Visual Radio - Flat rate GPRS on the way?

There is an article on the BBC news site describing something called Visual Radio. It goes a bit like this:

The visual channel is run from a computer within the radio station, and sends out different kinds of information to the handset depending on what you are listening to.

As well as details on the track or artist of a particular song, there is also the ability to interact immediately with the radio station itself, in a similar way to digital television's "red button" content.

The really interesting part comes a bit later in the article:

"If you enjoy the visual channel occasionally and interact it'll be two or three pounds per month," said Mr Wasenius.

"But typically what we see happening is the operator offering a package deal for an 'all you can eat' arrangement per month."

The payment system could therefore be similar to the way that broadband internet works versus dial-up connections.

Apparently it’s going to start in a few months time on Virgin Radio.

Could this be the application that finally ushers in a sensible pricing structure for GPRS?

Do they have insider information that the operators *are* going to offer a flat tariff?

Or are they just crossing their fingers that the mobile operators will start a flat rate tariff?

The article doesn’t make that clear…

Petition for Flat Rate GPRS

Euan Garden (a Product Unit Manager with Microsoft's SQL Server dev team in Redmond) has just blogged on how expensive he found GPRS to be in the UK. It normally costs him $40 a month. Imagine that!

With the recent success of the Scoblephone I’ve been doing some serious ‘brain storming’ about what we could use the Windows Mobile platform for.

However I’ve always been brought back down to earth by the crazy GPRS rates in the UK. There’s no way our customers would pay such mad prices.

Well now there’s a "Petition for Flat Rate GPRS" running at http://www.modaco.com.

Sign it – then go tell everyone you know (well people you know in the UK anyway!)

The Enterprise Study Network, Marketplace

Executive overview

To re-cap these are the 6 ESN bullets:

• Training supply chain management (part 1)
• Control
• Plug-n-Play
• Marketplace
• Reporting
• Internal training administration

Marketplace

I was initially reluctant to use the term marketplace as it conjours up all sorts of stereotypes that I don’t want to associate with ESN (buying purely on a price basis being one). 

So in what way is ESN like a marketplace?

• ESN makes it easy to browse and select new suppliers
• For vendor courses, where the training content will be the same across suppliers (The Microsoft Official Curriculum is a good example of this) you can combine their dates into one national schedule. This also allows you to directly compare prices – though this is not a good idea as with training courses you generally do get what you pay for. We call this technology AutoMerge. You can see a screen shot below.

Fig 1. A combined schedule from two training suppliers for the Microsoft course 2153.

The other side of the coin there are no facilities for setting up auctions or competitive bidding. Our philosophy is to make ESN a collaborative platform for buyers and sellers – not a competitive one.

The Enterprise Study Network, Plug-n-Play

Executive overview

To re-cap these are the 6 ESN bullets:

• Training supply chain management (part 1)
• Control
• Plug-n-Play
• Marketplace
• Reporting
• Internal training administration

Plug-n-Play

I always think it’s a bit of a let down when you switch on your flash new PC and that’s all you’ve got – a PC. There’s no content. The Internet has changed all that of course but the principle is the same, it’s the content that really makes a system.

ESN has got content. The first thing you need to do when you get ESN is decide on what the contents of your catalogue will be.

You first of all need to choose the suppliers that you want to work with.

Fig 1. Screen shot of the supplier selection screen taken on the 5th January 2005.

If you work with a supplier that is not on ESN we will work with both of you to ensure a smooth upload. The supplier selection screen also let’s you know how up to date the information is. This screen shot was taken on the 4th January 2005.

Once you have your suppliers you can select which courses to include in your catalogue. You can choose ‘Auto Include’ to automatically include their entire catalogue, automatically adding new courses as they are added.

Fig 2. Choosing courses from a supplier catalogue

That’s it. You can now do a course search

Fig 3. The completed course search