Well, I am sorry but this is probably the strangest idea I've ever heard of in mobile banking... Actually fixed banking: Telecom New Zealand is installing an ATM Payphone:

TSB Bank and Telecom have teamed up to trial New Zealand's first ATM Payphone kiosk. The kiosk will allow people "on the move" to do their banking and make phone calls from the same handy location.

Telecom National Payphone Manager Lisa Hope said "Telecom operates approximately 4,300 payphones in New Zealand and like payphone operators worldwide is seeking new ways to deliver value to customers."

"There are payphone operators internationally that operate ATM Payphone sites and there is evidence that these sites are popular with customers," Mrs Hope said.

Well perhaps somewhere else... But in New Zealand, where there is a huge penetration of cellular technology?

I can imagine someone going to the ATM to withdrawal some cash, and by the way "I will make a phone call here while a line is forming behind me".

But most importantly:

The ATM service features all current services provided via standard ATM's (sic) and has the most secure ATM technology available. Features include 3DES encryption, anti-skimming facia and card insertion and removal jitter.

Standard Telecom Payphone charges will apply for phone calls made from the ATM Payphone.

I feel safe already...

UPDATE: Added a picture as requested by sbiddle, and got a quote from Telecom New Zealand:

If you're wondering about the reasoning behind sticking an ATM on a payphone.... It enables TSB to get access to pre-existing high profile sites around NZ allowing them to expand their network easily, and the advantage for Telecom Payphones is that they get to share the site rental.

While here at Convergence Oceania 2007 I had a chance to meet Martin Levy, CEO of RoamAD. The company "... supplies a wireless networking platform for converged wireless networks including citywide Wi-Fi networks, public safety networks, highway Wi-Fi corridors, surveillance / CCTV networks as well as general use networks". In other others metro wi-fi networks.

I've spoken to Martin once over Skype and met him briefly in Auckland before, but today I was given the full rundown on their services, including a demo of the remote administration tool used in the platform - including monitoring network nodes around the world.

This is very impressive technology, and I wonder why the Wellington City Council doesn't use some kind of mesh wireless network as part of their broadband plans for the region - I mean, we can't just have fiber, taking in consideration the local geography, access, etc.

The Convergence Oceania in Wellington is in full motion... Hon David Cunliffe, Minister for Communications and Information Technology opened the conference, quickly followed by a session with Andrew Seybold talking about current trends in wireless technologies.

Quite a few old faces around, and new people too. Met Gary Rogers and Pat Kelly from APT who showed me some of the new CDMA EVDO Wireless Routers, and Telecom New Zealand as expected is showing the CDMA EVDO Rev A USB modem - and surprise an ExpressCard version. The first should be coming in June, and the ExpressCard late in July.

Tomizone is here and I got to connect to their service using a day pass. Also got to look at the user interface when accessing the servce and managing your account. If you don't know Tomizone is a "broadband" sharing service, and recently announced a deal with ISP Orcon and D-Link which will see Tomizone-enabled routers getting to the streets. This is a huge step, because most ISPs had T&Cs that prevented the sharing of a service, but this seems to be changing here in New Zealand.

Other interesting thing I saw was the Neo Digital guys with their home media server and home control units.
Coffee is good, and as in last year's it is courtesy of Aangel (thanks Willian). Aangel is a mobile service that transcribe short notes, appointments and contact information over the phone and send this to your mobile as a SMS with the appropriate vcal, vnote and vcard formats so you can quickly have these entered into your handset.

Other displays were Citylink, Vantex, InternetNZ, Spirit Wireless, Nutshell (hello Ian) and more.

Paranoids of the world, unite! First, target a boy for writing an essay. Then suspend a boy for creating a Counter Strike map. Next fire an IT professional for talking about target shooting, just because, well, just because the co-workers are paranoid about anything and everything, thanks to the media and the current state of affairs.

