Martin Weigert’s thoughts on the social web. And life.

How much should a customer be worth to a service provider, and how important is it for a company to show goodwill?

These are two questions I had to ask myself today after my girl friend unsuccessfully tried to pause her mobile subscription at the world's sixth largest mobile phone operator Telenor for six month due to staying abroad.

Even though I am biased here, I would say that my girl friend is a valuable customer to Telenor. She has been with the Norwegian based company for more than two years, and a year ago she signed up for a 24 month iPhone subscription, paying 599 SEK (about 60 Euro) per month for calling and free data traffic. Considering that Telenor has an average revenue per user (ARPU) of about 270 SEK per month here in Sweden, she is definitely a customer Telenor should try to keep.

But judging from the answers she got from the Telenor telephone support regarding the possibility to pause her subscription for six month and to continue afterwards with the remaining contract period, the telco company doesn't seem to think so: Telenor is not able (or willing) to pause a subscription, so the only thing she could do to avoid paying 599 SEK per month without being able to use the subscription is to find someone who wants to take over her contract. Needless to say, that's not what she hoped the support would tell her.

The consequence of this is that my girl friend decided to ask Telenor to send her an invoice for the total amount of subscription fees left until the end of her contract period, paying everything at once, and saying bye bye to Telenor. 

Telenor is playing by the rules when not allowing people with contract obligations to pause their subscriptions. But it is clearly not showing any goodwill, and it doesn't seem as if the company is interested in significant customer satisfaction beyond its basic service of providing stable telephone and data services. 

So to be constructive, which options Telenor could offer to revenue driving, loyal customers in a case like this? I see three possibilites, plus one bonus offering:

1. Simply allowing customers to pause a subscription and to continue with it afterwards, with the only requirement being that a specific time frame (e.g. six month or one year) shall not be exceeded. That's the most customer friendly option. 

Bonus offering: My girl friend will stay in another country also covered by Telenor. She told that to the support person, but the answer she got was dissappointing: Her phone would automatically select the other countries Telenor network as default wireless operator... wow, awesome...! Instead, Telenor could offer her to send her a second sim card for the other country, giving her the option to continue using her existing subscription over there. But no, this apparently is where globalisation stops.

I don't know how most other network operators would handle this case, but I'm afraid in a similar manner. Which is definiftely the best they can do to degrade themselves to what they are so scared of becoming: dumb pipes. 

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My article about MyClubCards was crossposted on www.arcticstartup.com, a Helsinki based tech blog covering the Nordic startup and web scene. In the comments a small discussion evolved surrounding the question when a web idea can be called "great" and innovative, and how necessary it is for a startup to have economic success in order to be percieved as "great".

For me, a great web service is a service that combines several aspects. In my eyes a really good startup must have an awesome idea and an outstanding execution (features, design, name, logo, communication etc.). But personally I don't find it necessary that the idea is totally brand new. First of all, completely new ideas are very rare. Almost everything has been done and tried before. BUT often with bad execution. Which means that it's actually the execution and not the idea itself that decides if a startup is facing a bright or a rather dark future.

Take Spotify as an example. There have been dozens of streaming music services before, and there are many competitors. Still, none of them was able to create the same kind of buzz and user demand as Spotify did in the few markets where it is available. That's not because the idea was great (it was, but it was not invented by Spotify), but the execution. Or Facebook. Facebook was one out of hundreds of social networks launched during the last decade. They all based their service on the same concept, but the way they approached and packaged it was different. And obviously, Facebook executed better than any other similar service.

So does a "great startup" have to generate a lot of money for its owners to qualify to be labeled  as "great"? Probably yes, But within what time? There are people who question the prospects of Spotify or Twitter because those services haven't reached profitability yet. But what if those companies will start to make a lot of money in two or three years? They could become cash cows, as soon as they find a killer business model. 

You can never be sure if a popular, innovative looking web startup will ever find a sustainable business model and become a money machine. But you can judge based on the idea and execution. If both seems to be good, then the initial situation couldn't be better for turning the project into a successful business. Having said that, it still won't be easy.

Considering this, it's maybe not the great ideas that always come from Sweden, but rather good execution.

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If you have a video file available in the cloud, let's say via a torrent or hosted on Rapidshare, and you would like to access it from your iPhone at a time and place which suits you, how would you do it?

For me, the answer is using the recently launched cloud download and streaming service put.io (availabe in private beta). With put.io, you can add the link(s) to the torrent and rapidshare file(s), and after that the service is downloading the file(s) to your 50 GB huge cloud harddisk. From there, you can either download it on your computer, stream it directly or press the convert button - 5 minutes later, a video is availabe for on demand streaming from your iPhone.

I have been using put.io pretty often during the past weeks, mainly to access documentaries, and have been impressed by the speed and how well everything works. Streaming videos directly via put.io's iPhone site seems so much easier than going through the hassle of syncing it via iTunes - at least as long as you have WiFi (or a good coverage and an unlimited data plan) around.

put.io is based in Turkey and one of the most awesome services I have tried in the past month. Let's see how long it will be around, considering the obvious risk/chance of becoming a hub for pirated content.

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I ask myself pretty often why there is so much great web innovation coming from Sweden. Really awesome ideas and startups are much more rare in my homecountry Germany, despite a population almost ten times as big as Sweden's. 

