasted for its operating system and Microsoft, revered for its new Window Phone 7 OS but hamstrung by the fact that none of the big handset manufacturers have been willing to devote their full attention to it (favouring Android instead) have come together to offer something genuinely different to the current smartphone formula of grids full of App icons.

At the heart of WP7 are live tiles, the purpose of these are to put what is important to you front and centre of your experience, for example social media updates, weather updates, email are all available at a glance. The people tile is especially cool, selecting a contact not only gives you access to the usual details but also lets you view all their latest social media updates and gives you the ability to reply to them straight from their contact info. No opening separate apps. Add a Karl Zeiss 8 megapixel camera, quality finish, best in class maps and excellent battery and we’re looking at highly desirable handsets from Nokia once again.

These phones will be on sale next month with the Lumina 800 costing 420 euros (without contract) a clear signal to the market that this is not a direct iPhone competitor (it’s much cheaper) and that the best is yet to come.

Talk of genuine convergence in the mobile space has been seriously over estimated. We are no closer to seeing any one ecosystem dominate the market place than we were 1, 2 or even 3 years ago. From a marketing perspective we need to embrace multiple ecosystems and plan for them. Battle will rage for the foreseeable future and this is a good thing because inevitably it breeds innovation and progress.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Paris trialing the use of NFC to allow commuters to use their Smartphone like an oyster card, well now they’ve just launched a car hire scheme with a difference. All the cars are electric. The scheme is called Autolib and comes off the back of the hugely successful Velib (Paris’ version of Boris Bikes).
It went live on the 2nd and has started with 66 cars and 33 stations around the city; a deposit is required along with a driving license but from there it costs as little as 5 Euros per half hour. Not only that but there are 300 people in a call centre and another 1,200 on the streets in the early stages as support, oh and it has a parking aid that helps you locate the nearest free parking/charging station. Brilliant.
I’m really not a fan of electric cars, but I reckon I’d definitely warm to the idea of being able to swipe a card or touch my phone to jump into a small, Pininfarina (an Italian car designer better know for Ferraris and Maseratis) designed one that will do over 80mph and 150 miles on a single charge, at a moments notice.
Sure we have Streetcar and the like but the volume of cars simply isn’t enough to remove the planning ahead needed when booking, so the scale isn’t there to actually reduce the number of privately owned cars (let alone reducing emissions or having the convenience of a Boris Bike), but Autolib is a Government scheme so if it works, expansion will be rapid. 250 vehicles by December and 3,000 by the end of 2012.
This is a big risk for the Mayor of Paris, they city has invested 200m Euros in the infrastructure (the cars and running of the scheme has been tendered out to the private sector) and he is already facing serious politically motivated criticism which makes it all the more impressive that it’s happening.
Surely this is exactly what we need, great ideas actually being executed. Again, take note Boris!
What do you think? Would you use an Autolib type scheme in London?

Last week the F8 conference for developers saw Zuckerberg announce some pretty significant changes to Facebook. The most interesting of which is Timeline.

A few new things have been implemented already, the Ticker on the right hand side of the page that delivers ALL updates from your friends in real time and the revamped friends lists. What is on the way though represents something of a step change.

Timeline, set to replace your profile, aggregates and organizes your life into chronological order, all the things you’ve posted on the site, starting with your D.O.B. when you first registered, are available, you can then jump into individual years for more detail. It can also be filtered by different actions, so you can view your timeline just in photos or just in status updates and so on. Of course for most of us there is going to be a vast jump between date of birth and actual Facebook activity so you are of course able to add pics, videos, narrative and so on to fill in the gaps and create a complete digital documentation of your life.

Privacy I hear you say? Well not that it’s ever really stopped them before, but yes of course, you will able to select exactly who is able to see your timeline.

Inevitably some will love it and others loathe it but before long it will simply be part of our daily life and we’ll struggle to remember what profiles even looked like.

Another major change is around frictionless sharing, the aim here is to make it as easy as possible to share content, ie websites or apps only needing to get permission once and then everything you view/do within them will be shared…umm, not sure about that!

But back to Timeline, is Facebook missing the point? Hasn’t it always been about communicating and distributing content and data? Not archiving it? What do you think?

It should be live to all users by the end of week.

STIF – Frances’ Public Transport Authority – are trialling the use of NFC enabled smartphones as travel cards on the Metro and on buses in Paris.

Bravo Les Francais…Boris, pay attention!