Oh, and make sure the guy is also accused of terrorism for drawing a comic reporting the incident. And plenty of links on Slashdot.

When are these people coming to their sense? I mean, classifying people on hearsay? Are we going back to the Middle Ages?

When will New Zealand get a Do Not Call Register? There is a Do Not Call Register in the U.S. and now a Do Not Call Register in Australia. When are we going to have it here?

If you don't know, this is a list of numbers that are not to be called by telemarketers.

Do you think this is needed here in New Zealand? How many times a week do you have a call from someone trying to sell a phone share scam, or trying to make you change ISPs, or trying to sell you life insurance?

Around the world we read about Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO), companies that provide a mobile service to its customers but does not have an allocation of spectrum.

One example of MVNO is Virgin Mobile UK, launched back in 1999 and with over 4 million customers in the UK alone.

We are now seeing a new approach coming out. Like those Affinity Credit Cards, an association, company or group can create a virtual MVNO through a new service called Sonopia.

Once you create your virtual MVNO you then proceed to create plans and select what mobile phones will be available from your "company".

You can then promote this through a web site, or any other means. And like the Affinity Credit Cards, your association, company or group will receive a percentage of the revenue.

The service is provided by Verizon Wireless in the U.S., and all handsets are CDMA (of course, since Verizon uses this standard).

It looks like an interesting idea - and I have registered myself to see how it worked, but being outside the U.S. I can't actually create the group, etc. I mean I can - but the forms all request State and ZIP Code, so obviously I am out.

Sonopia's CEO is Juha Christensen, ex-Symbian, ex-Microsoft, ex-Action Engine, ex-Macromedia. Juha co-founded the Symbian Ltd, the joint venture between Nokia, Ericsson, Sony-Ericsson, Matsushita, Samsung, Siemens, and Psion responsible by the Symbian OS now in use in million of mobile ghones. At Microsoft he was the VP for Mobile Devices Marketing Group.

Today I received an e-mail from Sonopia inviting some of the early Sonopians for dinner in San Francisco, to discuss the service and provide suggestions. It's a shame I won't be there though. I would be interested to find out more about this idea - and perhaps even suggest they allow us, aliens, to create our virtual MVNOs as well.

Do you think this would work here in New Zealand where we had two dominant players in the mobile market and knowing the mobile rates are ones of the highest in the OECD?

Next week (8 May) is the Convergence Oceania 2007, at Te Papa here in Wellington. I will be there the whole day (or better part of it), and I am also attending the Positively Wellington cocktail afterwards.

Running at the same time as the exhibition there's a series of discussions:

8.45 - 9.00am David Cunliffe - Conference Opening

9.00 - 9.45am Andrew Seybold
The big picture: Where the industry is today and where it is headed

10.00 - 11.00am MORNING PANEL (Sponsored by Kordia)
Content is King to drive broadband usage- so what is NZ doing?
Damien Toman (Gen-i),Jeremy Hope (Ericsson), Maurice Stilwell (NZTE), Hyperfactory, Susie Stone (Kordia), Mantosh Malhotra (Qualcomm)

11.15 - 12.00pm Mike Iandolo - Alcatel Lucent - International Speaker
Wireless Public Safety Today and in the future

12.15 - 12.45pm Damien Toman - Gen-i
Discussion around wireless, broadband and convergence for business - with Michael Gregg

1.00 - 1.20pm Darian Bird - IDC
Wimax around the world: Where do we fit in?

1.30 - 2.15pm Wireless & Broadband PANEL (Sponsored by Telecom)
Wimax and Wifi - what do these technologies mean to you?
Martyn Levy (RoamAD), Steve Simms (Tomizone), Mike Landolo (Alcatel-Lucent), Telecom, Darian Bird (IDC)

2.30 - 3.15pm Mantosh Malhotra - Qualcomm - International Speaker
Next Evolution of Wireless Applications

3.30 - 4.15pm Steve Roberts - Kordia
The Beauties of Datacasting

4.30 - 5.30pm FINAL PANEL (Sponsored by Citylink and Cafe Net)
Wellington Wireless Broadband Wonderland - Myth or Reality
Rod Drury, Jamie Baddeley (InternetNZ), David Cunliffe, Duncan Turnbull (Citylink), Andrew Seybold

I hear Telecom New Zealand will at last unveil their CDMA EV-DO Rev A USB modem device at that event.

