Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Houston we have a problem! I can’t get an iPhone now. This is related to some constraints that I will further elaborate. Dirk just sent me a link to this post by Jens Matheuszik from Pottblog who has the same problem (post in German) and I was contacted by one founder of a big startup that has since left that has the same problem again. So, where are we.

The iPhone is out, but we can’t get it … because we want to keep our old mobile phone number. Now there is something called “Bundesnetzagentur” here in Germany that sets some basic rules that the carriers (all of them) and gase providers and the like have to abide to. It’s done to foster competition. Some years ago one thing was done to allow you to more easily switch your mobile phone providers: You could take your number with you. As a background for the non-germans here, in Germany previously every carrier had their own number (e.g. 0171 xxxxxxx) for T-Mobile and that has now changed. There are some basic rules for how this works.

Let’s presume you are moving from Base (my current carrier) to T-Mobile. You can cancel you contract at Base at any time. As soon as there are 4 months (123 days to be exact) left in your current contract you can go to your new carrier and get a new contract with a request for number portability. You can do that later, but at the latest 4 weeks after your old contract ran out. Those are the rules by the Regulierungsbehörde. But remember, those are the minimum rules, how Jens above so wonderfully found out.

Back to my case. I cancelled my contract and I can theoretically get a new contract this Friday, when there are 123 days left on my old contract, requesting my number to be ported. The problem that now appeared is that T-Mobile says: Very good sir, please sign here, and as your contract ends on the 17th of October, we will be sending you your iPhone a few days before that with your new SIM card and you will have your new contract on the 18th of October, thank you for signing up.”

WHAT?!?!? Yes, you read correctly, I would get the phone only at the end of my contract. Obviously I couldn’t let it rest at that, like Jens. Here are some things that do not work:

• I cannot make Base cancel my contract sooner, even though I would offer to pay all the remaining fee.
• I cannot make Base to give free the number and give me a temporary one.
• I have to admit that I can understand Base’s reasoning.
• I cannot get the iPhone now from T-Mobile even though the contract would start in October. It is not important here that I would pay them the sign-up fee and so on now.
• I cannot get the iPhone now and let the contract start now and get a temporary number from T-Mobile up until the old number is transferred (making them instant money)
• I also cannot get the iPhone and use another contract I have at T-Mobile that is still running for a few weeks (end of September, never mind why that is, not important as I do not want to keep that number) making them instantly more money.
• It is not possible to extend my old T-Mobile contract with an old number and move the new number over when the old contract at Base expires.

I am out of options. I sent them a mail to ask for a solution but have not received an answer yet. That mails is 3 days old now. But Jens has some interesting learnings that I can also confirm. Other carriers will give you a temporary number if you want to start a contract with them now and port the number over later. T-Mobile says that they can’t because the Regulierungsbehörde says so, but that is not true. They only say that the porting of the number cannot be requested sooner than 4 months before contract end and 1 month after contract end. Theoretically I should be able to go to T-Mobile at any date, say I want a new contract, get that, and port my old number over later. It’s not that hard in theory, unless of course all their billing system rely on not a customer number but on the mobile phone number, which again would be weird because I have a customer number in my online interface for the old contract. So again that can’t be the case. So they are not forbidden to give out temporary numbers. They are not forbidden to port over numbers to existing contracts. They are not forbidden to give me my phone now even though the contract starts later I would presume (and don’t tell me that I can cancel everything until the contract start, I would have to give back the phone then without having used that or I can’t or you have bad lawyers writing your contracts and I doubt that ;)). In any case, with T-Mobile being the biggest carrier in germany, or second biggest after Vodafone, no clue, I would presume they can handle giving me a temporary number, or letting me use my existing one if they don’t have one free anymore! This can’t be that hard.

In any case, this saga continues and I am looking forward to seeing if we find a resolution. Please leave a comment if you have similar problems, here or at Jens post. Thanks.