NFC (near field communication) has been a hot topic in the mobile industry for a while now; we use the technology every day in our Oyster Cards. Without going into unnecessary detail it’s a short-range wireless technology that involves an active chip (like the one in your oyster card or smartphone) and a passive receiver to transfer data. Its potential is huge with wide ranging applications, however, it’s been rather slow to get off the ground. The main reason for this is, with payment as its focus, there are currently far too many stakeholders making far too much money out of the current credit card system. Banks, credit card companies, transaction handling companies, data companies and so on…and on…and on…

This is why launching mobile payment in a controlled environment like city travel, where the technology already exists, is a great idea. I love my Oyster card, I think it’s great. What massively frustrates me is that I rarely ever know when it needs topping up, not too bad when you’re using the tube and you can top up round the corner from the gate but getting on the bus, having waited an age, only to find that you’re out of credit and with no change in your pocket? Rubbish! Being able to glance at your phone on the way to the bus to see what your ‘mobile oyster’ balance is, or even better not having to worry about a balance at all because it gets charged straight to your phone bill? Yes please!

Think how much easier we could make travel in London; no more hunting for coins, cursing the person ahead when their Oyster doesn’t work or fiddling around with cards and PIN’s when topping up. Want to hop on the tube? Touch your mobile. Want a Boris bike? Touch your mobile. A Bus or train? Yup, touch your mobile. Even taxis could benefit hugely, no more stopping at cash points, waiting for change etc, even your receipts could be digital and sent straight to your inbox ready to go on an expenses form!

Outside of paying for stuff, smart posters are the other use of NFC that people, especially OOH media owners are raving about. With the poster acting as a receiver, touching your phone against a 6-sheet at the bus stop will deliver all matter of extra info instantaneously, making QR Codes look, well, a touch prehistoric.

Granted that we need all our phones to be NFC enabled and that’s happening at the moment. Most smartphones already have NFC functionality, they just aren’t activated. So outside of mobile payment and smart posters, what other cool/useful functions can you see for NFC? How about instant customer feedback? Touching your phone against a smiley face or frowning face as you leave a shop depending on your experience. What about transferring content from different media devices? Putting your phone on top of telly when you get home to transfer the web page/video you were viewing onto the big screen for example. How about from a marketing perspective? What are your thoughts?

I’m not a fan of Apple, and certainly not a fan of Steve Jobs, however there is no doubting that what he has achieved with the company is nothing short of incredible. Apple is now, give or take, the most valuable company on the planet and has more money on hand than the US Government ($80 billion in the bank). Add to this an incredible position within each market that they compete and it’s very much Job done for Steve and he can concentrate on getting his health sorted safe in the knowledge that he really couldn’t have done much more. Good luck and good health to him.

Ok, so the interesting thing is that his successor, Tim Clark, is going to have make some moves; Apple shareholders are getting restless and by the end of the year the company will probably have $100 billion in the bank and the pressure is on to do something with it, either give it back to the shareholders or sink it into R&D or manufacturing, or distribution channels….whatever, just use it!

From a mobile perspective, Apple could have dropped the price of the iPhone a couple of years ago and flooded the market with half a million handset activations a day; they didn’t and the latent demand for iPhones globally is still huge. But what now?

Ewan at Mobile Industry Review makes the point that Apple now has the ability to completely change the face of the mobile industry, not by product, design or marketing but actually through economics. HP has just canned investment in Web OS, sparking a mad rush for hugely discounted (£89) HP Touchpads, imagine what a £99 ipad would do? How about an Apple subscription plan? £100 per month for 2 years and you get an Apple desktop, laptop, ipad and iPhone, price plan included, and after those 2 years you get to upgrade. Scale that down across different price points and it’s pretty compelling huh? Game changing in fact.

Apple’s steadfast insistence on remaining premium under Jobs has generated so much cash that it’s laid the foundations for a push at mass market dominance. Personally I hope they don’t wipe the floor with everyone, as competition in the mobile market can only be good because it breeds progress. Mind you, with Google’s recent purchase of Motorola it might just get messy!

So it’s that time of year again when the nations’ tattiest briefcase is paraded around with a reverence more befitting the crown jewels.

