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Went for Mobile Monday this week after reading that the topic was going to be Mobile Payments. Very interesting presentation by the CEO of mchek, a Bangalore based mobile payments company. Interesting how many different ways they have of being able to complete a payment on the mobile phone. Some of the challenges discussed were probably not very surprising considering the number of regulators they have to deal with. But I really liked some of the ideas they had pertaining to Bill payments, and how to make the solution a Card present

They won an award at the Mobile Congress in Barcelona earlier this month for how well made the payment process was. I learnt a lot from the session, and was glad that I made it for a Mobile Monday after such a long time.

The second presentation was from Make my Trip showing off their WAP site, and the apps they were developing to complement the site. Not as interesting, but probably more useful for me considering, I would up buying a ticket of their WAP site, when my internet was down at home. Cleartrip is my website of choice for travel stuff, mainly die to the clean layout  they have. But the experience on Make my trips WAP site was very good(I have a Nokia E61 so he full keyboard made entering in all the fields a breeze. I don’t know if it would have been as good if I had to use T9)

I really need to start attending these events a lot more regularly.

A couple of weeks ago I started getting a few emails from Fanbox.com, which is supposed to be a virtual desktop that you access through a browser. Here’s the email text:

Karen asked you a question. View the question(LINK REMOVED) and answer it.

FanBox.com is the web-based desktop that instantly turns every computer into your computer. It includes over 10,000 web applications and games to choose from, including the Question It application.

This email was sent by Karen while using the Question It application on FanBox. Go here(LINK REMOVED) to learn more or stop receiving emails from friends using Question It. FanBox: 255 G Street #723, San Diego, CA 92101, USA

I’m not an anti-spam nut. I don’t go nuts every time something that’s trying to get me to sign up or sell me something comes into my inbox. What I do expect though is a way for me to say don’t send this stuff to me anymore. And this fails miserably at that. Notice the link for unsubscribing isn’t an unsubscribe link. It says go here to find out how to stop receiving emails. I assumed there’d be an attempt to get me to stay with them, but that wasn’t it at all. Instead the page simply wont load. It keeps saying we are preparing your Fanbox experience. I don’t want a fucking fanbox experience. That’s why I clicked the link to remove myself from it.

Astonishingly the page where you can go and answer the question loads pretty much immediately.

I keep seeing sms.ac links, and remember that the company had the same kind of issues. To have the same kind of issues twice means they no longer get the benefit of the doubt like plaxo, who had problems with email notifications, but cleaned their act up(By the way I love Plaxo now).

It is disappointing, cause it seemed like a while back they hit on a good idea, where they were going to create an international payment system for mobile application developers. I guess that out the window now as sms(dot)ac redirects to fanbox(dot)com.

I’ve found only 2 people talking about this on the net Here and Here. Steve Riley suggest blocking the domains on your email black lists.

There are 2 movie theatres, in South Mumbai, that offer online ticketing, INOX and Metro. A friend of mine wanted to go see Jodha Akbar, the new Hritik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai film, so he asked if I could arrange 2 tickets for him, cause he was on the other side of town. I rarely watch Hindi Movies myself, so whenever I want to go to see a movie, the tickets are generally pretty easily available.

Today I found out what happens when the tickets are not easily available. And how much the web experience sucks when that’s the case.

Inox has a pretty good system, but a few limitations. One thing I don’t like is that they don’t release most of their seat inventory for online booking. But I can live with that. What drove me nuts today was how it kept telling me there was an error in processing, but gave me no clue as to what that error was. And funnier still the number of tickets available kept changing from 3 to 1 to 5 to 3. It was crazy.

Metro Adlabs has much more severe issues, with their interface. I’ve bought tickets online for Metro several times, but as I mentioned above, since I rarely go for movies, that tickets are difficult to come by, I never realised how annoying their process could be. 1. On the heavy duty flash page, you need to select how many people, what movie, which theatre etc.to check availability. So far so good. Now here’s where the utter moronicness of the system comes in. Before they will tell you whether or not a particular shows tickets are available, you need to sign in or login. Its pretty stupid to ask someone to register on your site before you will tell them if tickets are available, but we are still not at the limit of the stupidity involved.

Now if tickets arent available they pop an error which looks like this:

If you dont want to click through the image this is the error message:

Error in Booking seats!!! : Exception = Error in Adding Seats

Nice. Very sensible. Perfectly explains what happened. Also there’s no way to go back to a search page from here. so you need to type in the main url again, or go back a couple of times or whatever

Thought I was done? Hah!

Now I search again for the same movie time, cause the error tells me that there was a problem in adding seats, and hey its the internet, shit happens you know. Now heres where we see the utter lack of anything resembling thought going into this system. Before they will show me the result of the search, I have to log in again. Even though I JUST DID THAT LESS THAN 2 MINUTES AGO!!!!

Its ridiculous that they make you log in to see whether or not tickets are available for a particular show, and they make you log in EVERY TIME you check, even in the SAME session. This is not making you login to pull your credit card details or some other security issue. You have to enter that stuff whenever you order. You have to enter your email id when you login, so the only thing they pull out is conceivably your cell number to send an sms notification.

To be fair though Adlabs has a fantastic Mobile Booking Application, though Ive never tried to buy a ticket of that and had a problem with availibilty, so dont know if the flow is different there. I’ll run through it this weekend and see what comes up.

I came across this blog post by Rashmi Bansal. Shes unhappy with Vodafone, for what she considers unjustified billing.

My latest Vodafone bill says I need topay 25 bucks for 2 downloads:
a) Callertune from Onmobile - Rs 15
b) Wallpaper from Hungama - Rs 10
Exact download dates and times have been given. Which is great except that I have not made these downloads. I’ve had the same caller tune - ‘California Dreaming’ for many months now. And neither am I into wallpapers!

Ridiculous right? How dare the operator scam people in this way. Except that the callertune is clearly a subscription service, that she acknowledges using.

Heres a screenshot from the Vodafone site:

I have huge issues with Mobile Operators. But a complaint like this does nothing and serves no purpose, other than venting  frustration. The operators track record is such that most people will believe anything about them no matter how bad.

What this does do is obscure legitimate issues with the operators practices. Such as the disaster that is the Do Not Disturb list.