Update: I got an update from an email I sent. There is nothing they can do if I want to keep my number. The phone will be sent and the contract will start when my old contract expires. So I presume we need to go to PR and or Headquarters with this one

Oh damn. I was feeling all good about getting the new iPhone until a short while ago. A bit of background is needed.

I have a contract at another carrier, called Base, and cancelled my contract there, which ends 17th of October 2008 now. I do want to port over my number from Base to T-Mobile though. There is a rule that the number portability can be requested 4 months before the end of the contract, 18th of July in my case. I thought i would be getting a temporary number at T-Mobile then, but as I have just learnt, this is not the case. I can order now, and they can request the number porting on the 18th, but I will only get t he iPhone and the new contract in October. I am not sure why I should order now then

There is a time limited pricing option for the iPhone introduction which might make me order the iPhone sooner but I am feeling a bit weird as I am sure that in 3 months a lot can happen and there might be some price changes again and other new options. I even called Base to see if they would not free up my number sooner, but that does not seem to work, which is another bad thing. The only thing I could do now is use my old number and get an iphone with that one, using the Base number through a Pre-Paid card, but that sounds like a really nutty idea.

Life is hard some times. No iPhone for me for another 3 months it seems. Good that my Parents gave me a gift-certificate for part of the price of the iPhone for my birthday a few weeks back. It will always be christmas until I check that now

Now that is interesting news: BOSS - The Next Step in our Open Search Ecosystem. Techcrunch as a positive note and RWW thinks it’s exciting news and I have to agree. Of course as both also note there are limitations to all of this but it is a good first step.

In short, you will have full API access without rate limits to query the Yahoo! Search Backend, getting back results based on your query as for example JSON, being able to do with it whatever you like. In our case at Ormigo we might want to do searches for related pages within Ormigo, enhancing the results based on internal data we have and adding a few external links based on where they came in in the results.

Check out Me.dium for example to see one company already using the system. Actually a very nice idea to use my and my friends surfing behaviour to give me the right results. Sadly I don’t see all my friends installing the browser bar so it is out for me.

In any case this will drive innovation in the space and I am looking forward to see what comes out of it. In the long run you will be able to pay CPM based or you will have to run their ads next to the search results, which makes it a little bit less altruistic, but that’s ok. For now, all is fair game, so go play.

Nokia was kind enough to give me a Nokia N810 some time ago and it is a really nice tool. Recently a new release came out, called Diablo and I suggest you update to that first. There is a slight problem with the Flasher for OS X in that you will have to not start flashing until your table boots with the USB sign in the top right. You get that by keeping the top button on the left side of your screen pressed and then turning it on.

Next up go to Talk Android to get all the stuff you need. For those who know how to use gainroot to get root access on the device, I suggest editing their /usr/bin/android.sh with the information in this post, adding the stuff just below the ‘echo “starting Android …”‘ bit. Also, if you want Internet Access from within Android then you will need to log in to a nocat hotspot from within Diablo first. If you install further apps just put them in /android/system/app on the MMC card you installed android on.

Have fun running Android

This is an ongoing discussion and now Michael Arrington is at it again. This time it is about Friendfeed having taken 5 months for his account to have half as many friends as in twitter, where it has taken 24 months … now read again.

Anyway, he is comparing apples with oranges, sorry Michael. Friendfeed is something totally different than Twitter. The oh so wunderful thing about Twitter is that there are NO conversations, or only short ones. That reduces the load on your own cognitive capabilities immensely. You go to twitter to hear what people are doing and possibly ask a question which is answered by a few of them. But there is not discussion forming around that one message.

Friendfeed is a simple aggregation service, and yes, it has a few nice features but at least with the current interface, there is no way to follow that conversation. I have added a lot more people than I would on twitter to Friendfeed, including you, I think, but that is only because I value your opinion and when I search for something on Friendfeed I want your opinion to be part of the answer. I will not be following live what you are doing.

So these two are totally different things. I believe Twitter can become a new communication medium if they stay true to what they are doing, meaning that they are not making discussions too easy. Friendfeed might replace Google, but not Twitter.