So what’s in store for us all this time around? Here are the highlights:
* Let’s start with some good news – alcohol duty is to remain the same!
* Tobacco duty is set to increase by 2% above inflation, that’s up to 50p per pack of 20
* April’s inflation rise in fuel duty has now been postponed until 2012 and the annual 1p ‘fuel escalator’ rise has been scrapped until 2015 – a start but is it enough?
*  More good news – no personal tax increases and a long term plan to merge income tax and national insurance
* Council Tax to remain the same or be reduced in 2011 across the board – given the general reduction in Council services this seems the least they can do!
* 10% inheritance tax discount……but only if you give 10% to charity
* Road tax will rise in line with inflation
* Air passenger duty to be frozen for 2011 – thumbs up, cheap fights may actually remain cheap!
* Private Jet users will have to pay a levy for the first time – looks like the Maxus Senior Management Lear Jet might have to go on the back burner!
* Corporation Tax is dropping by 2 rather than the planned 1% – nice to see the new Government isn’t biting the hand that feeds it….
* In fact Corporation Tax will be cut 1% each year for the next three, but bank levy will be adjusted so they don’t pay less tax as a result – umm, maybe not!
* And finally, possibly the best news of the day – for those of us that cycle anyway – £100m for repairing potholes…whoop!!
So overall it looks pretty good for small business and there is at least some movement in the right direction for your average consumer. I did a straw poll of the Mercedes Team to see whether the Government has done enough to reduce escalating fuel costs, and well the answers varied from ‘I don’t have a car so don’t really care’ to ‘I don’t know but there should be tax breaks for those whom speak Latin’ and ‘Chatsworth Estate rules – give things [alcohol, tobacco, petrol] to us cheaper and we’ll kill ourselves quicker and be less of a burden on society, colourful bunch…..and who says you can’t get a straight answer out of media people! 

Last Saturday a few of us managed to book a small table in our favorite pub for the rugby. It was a 5pm kick off but we had to be there for lunch in order to have the table, so we’d said to everyone else to come down in time for kick off. Fair enough right? But inevitably there’s always someone you forget to tell. Usually this is not a big deal and more often than not goes unnoticed.
Enter Facebook Places. Whilst waiting for our food my phone pings with an email, I’ve been ‘checked in’ to the pub in question by one of my mates at the table. I think nothing off it until a while later when, yup you’ve guessed it, a friend bowls in and straight off the bat has a go that they weren’t invited and only found out we were watching the game around the corner on Facebook. An innocent mistake and I get a grilling, not after the event but during the event. Rubbish!
 I want to be able to share my location but I want to have complete control over it and I really don’t want to have to remember to manually share it, especially not on a social network. Sure I could have a massive cull of who I’m ‘friends’ with on Facebook so it’s more like my phone book, sure I could probably turn off Places but why isn’t it so much easier and controllable for all of us? Why can’t I just set up groups from the contacts on my phone and select those I want to share my location with, then when out and about my location (via the GPS we all now have on our phones) is available for those I’ve selected to view, and vice versa.
Easy, controllable and useful.  Not to mention the obvious benefits of being able to market offers based on real time GPS rather than manual, probably out of date, ‘check ins’.

Is this the future of smartphones and tech, if so start forming an orderly queue…

So, what’s being discussed in the mobile industry this week? Nokia, Nokia and well Nokia. It’s Nokia’s Capital Markets Day on Friday where their new (ex Microsoft) CEO Stephen Elop is widely expected to announce a tie-up with Microsoft’s mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7.
The chatter started this week with an open letter from Berenberg Bank  analyst Adnaan Ahmad to both Elop and Steve Ballmer urging a partnership that would see Nokia ship devices using WP7 software and has continued at Pace.  Today a ‘leaked’ memo from Elop to Nokia staff has found its way on to Engadget and been quickly syndicated across all major news networks. Surprise surprise Nokia’s share price has been steadily rising.
Elop talks about Nokia being in crisis thanks to being caught out by the likes of Apple and Google, adding even more weight to the prediction a Microsoft tie-up is just days away. Reactions have been numerous and varied. It’s been called everything from ‘the industry’s new powerhouse’ to the ‘coalition of the defeated’.
Given that this is still just a rumour at the moment, and we’ve no idea of what a potential partnership would look like (a couple of high-end handsets rushed out to appease a baying marketplace or a five year role out strategy across all of Nokia’s mid to high end devices?) It’s far too early to pass judgement but the potential is huge.
I’d bet my house that pretty much all of you had, back in the day, a Nokia or two that you absolutely loved, their hardware has always been class leading and despite poor software over the last five years they still have the best cameras available. WP7 got great reviews on launch and backing from the biggest device manufacturer in the world is just what they need to see it take off. We might even see the first device at Mobile World Conference in a couple of weeks.
Of course it could be another unmitigated Nokia disaster, but I hope not. Roll on Friday!