This time, it's a new service called MyClubCards that caught my attention. MyClubCards offers a mobile application (currently iPhone only) which people who are members of one or more loyality programs can use for collecting points when paying in a store. So imagine you have club cards from three different loyality programs that you carry in your wallet. Instead of that, you can add those cards to your MyClubCards collection by simply entering the program name and your personal customer number. MyClubCards generates a barcode for each of those cards, which you can show to the cashier next time you want to use your card at a point of sale. Instead of scanning the physical card, the cashier is scanning the barcode on your phone.

I don't have a single club card in my wallet, but I know that I'm not typical here. I know many people who have half a dozen cards or more, and for them, MyClubCards could be the ultimate solution to remove some weight from their wallet.

For end users the service is free, so where does the revenue comes from? Since every user of the service has shown that he/she is fan of the concept of loyality programs (again, I'm not, but millions of other people are), there is a big chance that they would be willing to sign up for even more programs. With this idea in mind, the company is offering retailers the possibility to become a partner and to include their loyality program in the MyClubCards application, ready for signup. The retailer get's new loyal customers (and data about their shopping behaviour), and MyClubCards gets a commission. 

Even though MyClubCards will not be of any use for me, I'm convinced that with the right excecution, this startup could become huge. I'm not sure if there is a similar service somewhere else, at least I have never heard of anything like it. Though I'm pretty sure we'll soon see some other companies experimenting with the same idea.

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I'm just sitting at a Stockholm metro station waiting for the next train. As it looks, something is wrong, since the display with the info about upcoming trains is dead, and people are getting impatient.

Until December 2008, a situation like this would have annoyed me a lot. I cannot imagine anything worse that standing/sitting somewhere, just waiting (for the train/plane/bus/doctor/friends...). But in the end of 2008, I bought my first real smartphone (in my case an iPhone), and since that day, delays and unexpected waiting don't bother me anymore. Thanks to 3g/WiFi and a smartphone, there is always something you can do when you are waiting. And I don't just mean playing games or other entertaining but still time wasting stuff. I mean real work or tasks that somehow belong to your daily routine.

I'm sitting here, doing what I was planning for later this evening: Writing a post for this blog. So instead, I'm doing it now, using the waiting time in a productive way, gaining spare time for later. I also could scan through my RSS feed or stream the news.

Thanks to the mobile lifestyle, people are not that depending anymore on external factors/services for being productive and getting tasks done. We have gotten much more flexible, and I enjoy that a lot. Only sometimes, my first reaction to an unexpected delay is anger and irritation. A few seconds later, I usually realize that I still can use the time efficiently.

Of course, everything changes if there is no internet connection or if your battery is empty. To avoid the latter, I'll now try to find an alternative way home anyway.

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I just logged in to Spotify to be presented with a video premiere of Jimi Hendrix - Bleeding Heart. What's so special about that? So far, Spotify has been all about music, not music videos. Although there have been rumours in the past about Spotify launching a video service, this is the first time the company is actually using its popular and wide spread music app to broadcast a music video.

It could only be a "simple" promotion for the latest release of Jimi Hendrix (it obviously is a paid advertising format), but it could also be some kind of test to see how users react to the possibility of streaming music videos within Spotify.

I think it is great!

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In October, I wrote about Doit.im, a great task management tool for the PC/Mac desktop, based on Adobe AIR.  The software which has its origin in China quickly became one of my most favourite web tools. The only thing I had to critize was the lack of an iPhone application. A taks manager without a mobile app just isn't complete. But that's history: A few minutes ago I did a search for "Doit" in the App store, and voilà, the free Doit.im iPhone appeared, ready for installation.

I quickly installed it on my iPhone, and as far as I can tell, everything works the way it should. Push notifications are supported, too. For every iPhone user who has been hesitating to start using Doit.im, there is no reason left to not give it a try. An Android version is available as well.

And yes, it looks pretty much like Things, a task management tool for Mac. I'm a PC user so I don't mind.

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1. Global licensing
It's no fun to see national borders on the global internet when consuming media from popular sources like Hulu (US only), Spotify (a few European countries only) or YouTube (some videos only available in some countries). A better internet is an internet without these kind of limitations.

2. Net neutrality
The internet doesn't treat different kinds of content in a different way. Data is data. Some operators want to change that (or have already done it). A better internet is achieved when there will be no doubts left that all data is handled equally.

3. Better filters
There is no information overload, but there are bad filters. That's the problem that needs to be solved. Better systems for filtering and recommendations based on personal fields of interest and usage history is what we need in order to be able to use the web in the best and most efficient way.

6. Fast broadband for everybody
In the same way as water, electricity and roads are being seen as basic infrastructure, even fast broadband should be. The more people have access to fast down- and upstream connections, the better the internet experience and variety of services will be for everyone.

7. Higher status for founders
The higher status and confirmation people get when starting companies within the digital field, the more will feel encouraged to follow this step. With an increasing number of founders and startups, it is more likely to see innovative and revolutionary web services.

8. Higher media competence
The more know-how users, decision makers, politicians and companies do have about the way the web works and regarding the risks and challenges connected to the digital world, the better and smarter decisions they'll make when using and shaping the web. 

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