I just saw this in my RSS feeds, but the page is not up at Microsoft PressPass yet:

Microsoft Acquires Mobile Advertising Pioneer ScreenTonic

ScreenTonic’s mobile ad serving and management expertise increase advertiser opportunity across Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions

Interesting to see more details when the press release actually comes out.

UPDATE: Some details emerged, but not much.

I am receiving lots of requests for Joost invites, which is cool. Keep them coming in the other post please!


But I wanted to point out this entry in their FAQ:

How much bandwidth does the application use?

IMPORTANT NOTICE for users with limits on their internet usage

You need to read this carefully if:

- you have an upper limit on your monthly internet usage, or
- you pay for internet usage as you go (i.e. you pay per megabyte you download, instead of a flat fee).

Joost is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. In one hour of viewing, approximately 320MB data will be downloaded and 105MB uploaded, which means that it will exhaust a 1GB cap in 10 hours.

Windows users should note that the application continues to run in the background after you close the main window. For this reason, if you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit Joost client completely when you are finished watching it.

To stop using bandwidth, you need to exit the application entirely...

This is particularly sad for New Zealand users, because there are no true unlimited plan with decent bandwidth available in this country...

So, beware of the usage when running Joost.

UPDATE: Please note these figures are Mb (megabit) not MB (megabyte), Gb (gigabit) not GB (gigabyte). Therefore 1Gb (gigabit) = 128 MB (megabytes). So Joost should use about 128 MB (megabytes) every ten hours.

UPDATE: I've contacted the Joost support through their forums and the Joost FAQ is incorrect. It's actually supposed to be MB (megabytes) and GB (gigabytes). I am updating the blog to reflect this. Note then that you will burn about 435 MB/hour with Joost!

People know things will fail. They know computers will stop working, or worst, hard drives will crash. Work will be lost, content will be lost. Memories will be lost.

And that's what happened to Busines 2.0, one of the few magazines I actually buy (the others are Fast Company and Wired). According to some news Business 2.0 lost its main content server with all the material for the next issue.

They did backups. But apparently didn't test the backup lately - and the process failed to restore the so needed content.

Lucky for them most of the material was sent to lawyers for review and approval - but all the art work needed to be redone.

How are you doing today? Here are some tips:

If you are running Windows Vista, the Backup and Restore Center offers a handy basic file backup and restore, and in some versions (Business, Ultimate, Enterprise) a Complete PC Backup and restore option. It will copy the entire hard drive to an external drive and you will be able to restore your digital life to the exact image of that backup. It will do incremental backups, meaning you will be able to do faster backups over time.

Try an on-line service. There are free ones (up to 5GB) such as Xdrive, and some inexpensive options such as Carbonite. These are set and forget things, and they will copy your data to servers over the Internet. Of course you will need some fast broadband and an unlimited account or at least a large allowance for all the data backup. In New Zealand you can also try local solution NZDrive.

Try a backup to another computer. You could use Memeo and forget about this. Set it to backup your files to another computer on your network, and forget it. It's all automatic. And Memeo works on Windows and Mac OS.

Get into the home network server space. Try Windows Home Server. This might need a bit more knowledge, and more hardware, but it's getting to a point where some households have more than one computer, and this is an automated solution for backup nightmares. It will store automatic backups from all PCs in your network, and allow for restores over the LAN.

And of course test the restore to see if it all works. After all storing the data away but not being able to retrieve is not fun.

Most importantly: practice safe computing.