SINGAPORE -- I'm often surprised that people use their cellphones so little.
Not in terms of SMS and talking -- indeed, people don't seem to walk down streets anymore; they meander, phone pressed to an ear and their gazes far, far away. And I'm not talking about the BlackBerry addicts who can't keep both eyeballs off their screens even if they're in a freefall. I'm talking about ordinary people, choosing not to send emails or photos from a device that now boasts as much firepower as a laptop and has inside it at least one camera, not to mention GPS and WiFi chips.
This is always a puzzle to me, right until I get my monthly cellphone bill. I'm no heavy user -- I check email and occasionally lob the odd photo onto photo-sharing Web site Flickr -- but the data part of my bill is rarely less than $25. That's when I realize: It's not users who are holding back our cellphones. It's operators. Cellular operators, it seems, still want to sting us for each piece of data we send over their networks. And everyone except me seems to know this and stays well away.
Somehow ordinary users have got to start feeling that the data they move in and out of their cellphone is the same as the data they move in and out of their Internet connection -- on a public WiFi network, say, or at home. The days are over for most of us when we'd be charged per byte for our Internet connections there, but many operators are clinging to the idea that somehow that model will still wash with cellphone browsing, email and photo-sharing. What needs to change is for mobile operators to shift to what they call a flat data rate package -- a fixed cost each month, meaning we won't have to agonize over every download or upload.
For some, this is already true. Some U.S. networks offer an "all you can eat" package, but in most cases these are designed for corporate or heavy users (i.e. BlackBerry fans) and are pricey for ordinary people. Operators need to put together packages that are cheap enough to appeal to us and get us to change our habits. Hutchison Whampoa-owned 3, which runs networks in Asia, Australia and Europe, offers some of its subscribers free Skype calls (phone calls made over the Internet), instant messaging and almost unlimited browsing for as little as $10 a month. That's pretty generous.
That's one way of doing it. Here's another. ShoZu, a British company I've mentioned before, which makes software that offers an easy way to send photos and videos from your phone to many popular Web services such as Flickr, has recently cut a deal with Singapore's StarHub, a combined Internet, telephone and cable TV provider, to let users upload and download all the video and photos they want for less than $3.50 a month. To put this in perspective, says StarHub's product manager for ShoZu access Lee Jin Hian, it would cost you about the same to upload just one 500-kilobyte photo at its pay-as-you-use rates.
What's neat about this is that ShoZu itself is an example of software that actually (a) makes sense and (b) makes it easier to do stuff. Indeed, Mr. Lee pushed StarHub to adopt it because he was already a fan of ShoZu. Why should we want to store photos taken with a camera phone on that phone, when we could send them to all our friends seconds after we take them? And ShoZu is particularly good in doing all this in the background, so you don't have to worry about progress meters, or resending something that only made it halfway before your connection cut out. Mr. Lee was as impressed with ShoZu as I am, but he realized that unless it was offered at a flat rate, and at a price that appealed to ordinary users, it would never take off. "If you worry about the bits and bytes," he says, "you're never going to use it."
That's the other part of this process. It isn't just cost that is holding people back from using their phones to do this kind of thing: It's ease of use. It isn't fun to try to attach a photo or video to a multimedia message and send it to someone else, let alone try to post it to Flickr or to some other Web site. ShoZu makes it easy.
Dean Wood, ShoZu's senior vice-president, says he is happy with the deal because he sees StarHub as a sort of unpaid distributor and marketer for his company. On top of that, ShoZu will take a cut from the Web sites that users upload their photos and videos to -- the advertising revenue that YouTube, say, would get from ads alongside the video uploaded by a ShoZu user. Further down the track, he says, the company will make money by delivering targeted ads to users through the ShoZu software on users' phones. (This raises some privacy issues that I'll go into in another column.)
The important thing, Mr. Wood believes, is that the user doesn't have to pay. This is definitely not the way things are done presently, where operators try to wring what they can out of users for every little extra they tag on. "A lot of operators are in transition between those models," he says. "The dominant model is essentially the consumer pays, whether it's a subscription fee or a download charge for a piece of content or an application."
So why aren't more operators doing this? Well, it's partly about cost. Many operators don't have the tools in place to ensure that all this extra data doesn't slow down their networks for premium customers. If you don't have a lot of business customers, like 3, then this isn't a worry, and StarHub's Mr. Lee says his company's network can handle it.
For StarHub, then, it's a lure: If the company is able to persuade users that ShoZu is cool, it will attract more subscribers because of the cost, and the fun of it may encourage those new users to do other things with their cellphones. But that isn't a given: Mr. Lee knows there's much still to do. "There's a lot of awareness [raising] that needs to be done over the next year or two," he says.
So: Instead of dodging people who are yakking on their cellphones in the street, now we'll have to dodge people who are snapping and uploading photos on their cellphones. That's progress of a sort, I suppose.
Jeremy Wagstaff
