ANZ Bank first in Australia to launch true mobile banking.
Australian IT has this article about Australian bank ANZ expecting to launch a mobile banking service in the next few weeks. ANZ looks to be backing two forms of mobile technology, SMS Texting for their TXT Banking service and a Java mobile GPRS application for their M-Banking service.
The services will allow you to,
* receive account alerts
* account balances
* mini statements
* transfer money between accounts and others
ANZ already has an in-depth website setup with details of the 2 different types of services. Whilst either service is not live at the moment, you can register your details to be notified when it is released.
Once other Australian banks see how relatively easy this is to implement, hopefully we will see some others launching equivalent services soon. Great to see some movement by ANZ in this area as it is a long overdue service on mobile in Australia
ANZ Mobile Banking Site – http://www.anz.com/aus/Personal/Ways-To-Bank/Mobile-Phone-Banking.asp
Posted by Shane Williamson
10 Million subscribers battle away in World of Warcraft
Wouldn’t you just love to be the guy who put the original concept of an Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft (WoW) today?
The fact that WoW has again reached an amazing milestone of over 10 million subscribers just shows the testament to the way Blizzard looks after their customers and the WoW franchise.
Whilst all 10m are not located in one online virtual universe, the power of 10m sword wielding, spear flinging, wand waving and basket weaving fans means for one very large global online community that must be fed and pampered constantly to keep them on board and more importantly filling Blizzard’s coffers with subscription gold.
Blizzard is the only games company that has translated a highly successful PC game franchise into a highly successful MMORPG and by doing so, has set some incredible goals for other MMORPG manufactures to dream about achieving, let alone even aim in completing.
It’s scary to think that with pulling in these subscriber numbers that WoW is no longer a game, it’s a living, breathing, socially active, exploding economic global giant in it’s own right.
Posted By Shane Williamson
ScanR goes colour
One of the must have services in your mobile nerve center is the image scanning & Optical Character Recognition (OCR) product called ScanR (http://www.scanr.com). ScanR uses your mobile’s camera to scan business cards, documents and even whiteboards so that you can distribute them in various OCR’d formats.
I primarily use ScanR for whiteboard capture, but also use the OCR capabilities for saving business card info to your mobile contacts too.
Now that ScanR has added colour to their service it has enhanced the service considerably.
You can trial the new colour scanning for free up to 5 times, but for only US$9.99 for 40 uploads ScanR Pro is a worthwhile service.
Thanks to MobileCrunch for the link
Posted by Shane Williamson
Mobiles as social devices!?!?!
More evidence that demands a verdict in how mobiles are trending more heavily toward being used for online social mingling rather than something you show off at the local cafe.
A UK usability & accessibility consultancy called Webcredible surveyed 1010 people in the UK and found that 25% would use Social networks more on their mobiles "if speed and quality weren’t an issue". The most sort after service was Email with 33% and I bet a large group of those have this capability already but do not have it setup.
To think there are still people out there that believe mobile’s are used for voice calls!?!?!? ;-p
Thanks to IntoMobile for the link
Posted by Shane Williamson
Social & business online collaboration sites
Technology magazine has posted a great list of both family & business online collaboration sites.
http://techmagazine.ws/social-and-business-collaboration-tools/
Just when you thought Facebook was the center of the universe you discover why social networking is the big thing for Web 2.0 by the mass of sites that are forming in the void. Whilst most sites cater for the social aspect, there are a large amount of business specific sites that cater for business specific collaboration requirements.
No matter what your business size is, if you are not establishing structured trials around some of these collaboration systems, you may miss out on key productivity initiatives that other organisations are beginning to implement today.
They don’t list http://www.ning.com, but it is one I have used and would add to the list as I find it to be powerful for both social & business social networking requirements.
Posted By Shane Williamson
How not to treat a new HTC TyTN II
I was in a meeting last week where one of our fellow managers turned up with his new HTC TyTN II and instead of joyous celebration there was tears of despair.
So the story goes….. on the first day he took it home and put it on the family coffee table, his pet beagle decided to take it for a trial run and discovered its touch screen is not canine mandible proof.
I guess the dog is a Nokia fan……
Posted by Shane Williamson
Mobile Industry Predictions 2008
Chetan Sharma has released some findings from a survey of mobile and other industry people on interesting topics and trends in the global mobile market.
What makes this survey interesting is that it is from people in the industry from around the globe. So most of the major markets are covered.
Whilst there is some summary information in the report from 2007, the big picture themes of 2008 are shaping up. New disruptive entries into the mobile market such as Apple’s iPhone last year have kicked started initiatives from other organisations to accelerate the user experience race that should have been started years before. The iPhone enigma has entrenched device manufacturers in a spin over having to create competitive retaliations to the iPhone instead of earlier ignorance is bliss attitudes.
The war on mobile is heating up and the battle is proving to be winning the hearts and minds of customers worldwide as device purchases are ever increasing over previous year purchases.
Head over to Chetan’s site and view the survey results here… http://www.chetansharma.com/MobilePredictions2008.htm
Posted by Shane Williamson
Apple Keynote from Macworld 2008 in 60 seconds
For those of you who can only take Steve Jobs in small byte sized bits…..
Quite frankly, why aren’t more keynotes done this quickly 🙂
Posted by Shane Williamson
Photobucket goes mobile
Great to see the fun photo sharing site Photobucket has spawned a mobile site for their service.
Now you can share your Photobucket pics and view them with your mobile too.
Features for Photobucket mobile,
* View photos in your album on Photobucket
* Upload photos and videos from your camera phone
* Share photos with friends via email
* Search Photobucket’s vast library for photos and graphics
* View tagged photos and find related images
* Browse Photobucket’s daily dose of fun images
Posted by Shane Williamson
ASUS Eee PC back in Oz stores!
Missed out in getting an ASUS Eee PC in Australia last year!?!?! Well news is out from Australian IT that the device is back in the country and out of exclusivity from Myer only stores.
You can now purchase the AUS$499 PC from Myers, Betta Electrical, David Jones, Good Guys, Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, Retravision, Wow Sight & Sound and Officeworks.
The ASUS Eee PC/Notebook is a Linux based WiFi enabled memory only PC (system is also Windows XP compatible) that retails for only AUS$499.
Australian ASUS Eee PC site – http://eeepc.asus.com/au/index.htm
Posted by Shane Williamson
Universal Convergence 